Theology, Disability and the People of God.

For the last three days, from 9am til 9pm, I have been at a conference. It was held at Carey Baptist College (in conjunction with Laidlaw College) and was focused on Theology, Disability and the People of God. The two international keynote speakers were Professor John Swinton from Aberdeen University, and Professor Amos Yong from Regent University.

There are so many reflections that I want to make that I am not sure where to start! My overall impression of the conference was that it was wonderful. It was unlike any conference I have ever been to. There were people from all professions, Christian and secular, of both genders, many races, and of varying degrees of ability and disability. They were all given a voice through the variety of speakers and were all celebrated and embraced in a way that was truly moving and inspiring. It was a total contrast to the usual boring theological conferences I have attended.

I was privileged to be able to spend a substantial amount of time with Professor Swinton. He is a Jamaican Scot with a loving personality and a wicked sense of humour. Within a couple of hours of meeting each other we were joking and poking fun. I very rarely meet people I instantly connect with but this was one of those moments. He has a background in mental health nursing and has a phenomenal intellect and interest in all things theological. His work in theology and disability is profound and deeply moving and challenging. It was many of his words that stuck with me throughout the conference and shaped the way that I viewed and considered what I was hearing.

The entire conference was about challenging our views of what we believe disability is and how people with disability are treated in the church. The personal stories that came out in the talks were amusing, harrowing and confronting. A statement that particularly impacted me came from a man in a wheelchair who thanked the college for installing ramps for access. He said that this simple gesture was the gospel to him. I had never thought of it that way before. I am thinking now about my church's worship spaces and whether or not they are accessible to ALL people. I think it isn't just whether or not there are wheelchairs in your congregation already, but the need for churches to be wheelchair friendly from the assumption that people in wheelchairs are in their communities and so therefore will at some point come to the church (if we are doing our jobs properly!!).

Another thing that really challenged me was the idea around carer. I often approach people with disabilities as a 'carer' that is going to take care of the person who obviously needs help. I had never considered letting them be the host and me the guest, or letting them care for me. I had never thought that the gifts of the Spirit are as applicable to them as to me. I had made people with disabilities the 'other' and covering up through charity. I have been moved and convicted in the idea that charity is still continuing the thought that these people are 'less than' and not 'equal to'.

I have cried a lot the last three days. I have been moved by the bravery and love that I have seen exhibited. I have been overwhelmed by the response I got to my own paper (see previous post). I have made connections with people on ministries that I never knew existed. And I have seen God in the face of so many people who have been rejected and cast aside. 

I may reflect on this further during the week but I am still processing all the things that were said. 

At this moment, I am moved beyond words.

The Silence Surrounding Psych Wards

Just today I presented a paper at the conference for Theology, Disability and the People of God. I shared my story of my experience with mental illness and used that as a framework for working with people with mental illness. I have shared my paper below. Feel free to share this and pass on to educate others in this area. Blessings

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Today I am here to talk to you about the impact of mental illness and the importance of the church community in the healing and restoration of people who suffer from these illnesses.

10 years ago I was diagnosed with early onset schizophrenia, an illness that usually besets someone in their 30's that I started experiencing at age 12. The diagnosis was given when I was 19, just after I had got married, and by then it had been seven years of mental health issues with little help or understanding. For all my teenage years I had struggled with extreme depression, self harming, eating disorders, and audible and visual hallucinations. In some ways it was a relief to finally be told what was wrong with me, and in others it felt like a death sentence. I had been labelled as incurable. For 5 years after my diagnosis I was placed on medication after medication, I was kept in psych wards for varying stretches of time, my every action was viewed through the symptoms of my illness. I was told the damage in my brain was irreversible, would get worse as I aged and I would be a permanent mental health patient. There was no hope for me, my family or my new marriage.

While in the wards I was exposed to people and behaviours that, in my early twenties, I was completely unprepared for. I watched a heavily pregnant woman attack staff and have a fire hose turned on her in an effort to control her. I heard the same lady describe her unborn child as a demon. In reality it was her fathers. I listened to a woman for hours tell me how the skin on her face was falling off. I met a 17 year old boy who was dropped off by his parents for suicidal behaviour. He remained there for a week with no visitors. I was verbally abused by a man who thought I was his mother, and I was confronted by nurses who were in equal measure compassionate and careworn. When not in the psych ward I was a daily visitor at the day ward with other mental health patients in the community. Though this was a much more pleasant environment I was surrounded by people I did not know, that were usually much older than me, and by community workers who were understaffed and overworked.

