A church that is real will not be too quick to judge but will rather be honest enough to recognise that each member sins, each member has their own struggles and each member – if they nevertheless love Jesus and want to obey his commands – is saved by grace and fully accepted by him. All of which means, we won’t be too quick to pronounce judgement recognising that we can all be judged.

You sometimes hear about people wanting church that is real. The other thing people sometimes hanker after is authenticity. But what is a church that is authentically itself? What does that kind of church look like? Here are some possible things.
Free to be individuals
A church that is authentically itself will have room for all the individuals that make it up to be themselves. Nobody will be expected to wear the formally or informally prescribed uniform. Rather, everyone is free to wear what they wear simply because it is what they would wear. Similarly, everybody is free to speak in the way they would naturally speak and talk about whatever it is that happens to be their particular points of interest. In all the ways that people might express their personality, ethnicity, culture and interests, a church that is real will gladly make room for such things.
Free to be honest
A church that is authentically itself will gladly be honest. There will be a culture of honesty – that probably starts with those at the top but reaches down throughout the church – that we can make our struggles known without fear of damning judgmentalism. Being honest about our many and varied struggles – physical, mental, spiritual – is a sign of being real.
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Rather than loving Jesus so much that we hear his call and gladly do it, finding our contentment in Christ and pressing on for his glory because it is what we most want to do, we focus on ourselves, our felt needs and end up shying away from what Jesus asks because it doesn’t “meet my needs”. It is, when all is said and done, a failure to trust in Jesus. 

It is not uncommon to find people dissatisfied as believers. They may be dissatisfied with their lot in life. They may be dissatisfied with their church. They may even have become dissatisfied with the Lord himself.
There is often a common theme with such dissatisfaction. There is a belief that either they deserve better or that the Lord had committed to giving them something that they don’t currently have or enjoy. When the Lord isn’t giving them what they think he should, they become dissatisfied. This may lead them to try and ‘make good’ what is currently lacking and chasing after things they hope will fill up their lack. In worse cases, it may lead to people backsliding altogether and rejecting Jesus because he hasn’t given them what they want.
The problem is obviously not with Jesus (you knew that!) The problem does not even lie in the dissatisfaction itself. We may all be prone to dissatisfaction sometimes. The issue in these kind of cases is in the belief that things are not how God promised they would be. Although more accurately, the real issue is that God often hasn’t promised these things at all.
Most of us can clock on to the more obvious stuff – the things of the unabashed health and wealth gospel – and recognise God simply hasn’t promised to make us all healthy, wealthy and happy if we just trust in Jesus. At least, not this side of glory. We recognise ‘Lord, fill up my bank account’ is just not something Jesus ever promised to answer with a ‘yes’. But there is a soft prosperity thinking that creeps in which says that God has effectively promised I won’t be dissatisfied, and if I am I must do something to find the contentment he promises.
Only, Jesus doesn’t promise us contentment; he commands us to be content. That is subtly different. Along with the command to be content, he also commands us to do a whole host of other things too. Some of which are quite difficult and may not seem like the obvious road to health, wealth and blessèd happiness.
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It is important that we don’t lose sight of what we are supposed to be about. We are in the business of disciple-making. The end to which our outreach activities must point is the making of disciples. If they are not doing that, or we have no plan or understanding of how we get people from what we’re doing to being disciples, then we’re not really doing much more than filling a room in the same way as anyone else. 

Yesterday, just before I had a meeting with another pastor, I was able to spend a bit of time around the end of our English Classes in church. I was so encouraged to see how they had grown. What used to be one class, which later became one big class with a little adjunct second class, turned into two reasonable sized classes and is now two fairly sizeable classes. Every person attending represents somebody from the local community we now have meaningful, ongoing contact with and the breadth of nationalities represented is significant. As has been noted a number of times, by our Muslim neighbours locally, when they run things for the community they tend to be monoculturally Asian; everything we do is always multicultural. We are probably the most multicultural thing in the area.
I don’t want to suggest that any of that is unimportant. Quite the opposite. Without things like our English Classes – but all the various other outreach works we do too – we simply wouldn’t have the reach into the community that we do. So, don’t mishear me here. Without these works we would not have the excellent contact with so many people in our community that we do. So doing these things is important to us.
However (and you knew one was coming), frequently people’s excitement stops at these works. They see the growing English Class and say, ‘wow! We’d love it if we could do this’. They see the plethora of nations represented in the room and say, ‘wow! We’d love to have this at our church’. They see the efforts made to show practical love this way and say, ‘this is brilliant!’ To which I always want to ask – genuinely, and not facetiously at all – what is so brilliant about it?
Too often, we get wowed by people in a room. But when all is said and done, our English Classes, our Dialogue Evenings, our Food Security Programme and all the others ultimately are just people in a room. Yes, we might say we are showing the love of Christ to people. But let’s not pretend the Food Bank down the road, the interfaith forum in town, the English courses in the college aren’t doing exactly the same stuff without any attempt to show the love of Christ to anybody and they look, frankly, much the same as what we’re doing.
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Submitting the evidence of the church’s relevance, Rev David Cameron goes on to list a whole load of things the Church of Scotland does that one can access in any number of other places. That is to say, although it may offer some worthy things, they are not uniquely worthy things that can be found in the Church. They are apparently quite worthy things that people can access in lots of other places without having to suffer all the religious stuff they don’t subscribe to anymore. And this, he fails to realise, is what makes the Church of Scotland less relevant. Not the numbers of themselves, but the lack of any unique offering at all.

