What is this all about?

I’ve been doing some work on Ecclesiastes recently, and had one of those moments of seeing more clearly how to explain our Joshua’s Tree vision when reading these words in Ecclesiastes 5, and some commentary on them.

They describe two different attitudes of coming before God – the way of folly and the way of wisdom. The fool comes loaded with sacrifice, and ready to promise much to God. The warning of the passage is that promising much but not delivering is empty words, and it treats God lightly.

The way of wisdom by contrast is to come to listen, with few words and to fear God. Today we don’t come to offer sacrifices – but the subtle danger is that we come to a worship service to give and to do and even to achieve. The danger might be even higher in lockdown, where the worship service can be endlessly polished to achieve a ‘professional’ standard. In our services we may have a lot of noise, and a lot of activity – but we need to first stand in awe of God, and then be silent and listen to what he has to say.

I read these words in Iain Provan’s very helpful commentary on Ecclesiastes:

“Christians, too, often inhabit all-noisy space. Their noise is more religious, perhaps, but it is still noise. “Worship services” provide little opportunity for silent awe in the presence of God but plenty of opportunity for performance on the part of a select few professional speakers and musicians, who fill all the space with their relentless activity. It is Christian activity of course, but it still fills the space that might be taken by silent adoration. Thus church comes to resemble simply another form of human group endeavour and indeed often comes to mimic in a serious way the culture around it that is supposedly governed by different values. “Church” is increasingly thought of in terms of organisation rather than of people worshipping God together, and leaders bring business and management models to bear on its development – planning growth, programming success and managing change.” … “Noise deafens us to reality. Silent reflection – deliberate inactivity – is necessary if we are to regain perspective and remember who God really is, what that really means, and what therefore the church is for. We need to hear again that injunction. ‘Do not come any closer … take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground’ Ex. 3:5; and to hear it, we need to stop talking.”

Iain Provan p121 & 122 – Ecclesiastes/Song of Songs NIVAC.

And he cites Eugene Peterson

“It is necessary, if we are going to truly live a Christian life, and not just use the word Christian to disguise our narcissistic and promethean attempts at spirituality without worshipping God and without being addressed by God, it is necessary to return to Square One and adore God and listen to God. Given our sin-damaged memories that render us vulnerable to every latest edition of journalistic spirituality, daily reorientation in the truth revealed in Jesus and attested in Scripture is required. And given our ancient predisposition for reducing every scrap of divine revelation that we come across into a piece of moral/spiritual technology that we can use to get on without God, a daily return to a condition of not-knowing and non-achievement is required.”

Eugene Peterson Subversive Spirituality p30

Some of these words leapt off the page at me:

“Noise deafens us to reality. Silent reflection – deliberate inactivity – is necessary if we are to regain perspective and remember who God really is, what that really means, and what therefore the church is for.”

They leapt off the page because I think this sums up so much of the Joshua’s Tree vision and dream that we have. We want to be able to help church and ministry leaders do this.

We are seeking a place – a physical place where leaders can come away and be quiet and be refreshed. A place to regain perspective and remember who God really is, and what that really means, and therefore who they really are and what church or their ministry is all about.

Then these words struck too: Given our sin-damaged memories that render us vulnerable to every latest edition of journalistic spirituality, daily reorientation in the truth revealed in Jesus and attested in Scripture is required.

So, we want a ‘place’ – in the form of a website, where resources to help Christian leaders do this can be found. A place where leaders can be helped to dig deep into the wells of scriptures and be refreshed for their own journeys and a place where they can be helped to dig deeply into scriptures to feed their congregations or ministry.

Both of these spaces would be places where we’d love to help people come back to the attitude that Eugene Peterson described so well above: a daily return to a condition of not-knowing and non-achievement is required. This isn’t about fixing anything or anyone – but about providing space for healthy life so that we can help some leaders stay healthy for the long term.

It might be that there is organisation out there whose vision would mesh with this and would be happy to have us operating in partnership with them, or it might be that we simply operate individually in this and build up contacts with people organically.

With the current COVID crisis, and our own limited resources the first of these is not humanly speaking feasible right now. But work on the second is something we want to do. We are aiming to build up a website and resources available to help leaders dig deep into scripture both personally and for their ministries, and for leaders to take time to pray and be prayed for.

Acts 6:4 describes the priorities of the apostles as “prayer and the ministry of the word”. We would love to help leaders go deeper in both these key priorities.

We aim to provide resources, and personal input in terms of help with getting to grips with scripture and its implications on our own lives and those we work with.

To do this we’d love to hear more about what would be helpful for us to include in this. So, if you are in some sort of leadership role and resource/support of this sort looks promising please get in touch with any thoughts that you have.

Please share this with anyone you know in leadership who might benefit from this.

Please share this with anyone you know who might be interested in supporting/advising or praying for such a venture.