Eventually my illness took its toll on my loved ones and my marriage fell apart 3 years after it had started. My mother had to quit her job to become my full time carer. She had to wake me up, make me shower, take me for walks, and made all my food so I ate well. We were all told that this would be a life long sentence. There was no hope for recovery. Despite my mothers care, my mental health continued to deteriorate and I lived only for my chance to die. My family described me at that time as a zombie with no purpose or care for my life.

It is with this experience that I speak to you today.

I find that when I speak of my experiences with mental illness I am met with 1 of four reactions by the listeners.

The first is ambivalence. These listeners cannot relate, or don't know how to, and so are quick to change the subject and to move out of the area of a topic of which they have no understanding. They may think that mental illness is “all in your head” and something that can be changed by will power, or they may simply have no interest in the matter.

The second reaction is nervousness and confusion. These listeners mean well but simply do not comprehend what mental illness is or how to respond to it. They may look at you like you are about to pull out a gun and start a rampage, or they may ask to pray for you to release you from the demonic stronghold over your life. These are the listeners that will offer to pray for you but end up lost for words as they become confused as to what to pray for. They often super-spiritualize your experience in order to bring the conversation into a language that they understand.

The third group is perhaps the most interesting of reactions. They are the group that leans forward with eyes shining lapping up every word. When you have finished speaking they will say things like “that is so cool” and ask questions like “so, you could actually see people that weren't there? Was that freaky and what did they look like?” They are curiously excited by what is being said and can ask insensitive questions about experiences in the psych wards. They will also be the ones most likely to call people with mental illness 'crazy' or 'psycho'. They also tend to be under the age of 30.

The fourth group is the minority. They are the listeners who will find you alone later, share their own experiences, cry and pray with you. They usually have had an experience with mental illness and have genuine compassion for what you have been through. But these listeners are few and far between.

Unfortunately mental illnesses have stigmas attached to them that cause reactions of fear, disinterest, and wariness. People buy into the stigma that schizophrenics, and other mental health patients, are WORTHLESS, DIRTY, INSINCERE, DELICATE, SLOW, TENSE, WEAK, FOOLISH, INCOMPETENT, NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ACTIONS, DANGEROUSLY VIOLENT and UNPREDICTABLE. It is my experience that these stigmas are found just as much within the church as from without, but with the added labels of LACK OF FAITH, DEMON POSSESSED, and ANGRY. With these labels it is easy to understand why mental health patients find it hard to contribute in a world where the stigma of your illness is often worse than the illness itself. It is also easy to understand why mental health patients often talk of feeling isolated and rejected by their communities and churches.

The simple fact of the matter is, people do not know how to respond to mental illness.

Mental illness are two words that create a lot of confusion as they encompass a plethora of issues from emotional depression through to full blown psychosis that requires institutionalization. There are also very few mental illnesses that are truly understood, even by the medical profession, and this leads to misunderstanding, fear and isolation within families and communities.

Diagnosis of a mental illness creates greater issues for the patient than suffering the illness alone. Diagnosis locates the illness entirely with the individual, apart from their family and environment. It claims that there is something 'wrong' with the person that defines them as outside the acceptable 'norm'. This reduces hope of recovery, creates stigma from labelling, and turns a person into a category.

Currently in NZ today it is estimated that 1 in 4 people will suffer from a mental illness at some point in their lives. It is estimated that 38% of europeans, 62% of Maori, 59% of asians, and 59% of pacific islanders will be diagnosed with a psychotic disorder, such as schizophrenia, in their life time.[1]

Despite a quarter of the population having experienced one mental illness or another at some point in their lives, it seems to be a human issue that we cannot comprehend or relate to, a suffering that cannot be physically manifested. People will react out of fear and amusement, but very rarely out of genuine compassion.

And this is true of the church as well.

I was healed 6 years ago. Some ladies from the prayer group at church answered my mothers cry for help and started a chain of events that means I am able to stand before you today and speak for those that often have no voice. In the last six years I have had to relearn social cues and behaviours, get use to being on my own with no other voices to keep me company, try to reclaim what of my memories are true events and what were hallucinations, and to survive on my own outside of my family's care.

I carry with me the memories of people who have not been as fortunate as I. The haunted eyes of the lady that believed the baby in her womb was a demon. The dead eyes of the man that received shock therapy at age 8 and has been institutionalized ever since. The fear in the eyes of the lady who believed the skin on her face was melting off. The sadness in the eyes of the young teenager with suicidal tendencies. I remember the sadness, fear, anger and finally hate in the eyes of my ex-husband who received no support and who lost all hope.

I hold in my heart the conversations I had with the other patients about being forgotten, rejected, hated by our communities. I remember the questions I received when I told the other patients I was a Christian as to why no one in my church came to visit me in the ward. I remember the loneliness each one of us had wrapped around us like a blanket.