In yesterday’s Guardian, they report that a majority of people no longer identify as religious in Scotland. The most significant decline appears to have come in the Church of Scotland. The paper report:
The census found the number of people who identified with the Church of Scotland had slumped by more than a third over the decade, falling from 32.4% of the population in 2011 to 20.4%, or 1.1 million people, in 2022.
The number of Catholics in Scotland also fell, though less dramatically, from 15.9% to 13.3%, or 723,000 people.
This should not come as a major surprise for two principal reasons. First, the Church of Scotland has now embraced liberalism to such a degree that it offers absolutely nothing unique compared to the secular world around it. The Catholic Church, by contrast, has not quite embraced liberalism to the same degree and therefore will appear to offer something that cannot be accessed almost anywhere else.
The second point of fact is that Scotland simply hasn’t benefited from the levels of immigration that have been seen in England. Many of those who have come to England are already Christian and typically of a conservative theological bent. Not only has Scotland not received as much in the way of immigrants as England, the conservative-minded immigrant is less likely to attend a liberal Church of Scotland congregation and will instead find a more theologically suitable home. Those who come from non-Christian backgrounds and convert in the UK, again, find a happier home in a church that actually values and aims at conversion, something of a dirty word to liberals.
These observations shouldn’t really be all that surprising to anyone who has paid any attention to these things.
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God himself came to be that single righteous man required for God to relent of his anger and avert judgement. In Christ, his righteousness covers his people. God’s judgement is averted because of that one man, Jesus Christ the righteous.

Yesterday, we were continuing in our series in Jeremiah. We covered a large passage, from Jeremiah 4:5-6:30, and so couldn’t say everything that we might in the allotted time. What follows is one of the observations that I didn’t expressly make but I think is both interesting and valid.
In Jeremiah 5:1, we read this:
Roam through the streets of Jerusalem.Investigate;search in her squares.If you find one person,any who acts justly,who pursues faithfulness,then I will forgive her.
Having pronounced judgement on Judah, God tells Jeremiah if he can find even one righteous person, he will relent of his anger and forgive the country. All for one person. So, Jeremiah sets about looking throughout the city to find even one righteous person. He tries the poor, the suffering, the upper class, the priests, the prophets and even the children all to no avail. All he had to do was find one righteous person, but there was none to be found and so God’s judgement is both coming and entirely justified.
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If you want to see how liberalism is wrecking everything, this is it writ large. Don’t think I mean “liberal” like America uses it. I mean hyper-individualist liberalism. Neoliberals, driven by nothing but economic output, salivate over this stuff. Matthew Parris said quite bluntly, it is time we realised economically useless lives should end and the cost of keeping them alive is not worth it. Gross, but honest.

