News Blog

month ago, as you will remember, I had Andy Cann tell me what to preach about. He was given that privilege because he had the top bid in the auction last fall when I put up the right to name a sermon topic. There was also a second highest bid in that same auction and Jean Godin agreed to match Andy’s bid and be able to name a topic for this month.

      And I like Jean, I really do. In fact, I know many people who would only too happily attest to what a wonderful person she is. But I am going to confess to you that there were a few times as I prepared for this morning’s sermon when I wondered whether or not she liked me. (Just kidding, Jean.) The topic that Jean chose was this: How do we live out the Great Commission today? On the surface it is a wonderful question, of course, something that gets to the heart of what the church is supposed to be. It’s just that when you really take the question seriously (as we should all such questions) it seems to raise some issues that make many fine upstanding Presbyterians (and other Christians) uncomfortable.

      The Great Commission is a popular name for the passage that we read this morning from the Gospel of Matthew – in particular, the part where Jesus says, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” For generations, Christians have taken those words as the clearest statement of the task that Jesus gives us. It is our commission – our assignment. And the traditional understanding of this assignment is that that we are to announce the basic message of the Christian gospel to people in every nation of the world, convert them to our faith and baptize them into the church. Since this is such a big job, it is called the Great Commission.

      And, not all that long ago, Christians would have probably felt quite fine with the idea that our main job as Christians was simply to go out there and preach the gospel to everyone in the whole world, make them Christians and bring them into the fold of the church. But many Christians are not quite so comfortable with that whole line of thinking these days. Part of the reason for that is that, in former times, Christians only had to deal with other Christians for the most part. Western Society, by and large, was Christian Society. Yes, there were a few Jews here and there, but that was about it. Non-Christians or pagans were usually people who lived in far-off countries on the other side of the world. So it was fairly easy to think that we had it all right and they were all wrong.

      We live in a very different world today where followers of other religions or of no religions at all are not across the ocean, they are across the street. They are our neighbours and coworkers and friends and, what’s more, as we get to know them, we recognize that they are decent people who, like us, are mostly just trying to get by in this world and do the right things. So, while we still may hold to our scriptures and our doctrines, we have to recognize that it is not just people who believe exactly like us who are good people. To think otherwise is just to be petty and maybe racist.

      So we find ourselves in this situation where it doesn’t seem right to tell people what they ought to believe – not in any forceful way. But that is only just part of the problem. Not only have we begun to suspect that non-Christians might be good people all on their own, we have also seen things that make us suspect that at least some of those who are enthusiastic for the task of sharing the gospel with everyone might not be the best people.

      The group of people that today are most associated with the idea of preaching the gospel to the whole world are Christian evangelicals. Evangelicals have long worked hard at preaching the gospel to any who would hear it. But, in recent years, some of the choices that many representatives of this group have made have seemed a little bit suspect. They have entered into alliances with particular political groups, most significantly in the United States with the Republican Party. And some of the ways in which they have been acting in recent years have left people with the impression that they are far more interested in gaining power and influence for themselves and their policy goals than they are truly dedicated to living out the gospel.

      One example stands out in the last couple of months. Recently the report came out that the American president had had an affair with a porn star and had paid her off to keep silent just before the election. And I don’t really know (or much care) if the accusation is true. That’s not why I bring it up. The disturbing thing about it is that some key evangelical leaders apparently assumed that it was true and they didn’t care at all. Take Tony Perkins, president of the very prominent evangelical activist group, the Family Research Council, for example. He apparently believed it but his response (and this is what he actually said) was that he figured that evangelicals should give the president “a mulligan.”

      A mulligan? A consequence-free do over offered to a man who he accepted had probably had an affair just after his wife had given birth to his son? It seemed to be a prime indication that people who were supposed to be only interested in telling some good news were much more interested in power and influence and were willing to abandon some of their core convictions in order to get it from powerful people like presidents.

      I realize it is very unfair to tar all evangelical Christians with the brush of a few leaders like Perkins or Jerry Falwell Jr, (who has also said similar things recently). Of course, not all Christians who are keen to preach the gospel are seduced by the lure of power – far from it! But fair or not, I am afraid that it has entered into the common perception that the people who push the Christian gospel message these days have not the purest motivations.

      So, for all of these reasons, the very idea of evangelism – of sharing the Christian message with people who aren’t already Christians – has fallen into some disrepute these days even among Christians. All of this certainly makes Jean’s question a very timely one indeed. We do feel a certain discomfort with the very notion of living out the Great Commission. But, of course, none of this changes the fact that the Great Commission is there and if we have been commissioned to preach the gospel to everyone, then shouldn’t we just get over whatever we are feeling and get on with it?

      Perhaps, but maybe, before we get too far, we should look closer at what Jesus actually says and what he really expects of us. First, let us look at the context of the Great Commission. It comes at the very end of the Gospel of Matthew and definitely picks up some up the major themes of the whole gospel. For example, the very last words that Jesus says are “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

      Nevertheless, there is a commandment in what Jesus says, and we want to take that command seriously, so let us focus on that. Jesus says, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” Now, that is a long and somewhat complex sentence in the Greek original. There are four verbs: Go, make disciples, baptize and teach but actually only one of those verbs is in the form of a command and that is the verb that is translated as make disciples. So basically the order that Jesus is giving is make disciples and he is saying that the way to do that is by going, baptizing and teaching.