Jesus is a friend to the broken.

I believe this with all of my heart. Yet is it so difficult to befriend a person who doesn't speak sense, who may not even notice your existence while you sit with them, who can act in a way that seems barely human sometimes.

 

Yet Jesus is a friend to these broken.

Often these people who hear and see things very differently from us don’t suffer beause of their own psychosis. They suffer at the hands of people who tell them that they are abnormal, strange, ill, and crazy. They suffer from the side affects of medication and from the isolation and loniless. They suffer from feelings of guilt as they are told how much of a burden they are. They suffer because of us.

I knew this couple who had met in the psych ward, fallen in love and, against the wishes of their families, got married. Everyone expected them to spiral out of control mentally and end up back in the state's care. To everyone's surprise, they found a house, moved in, and, when I met them, had been happily married for 10 years. Their love and care for each other meant that they reminded each other to take medication and see the doctor. But the most profound thing that she said to me was “he makes me feel human, he doesn't care about my labels.” They had discovered in each other a person who saw and loved the intrinsic value that the other contained in simply being human. It was through this love and acceptance that they were able to move back into the wider community and form relationships there. Their mental illnesses didn't disappear or even get much better, but in being treated as human rather than as an illness they have been able to find wholeness and healing.

It was in their example that I saw a vision of what the church could be. Loving the broken is more than praying for their healing. It is more than listening to their stories. It is more than asking questions about experiences.

It is teaching the church as a whole to view people as human rather than as broken. To value the humanness of a person is to see past the brokenness, the medical labels, the sad stories, the stange behaviour, and to see the heart of a person who longs only to be treated as worthy of attention. It is to act out the continuing mission of Jesus to all who are difficult to relate to and to understand and to reincorporate them back into the community.

In my experience I have seen this love of my humanness a handful of times. I saw it in my next door neighbour who would come over for coffee everyday and sit and listen to me ramble, help me clean my house, tell me off if I did something silly, and give me advise on my struggles. I saw it in a fellow student who discovered that I had difficulty in picking up social cues and developed a system of signals to tell me when I was doing something wrong. I saw it in one of my lecturers who let me breakdown in his office when things were getting on top of me. I saw it in my new parents in law who accepted my history and embraced me for it.

These people listened, heard the issue, accepted it and worked with it, rather than trying to change it. For me, they are the church being lived out.

I still don't know how this love for the humanness of people works in churches. There is no 5 step program about reintegrating the mentally ill back into the congregation. But in a country where at least 1 million people will be diagnosed with a mental illness at some point in their lives, there needs to be a beginning of a conversation. And it is a conversation that includes those that it is about. They may be unwell, but they will be very aware of what they feel is missing, what they don't like and how they want to be treated. We need to start asking ourselves and our congregations some deep searching questions and listening to the answers from those who live with these illnesses.

I would love to say that I now run a ministry within psych wards. To be honest, I have found the very idea odf stepping back into that environment so terrifying that I have not been able to face it yet. It has been 6 years but the scars on my heart are still healing. Yet I do what I can to show that people with mental illness are worth time and effort. One evening I sat with a nextdoor neighbours mother when she turned up at their house while they were out. I found her yelling at the fence after not taking her medication for three days.

I sat with her all night as she told me about the things that only she could see. In that seemingly meaningless rambling I heard her fear of being alone, her joy of being able to talk to others and share what she was seeing. I saw her love for me as she told me I was smarter than Einstein and had the faith and feet of aborigines in the desert. I heard her concern as she asked me about my imagined Maori husband Steve and why he was angry at me. She talked about things that weren’t physically true, but in it she cared, she loved. And I loved her by listening.

I don’t know if my actions made an impact on her or if she even realised who I was or if I really existed, but to this day I am in contact with her daughter and the daughter’s partner and have been able to introduce them to a Christianity that loves even their broken mother.

I would love to stand here before you and say I am totally free of all impairment. I am not. I still suffer from chronic anxiety issues, depressive episodes, and intense migraines. I have had to take time out of my study to deal with these issues and I thank God for my husband Luke who is as steady as a rock and reminds me to breathe slowly. He is my reminder of God's redemption and resurrection power in my life/

Our congregations should have these people in them. The fact that often they don’t reflects on the fact that we have not questioned the way we practice church. Questions like:

What would it look like to have mental health patients not just tolerated in our worship meetings, but celebrated and embraced?

What does it mean to learn from the broken, rather than to teach them?

What would it look like to seek friendship with the friendless, not for their health sake but because they are human and have something to offer?

