I’m going to do an occasional series where I simply put up scanned images of evangelistic tracts. I’m not going to comment on them in the actually post itself! Here’s the first, called Last Rites which has an obvious target audience and is from Chick Publications.
I’ve found that boys and girls have very different tastes, every orange wednesday this becomes clearer to me. It was my choice to watch Blades of Glory, it was Jenny’s to watch Freedom Writers. Next week, we’ll go and see the U2 film (that’s my choice), this week it was Jenny’s with Juno (and secretly, I was very pleased, because it would have been mine too).
It’s a film about a teenage pregnancy. Here’s the trailer.
As far as the film goes, you sort of see it coming. Girl gets pregnant / girl tells boy / girl (thankfully) bottles out of an abortion / girl decides to give the baby up / girl wrecks a marriage / girl has baby / girl gives away baby / girl sings a song with baby’s dad. And even though what I’ve just typed looks more like a particularly dark episode of Byker Grove, it is really funny. All of it. Her telling him having warmed him up by complimenting his mum’s detergent? Funny. Her telling her best friend that she’s ‘for shiz prego’? funny. Her parents admitting that they’d rather she be on hard drugs? (Dark, but) funny. It made me laugh. So as far as a comedy goes, it’s job well done Juno.
Go and see it. It’s funny. But, maybe there’s a lesson or two to learn from it. They could have disowned her, but Juno’s parents’ reaction to her being pregnant calms and they stand by her - that’s a lesson. And as the 9 months tick by, you see Juno becoming more and more leperised by her classmates, and the reaction of those that walk with her is inspiringly counter-cultural. As I watched it, I thought of how I might react if a sixteen year old I knew got ‘caught out’. Which one of her classmates would I be most like? “For shame Juno, how could you..?”
And the thing is, it would be so easy to now make this blog about guilt. ‘Teenage pregnancy happens in churches, so be more like Juno’s good friends, and less like the bullies that give her a hard time.’ And that would look like a good thing. Externally, that’d be the right thing to do. But internally, that’s another matter. It may look like the right thing to do, but it’s not the gospel. It’s just moralising.
You see, it’s not just doing that right thing that’s important. It’s doing it for the right reason, with the right motivation. And our reason is always the cross. It’s only when we see ourselves in Juno that we’ll be changed ‘internally’. Before God, we’re all Junos - we’ve all been caught out and should be every bit ashamed. But the gospel is that Jesus, who in dying on the cross became the ultimate Juno - bearing the ultimate shame - our shame. Mark 15 shows Jesus being mocked by everyone, even sworn enemies united to shame him. And as they did, he was taking our place, and feeling our shame. When we get this, we’ll see that we have nothing to hide behind when a Juno walks in our church. We won’t want to help simply because ‘it’s the right thing to do’ but because ‘we can because Jesus dealt with our shame and loved us when he should have chucked us in the skip, and we have no right to see her as any different to us’.
It has got faults, of course it does. The biggest one being that it downplays the reality of the situation it describes. It glamorises a child having a child. And at the end of the film, I was left thinking ‘that was one hairy year in the life of Juno McGuff, thank goodness it’s all over now, and she can get back to playing the guitar with her boyfriend’; that’s not a good thing. But I stilll don’t think that that’s no reason to not go and see it. Don’t get all reformed and precious about making light of sin. Take your friends, and use it. This film will be seen by millions, lets make the most of it.
First off, if you don’t know what Crowded House is or why I’m here for three weeks then scroll down to my post last week and you’ll understand!
Second, I’m going to explain the ’structure’ as it stands at the present (though keep in mind that the nature of Crowded House is such that it changes quite frequently). There are two main networks at the moment, the 215 network and the Sharrow network. The 215 network, of which Steve Timmis is a leader, is the one I’m predominantly involved in and is the largest. They have four churches: Sharrow Vale, HuB, Broom Springs and Loughborough. Sharrow Vale meets in a typical (though of course modernised) church building and has two teams seeking to reach out to particular people. So you have the Manor team and the South View team. The hope at the moment is that eventually these teams may become church plants in and of themselves. The other three (HuB, Broom Springs and Loughborough) all meet in homes and Loughborough is expected to plant in the coming months and perhaps will become its own network. The Sharrow network, of which Tim Chester is a leader, is a lot simpler. They have two churches: Abbey and Sharrow. Both meet in homes. I don’t know what their plans and intentions are for the near future, as I haven’t spent as much time with them!