      Now here again is something that picks up on the entire theme of the Gospel of Matthew which has been all about how Jesus chose these people that he is talking to and made them his disciples by teaching and training them. He is telling them to go and do for others what he has done for them.

      And I think that is a key point that we must keep in mind as we consider what it means for us to follow the Great Commission in the world today. The goal, Jesus makes absolutely clear, is to make disciples. The goal is not to go out there and preach the gospel message at people everywhere. Yes, it is true that making disciples will likely include some preaching, but if you think that you could fulfil this commission just by preaching to everyone in every nation, you have another think coming.

      What Jesus is looking for is not converts or church members, he is looking for disciples – for people who are willing to do what he had done and put their lives on the line for the sake of what is right. It is not about making people believe certain things or join an organization, it is about changing people’s lives for the better.

      And I don’t necessarily see that there is a huge problem with that. Think of it this way: what if each one of us here made a decision over the next couple of years to invest ourselves into someone’s life – someone, maybe, in need of finding a better path. What if you decided to do the kinds of things that Jesus did for his disciples, if you shared your time and wisdom with that person and showed you really cared for them. Can you see how something like that could transform a person’s life? What if you really built that person up? And in the process, shared your own beliefs and priorities with them – not as a way of saying, “here, this is what you have to believe,” but more by saying, “This is what has worked for me, maybe it will help you too.”

      If you could do that, you would be responding to Jesus’ commandment because you would be making disciples or at least giving someone the chance to be best disciple that they can be. That is what the Great Commission is about. It is not about preaching a specific message to people everywhere, though it could include some of that. It is certainly not about building up the power and influence of particular institutions. It is also not about making everyone believe exactly the same things. It is about being involved in people’s lives for transformation – just like Jesus was involved in his disciple’s lives.

      I think that if the church could put its energy into that – and not into protecting its own interest and complaining about the power that it has lost, the idea of being a church that takes the Great Commission seriously would not be something to be embarrassed about. It is not about an obsession with numbers; it is about finding the time to build up those who do come along so that they can change the world. 

Everyone is welcome to attend.  

Worship begins at 1:00 pm with light refreshments following the service.

Hespeler, February 11, 2018 © Scott McAndless

Genesis 1:1-8, John 1:1-14, Psalm 148:1-14

I

 am sure that many of you are familiar with Dan Brown, author of bestselling books such as The DaVinci Code. His books and the movies that have been made of them have been incredibly popular in recent years. In an interview that took place to promote one of his books someone asked Brown the question, “Are you religious?” this is what Brown said:

      “I was raised Episcopalian, and I was very religious as a kid. Then, in eighth or ninth grade, I studied astronomy, cosmology and the origins of the universe. I remember saying to a minister, ‘I don’t get it. I read a book that said there was an explosion known as the Big Bang, but here it says God created heaven and earth and the animals in seven days. Which is right?’ Unfortunately the response I got was, ‘Nice boys don’t ask that question.’ A light went off, and I said, ‘The Bible doesn’t make sense. Science makes much more sense to me.’ And I just gravitated away from religion.”

      And I must say that I find it rather appalling that Dan Brown, a man who is clearly smart and very interested in spiritual and religious matters (many of his books explore deeply spiritual and religious questions even if some of the history is not overly accurate) – that Dan Brown should have been turned off from the church like that.

      Christians do proclaim and praise God as the Creator. It is an essential part of our belief system but it is not, I think it is important to say, just an explanation. This isn’t something that believers came up with simply because they didn’t have a better explanation for how everything came to be. The idea that this God, who we have come to know through Jesus, is the author of everything that exists is absolutely central to our relationship with this God and to the hope that we find in knowing him.

      I think that that was the first mistake that that Episcopalian minister made when talking to that intelligent young Dan Brown. To him, there was something scary about Brown’s question. The young man came in with an understanding of how the world and all that is in it came into being, a powerful story backed up by science and evidence and supported by a consistent theory. And that poor minister knew that, while he also had a good story of creation, his story did not have those kinds of theoretical or practical supports behind it. He felt that he had to defend his story but he knew that he didn’t really have the ammunition to put up any sort of reasonable defence. So he resorted to what the Christian faith has resorted to far too often down through the years: he shut down the questioner.

      Even worse he suggested that there was something wrong with Brown simply because he had asked the question – insinuating that he wasn’t “nice.” I don’t blame Brown for being turned off, but I am afraid that, in overt and subtle ways, we continue to turn all sorts of people off who bring in their questions and their reasoning to challenge our idea of a creator God.

      But that minister didn’t need to be intimidated by that question. The mere fact that other people – physicists, cosmologists, biologists – can find excellent ways to explain how everything came to be, is not a direct challenge to our concept of a divine Creator. That is because the Creator we meet in the Bible is not about the how of creation, the Biblical Creator is about the why.