What would it look like, as Swinton talked about on Monday, to stop having to act as the host or hostess and instead receive hospitality from people with mental health issues?

What does it mean to act towards the least of these as we would Jesus?

What would it look like to treat them like we would our Saviour?

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[1] Wheeler, A.  NZ Medical Journal 2005

Warrior God & Prince of Peace

This semester I have taken on the mantel of running a young adults group at my church. I love it! It is awesome to just sit and chat with people about real stuff that they are struggling to understand in the bible and to offer any wisdom or knowledge that I may have accumulate over the years. 

The dealio goes, if it is bugging you then ask and we will study it. So one of the peeps decided to bring up the issue of how do we reconcile the violence of the old testament with the 'love your neighbour' of the new?

Brilliant question. I am now officially leaving as leader....

Jokes. Though this question is one that I have struggled with for years. It is a question that usually haunts anyone who has been a believer for any length of time. In the Old Testament you have a God who is proclaimed as the Warrior God of Israel (Ex 15:3). In Jesus you have the acclaimed Prince of Peace (Is 9:6). 

Juxtaposition much?

I really don't like the violence in the earlier half of Scripture. It really bothers me when genocidal actions are attributed to God. It is totally at odds with everything I know of God being kind, loving, and a healer. It makes me unhappy.

Based upon a comprehensive study into the prevalence of violence throughout the Old Testament, Raymond Schwager calculated there to be “six hundred passages of explicit violence in the Hebrew Scriptures, one thousand verses where God’s own violent actions of punishment are described, a hundred passages where Yahweh expressly commands others to kill people, and several stories where God kills or tries to kill for no apparent reason (e.g. Exodus 4:24-26). Violence, Schwager concludes, is easily the most often mentioned activity and central theme of the Hebrew Bible.” 

That is a lot of killing.

Some Christians have found this to be waaaaaay too much to handle so they, like a dude called Marcion in the 2nd Century, throw out the OT and focus only on the NT. This is a heresy called Marcionism. The thing is, we may not literally tear our bibles in half and throw away the first lot like he did, but a lot of us don't read our OT because we don't understand it. Instead we read the NT, the stories about Jesus and the church, and we stay in our safe zones, not venturing out into the vast unknown of the Israelite world. 

But you can't understand Jesus if you don't know the OT.

Jesus came to fulfil the law, not to abolish it, and that means that in everything that Jesus was and did he was the pinnacle of what went before.

So you have to know what went before to understand how he fulfils it.

Which means delving into the angry God stories.

I am not going to do that today, the point of this blog is very different.

What I want to do is to encourage you to read what makes you uncomfortable, to wrestle with it, struggle with it, pray about it, and talk about it. Don't ignore it or run from it, that solves nothing! Take the bull by its horns and stare it in the face knowing that the God you are trying to learn about won't let you fall if you are placing your faith in him.

And the God we place our faith in shows us most fully what he is like in the person of Christ. So while you are struggling and wrestling with difficult passages, remember that it is in Jesus that we see the full picture. It is ok to come back to the person of Christ as a safe zone while you roam through the foreign land of the Bible. It is ok while sitting in the tension of how to reconcile the two to look at Jesus because he is the FULL image of God. 

Just don't give up. It is worth it if you keep pressing forward in hopes of understanding God.

A NEW ZEALAND CREED

We believe in God, creator and sustainer of life,
creator of the black woman and the white woman
of the black man and the white man
of the woman who is not quite black and not quite white
of the man who is not quite white and not quite black.

We believe in God, the Creator
who gave us the Silver Fern and the mighty Kauri tree,
the Kahawai and the Kiwi,
the Southern Cross and the Milky Way.

We believe in God,
who gave us a land to keep, 
to reverence and to cultivate.

We believe in Jesus, born of a woman
who was not quite black and not quite white,
a woman who was not quite sure of who she was or who she was to be, 
a woman who faithfully struggled to believe.

We believe in Jesus - risen,
liberator of all humanity, Emmanuel, God-with-us, God-for-us.
We, women and men of The Land of the Long White Cloud, Aotearoa, land of the Holy Spirit,
believe in the power of the Spirit to set us free to regenerate our land, to transform our world, to work for peace,
to listen to the cries of the broken tribes, and the dislocation of the 'foreigners' 

We believe in the power of the Spirit to transform our dealings with our sisters and our brothers of other colours, whakapapa, and diverse iwi and creeds.

Why Does a Good God let Bad Things Happen?