As I was scrolling through the news yesterday, I came across this story in the Guardian. As most will know, the Netherlands has brought assisted dying into law. As many will also know, this is currently a live discussion in the UK and it seems almost inevitable that we will follow suit. The debates are currently happening but it seems like one of those campaigning issues that is all over the media now and has a whiff of sad inevitability about it. I would love to be proven wrong, I just suspect I won’t be.
Anyway, this Dutch woman hit the news because she has just won a landmark judgement granting her request for assisted dying. What makes this a landmark judgement, as opposed to just another run of the mill permission to be killed (what a horrible half sentence that is), is that she has been granted her request on the grounds of ‘unbearable mental suffering’. She suffers from chronic depression, anxiety, trauma and an unspecified personality disorder. In other words, her suicidal ideation and self-harm are no longer viewed as symptoms of her mental disorder to be relieved but as the very cure to the underlying mental health issues she currently faces.
Last month, I wrote this concerning such moves in Britain:
As many of you will know, I suffer from quite serious depressive illness. I have made more than one serious attempt on my own life and actively planned many more. Fortunately, I am alive today because I was not very effective at killing myself on my own and I now have some helpful medication that keeps me broadly on a level. The threat of assisted dying has some serious and real implications for people like me.
I went on:
If we are comfortable with people killing themselves, even encouraging some to do so, it will be hard to view as tragic those who do so as they struggle with mental illness. As we consider it less tragic, we may well find ourselves caring less about intervening with mental health services to avert it. If we follow the reasoning of Matthew Parris, the mentally ill are useless to society and, therefore, not worth saving. Not only is the cost of keeping them alive on benefits not worth it on such thinking, the broader cost of mental health interventions will similarly not be worth it. Just as some trumpeted abortion as health care because it is cheaper than paying out benefits and providing high level children’s and family services, so it won’t be long before we twig that the cheapest solution to mental health problems is to not bother intervening and then trumpet assisted dying as a form of health care too.
On a more personal note, I am alive today because I was not very competent in trying to kill myself. I am quite confident that if assisted dying were legalised and someone was willing to help, I would have been much more effective. If that someone is a doctor, it is nigh on guaranteed. If the grounds for assisted dying is the desire of the individual to die, and their willingness to be put out of their misery, it is hard to imagine anything other than a queue of severely ill, mentally tormented people not lining up to take advantage of the provisions. We should be at least a bit troubled by the prospect of doctors being less concerned about how we might treat one’s suicidal ideation so much as proposing how they can help their patients most effectively carry it out!
Well, somewhat predictably, here we are looking at exactly that being proposed in the Netherlands. Indeed, not only proposed, but legally granted by court injunction. This, I think, really should make any British politician sit up and take notice. It should similarly make the British public sit up and take notice.
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Things that are otherwise good or neutral that we chase after and desire – that the Lord has been keeping us from for our own good – that he eventually gives to us. In the end, he may give them to us so that we realise the Lord was keeping us from the things for our good, not to ruin our fun. He isn’t saying the thing is bad, but that it perhaps is not good for us. 

I am convinced that there are times God gives us exactly what we want, not because it is a good thing for us, but because he is giving us over to that thing as a judgement. There can be times we ask, push and go after things that God would keep us from. The thing may be an otherwise neutral thing that God, in his goodness, is keeping us from. It may be an ostensibly good thing that simply wouldn’t be good for us. It may be a bad thing, that would be bad for anyone, but we have decided it looks particularly good. Sometimes God gives us the desires of our heart so that we can see just how unappealing it is.
The Lord did this specifically to his people in Israel:
But my people did not listen to my voice;Israel did not obey me.So I gave them over to their stubborn heartsto follow their own plans. – Psalm 81:11-12
But he appears to do this in the New Covenant too:
because they did not think it worthwhile to acknowledge God, God delivered them over to a corrupt mind so that they do what is not right. – Romans 1:28
You can read the rest of Romans 1 to see how God might give people over to different things. The very going after of these things, and then getting them, is itself a judgement upon them. That seems to be what Paul is referring to when he says they ‘received in their own persons the appropriate penalty of their error.’ The very things that they do, they very natural consequences of their choices, constitute a judgement of their own.
Of course, Psalm 81 and Romans 1 are both concerned with those going after sinful behaviours. They are, frankly, the sort of outward sinful behaviours that most Christians rightly understand to be a problem. Few of us who claim to love Jesus will be literally bowing down to Baals nor engaging in some of the more base aspects of Romans 1.
Where we are more likely to hit upon problems is less in the going after specific sinful behaviours – though I don’t pretend that we are immune from that – but rather that we will be driven by sinful desires and motives towards ostensibly good or neutral things for bad reasons. The Lord, in his goodness, may keep us from those things – knowing that they wouldn’t be good or helpful to us –
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Not having his excellence spill out of us in the form of verbiage may not be a sign that we have an affection problem. It may just be evidence of a particular personality. It may be evidence of other perfectly innocent and ordinary things too. We shouldn’t be too quick to assume a lack of affection for Jesus. But I think it is fair to say, if we find that we never have anything to say, might it be because we don’t actually have a living relationship with him and we simply don’t recognise his excellency? 

