To the pub

The church study group that I attend is planned to meet in the local pub (bar/hotel/alcohol joint) to 'be in the community' and maybe have some conversations with the denizens.

Firstly, I doubt that we would have any useful conversations with the denizens, but perhaps.

Secondly, if we want to visit the pub for a social evening, all well and good. Just don't drink too much and don't get into any fights (more a problem in some places than others).

Thirdly,  "whaaat?!" As the 'medium is the message', as Marshall McLuhan has written, we submerge our message into a contradictory medium and align it with a dissonant message. The message of the pub is not the message of study. I wouldn't have gone to the pub to study my finance textbook so why would I go there to study the Bible?

This would be a 'show-off' stunt. Most patrons would see it as seeking to show them up as lesser people, even with a jar of ale on our table.

Moreover, if we prayed, we would be praying on the street corner for all to see, against the word of our Lord in Matthew 5:5-6:

When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.

 In fact, the whole thing would be a street corner event. Not good.

In none of the pagan cults I've encountered was this ever a recruitment approach. Sure some members might have gone to pubs for quiet conversations as individuals; but generally their intake was via free talks about self-serving quasi spiritual techniques and success stories, or 'club' type events, entertainment evenings (music, film) and supper afterwards with no pressure, some promotions for innocuous weekend courses or 're-calibration' meditation, etc. but no pressure.

What might work is a parson in the pub event monthly from, say, between Easter and Advent, as long as the parson brought a few pals to order beers and was a great raconteur.

Outreach or In-drag

Churches offer many 'in-drag' events in the guise of 'out-reach'. But they are not, in most cases. Usually  they are simply in-drag with bait. And usually not a very good bait at that.

But I think the Seventh Day Adventists have an approach that is worth considering (not their crazy theology, of course). That is offering something of value to people in the community. They run 'courses' in quitting smoking and handling anxiety. Both commendable efforts (unless you are a tobacconist or pharmacist, of course).

That might work in some communities, but not others.

One things that Christians should be good at is communication (spoken word, I mean, because they are not usually that good at other media). So courses in personal communication in different contexts: for example, in formal meetings, giving presentations, on in manager-team relationships. The latter should be worthwhile in any locations where there is a sizable proportion of people in business or the professions.

Such course could be aimed at particular age-groups, or not, but to offer them, for a small fee, of course, with 'concessions' easily granted, could be of general interest and service.

The courses would be designed in terms of what we know about the ethos of communication we see in the Bible, and the personal attitudes and challenges that become important.

I'll see what I can do about this with a course on 'Leading People' that I'm developing.

The challenge for the church is to move people down the discipling 'funnel' from 'contact' (through some form of outreach or indrag event) to 'engage' (perhaps a course related to Christian faith or children at youth  group, etc..), to 'integrated'. This last stage is marked by regular attendance and participation at some level, and is the precursor to 'discipleship and service'. Which could be just 'service' to keep down the language temperature.

On babies

In a documentary on the Islamisation of Sweden, the speaker made the point that Islam wins by out populating the post-Christian West. Not his words of course.

This caused me to reflect on the degree to which the church broadly as bought into this. I look at my church. It is in a well-off suburb with many practicing or retired professional people, managerial types and academics. Happily we do see a good (but not good enough) number of children in the church.

But the Christian ethos tends not to dominate our lives. Self included.

I compare this with what I've seen of Roman Catholic practice as lived out. Two of my relations are priests and on the rare occasions I've participated in services they've been involved in I've been struck both by the simple courtesies of both clergy and 'laity' and the going out of the way concern for others. I noted particularly the concern for one disabled man who could not sit on the chairs available, so had to recline on steps to a podium at the rear of the ecclesium. One person offered to fetch him a chair, another a wheel chair, a group of clergy, all in their flashest PPE greeted him with a nod and a kind smile as they walked by.

I also saw lots of children; lots!

But we in the land of the well off seem to have 'just enough' children. The median number seems to be two. Three are rare. More is almost never seen. Yet, I would hope that we'd routinely see famlies of four to six children and middle-income pretensions be damned. But we don't.

The church has turned into a comfortable sermon club, neither engaged with (prophetically) the world, or a witness against its indulgent values.

Then I look at my own history. I have one child, and that in later life. I wanted to have a 'brood', but perhaps I was unconsciously wearing a 'not husband material' T-shirt, as I was also married later in life than...anyone else I knew.

Yet the environment seemed to be full of young women not so interested in marriage (except for one, who's companionship I fumbled badly), or to my mind 'not suitable' for me or 'out of range' in terms of age. Was I too 'picky'? Was I indeed not 'husband material'? To what extent had my church life led me unwittingly down the same path as the self-indulgent? Had it similarly led the women I mixed with?

Just who am I? Thoughts about identity and meaning

The current fashion amongst many to determine a non-obvious 'identity' based on their sexual interests is odd, to say the least.