In my last blog post about I answered a question from a friend about why I believed in God. I then expanded that to explain why I believed Jesus is that God. A comment was left on that blog that goes like this:

 A lot of people have asked me not why is there so much evil in the world, but why is God letting it happen? Why is He letting people suffer? What would your response to that be? I can answer it but it seems a very uncompassionate answer. One thing I suddenly think of is what you moved on to talking about - Jesus. Before Jesus, God seemed to mostly worry about what the Israelites were doing, as the people of God. But when Jesus came, God in human form, he started to heal people and talk them through stuff in a way I don't think God had so much, BC. It was the human that went out and started the process of 'healing the world' and giving that example of what we should be doing.So it appears to be our duty to be the change we wish to see in the world (together with others).
I still don't get where cancer comes from, though. It doesn't make enough sense that 'God is with us through the suffering'. It's almost like a parent saying, 'oh whoops, you got hit by a car and got paralysed. But it's okay, cos I'll sit with you in hospital'. 
I am kind of thinking that one's faith cannot be based on knowledge alone, but as you say, a personal encounter with Christ, which cannot be scientifically proven, or completely falsified, because it is each person's experience. Even when people have experienced miracles, others will not believe because, well, maybe because those miracles have not happened to them. Maybe their friend died of cancer. Maybe they themselves still haven't been healed. Sorry about the rant but I am putting stuff out there that probably lots of people are thinking. The kind of questions that don't go away..

There are so many things I want to respond to in this comment that it took me a couple of days to get my head in order! First off, thank you for leaving this post and asking the questions that are difficult and that Christians and non-Christians alike struggle with. The problem of suffering is a HUGE issue that often we are too afraid to speak about in case we sound stupid or whiny or because we are afraid that the answers (or lack thereof) will hurt our faith. So thank you for your bravery and you 'rant' haha.

Secondly, I think the only way I am gonna be able to tackle this is to state from the get go that there is a lot about God that I don't know (shock! haha) and that anything I say are my opinions and not necessarily the Truth about the situation. I have only my biblical study, my opinions, my experiences, and my community to draw on. These are big questions that I more than likely will not resolve but maybe I will help add to the discussion, clarify it, or even just point people in the direction of where to look to wrestle with these sorts of things. In other words, this blog post is not going to attempt to solve the issue of suffering in the world, and I am ok with that.

So I am gonna break this down into sections with what I believe are the big issues being talked about here. If I have read this wrong please feel free to redefine and get me to answer the actual question :p

Ok, here it goes.

I see three big topics in this comment:

1) Why does God allow suffering to happen?
2) What is the relation of the OT to the NT in terms of suffering in the world?
3) What is the role of Christians in the face of the suffering we see? How do we respond to it?

1) Why does God allow suffering to happen?

In order to answer this question I actually want to start with the second one. So...

2) What is the relation of the OT to the NT in terms of suffering in the world?

The reason I want to start with this question is because the only way we know the truth about who God is and how God acts is through Scripture. It's the starting point from where we can judge all experiences of God in our lives, or the theology we are taught in churches, and figure out what is God and what is not by seeing if it is compatible with the God in the Bible. For example, if someone says "God told me to steal that person's wallet", chances are God didn't actually tell them that because we know that God in the Bible was really against people stealing. Comprende? 

So by looking at the OT and the NT we should be able to answer question 1) a little better (hopefully....fingers crossed).

It is true that in the OT God seems a little preoccupied with Israel as opposed to the rest of the world. Remember that these books were written by Israelis for Israelis about Israel and Israel's God. They aren't gonna talk a lot about the rest of the world. BUT, in amongst this history of a chosen people, there are whole sections dedicated to people who weren't part of Israel and yet are called Godly people and are seen as saved by God!!! This is pretty mind blowing that they were included in the story of a people who thought God's salvation was for Israel alone!

Let's start with Abraham. He is what we call a pagan (a worshipper of many manmade gods) when God calls him and tells him to go to a 'land which I will show you'. So Abraham (at this point called Abram) goes. Talk about a leap of faith! Leaving everything you know to follow a God you have never heard of and can't see! Like Noah before him, Abraham was seen a a solo righteous man among many unrighteous men. Noah and Abraham were both called and they both followed. Both are really messed up!! Noah gets drunk and naked one night after the flood, and Abraham lies about his wife (calling her his sister) in order to save his own life. Not exactly perfect men but God still used them.

Abraham meets a man called Melchizedek on his travels. This man is outside of the covenant God formed with Abraham, so he isn't part of the nation that will spread God's word. He appears from nowhere, no history of him, and is called the King of Salem (translated as the King of Peace). He is recognised by Abraham as a righteous man and yet not part of the 'elect'.

