The backgorund is…Google host talks regualrly in their various headquarters. Talks are by authors, Presidential canditates, etc. For some reason, they invited Tim Keller.
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.
What’s the difference between a devout muslim or one of Dawkins’ meatheads being the president of a university Christian Union, and a university’s ‘Welsh Society being open to Scottish members; the wine society open to teetotal members, the choral society open to non-singing members, and the cheerleading society being open to male members…’?
None apparently.
Or at least that’s the decision of Martin Shaw, the QC leading the informal adjudication process involving Exeter Christian Union and Exeter University’s Student guild. He goes on to say that ‘the Guild were ‘laudable’ in their aims, the University had no responsibility for the discrimination against Christians, and that the CU was wrong to require that those leading the CU should be Christians. That position, he said, could be held by anyone of any faith or none, provided they agree to the objectives of the CU.’
Three weeks ago I sat in the middle of five hundred men at the EMA conference at St. Helen’s. Though the conference’s title was ‘Defining the times: what is an evangelical?’ there was a subtext to nearly every message during the week - ‘prepare your young men - persecution will come’. As one of only a couple of dozen men under 25 there I shuffled my bum. When we heard that ‘young men are scared to suffer they’ve never seen you have to do it’, mine, along with the other young men’s bum, almost did something else.
Whoever it was that said it (either Tim Keller or Dick Lucas - I’ve searched my notes, and can’t find the quote…) hit the nail on the head. What does it look like? When will it come? I am scared to suffer - I don’t don’t have a clue what it’s going to be like.
The news coming out of Exeter gives me an idea.
Exeter, we stand with you, and pray for you. You walk a path we’ll inevitably follow you down. Stand strong - you will bask in all that Christ has won for you soon.
Beyond everything else, the worst thing I’ve ever been told is ’these days, a normal evangelical church congregation can only handle 30 minutes expository preaching’. Without a shadow of a doubt, this is the most crippling sentence in my memory.
The guy who told me this had a theory - Television programmes are broken down mainly into 30 minute episodes. As most of a congregation will watch the television (though one of prognosis’ bloggers doesn’t. Can you tell which one? I’ll give you a clue - he’s the one that still thinks that Anthea Turner is a welcomed new addition to the Blue Peter team), they’re trained to only take thirty minutes of information at a time. Preachers that go on for any longer will find that the congregation will develope a sudden bout of piles and start moving their butts around on the seat - officially to get comfortable, actually to make clear to the preacher ‘Look! Are you going to get to the point or what?! I’ve got a chicken in the oven, you know!’ 
Or at least that’s how I’ve been interrpreting the bumshuffle ever since I was given the 30 minute golden rule. I don’t think there’s been a week in church where I haven’t been slightly paranoid about causing Mrs. ****’s chicken to chargrill.
So last Sunday night a tough one. I popped down to Ammanford Church to preach at their Welsh language meeting. It’s a big encouragement to ‘go west’ and preach. People from that part of the world are ‘my people’ - we talk the same, dress the same, support the same rugby team - so many of the cultural issues that you’d normally have to deal with are sorted. I felt like Paul going to preach at a Benjaminite home group.
Because of this, I was relaxed and that may have played a part in me hitting 50minutes. It wasn’t like it was an upbeat 50 either - 50 minutes on Psalm 22, the horrors of the cross. I was gutted. I’d broken the golden rule. ‘How could God bless if I’ve gone on for 20minutes too long?’.
Sunday night came and went, I pouted til Monday afternoon, but continued to feel pretty annoyed about it until about Wednesday when I listened to an mp3 of Tim Keller giving a lecture about what an evangelical ministry should look like.
He started explaining that one day, he was reading a translation of Romans 1 that had verse 17 not as the usual ‘the righteous shall live by faith’, but ’he who by faith is righteous shall live’. He said that the moment that he read that, he heard a voice adding ‘and he who by preaching is righteous shall die every Sunday’.
This was a watershed moment, as it was for me, hearing him say it all in light of preaching for so long the Sunday before. Keller explained how for so long during his ministry, though he confessed Christ as his righteouness, his ‘functional righteousness’ was in fact his preaching. So, when he preached well, he would think that God must be for him, and that when he preached badly, he would think that God was against him.
This was a real eureka moment for me. I saw that my functional saviour had become ‘the 30 minute rule’. Stick to it and God will bless, break it and God cannot. Totally against the truth. Totally against grace. It’s all of grace, whether God blesses or not. I want to live (and sleep like a Calvinist), I want Jesus as my rightousness, not my preaching.
