Howard's Blog : Ethos

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 18

Classical and Radical

In a star filled Manchester night last Saturday 55 000 gathered at Old Trafford Cricket Ground for Coldplay. "Look at the stars, look how they shine for you, everything you do, and they were all yellow" as I joined the mass Karaoke (Naomi tells me I have a good voice - just as well as I was singing in her ears). I reflected on the power of creativity and innovation to move people. How many of those gathered would value the classical music from more than two centuries ago? Yet Chris Martin's classical piano training is never far below the surface. He must have given himself to hours of disciplined practise, learning scales and finger exercises, to make his creativity look effortless.

When people think about church they associate us with being at least two decades if not two centuries behind times, and dedicated to the spiritual equivalent of finger exercises. At worst the church is seen as laggards, traditional, past focused, dull and routine, about conformity, lacking risk, desiring safety, controlling passions, hypocritical, empty of compelling dreams and meaningless.

We have been misrepresented or we have misrepresented to others what it means to be a radical ( literally proceeding from the root) follower of Jesus. The ancient roots of God's church are its strength. The very fact that we have a message captured beautifully in scripture stretching back at least two or three millennia is absolutely the source of the church's power to not simply resist secular culture but change it one life, one salvation at a time. The very fact that 2000 years of history is full of Christians who changed the world is because they were rooted and established in Jesus Ephesians 3:17 and practised the ancient pathways of the spiritual disciplines of prayer and study, fasting and solitude, celebration and confession

Trusting God (Proverbs 3:5) does not make us a people of routine but is the launch pad to loving God first and loving others. Leaning on God not our understanding doesn't make us passionless or empty of ideas but is the springboard to our becoming the creative early adopters, the culture shapers, the Wilberforce's and Luther King Jr's of the 21st century. Straight paths doesn't mean conformity but that Jesus has set our course and that we change lives and move forward only as Mark Driscoll (Mars Hill Seattle) has said "with timely methods and a timeless message."