Written by T. M. Suffield |
Monday, April 22, 2024
Good growth is slow growth. Are those couple of moments when God has done that to me bad? No, they were wonderful touches of grace. The problem comes if I start to think that’s normal and everyone needs a crisis moment that leads to huge character change. Ideally growth is slow. We should seek growth that’s slow. Most sanctification should happen through the slow plodding walk of hearing the Word preached, taking the Supper, worshipping the Lord, and rubbing shoulders with the people of God.

There’s an increasingly common quip in response that suggests that healthy things grow, and then stop growing. The only thing that keeps on growing constantly is cancer.
The first is usually used to suggest either that your church not growing is a sign of it not being healthy; or used to defend either a growing church or a focus on numerical growth within your church.
To put my cards on the table: your church that isn’t growing could be healthy or unhealthy. On its own growth isn’t an indicator either way. Growing is not a bad thing, it’s often a good thing, but it isn’t always. A focus on numerical growth—by which I mean making that a goal rather than dealing with growth as it comes as a result of other things—is typically a bad thing.
Post-Covid many British churches shrunk or closed. Many other ballooned. With the recent Nigerian diaspora, many churches have ballooned again. There were other challenges in both moments of growth, but my point is simply this: ballooning isn’t desirable.
Of course, if it happens then you react to it as best you can, scrambling to teach doctrine and culture, carefully considering how and where to reconfigure structures, as well as all the other things you usually do to help new people join. You celebrate the new people, they themselves are precious gifts. But the fact of sudden growth is difficult for leaders. It’s inevitable that scrambling to keep up will be less ideal than if you’d grown to that size slowly over a number of years.
Why’s that? Because slow growth is good growth. Most of the time, good growth is slow growth.
I don’t want to suggest that all fast growth is cancerous, but I do want to suggest that it provokes a crisis of leadership. Churches are like trees and growing them is the slow work of pruning and watering and watching over multiple generations. A Church’s Pastors and other governing authorities are supposed to slowly grow with the church. You hope that some of this growth is numerical, though that can be as much a factor of place as anything else, but we can be talking about growth in depth and discipleship too.
We slowly mature as God gives us the grace to suffer. We can grow very suddenly through particularly difficult periods, and sudden growth in a church is this for leaders: a period of intense difficulty. It might be joyous difficulty but it’s stretching because naturally we mature slowly through a long series of small knocks. The danger with the sudden stretch is that a big blow to the head always runs the risk of killing you.
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Things are not right. Untold crowds protest. But in Psalm 130 we hear the perfect outcry that can, and must, arise from every heart. In this Song of Ascents we lift up our heads to Jesus Christ. We wait for him, more than the watchman waits for the morning. 

The year 2020 will be remembered, so far, for Covid-19, and large-scale protests. Vast masked crowds gather to rail against racism, policing, gender-inequality, climate change, and whatever other grievances each new week brings. Iconoclasts topple whole quarries of obnoxious memorials of the people and events of our past.
I tend to be cynical about all this. Protestors seem intent on inflaming rather than healing race and gender divisions. And they seem to give little thought to the consequences of their demands. Defund the police? Erase our history? How then will our grandchildren not repeat its mistakes?
Whatever I may think, thousands are getting off their bottoms and onto the streets. They are unhappy, distressed, and they cry out for change. “Things are not right! We want something better!”
In Psalm 130 the psalmist too was deeply unhappy and distressed.
In this they share some common ground with Psalm 130. The psalmist too was deeply unhappy and distressed. He too felt the pain of brokenness and cried out in anguish.
The difference is that Psalm 130 is a perfect outcry. It shows exactly what should be cried out, and to whom we should cry out, and for what reasons.
Psalm 130 is “A song of ascents.” The temple was on Mount Zion, the highest point of Jerusalem, which is itself a city on a hill. It may first have been sung by pilgrims as they streamed up through Jerusalem to the temple to worship. It looks up, away from self and the earthly, to the face of the Lord.
And Psalm 130 is, along with Psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, and 143, one of the Penitential Psalms. We see a sinner looking up to God’s face and pleading for his mercy.
A broken heart cries out to the Lord.

Out of the depths I cry to you, Lord! O Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy (Psalm 130:1-2).

