A word of encouragement for pastors

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I want to offer a word of encouragement for pastors. This season has led to much discouragement. The breakdown in the rhythms of church community has led to real strain and a fraying at the edges of church life, and this takes a huge toll on you. In addition, you have faced unexpected challenges – some emerging from without (especially politics) and some from within. You have been personally attacked and criticised, and it has been very difficult to mend damaged relationships. People are leaving your church, and some of them because they are disgruntled.

You feel a loss of purpose. God has given you a field to work – the church you lead – and it feels like you’re working with your hands tied and the field on fire. That makes it hard to stay upbeat and full of faith, because all you see are the problems. So, it’s harder to get up in the morning, and harder to pray, and harder to smile to the impassible shark eye of the camera.

If ever a minister knew discouragement, it was surely Jeremiah. This is how God encourages him:

Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD,
whose trust is the LORD.
He is like a tree planted by water,
that sends out its roots by the stream,
and does not fear when heat comes,
for its leaves remain green,
and is not anxious in the year of drought,
for it does not cease to bear fruit.

– Jeremiah 17.7–8

We are in a year of drought. There are natural and unnatural forces at work beyond our control, affecting our work, our field, our fruitfulness.

Are you trusting in your sovereign Father? Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD. When you’re discouraged and feeling a temptation towards self-pity, you must ask yourself: Do I believe God is sovereignly in control of these circumstances? And do I trust him to work all things together for good? Your emotional state is a gauge of your trust, and so be honest with yourself; are you anxious or are you trusting?

In an echo of the first Psalm, the promise God speaks to Jeremiah is for fruitfulness. While the world is burning, your trust is like a set of well-developed roots that find the underground streams and keep you nourished when everything else is charred, brittle, dry, and barren. Knowing you have access to the Father in prayer and in his promises and that he means to do you good has a sure and certain consequence: you will be fruitful.

Jesus does not will for you to be anxious. Yes, he’s allowed you to face a season you were not necessarily prepared for. You have felt the slow and chronic wearying through months of misery. You’ve also felt the blows, buffeting and battering of the emails and the gossip. But Jesus does not will for you to be anxious. He instead would want you to trust.

It is in trust that you will not fear when heat comes, you will remain green, you will not be anxious in this year of drought, and you will not cease to bear fruit.

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The inhumanity of lockdown

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I am well aware of the deep feeling that separates us on this matter of lockdown, and I do not expect everyone to agree with me in opposing this policy. But I think that, as Christians, we do need to think about this theologically and not merely imbibe the prevailing assumptions we receive via the media.

Lockdown is the expression of a philosophy of life. It is the practical outworking of a worldview. And since we, as Christians, have a radically different perspective on what the purpose of life is, and what it means to be human, then it should not be surprising that we might arrive at a different view on how to live and act at a time like this.

I say this because I believe that lockdown is inhumane, or anti-human. The Bible teaches us what it means to be human and shows us that our humanity cannot be lived out in its fullest sense apart from obedience to God’s commands. The two greatest commands, the ones that summarise the law of God and therefore teach us what it means to be human, are these: Love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbour as yourself. Lockdown resists and opposes obedience to both of these commands and is therefore inhumane.

Consider, first, how lockdown opposes the command to love your neighbour. What is love of neighbour if it excludes community, conversation, contact, laughter, hospitality, and the myriad other ways that we are called to be affectionate and tender towards one another? 

Some will say that limiting human interaction is the way we love others at a time like this by saving lives. If staying away from one another means more people survive, then surely lockdowns are loving? There are two big problems with this reasoning. The first problem is that we do not know that lockdowns work, and the picture internationally is not clear. It’s just as plausible, for example, that the slow-down over the summer can be explained not by the first lockdown but by the fact that coronaviruses are seasonal and respiratory illnesses always bounce back in the cold months. We simply do not know that the first lockdown achieved very much, besides a possible temporary delay in the spread of this invisible enemy. So, we are putting our faith in an experimental and speculative policy.