Jonah is sent to Ninevah, the ENEMIES of Israel who God said were outside the elect people of Israel, and God saves their lives because the repent!

Job is not from Israel, he is not a Jew. Yet a whole book is given over to him as a holy man who God cares about. He suffers greatly and dares to address God and God ANSWERS him. Trust me, in Hebrew literature for God to answer a pagan is a flippin big deal.

When the Jews leave Egypt they also take with them, as part of their number, Egyptians who wished to follow them and they become part of Israel when the land is given to the Jews. So does Rahab, a Moabite prostitute, and Ruth, a Moabite pagan. Both these women are great, great, great....grandmothers of Jesus.

What I am trying to get at here is that God in the OT wasn't just concerned with Israel. Through Israel God is forming a great plan (Jesus) that will save the world, but in the mean time he is also working outside of Israel to save the world also. Jesus acts in the same way. He purposely shows up the Jewish religious leaders by acting in a way that says "God cared about these people, the people you rejected, and always has. It is YOU that has read the text wrong, not God asking you to reject them".

In this the OT and the NT line up. God doesn't act differently. In both he is concerned with the care for the poor, alien, widowed etc (check out the laws in Leviticus, there are heaps of these). God is not only focused on Israel. They are a people that he is making in order to send his Son, but he is at work with love and concern for those not in Israel too.

I hope that answers this question.

That said, let's go back to number 1.

1) Why does God allow suffering to happen?

I think I need to clarify three different forms of suffering here. There is suffering from natural causes (earthquakes, tsunamis etc), there is suffering at the hands of others (rape, child abuse, name calling), and there is suffering through illness.

Suffering at the hands of others is the easiest to answer. In these cases God has given everyone the free will to act as they chose. Though this means that we will all act in a bad way at some point in our lives, some people will chose to act in a way that is purposely harmful to others. It is their choice. It sucks for the person who is at the hands of perpetrator (and as a sexual abuse survivor, I know what I am talking about) but God has chosen, out of love for us, to let us make our choices, even when they hurt others.

Now I know people out there are gonna say "but why doesn't he stop them? What if they are hurting a child?" I get that, I really do. Nothing makes my blood boil like child abuse and I would quite willing castrate anyone who lays a hand on anyone else in violence. But if we would let God take away free will there, when do we say stop? What about stealing? Cheating? Lying to your parents? When does intervention actually start meaning no free will and we become robots made to serve God, instead of people who can chose to love him? When is it ok for God to intervene and it not ok? As someone who has been through it I would say God did intervene in the fact that he gave me a choice to either live on in anger, or to give it to him and learn to forgive. He didn't have to do that. 

Suffering from natural causes is a little harder. The bible tells us in Romans (I think chapter 6?) that the earth is groaning with birthing pangs. In other words, when death entered this world it didn't just affect us, it affected the whole of creation. Everything started breaking down. Global warming is an example of where things are breaking down and it is from our choices. We haven't treated this planet well and it is feeling the affects. And when laws of nature come into affect then these things are going to start affecting at least some of the millions of people who live on this planet. It sucks. It is awful and sad to watch it happen. But God created this world to work with certain natural laws. Unfortunately, those laws work really well and cause catastrophes at times. 

Illness is the one that gets me every time. I don't know why God doesn't heal everyone. I don't know why Jesus at times heals everyone who comes to him and then the next day it is only a few. I don't why I was healed and others haven't been. It can make me angry, thinking of the people I know who get sick, and it makes me feel survivors guilt that I escaped and others have died from their illnesses. Perhaps it has to do with choices (ie lung cancer from smoking) and to do with creation breaking down and our bodies going all wrong. 

But what I do know is that in the face of all this suffering God has said "this ISN'T it!" He sent Jesus to die for us and to rise again to show us that this life isn't just "life's a bitch and then you die." There is healing to be found, if not in this life then in the next. There will be miracles for all who believe. That when a friend dies of cancer we can grieve but also be glad that they are free from their suffering and made whole with Jesus. There is HOPE. And that is a wonderful thing. Because God will heal everyone, and he will stop all natural disasters, and we will live without fear of what others can do for us. So God HAS done something about suffering, he HAS intervened. It is just not on our timeline.

And this leads to,

3) What is the role of Christians in the face of the suffering we see? How do we respond to it?

We are to tell others that this isn't it! That there is hope. That they don't have to only experience life this way. We are to sit with them and grieve with them and pray with them and hold them. And we are to love them as people who are worthy of love, people who are worthy of attention. We don't ignore them like the rest of society does. We aren't to put sick and suffering people away where we can't see them. We are to embrace them as children of God and invite them into seeing themselves that way. Because we love them we will want them to know the truth, that God has intervened, that he has a time limit for suffering and one day it will be finished. That this life with these broken bodies in this broken world is not forever but life and joy can be. 