David had once said, “I sink in the miry depths, where there is no foothold. I have come into the deep waters; the floods engulf me” (Ps. 69:2). “The depths” is the bottom of the sea, the base of the slimy pit. “The depths” can take many forms. It could be the depths of an airless dungeon, or chronic pain. It could be the depths of poverty, or of a broken heart. It could be the depths of despair, shame, or fear. It could be the depths of hopelessness, of looking forward and seeing nothing but the cold grave and endless torment. The psalmist cries out de profundis (Latin for “from the depths”) of this black and hopeless place. He dares to evoke God’s “ears” and begs that he will listen.
We should never forget that a loving Lord sometimes casts his people into the depths. Think of Joseph in the Egyptian dungeon and scabrous Job on his ash heap, consider David in the caves of exile, Jonah in the stinking whale, Daniel in the lions’ den, the Prodigal Son in the sty, and Peter in the abyss of bitter self-loathing on crucifixion eve. The Lord casts us down to death, that we might come to life and cry out to him.
Notice that the Psalmist doesn’t scramble out of the pit, and then call to God. He calls to God from the shroud. God wants our prayers from wherever we are, and even from whomever we are, at that moment.
Note two fundamental differences between the protester and the penitent.
First, the protester cries out to human authorities for change. Thus, they aim far too low and expect the impossible. Human governors can provide a degree of defense, law and order, communication, and healthcare, and we should be thankful for good government in Australia. But no government can reach into people’s hearts. They cannot make the greedy generous, the racist color-blind, the violent gentle, the selfish selfless, and the reckless responsible. The Psalmist cries out to the highest heavens. The voice of the protester, like a flapping dodo, fails to rise from earth and clay.
Second, the protestor cries for justice and rights. “Give me what I deserve!” The Psalmist cries out for the opposite. To see the Lord, the Rose of Sharon, the Lily of the Valley, the Lamb without Blemish, is to see at once the blackness of our own hearts, “deceitful above all things and desperately wicked” (Jer. 17:9 NKJV). To see the Holy One, sword of justice in his hand, is to see at once what we richly deserve, the fires of hell and the worm that does not die.
We must tread very carefully here. There are people who are in the pit as an immediate consequence of a sin. Think Jonah, Peter, and the Prodigal Son. And there are people in the pit, but it is not an immediate consequence of sin. Think Job, Daniel, and Paul and Silas in the Philippian jail. Yet the cry in both cases is the same, “Have mercy!”
There is profound injustice in the world. “The poor you will always have with you” (Matt. 26:11 NIV). Love compels us to stand for the rights of the unborn, the impoverished, child-slaves, political prisoners, and the elderly who are abused and who live, in some nations, with euthanizing potions at hand. Christians will always want to defend the weak.
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Gill recognizes that as a sinful human, he is meant to struggle, and there is power in embracing that struggle. Indeed, the only real way for people to flourish is to let go of pride and accept and even embrace the humiliating realities of life. Gill gets this, making his song a radical departure from the mental health industry’s sole focus on “chemical imbalances” and “biological predispositions” to various mental ailments. 

Gen Z is being marked down as the most mentally ill generation to date. Disturbing rates of anxiety, self-harm, suicide, and depression plague young people, with professionals calling it an “epidemic.”
That’s the cultural context for “Hi Ren,” a nine-minute rhythmically and lyrically genius blend of rap, singing, and acoustic guitar by English musician Ren Gill.

“Hi Ren,” thrusts you into the harrowing internal battle within Gill’s tormented psyche. The Music video is filmed in an unsettling room inside a mental institution, with Gill dressed in a hospital gown and seated in a wheelchair. The song appears to be a vocal and visual representation of mental illness or perhaps addiction.

Throughout the song, Gill switches character between a scary and belittling version of himself, to a positive part of himself that wants to thrive, make music, and be fulfilled.
At first blush, “Hi Ren” seems to be yet another song about mental health struggles and internal turmoil. When the “good” Ren wants the “bad” Red to go away, “bad” Ren responds, “You think that you can amputate me? I am you, you are me, you are I, I am we. We are one, split in two that makes one so you see? You got to kill you if you wanna kill me.”
However, things take on a dramatically new and counter-cultural meaning when the “bad” Ren reveals himself as entirely separate from the real Ren:
I was created at the dawn of creation,I am temptationI am the snake in Eden,I am the reason for treasonBeheading all Kings,I am sin with no rhyme or reason,Sun of the morning, Lucifer,Antichrist, father of lies,Mephistopheles,Truth in a blender,Deceitful pretender,The banished avenger,The righteous surrenderWhen standing in-front of my solar eclipse,My name it is stitched to your lips so seeI won’t bow to the will of a mortal, feeble and normalYou wana kill me? I’m eternal, immortalI live in every decision that catalysed chaosThat causes divisionI live inside death, the beginning of endsI am you, you are me, I am you, Ren
The development of the song reveals the earlier assertion that “bad” Ren is the same as “good” Ren is a malicious falsehood. “Bad” Ren is not Ren at all, but the Devil himself—the “father of lies.” He is “truth in a blender,” a “deceitful pretender.”
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