The second problem is that we do know the harm lockdowns cause, even if this is not as immediate or as in-your-face. These effects have to be weighed in the balance. Consider: (i) Lockdown will have a devastating effect on the global poor, as economies are being vandalised by this policy. That will, in time, lead to a massive increase in child poverty, sickness, and death, though these effects will be far removed from us who can collectively afford to take time off work by borrowing billions of pounds. This is a tragedy in the making. (ii) Lockdown will lead to a long-term economic slump that will affect the health of our nation. Consider the amount of money that has been spent on lockdown – the many hundreds of billions of pounds – and then consider how the loss of this money will affect our ability, long-term, to maintain a healthy nation. Social services, hospitals, welfare and many other public services will suffer for years, if not for decades. The effect is indirect and will be difficult to measure, but I have no doubt that future historians will get to work on demonstrating how lockdown ultimately led to shortened lifespans across the population for years to come. (iii) Lockdown is causing suffering and sickness right now. There has been a massive rise in deaths at home, undiagnosed cancers, untreated heart conditions, depression, and a lot more. Again, these effects will be delayed and indirect, but do not doubt that lockdown will cause all kinds of suffering for years to come. (iv) Lockdown stops us from loving one another in the ways that we need to be loved, which ultimately harms us all and tears apart the fabric of society. 

These points are not speculation; they are rational and logical and factual. Considering the fact that there are alternate strategies on the table – such as that put forward in the Great Barrington Declaration – can we really justify the immense cost and long-term fallout of lockdown on a gamble that it might save lives? And all the while we are prevented from expressing our humanity in community, and so we are becoming less human.

Second, I believe that lockdown opposes the command to love God. Mankind was created to love and worship God, and we cannot be fully human without giving expression to our worship. When God made Adam and Eve, he tasked them to work and worship. Herman Bavinck expresses this dual calling in this way: 

Work and rest, rule and service, earthly and heavenly vocation, civilisation and religion, culture and cultus, these pairs go together from the very beginning… Religion must be the principle which animates the whole of life and which sanctifies it into a service of God.

We should not be surprised when a secularised state imposes a law that prevents people from worshipping together in order to ‘save lives’. The operating philosophy of our age is built upon survival, the progress of humanity, and living life to the full in the here and now. There is no weight or consideration given to the eternal purposes of mankind; only the temporal. And so, it makes sense that we would panic and scrabble to preserve and prolong life, as though survival is our greatest need.

But a Christian whose mind is shaped and formed by the word of God will know that survival is not our greatest need; our greatest need is salvation. And to be prevented from gathering as God’s people before him in a humble expression of worship and adoration and prayer is to be prevented from expressing our humanity as God intended and seeking him as he desires.

Moreover, if you re-read the prophets you will discover that when disaster strikes a nation under the sovereign hand of God, his intention and purpose is to drive us to repentance. The salvation we need is in seeking him, and yet we are being prevented from gathering in his name.

Many will object and protest that we can worship at home or online. This is only partly true, since in Scripture there is no true devotion from God’s people without a gathered, embodied, corporate devotion. Yes, God sees and hears me in my room on my knees, but he also commands me to sing with his people for his glory and my good. The gathering of the saints is not an optional addition to the spiritual life; it is the beating heart of the life of worship.

I am not sure how much longer we, as Christians, can tolerate this policy that is built on a secular worldview and inhibits us from obeying God while stripping us of our humanity. We need to see that this policy is the natural outworking of a godless worldview, and an expression of corporate anxiety without eternal hope.

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Nose-to-tail preaching

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In recent years there has been something of a revival of ‘nose-to-tail’ cooking. The idea is simple. It begins with the observation that we have become accustomed to eating only those carefully prepared and packaged parts of the pig, cow or lamb that you can find on supermarket shelves. Smoked bacon. Ribeye steak. Lamb chops.

(Of course, we do already eat the off-cuts, but only in the more acceptable form of sausages, burgers, and meatballs. But this does not count as nose-to-tail cooking, since you literally have no idea what you’re eating, as proved by the great horse scandal of 2013.)