We are to live in such a way that we point them to the one that will heal their suffering and give them peace.

That is my hope. 

That is my joy. 

I am honoured to share it with you.

Why I Believe in God

I got a text the other night from a friend asking why I believed in God. This sent me into 24+ hours of thinking why I do actually have faith. What I came up with is below. 

I am not an apologist, and sometimes not good with explaining things that are really personal to me. Ask me about the different theories of atonement and I could go for hours. But ask me about my faith and I get tongue-tied. So here it is, in all its inadequate glory. But maybe it will help someone or point them towards others who are much better at explaining these arguments than me (William Lane Craig and Ravi Zacharias are good people to start with).

So here we are. Feel free to add your own insights to this in comment form below.

Why do I believe in God?

1. One of the biggest things I hear from non-believers is 'if there is a God why is there so much evil in the world?' The thing is, how would we know what was evil if there wasn't a higher understanding of the good that should be? In other words, if this is all there is, why should it be any different? Evil and suffering, if morality is invented by humanity, is just part of everyday life. We wouldn't be shocked by it, argue against it, or think that people should act better. But the fact that we DO get shocked, argue, and think people should act better is because there is a higher moral standard that is above our own. It is one that says some things are inherently right and other are inherently wrong and that there SHOULD be something better than this.

If humanity is the one who creates objective morals then morality is relative depending on who you are talking to, the culture they are in, the time in history that they are born etc. So when people say that morality is relative then when a Hitler kills millions Jews and says it is right in his eyes, we should be ok with that because his morality is just as 'right' as anyone elses. Yet we don't say that. We say that he is wrong. This to me points to a higher objective morality, ie God.

2. Everything that begins to exist has a cause, the universe began to exist therefore there is a cause (the cosmological argument). That cause would be a god.

3. Humanity is hardwired to worship something. If it isn't a god then it is mon

ey, ourselves, science etc. This to me points to the fact that we are made to point to something and worship it as the foundation of our lives.

WHY I BELIEVE JESUS IS THAT GOD.

1. Historically speaking, the gospels have far more evidence for them being historically acurate than any other manuscript ever. We don't argue the existence of Alexander the Great, yet there is more evidence (within and outside of the biblical cannon) for Jesus than any other major ancient figure. So he did exist. And not only did he exist but he claimed something that no one else has ever claimed, to actually BE the same as the monotheistic God of the Jews.

2. The radical change from devout Jews who believed in a monotheistic God to including Jesus AS that God is astounding and calls for a serious consideration of the claims that Jesus was actually who they say he is. The eye witness accounts to miracles etc (all written within one lifetime of Jesus) would show that there is something at work here that needs to be considered.

3. The 'stickability' of Christianity throughout the ages, despite persecution and politics, would testify to the truth that people found in it. Even today the accounts of personal experiences with Jesus are vast and varied but at the same time hold similar elements of facts about forgiveness, peace, and hope. This is true in the majority world (also known as the Third World) as in the West where the church seems to be dying.

4. My own story of healing and deliverance cannot be scientifically explained, even though my doctors tried. I have seen my life changed at the power of his name, I have experience the hope and freedom that comes with believing in Jesus (and you have told me of times past where you have to). It is particularly poignant to point out that when I was healed I was anti-God, anti-Jesus, angry, and not wanting anything to do with him. This wasn't my own mind making things up. I cannot deny what I have been through, what I have seen in my own life and in others. This lead me to Christ, all the other arguments cemented my faith for me.

Manipulating the Spirit

I posted the other day this article on a social networking site about Benny Hinn, the infamous televangelist. Apart from his extremely suspect theology (seriously, research him one day) he is also widely known for his healing conferences and for people being 'slain in the spirit' (which basically means falling over under the overwhelming presence of the spirit) when they are around him.

When I posted this article I got a very interesting response. Someone said to me that we shouldn't, as Christians, be putting down other Christians if their ministry is working and healing people.

Well, I tell you, this set off some MAJOR warning bells in my head for several reasons.

1) Do Not Judge.

It is a common thing in this postmodern (pomo) Western world that we live in that we are told that all people's views are of equal value and we should never judge anyone. As there are phrases like 'Do not judge, lest you be judged' in the Bible, the church has adopted this policy hook, line and sinker. But the church as a people that claim the truth are, by their very nature, laying down a line that claims that on one side is the truth and on the other is not. Throughout the history of the church that line has had to be argued, researched, and reclaimed as new beliefs and practices came to the fore and challenged the way the church worked. Sometimes these challenges changed the church (for example when the Protestant church formed out of the Catholic church in the Reformation). At other times the challenges have been rejected by the church as anti-gospel and labelled a heresy.