Third, here’s what I’ve been up to this week. If anything doesn’t make sense then do ask in the comments bit and I’ll clarify.
| Morning | Afternoon | Evening | |
| Sunday 13th January | Sharrow Vale’s out there sunday - house church meetings. | Hanging out with my host family. | South View team meeting, meal and communion, followed by the pub. |
| Monday 14th January | GTs (Gospel Trainees) meeting, ’sermon’ prep. | Lunch with the GTs, outreach project | 215 network leaders’ meeting, Loughborough leaders’ meeting. |
| Tuesday 15th January | Group hermeneutic exercise. | Outreach project | Tea at Adam and Amy’s with the Aussies, pub quiz on the Manor estate. |
| Wednesday 16th January | GT meeting, prayer with the leader of HuB, Mum’s and Tots. | Lunch with the local launderette guy and HuB church people, hanging out with a homeless guy and his mate. | Pasta plus, hanging out at the pub. |
| Thursday 17th January | Porterbrook Training. | Hanging out with Tim Chester, sitting in on his 1-2-1. | Tea with the Chesters, Greenhouse training, pub quiz. |
| Friday 18th January | GT meeting, hanging out with Bobby-Jo (a leader of a house church in Tasmania). | Preparing a video for Sundays meeting at Sharrow Vale | Being a waiter at Live @ 215 (Jazz cafe). |
Fourth and finally I want to reflect on how the evangelism is done here. If like me you don’t think that street preaching is the best form of communicating the gospel and that door knocking is not the best way to get into a relationship in order to share the gospel, then you’ve got to ask the question how can I do evangelism? One answer is to hold ‘events’ as a church and tag on a token gospel talk at the end. Another answer is to rely on individuals in the church to go out, build relationships and share the gospel themselves and then when their non-Christian friends become Christians they can be brought into the church. I would have said that the best means of evangelism was the last one, that is until I read Total Church and saw how it worked out here at Crowded House.
Since technically I am a student, (although I rarely feel like it—there’s too much work involved in a Bible College to call myself a normal student!) I’ve gotten myself involved in this 
mission that’s currently going on in Ammanford. Tonight we had an open mic night. Four acts performed with various different styles, three guitar based and one piano. It was all very fine and dandy: lovely atmosphere, good coffee and some nice sweeties and lollies to chew and suck on! There was no message, talk, address, testimony or preach. The nearest it got to that was one guy’s song which was basically his testimony and the brief adverts for two of the events on over the coming week and the Christianity Explored course starting in September.
Now, I’m not going to get into a discussion on whether we’re going to call it evangelism or whether it was simply a bridge-building event. I guess if we’re going to get technical then it shouldn’t be called evangelism because there was no proclamation of good news, but then was good news subtly portrayed through the lives of those who were Christians there? Well, you know… whatever… that’s not my beef!
My point is this; it is really valuable to put on ‘church’ events where there is no gospel proclamation for a few reasons:
It’s fair to say that there are negatives to this ‘non-proclamation events’ process too:
But these aren’t impossible to overcome. With the first three, so long as you’re aware of the need for these types of events and you’re aware of the downsides then you can put them on realising that it is going to be a long process and it will be less encouraging at times and will take up a lot of time with less obvious results. And as for the fourth one, surely that’s something that ministers should be doing and encouraging both in the pulpit and in seminars/training courses.
The need is great. And as Jesus simply ate and drank with ’sinners and tax collectors’ so should we.
*The lists provided are not exhaustive. There are other positives and negatives that could be included, I just can’t think of them this late at night!
Week in, week out, I remember plugging from the front the fact that CU was not a church. Oh we had all sorts of reasons why not, most pretty weak, but I was positive that it was not, nor should it be. My opinion hasn’t changed.
You see while I was at university my mission field was the university. I spoke with passion at large CU meetings about how we were a missionary group, that even though we weren’t in China or Montinegro (the vogue places to go do mission in Warwick) we were still missionaries, ’sent’ from our home churches to impact on the campus. It was brilliant, I had CU for witnessing to students and my University church for doing church things.
The greatest thing about CU was its focus on the gospel. By its very nature (multi-denominational) we were obsessed with focusing on Christ, the cross and His ressurection. Possibly our motive was to avoid any disagreement amongst us rather than a St.Paul realisation that that was all that mattered, but still, that was our obsession and is the obsession of CU’s all over Britain. Focusing on the cross made us extremely missionally minded. We used the tag line, “Mission and Maturity” but with our focus on evangelisinig the lost and getting them into local churches (as CU was most definitely not a church) we were actually more realisticly about, “Mission & maturity”.
So, why the title? Well as I’ve returned ‘from the mission field’ to the day by day slog of the local church, one thing has struck me more than anything. That is the need for people to realise that they are missionaries, that they’re place of work, friends, family, these are their mission fields and if they are truely maturing, then they would be witnessing all the more. Unfortunately we have this idea that doing ‘maturity’ is seperate from doing mission. How wrong could we be! The greatest source of maturing is sharing the gospel and anyone who is truely being matured will be driven more to mission and sharing Jesus. That’s a fact. Our churches are far to inward looking, thinking that if we ’send’ some students out, ’send’ some people abroad, then we fill our missional quota and the rest of us can get on with worshiping God and getting to know Jesus better.
If our Churches could steal just a small amount of that passion from our CU’s, well the kingdom of God would be in much better shape here in Wales. A church that is more interested in the style of songs we play, or why there isn’t an evening service any more, or why Mrs. Smith has started coming to our Bible study when we were quite happy as we were, a church that is more interested in this, I’m not sure is a church any more. At the very heart of a church must be the urgency to let people know about Jesus. If that is lost (if it is not over emphasised to the extreme) then we are nothing more than a social club and a very odd one at that.
Hats off to CU’s across the nation, they are more of a church than most of the churches that we’ll ever visit.