Clearly, in the age before supermarkets and the sanitised privileges of a consumeristic age, no part of the animal was wasted. This is quite obvious if you have ever experienced a food market outside the Western world where baskets of goats heads peer at you, alongside buckets of pigs trotters. Just about every part of the animal can be eaten, if prepared in the right way. Nothing is wasted and everything is useful.

This rediscovery of the potential in bone marrow and cow tongue has led to a revival of cooking every part of the animal – nose-to-tail – that has begun to affect how we think about our relationship with the dead creatures we eat. (Ironically, this movement has not sprung from economic need, but rather from the privileged and newly gentrified haunts of the East London food scene.)

I find this a compelling analogy for the state of preaching today. The growth of consumeristic culture in the West, along with pastoral ambition to appear successful, has applied market pressures to create churches perfectly designed to cater to an audience. Just as the gore of the slaughterhouse has been replaced by the polish of the plastic-wrapped packages on supermarket shelves, with neatly and finely sliced portions of tender cuts to feed the masses, so we have seen this reflected in churches, particularly in preaching. This takes the form of the short preaching series, exclusively focussed on ‘how to’ questions – easily purchased and digested by the hungry consumers. There is nothing there to really challenge the worshiper; no bones or tough cuts that need more mastication. Instead, spiritual food is doled out with step-by-step instructions, and crucially, without blood.

One of the reasons I am a strong advocate for careful expository preaching is that it forces you as a preacher to offer people a nose-to-tail diet. This is very challenging for you and for the congregation. You take a book of the Bible and then you get to work like a skilful butcher. But if you are really an expositor, then you are not permitted to extract only those portions that are most easily prepared, chewed and digested; rather, in true expository preaching you aim to miss nothing of what God decided to include in his most Holy and Infallible Word.

So, one week you encounter an ear or a tail or a digestive tract. And at that point you have to think very carefully about how you will prepare this portion for consumption. You have to resist the temptation to simply discard the meat (by ignoring the passage), or to grind it up into sausages (by dealing with it very superficially, or mixing in an excessive ratio of herbs and bread in the shape of stories and practical points, so that the passage is basically unrecognisable). Now, it is true that any good chef must find a way to make an ear or entrails more appetising, and any good preacher must find a way to make a text ready for consumption. But still, there’s a sense in which the people need to encounter these awkward and offensive parts of the Bible, or else they remain juvenile, only ever capable of eating breaded meat with lots of ketchup.

Why is this so crucial? I believe that consumeristic Christianity has managed to survive because the conditions have been favourable. Broadly speaking, it has been possible to offer people a stripped back and simplified spirituality that has sat comfortably with people going about their normal lives. Drive-thru church gives a boost each week and helps people to stay positive and feel spiritual.

But times are a-changing. The view of what is morally normal and acceptable has so shifted in recent years that it is no longer possible for consumeristic churches to produce Christians that can survive in this modern world. A normal Christian (by New Testament standards) is basically a fanatic and a bigot in today’s world. And so, we are increasingly identifying with the experience of being ‘sojourners and exiles’, as Peter described in his first letter.

In this age, some well-meaning pastors will continue to serve up easily digestible ‘content’ (a word that perfectly captures the spirit of the age) in the naive assumption that the Holy Spirit will make up for what’s lacking, and mature disciples will emerge without the need for discomfort on a Sunday. But sadly, all this will create is Christians with no moral fortitude or conviction who will be crushed by the onslaught of lies that our culture is offering up.

More sobering still, we see that other pastors will continue to deliberately create a highly processed and refined product to pitch to their spiritually obese audiences – churches that want to be known for what they are for, rather than what they are against (as though these two things do not go together). But, by slicing away and discarding even more aspects of the truth that are considered offensive, reducing the diet down to the spiritual equivalent of chicken nuggets, the sad result is that underneath the polished appearance of the slick establishment, these churches will be rat- and cockroach-infested havens for sin.