At least, it would be odd but for the collapse of the broad Christian consensus in which there was a reference point for 'meaning', or rather, existential confidence that sat outside our life-world.

Now that the 'life-world' for many has collapsed to the individual, the only available reference point which has some flavour of external validity is to adopt a group or fabricated 'community' reference point. So we have some who 'identify' as 'trans' (the most conspicuous assertion of difference from the everyday male-female distinction and di-morphism), or any one of the variably numbered 'genders', so-called. Each an invitation for the claimant to grasp at some form of specialness while verging on the narcissistic.

But for the Christian a great point of connection for a possible conversation about the gospel is given by this loss of bearings.

The 'loss of bearings' is a direct result of not only society's loss of confidence in Christian Theism, to which people without Christ 'out-sourced' their existential moorings, but is also exemplified by the vulnerable individuals whose sense of self is shaky.

It is these individuals who are left with no option but to seek to anchor themselves in an asserted 'identity' which, reduces the beauty and wonder of their created self-hood (in God's image) to a sexual obsessiveness.

The move is one to offset the loss entailed in the fall, and exemplified in the constant and pervasive discontents of life. It is a strategy to deal with the 'problem of evil'. But one that leads to a futile empty self-referential dead-end.

Thus the conversational opportunity for the gospel.

It would be a long conversation to get the other person's 'settings' tuned to the issues of discontent and the slipped mooring that we all suffer but for Christ's indwelling spirit.

The conversation, once the person has asserted their 'gender' (as such people are wont to at the earliest opportunity), is then about what 'identity' means; how it attaches them to a community; how we all need community.

The conversation might then flow to the reality of that need, but its contradiction of the materialism that pervades the modern thought-world brought by Darwinian (or any materialistic) Evolution.

After all, why would a bunch of molecules that give nothing but chemical signals have anything to do with a need for 'identity' let alone the idea of 'identity' itself. Yet the need is there.

However, the need which emerges (as we know) as a fracture in the fabric of reality brought by our denial of life (only available truly in Christ), cannot be resolved within that fractured reality. It will always be unsatisfactory.

The need emerges on the basis of our created nature: we are created for community, and for that lovingly. Just as God is love, and his being is of community in the Trinity of Father, Son and Spirit.

We are cut off from sharing in that community and without it seek to bind up the rupture with some futile 'identity' of mere assertion. An assertion the locus of which is merely the self seeking its own introverted and ungrounded definition.

As Sartre is reputed (but perhaps unlikely -- I have no reference to this) to have said: 'No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.'

Because, without an infinite (or independently (self) existent) reference point, there are only ungrounded relative 'references' which are because ungrounded, meaningless and always existentially disconnected.

This basis for conversation could lead to the Pauline point of inflection in Acts 17 on Mars Hill: that we have a creator who made us like himself, for fellowship with him.

The whole question of origins, materialism and substance dualism opens up with exciting possibilities.

The One v the Many

 As Peter Jones reminds us (see his articles on TruthXchange and podcasts on Spotify from 1998), there are but two religions: the worship of the Creator, and the worship of the creature.

He springs from Paul's words in Romans 1:25: For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.

Thus there are but two world views.

The worship of the creature which reduces to monism (Jones calls it 'Oneism' for simplicity), where there is but one thing, a unity without diversity, or true differentiation, and

'The worship of the creator, (Jones calls it 'Twoism'); which shows us who we are. We might term this dualism of a kind: there is a creator, who reveals himself as personal, communicating and the one who is love, and there is the creature, created to know the creator, and enjoy him forever, as the Westminster Catechism puts it.

Oneism is perplexed by difference and all 'identity' is absorbed into a vague unity with no basis for differentiation. However, people are in reality not that kind of unity, there is difference within humanity; it is repleted with both similarity and difference, yet cut off from the creator, ungrounded, people search for identity. Not finding it, some manufacture it as the current fashion to declare their 'gender' in a hopeless grasp for 'identity'.

On the other hand, we do have a real 'identity' being in the image of the Triune God, in home is exhibited the reality of unity and differentiation, were love is real, committed and open (those loved are loved as they are, not conditionally).

The Trinity shows us that difference in unity is true, but does not destroy real communication, real being, or the significance of the individual.

Paganism -- Oneism -- destroys all of these things as the individual is really but an indistinguisable component of the all, at best. The example of this is the hopelessness of materialist monism captured in the notion of (Darwinian) evolution: no one is anything but a local assembly of molecules which were previously some other assembly, and in the future will re-arrange through decay, back into worm dung. And that's all it offers!

 

Death: do animals count?

Some people question the meaning of the fall in relation to its introduction of death. They want to limit this to either mankind alone, or restrict it to a 'spiritual' death. This is to avoid the implication of materialist long age of earth and the obvious death of animals this would require prior to the fall. That is, millions of years of animal death recorded in fossils, again, on their terms.

This question, of death before the fall, in reference to animals (the 'living creatures' of Genesis 1:24 excluding plants, bacteria, insects, and the like) seems to want to make God part of the creation, and not separated from it as creator, but separate from it as source of life; despite being so as the creator of all life.

