The Least Christian Leader

Leaving one church and getting ready to pastor another has led to lots of kind compliments being paid to me.  Thank you all.  More of that another day.  Today I should tell you about one of the best compliments I ever received.

It was a few years ago in the Lakes, helping lead an outdoor pursuits venture for 12-16 year-olds.  Mountains were climbed, lakes crossed, abs seiled and all that.  The gospel was shared, and I sat in on the older lads' dormitory as they fathomed questions of faith and wondered whether they could or should believe in God, trust Jesus, be filled with the Spirit.  All that.  Their other leaders were brilliant: young adults with vim and vigour and verve and other high-scoring Scrabble words.  I rarely had reason to interject.  I may, just once or twice, have raised an eyebrow at the very slightly cut-and-dried faith they were demonstrating, as if to say, "Ah, the brilliance of youthful optimism.  The faith is good, but not as simple as all that."  You try communicating that with just one eyebrow.

Me, eating toast with only one eyebrow

And on the last night, a 16-year old lad tracked me down by the ping pong table.  He was from London and his name began with a J.  He furrowed his brow a little, and asked if I would help him with his faith.  "I think it all makes sense," he said.  "I think I want to follow Jesus.  But I wanted to talk to someone about it… and you seem like the least Christian leader here."

Well.  Boom shake the room, my friends.  The least Christian leader here!  As soon as he said it, he was embarrassed, but I was thrilled.  Thrilled to little skinny ribbons.  The only ordained priest on the venture, and the least Christian leader there!

I did my little Chandler dance (on the inside) and got on with talking to him, listening to him and trying to understand where he was coming from.  It was a productive evening, and the next step for him in rather an exciting journey.

My co-leaders in that dorm did brilliant work with the seven other lads up there.  But one of them - J - needed someone a bit wearier, a bit more sceptical, a bit less part of the culture of Christianity that can emerge on these ventures and in our churches.  It's no reflection on him or them.  It might be a reflection on me!  I was overjoyed to find that we'd accidentally (and God had deliberately) got all the bases covered in that dorm.  I was feeling slightly (if happily) redundant up there, glad that younger people were doing my job, so that if ever I retired, I needn't worry about it all being in good human hands.

When J said "least Christian," I hope what he meant was that he needed to know the faith without the subculture, without the slightly cheesy too-certain caricatures of Christianity that maybe he'd been offered.  He needed someone Christian without being so caught in the tradition that they were in love with the trappings.

There's a brilliant song out there that churches sing, which says:

Father God, I wonder how I managed to exist

Without the knowledge of your parenthood and your loving care.

It's double-edged.  It doesn't just mean, "I don't know how I lived without you."  It also means, "I've forgotten what it was like without this faith," which might just mean, "I've no idea how to communicate it effectively to people any more."  You can get lost in your own sub-culture.

I'm overjoyed to say that I love Jesus, but I can't be doing with church architecture, choral music or Songs of Praise.  People tell me all about church buildings they've seen on holiday as if a vicar must really want to see more flying buttresses and a jolly good nave (not jolly good knave, that'd be me).  I think people swooned when I declared I'd like church to be less like Songs Of Praise.  It's a bit too clean-cut, with apparently middle-class middle-aged people dressed rather too well and singing with rather too much enthusiasm and rather too-wide-open mouths* for me.  I fear that a passing viewer (and passing is what they might well do) may well mistake this sub-culture for Christianity and imagine that they could never belong to it: life too messy, mouth not wide enough, not middle-class or middle-aged enough, not got quite the same capacity to dress up and enunciate.

If you've ever thought that, fear not.  There are lots of us "less Christian" Christians about, for whom life is a bit fuzzy, who've been battered or hurt, or whose CVs might get us thrown off the BBC.  Sidle up to us while the mouths are wide open, and we'll talk about our scepticism and our faith in spite of our scepticism.  Anything to pierce the bubble of respectability which Christ's followers get stuck with on the telly and in the news.

Sidle up to us scruffs with scars, and join us in being the lest Christian Christians in the room - which may well be what Jesus needs to change this world.

And J, I hope you're still doing well out there.  I may use you as a reference for my next job!



*I may change my mind a little since Songs of Praise went to Calais...