The only alternative is Spirit-empowered and bold nose-to-tail preaching of God’s word. Now, more than ever, we need to recover a conviction that all of God’s word is useful ‘for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work’. I believe this is the only way to form disciples capable of weathering the storm that is coming and even now is upon us.

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A lockdown-related thought experiment

Consider this thought experiment. If you received an elixir that stopped you from ageing and prevented all disease, what would your life look like?

You might think you’d be brimming with excitement and ideas on how to spend your indefinite quantity of time on earth. You could go anywhere, do anything, and literally have all the time in the world to do it.

I would suggest that this is the wrong answer. You would in fact be so petrified at the possibility of having an accident that might lead to your death – perhaps on the road, or on the path of an e-scooter, or even cutting some carrots – that you would be too scared to go anywhere or do anything.

The paradox here is that unlimited life span could actually diminish your quality of life because of the paralysing effect of anxiety, since any accident that could end your life would be too great a threat compared to infinite years of health. The risk of living a normal life would seem too great given how much you could lose.

In a sense, I think this is why the world is going for lockdowns. We have managed to extend human life span right up in to the 80s or 90s, and we can manage most diseases. The greatest idol of the modern age is the cult of health (witness: gym obsession, NHS worship, etc).

So, how do we react when an uncontrollable virus comes along and we haven’t quite got enough time to scramble and create a vaccine? When pandemic strikes – as has happened umpteen times in history – what is different this time about our reaction?

It seems to me that this is the great different: Now that we have drunk deeply the elixir of health, there is no greater threat than a calamity we can’t control or a disease we can’t stop. And so, we have entered a state of collective paralysis and anxiety in the form of lockdown. It is the desperate attempt of those not ready to die to deny the inevitable and control the uncontrollable.

That sense that time is standing still

One of the strangest aspects of this lockdown life is the monotony. It’s becoming hard to tell one week from another, or even to judge how long this season has lasted.

The reason for this monotony is not immediately obvious. It’s not necessarily down to a lack of busyness, since many are working just as hard, or harder. Nor is it down to working from home, since that was true for many (myself included) prior to lockdown. So, what is it?

I had a moment of realisation reading two beautiful paragraphs in David Gibson’s book, Living Life Backward. He is commenting on that most famous of passages in Ecclesiastes: ‘For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die… a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance… a time to love, and a time to hate…’ (see Ecclesiastes 2.1–8). 

Gibson sheds light on this by helping us understand how we, as humans, measure time:

Observe as well how the combined effect of the poem puts flesh on the skeleton of a human life. There are seasons in the world that act upon us (war and peace), but almost every pair in the poem involves our connectedness to others between the moments of our birth and death. We are profoundly relational beings, and most of the seasons of our lives are taken up with navigating the different stages of our relationships and the effects they have on us. We dance at a wedding, and we mourn the loss of the one we danced with. We laugh together, and we weep for what the people we used to laugh with have done to us. Without thinking, we reach out and touch, but we instinctively respect a different emotional and physical boundary with someone else. We grow to love some people and come to hate others.

If we were somehow to take the seasons of life out of the web of relationships in which we are enmeshed, our lives would become flat and monotonous. We check our calendars every day, but we don’t set the seasons of life just by the patterns of the sun and the moon. Rather, our times are marked by being a daughter and a sister, becoming a wife and a lover, then a mother and a grandmother, and a widow. These are the seasons God gives. The times he grants are bound to the presence or absence of relationship.

In other words, humans measure time in relationships.

Therefore, lockdown is getting more and more weird because so many of our relationships are on hold. Even if you are interacting with others in all their two-dimensional pixelated glory, this is not the same as relating to them in the flesh. And where there is no real progress or change in relationships, then it seems as though time is standing still.

Of course, there are some very tangible benefits to this season if you have people to share it with. You may well have grown sick of your screens, and reclaimed the art of conversation – the most essentially relational thing a human can enjoy. We can all benefit from sitting till bedtime. 

My hope is that when we all come out of hibernation, we will emerge with a renewed commitment to each other. It will feel as though we have left limbo and reentered the land of the living. And perhaps we will be able to bring together the benefits of normal life along with the benefits of lockdown – that is, the freedom to be together physically, and the freedom not to rush anywhere in particular but simply talk.

