January 2010 Archives

What does it take to believe?

As a youth worker many moons ago, I remember taking a 6th-form double lesson (quite why they let me loose with their 6th-form RE students for nearly an hour-and-a-half I'll never know?) where I'd been asked to help them think about the evidence for the resurrection.

We did the now well-worn route of looking at alternative explanations - eg. hallucination; swoon etc. (and if you've never thought through the historical evidence for the likelihood of Jesus being raised, you could do worse than read Who Moved the Stone? by Frank Morrison).

At the end of the session I asked who was convinced by the evidence. The huge majority of hands went up.

Was there a mass conversion? No, of course not.

Seth Godin - prolific (and usually wise) writer about marketing and business, gets the point very well:

...no spreadsheet, no bibliography and no list of resources is sufficient proof to someone who chooses not to believe. The skeptic will always find a reason, even if it's one the rest of us don't think is a good one. Relying too much on proof distracts you from the real mission--which is emotional connection.

...and if that's true for business, how much more for religious belief.

Why do you believe what you believe?

New Year is the somewhat cliched - but singularly appropriate - time for taking stock.

This New Year, for All Souls, carries with it a 10th birthday (of the church plant - September 2000) perspective that we're aiming to help propel us energetically into the next decade and more...

A recent piece on Seth Godin's blog quoted a friend of his:

I spent the last seven months doing this [job] and I have nothing to show for it. If I had known I would have spent seven months and gotten nothing, you can bet I would have done something a lot more fun.

Godin looks back on the past decade, suggesting that most people missed the opportunities and simply "hunkered down and did their job or did what they were told or did what they thought they were supposed to, and just about everyone got very little as a result."

Given that ten years is beyond most of us to imagine ahead into, he suggests seven instead:

Seven years from now, what will you have to show for what you're doing right now?

If your answer is, "not much," perhaps you should consider a new plan, one that might generate a different answer, or, at the very least, be a more fun way to waste seven years.

...so back to All Souls' 10th birthday year, we're asking that sort of question. There's simply no point 'hunkering down' and just keeping things going. If all we have to show for it in seven (or ten, or fifty) years' time is a church that is still here and keeps on going, then we've missed the point of why we were planted.

If you're someone who pours time and energy into All Souls - what have you got to show for it so far? What have you seen God do here? What do you dream of him doing in the years to come that we could be celebrating in 2017 or 2020?