IT IS OUR JOB TO JUDGE TRUTH CLAIMS.

It is our job as people of the Truth that we judge other claims to truth. It is essential that we are analysing and holding to account the people who claim Jesus name as their motivating factor for their ministry. It is vital for the faith that we discuss what we see happening in other churches, that we research it, and that we weigh it up against Scripture.

If we don't do this, if we fail to hold each other to account, to judge ministries by Scriptural truth, then the Truth of the Gospel gets distorted, cults form, and we have no backing to say that Mormonism, to take one example, is not Christian.

I am not going to go into the theology of Benny Hinn here, but if you hear people you know saying that such and such a preacher is dodgy, then do your homework, engage in debate, and don't shy away from saying "But what they say here is totally against the Bible..." when you know that the Truth is being distorted.

2) When 'the spirit' is not The Spirit.

Benny Hinn, as I said before, is widely known as a faith healer and a man who works in the ecstasy of the Spirit. What this means is that at his meetings there will always be prayer times where people fall over, convulse, and in other ways appear to be under the control of some other power. I knew a young woman who was healed at a Benny Hinn conference. She was my flatmate for a year and was healed 2 years before I meet her from a brain tumour. Unfortunately in the year I knew her the cancer came back and she died at the age of 22. I know her story was genuine. I also know that she was a Bible believing Christian. I don't doubt her faith or that God healed her.

But here is the crucial difference. God healed her. Benny didn't. As someone who has also experienced a dramatic healing, I can testify that God can, and will, work even in experiences where people weren't praying for healing (as in mine). If God is gonna heal, it is gonna happen.

But back to the point.

The Bible says in Matt 7:21-23:

 21“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ 23And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.

Jesus doesn't say that they won't be able to do miracles, these people who didn't know him. Moses in Egypt faced sorcerers who could do many of the things that God told him to do. When Jesus talks about the end days (also in Matthew) he says that many false teahers will come in his name performing signs and wonders and yet will not be from him. 

What we can see here is that there are people who will be able to do stuff like healings and deliverance ministry in the name of Jesus and yet still not be ok in their ministry.

So how do we know the difference between them? How can we spot the preachers who do miracles for God and those that do them for themselves?

That brings me to my next point.

3) Misunderstanding the Spirit.

Something I notice about Christians in NZ is that a lot of us have no understanding of who the Spirit is. We don't think of the Spirit as a person on equal footing with Jesus and the Father. We don't really talk about the Spirit well, making it sound like it is something we 'plug' into when we pray for the 'Jesus hit'. And it is this misunderstanding of the role of the Spirit that I believe has lead us to be afraid of speaking out when someone is manipulating it because we don't know when that is happening. (Let me just qualify that I don't think someone can actually manipulate the Holy Spirit, but rather they manipulate our understanding of it.)

The Holy Spirit is as much God as Jesus and the Father are. It is not some strange force that floats around us and we have to say the right words or go to the right church to 'feel' it as it moves among us. It isn't manifested through the right words or the right musical chord or anything else. 

Rather, it is the Spirit of the living Christ that dwells within us! It is what gives us faith, and peace, in our walk with Christ. It is what connects us with the risen Christ and makes us holy in the eyes of the Father. We don't 'recharge' on the Spirit, we live in it. Being in Christ and Christ in us is all about the Spirit and it's work within us. Sometimes this can be shown through moments of ecstasy and prophecy and healings and the like. But it isn't hovering waiting for us to plug in before those things happen, it is with us all the time and sometimes decides to move through us in strange and mysterious ways.

I am tired at the misunderstanding of the Spirit being used by churches and preachers to convince people that what is being done is from God and not humans. 

We can know whether or not it is the Spirit moving by the fruit that is produced by the people 'working' in it. Is that person, like Mother Theresa, self-sacrificial, loving of all people, have a heart for the broken, giving all they have, recognised for their love? Are they humble and always pointing to God rather than to themselves? Or is that person, like Benny Hinn, preaching that God will give you all you want, money, possessions, etc? Are they living in a humble manner or are they taking the glory?

We can know the difference between people who are working for God and those who are working for themselves. We can tell in the way the preach, and whether it stacks up with what it Bible actually says. Miracles may still happen, but Jesus told us to watch out, to be smart, and to know our Bibles well enough (with the help of those who have gone before and our communities) so we can recognise and speak out against this stuff.

Don't be suckers, be on guard.