8 tips on working from home

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Many will attest that I’ve been self-isolating for more than a decade. So, while this is perhaps a little too late to be of much use to anybody, I thought I’d share a few tips on working from home that are especially relevant to those living with noisy little people... 

1. If you have kids, control the noise. Buy some earplugs. And maybe some noise cancelling headphones. I use both and play white noise through the headphones that are placed over my earplugs. That’s what it takes to block out three kids and an extroverted spouse.

2. Agree expectations with your spouse (or whoever you live with). There are hours in the day when I need to be left undisturbed, even if I’m with everyone else (we live in a flat). Agree this up front. Otherwise, even if you can’t hear the grumbling, you’ll sense the death stare.

3. Keep office hours. I once heard Don Carson pass on a maxim he learned from his mother: ‘Work hard, play hard, and never confuse the two.’ I often remind myself of that when I’m tempted to procrastinate in the day, or work at night.

4. Build a routine. There’s something very liberating about structure. I love routines, and though I change them quite often, I have found a routine helps me to get on with stuff I might otherwise neglect.

5. Go for walks. Apparently, it’s good for you! Walking will help you be more creative as well as just feeling happier. You need the sunlight. You need the blood flow. And, if you’re doing creative work and you get stuck, stepping away will actually get thoughts flowing again.

6. Block the internet (if you can work without it at all). I have used internet blocking apps (like Freedom) for a long time now. I set aside portions of the day to be disconnected and it helps a lot. In terms of your phone, you can turn off wifi and mobile data (you’ll still receive calls), or put it in another room.

7. Take regular, scheduled breaks. It’s super-helpful, especially when you’re tackling something quite daunting (in my case, sermon preparation) to know when you’re next going to pause. When I fail to do this – imagining I’ll be more productive by powering through – I find the hours slip by and I feel more and more groggy, and get less done.

8. Cut yourself some slack. If you get into a guilt cycle, things will go from bad to worse. If you love Jesus, then remember that he is your justification. He wants you to live a fruitful life, but that’s not necessarily the same as being busy. Ask for his help. Repent. Repeat.

Further reading: Check out Deep Work and Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport.

This post first appeared as a Tweet thread, and then on Think.

That elusive quest for happiness

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We ought to be much happier. Everything seems to be set up for greater happiness. If you could step back 100 years and describe what was coming, it would literally sound like some version of paradise: 

Everyone will be much wealthier. There will be very few taboos or constraints enforced on us by religion. Each person is free to choose the path they want in life. There is a constant flow of entertainment fed into our homes and our hands. You can go anywhere you want in the world for not much money. The local shops will stock the best ingredients sourced globally. You can throw away your clothes at the end of the season and buy a new set at rock bottom prices. You can warm your home in minutes, use the toilet indoors, and wash under freshly heated water sprayed at you out of a pipe in the wall. There will be cures for most diseases, and you’ll live longer. You won’t need to wash your clothes or the dishes by hand. It will even be possible to have sex with a stranger within 20 minutes at any time of day, no strings attached. Oh, and by the way, the weather will be getting warmer every year.

But of course, it hasn’t worked. Even though every part of our lives is surrounded by comfort and technology that promotes ease; even though there are tastes and experiences and sensations available that our grandparents couldn’t imagine; even though we have an exceptional level of personal freedom and liberty with the result that there are very few things you can’t do; despite all of this, we are no happier.

At first, this seems to make no sense. All of us would naturally assume that increasing pleasure and diminishing pain or discomfort should lead to greater happiness. There is even an official philosophical name for that belief: it’s called hedonism. But you do not need a philosophy to persuade you that hedonism is the way to go; it’s natural, intuitive, even animalistic, to pursue pleasure rather than pain, and to get as much pleasure as you can.

And yet, all the evidence points to the absolute failure of hedonism in delivering happiness. Why is that the case?