That is, somehow 'life' is external to even God, in some mystical or platonic construction.

Thus some disregard animal death in cavalier fashion. I doubt this can be sustained with a biblical understanding of the relation of Creator and his creation of life; something flowing from his word and the direct action of Christ. The Creator has no 'not-life' in him! Death is the denial of life and the reversion to a not-God state of being; that is, 'not being'. I don't think the hand of God, the Word of God produces death, otherwise, death would not be a cause for grief.

Death in these terms is a direct insult to God and an inversion of his creation (as sin is the inversion of his love).

I write this after recently seeing an aged relative's corpse and learning that our pet dog has multiple malignant tumors and will soon die. At different levels both are death, an assault on the life God created and both confront us with the horror, in different degrees, of the termination of life, of relationship and fellowship (even with an animal).

Our revulsion and grief at death is at its unnaturalness, its reverse of the purpose of the creation, It could not be before the fall, as the direct reading of Genesis 3 and as the ramifications of the fall are described.

Some days later:

We buried our pet dog today. The vet sent her on her way peacefully and without discomfort, or even curiosity at the cannula, she was so sick. The termination of life, even of an animal, was still horrible, it was still the inversion of life, it was still something not of the God of life who made Adam to govern (have care over) the animals that he named (examined, considered, classified, identified). Did Adam expect these animals to then die?

It was not until the fall that decay set in; and death is the result of decay.

1 big answer

In the blog "7 or so questions, 7 or so answers: an elevator pitch" I set out an approach to talking about one's faith in terms a non-Christian might better understand.

Greg Koukl recently released a video of his answer to precisely that situation.

An edited transcript is provided below.

What is your elevator speech answer to the   question "What do you believe and why do you believe it?"

First three stories.

1.  There is a God who is there.
2.  He has not been silent. (Francis Schaeffer's title)
3.  He has visited this planet in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

He gave evidence of who he was, and then did something to rescue us from ourselves that will determine what happens to everybody in the final resurrection.

That's, maybe, the content. At the end of history. Maybe I'll put it that way for a non-Christian.

Why do I believe it? Well, this one, in a certain sense, is I'll give the general point that I've given many times, because that answer is about the nature of reality—I'm not talking about my faith, my beliefs, as such.

Of course, they're my faith and belief, but what I believe about those things is that this is the way the world is. And I think that this is an accurate take on the world.

It's the accurate picture of reality, taken as a whole, because it turns out to be the best explanation for the way things are. And, so, when you look at the way the world is—that the world came into existence, that the world has conscious beings, that one set of the conscious beings—human beings—have a moral nature, and that concepts like mercy and goodness and justice and wickedness and evil. All of these are real parts of the universe— the worldview, the picture of reality—that makes the most sense out of all of these things. This turns out to be the Christian view of reality.

In the book, “Street Smarts," I have two chapters on atheism followed by one chapter on the problem of evil, and the chapter on the problem of evil is called Evil: Atheism's Fatal Flaw. I position the problem of evil, not in a defensive way, like, well, let's see if I can find out how I can convince you that it makes sense in our world; I did that in "The Story of Reality”. No, I'm trying to show there is a problem of evil, and that's not bad for us, it's bad for atheists, and here's why.

Simply put, the problem of evil fits into our world. Our story is about   the problem of evil from the beginning to the end”. It starts in chapter 3 of Genesis. It ends 66 books later. So, it fits in our story, and our story is not over yet. It's just part of it.

While there's no real problem there, in a certain sense. there remain questions that come up that we can speculate on and try to answer, but the key thing is, the problem of evil makes sense in our story. It does not make sense in the atheist's story.

In that, there's one example of our view of reality being a much better explanation than any other. In fact, the best explanation for evil or for the origin of the universe or for the existence of consciousness or the reality of human freedom or a whole host of other things.

If I was to give a short elevator speech, would I include any testimony in that or would I stick to, what I have just described?

No, I don't think I would put testimony in, partly because nothing in my testimony is evidential. It isn't like I heard a voice, I went blind, and then I got healed of blindness three days later (referring to the Apostle Paul’s encounter with the risen Christ). So, there's nothing that's third person public that I can offer.

Secondly, I really want to work to avoid relativizing my own views. This is why I don't like when people say, "Well, the Christian view is." There may be a place for that, but we have to be very careful that we're not just saying this is kind of, as you put it earlier, our club. I don't like "Well we believe this," or "We have faith that," "My faith tells me thus and so."

I'd rather put this in terms of my understanding of the nature of reality. These are my convictions about the way the world is, and I have particular reasons for thinking that my convictions match the world, and then I can talk about that. I'm going to try to stay away from the subjective element, in my case, for those reasons. I especially don't want people to be tempted to relativize my view. They could say it's inaccurate. Fine. But if my view is relative, it can't be inaccurate. It's true for me. That’s all you can say.