One of the great tasks of being a Christian is to go into the world an proclaim the excellencies of the one who called us. I do think we so often get taken up with the idea of evangelism as presenting a basic message about what Jesus did on the cross to the detriment of seeing it as a more fulsome task of proclaiming the excellencies of him who called us, in which the cross is not the whole story but a **ahem** crucial aspect. We are not called to just tell people the basic message of how they can get right with God, but to proclaim his excellence to them. A key part of what makes Jesus so excellent is the cross – we are missing something absolutely vital if we don’t mention it – but to proclaim his excellence suggests doing something more than imparting basic facts.
That is what I think often goes missing. It’s not particular key facts about mankind, the problem of sin and the particular solution in Christ. It’s more that we can convey all those things factually and yet do very little to proclaim Christ’s excellence. Not only is there much more to the excellence of Jesus than just what he did on the cross that we often don’t mention – though I can’t stress enough, what he did on the cross is a pretty major bit of excellence in its own right – but there is perhaps a tone and feel to what we say that may or may not convey excellence too. There is a difference between simply saying things Jesus has done that are good and so enthusing about Jesus that he is seen to be excellent. And proclaiming his excellencies suggests we find him so excellent that it just spills out of us. We are not merely into the imparting of basic facts about Jesus, but overflowing with the greatness of him that our evident love for him is seen, felt and heard.
The usual example we might give is the way people talk about whatever they are excited about. When somebody is excited about something – a holiday, a wedding, their hobby, whatever – it just spills out of them. They don’t necessarily rabbit on about it endlessly, they might have a bit more sense that not everyone is quite as excited as they are about it, but it definitely comes out. You will hear about it at least a bit and there is a palpable sense when they are speaking that this is not just some information they are imparting neutrally, facts to be heard and weighed, but a thing they are desperately excited about. Even if you’re not into yourself and don’t get the appeal, you can tell they just love it.
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Churches cannot have it both ways. They cannot simultaneously wash their hands of all responsibility, piling it onto their pastor and/or elders, whilst at the same time having strong and vociferous views about whatever they do.

One of the many terrific things I have discovered since being a pastor is that everything one does is probably wrong. Nothing quite brings it to the fore more than something-must-be-done syndrome. SMBD is usually the refrain you hear when somebody has identified and issue, and it may well be a real and live issue, but doesn’t want to do anything about it themselves. What SMBD typically means is the pastor should be called in to do the something that nobody else wants to do.
A fair question at this point might be, why exactly don’t you want to do anything? The answer is usually pretty obvious. Either the conversation required is a particularly awkward, and therefore unpleasant one, and nobody wants to have that sort of conversation. Otherwise, though someone might be willing to have that awkward conversation—for the sake of the gospel, no doubt—they suspect that everyone else, who see the issue but are unwilling to address it themselves, will have lots of opinions on the particular solution one lands upon. Whilst someone might be willing to have the immediate conversation, awkward as it may be, they are not prepared to face the inevitable pile on that will ensue afterwards as the world and their wife determine whatever you did about it was definitely the wrong thing to do.
For this reason, almost nobody—despite what your church covenant might say and people affirmed they were committed to doing when they become members of your church—puts their hand up to do anything. So, the assumption goes, the lot must fall to the elders, and usually the pastor for the stated reason that he has time though often the unstated reason that he’s the one that gets paid to put up with this nonsense.
So, the pastor goes and has the awkward conversation about whatever it might be and what ensues is totally predictable. I have variously been told that I was being heavy-handed by going and having a conversation with someone and, at the same time, slack and uncaring by having not had a conversation sooner. I have been told before that church discipline needs to happen but nobody, including the person saying it, is willing to vote to enact anything. I have been told that SMBD countless times but whatever something you happen to land on, it is definitely wrong and when you lay out all the possible options (even clearly wrong ones), none of the actual, possible options in front of us—ranging from doing nothing at all about serious sin right the way through to removal from membership and everything in between—all are deemed inappropriate whilst remaining adamant something must be done.
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We should think through tertiary and secondary matters and think carefully about what the scriptures say and how our approach to them will impact our churches. We may not write people out of the corpus if they land differently to us, but where we land may have implications that matter far more than we tend to think.

If you have been around the church any length of time, you will have probably come across people talking about primary and secondary issues. Primary issues are those essential gospel matters over which we cannot simply agree to disagree. Secondary matters were thought to be those matters that we can disagree over without writing each other out of the kingdom as a result. For many, primary meant important and secondary meant, effectively, unimportant.
Seeing some of the problems with that, theological triage advocates have seen something closer to a three tiered system of parsing issues. First order issues are those primary gospel matters the like of which, if they are denied, makes a person an unbeliever. Second order issues are those that don’t mean a person isn’t a believer but would make it hard for two people to sit comfortably together in the same church. Disagreements at the secondary level might not stop you doing gospel work together but might stop you belonging in membership to the same church. Third order issues are those matters that you might comfortably disagree on without thinking anyone outside the kingdom nor suggesting they couldn’t be part of your church.
These approaches to thinking about how to understand points of disagreement in the church is really important. We do need to know whether this particular disagreement is one that means a person is showing they don’t belong to Jesus at all or whether they just disagree with your particular perspective that is not a core part of belonging to a local church, let alone to the kingdom. If we are going to have any ability to live in community with people we will inevitably disagree with from time to time, and knowing we have to interact with believers from beyond the four walls of our own local church here and there, we do have to think carefully about how to judge these issues. But recognising that, we shouldn’t fall into the opposing ditch of suggesting secondary or even tertiary essentially mean unimportant.
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