It is partly due to a phenomenon called the adaptation principle, which means that each of us will adapt to new circumstances (good or bad) and return to our ordinary level of happiness over time. The psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, gives an extreme example of the adaptation principle at work. He sets up a thought experiment in which we are asked to imagine the best and worst things that could happen to us, and suggests that many would think of either winning the lottery (the best) or being paralysed from the neck down (the worst). Many would rather die than become a paraplegic. But the shocking truth is that, a year after either of these events taking place, your happiness level would return to normal.[1] The lottery winner is no happier than the paraplegic.

In fact, psychologists tell us that the opportunity to experience more pleasure in life causes us to step onto the ‘hedonic treadmill’. Just as a treadmill can get faster and faster, while the runner is (effectively) going absolutely nowhere, so too with the experience of more and more pleasure. The more you have, the more you need in order to experience happiness. And money makes it worse since it simply ‘speeds up the hedonic treadmill’.[2] The wealthier you get, the more disillusioned you will become as you fail to find any lasting pleasure that makes you happy.

Even if concepts like ‘the adaptation principle’ and ‘the hedonic treadmill’ are well established scientific truths, it is still hard to accept all this as true for you. Most of us, if pressed, would admit that no particular pleasure in life has made us happy yet, but we still hold out hope because we simply haven’t tried everything. There’s something we need that’s just out of reach – be it the thrill of romantic love, the liberty of wealth, or the opportunity to satisfy wanderlust by becoming a global nomad.

A problem arises, however, when we continue on in determination to find happiness through pleasure. At some point this belief system (and it is a belief system; perhaps even the defining belief of our age) leads to some kind of self-destructive choice. As a pastor, I have had many conversations with people who have found themselves sucked into the vortex of darker choices in pursuit of pleasure. One of the reasons this path fails is because it is so often accompanied by the most powerful happiness-stealer we know: the experience of guilt. Selfish or indulgent pleasure-seeking takes us down paths when the unthinkable becomes normal, and many people experience a profound sense of self-loathing and regret because of actions they can’t undo.

A friend recently described this experience in his own life. He likened it to that moment in a club when the lights go on. Up to that point, it had all been ecstasy and thrill, but then, as the lights fade up, there’s a sense of realisation and disgust. You don’t look that good, and neither do those around you.

None of this is new, of course. Almost 3,000 years ago a man known only as The Teacher wrote a short book called Ecclesiastes about his own experiences of seeking happiness through pleasure: ‘Whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them. I kept from my heart no pleasure.’ And what did it amount to? His conclusion:‘Vanity and a striving after wind…’[3] He felt the deep sense of emptiness that comes through a meaningless life of pleasure-seeking.

If hedonism doesn’t work, then what does? The sad irony is that our growing prosperity in the West  has led to the abandonment of those very things that genuinely lead to human flourishing, in particular, community and religion.

I witness this very clearly living in Central London. This great city is awash with young people who have moved here largely driven by an individualistic pursuit of fulfilment and pleasure. But, inevitably, for most this has meant leaving behind the rich and thick relationships of family and of community, and very often walking away from their faith.

And then something beautiful happens. When loneliness, emptiness and disappointment begin to set in, a spiritual hunger gently awakens. Many who come to our church (and churches like ours) have arrived at that same conclusion The Teacher came to millennia ago. They too have trod a circuitous route through pleasure-seeking that eventually leads them to the place they were running from. They return to their faith, and to God.

I dislike simplistic answers as much as the next man, and I don’t think the recovery of faith is a straightforward, uncomplicated solution to the quest for happiness. An authentic faith will involve self-denial, sacrifice, vulnerability, humility, and (perhaps the dirtiest word of all) obedience. But if the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, whilst expecting different results, then there is a kind of insanity in a world that keeps doubling down on the failed experiment of pleasure-seeking. In stark contrast to this, the recovery of faith offers what pleasure-seeking cannot deliver: an end to the futile quest and the sense that you have finally come home.

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[1] The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt, p.84–86.
[2] ibid. p.89
[3] Ecclesiastes 2.10–11

This article first appeared at Salt.