      That is why, for one thing, there is not just one account of creation in the Bible. There are several stories that give very different spins on what happened and especially how it happened. There is the best-known story from Genesis 1 that we read from this morning – the famous seven-day story. That story is about the who of Creation – identifying over and over the Creator as Elohim, the God of Israel. We miss that, of course, because the name Elohim is translated throughout simply as God. But the naming of the creator in this saga would have been deeply significant to the people who first heard it because what this story was teaching them was that the God, Elohim, that they had come to know through their worship and in their prayers was the same God who had called the universe into being.

      This story is also about the why of creation. It was saying – and this also is something that it repeats over and over again – that God created the world because it was good and that there was a goodness in how God had organized the whole thing – separating light from darkness, water from water and organizing everything from times and seasons to the various groups of animals according to their kind.

      The why of the story was also about teaching the people of Israel about their own time – specifically that they were to organize their time into groups of seven days and that every seven days they were to observe a Sabbath just as God had done by resting after six days of labour in creation. That is why the creation story all takes place in six days – it wasn’t really about how long it took for God to create the world, it was about how the people were to live out their lives in the world in weeklong cycles.

      What this creation story is not particularly concerned about is how it all came about, at least not as we would see it from a modern scientific point of view. We should hardly expect it to because that was not a concern of the people for whom this story was written. That is a modern, post-enlightenment way of answering the question of why everything exists. This story was concerned, from the point of view of the people it was written for, with much more important matters.

      One thing that makes this very clear is the fact that the Bible didn’t limit itself to one account of creation. After the first story – the seven-day story – there is another story of creation that is told in the second chapter of Genesis – a story of a man named Adam and woman named Eve in a garden. This is no less a creation story than the first one. This is sometimes smoothed over in translation, but the original text very clearly recounts the creation of the world and the plants, animals and people all over again.

      This, again, didn’t really bother the people for whom it was written. They understood that the story was being told in different terms because it was finding a different meaning in the creation and in the Creator. Here the focus was on relationship – the relationship of the humans to the natural world, the relationships between men and women and above all the relationship between God and humans. So, once again, it wasn’t about the mechanism of creation so much as about the meaning of creation.

      So, unlike that Episcopalian minister who spoke to that young Dan Brown, I don’t see any need to be fearful or defensive about the apparent contradictions between scientific explanations of how the universe came to be and how the Bible talks about the topic. I feel that all of these accounts are valuable if you understand what they were written to convey and use them accordingly.

      But there is another Biblical creation account that I would like to focus on for a few minutes – one that might help us to bridge the divide between Biblical and modern approaches to understanding the existence of everything. When the Gospel of John was written (and most scholars think that it likely wasn’t written until maybe a century after the death of Jesus) the author probably thought long and hard about how he would begin his account of the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. Other gospel writers (Matthew and Luke) had started with stories of Jesus’ birth. Mark had started with Jesus getting baptised. But the writer of John felt that he needed to go much farther back to get to the real start of his story. He started with a new account of creation.

      This new creation story starts out with a nod towards one of the old ones. The first words, “In the beginning,” are lifted directly from Genesis 1:1. But from there it takes a strange turn. Instead of “In the beginning God,” we get, “In the beginning was the Word.” Now even there we can see a connection with the Genesis story because, of course, in Genesis God creates by means of the spoken word, by saying things like, “Let there be light” and “Let there be a dome.”

      But the gospel writer is saying more than just that God created by speaking – a whole lot more. The word that he uses there – the word that is translated word is a Greek word: logos. And logos is not just another Greek word that means word. It is a word that takes us to the heart of the ways in which Greek thinkers at that time thought and understood their world. For the Greek philosophers, the logos was the organizing principle for everything that existed. If you grasped the logos, you could understand and explain everything. That is why, to this very day, many of the words that we use to talk about how we think and understand the world – words like logic, biology, archaeology and cosmology all contain within them the root logos.

There are lots of things coming up.  Please mark your calendars. 

More information will follow in our bulletins and newsletters.

W

hen we pray to God and call God, “Our Father,” you all get that that is a metaphor, right? I mean, we all understand that we don’t mean that literally. We’re not saying that God is our literal or biological or even foster father, but that, in some meaningful ways, God is like a good human father. It’s a metaphor. And it is, in many ways, a good metaphor – a metaphor that genuinely helps lots of people to see God in a helpful way. But we also understand that, like most metaphors, you cannot push it too far. You should not take that metaphor as an indication that God is human or male or likes to smoke a pipe and read the Sport’s Section even if every father you have ever known has been human, male, a pipe-smoker and a sports fan.

      What’s more, I think we can all recognize that it is a metaphor that doesn’t work as well for some people as it does for others. Some people, frankly, don’t really have the best experience with human fathers. Some children don’t grow up even knowing a father or have been abandoned by him at a very early age. You can well imagine that, for such a person, calling God Father doesn’t necessarily help them to engender the warmest feelings for God. You could hardly blame such a person if their image of a Father God is someone distant or absent. And, of course, I hardly need to say that if someone had an abuser, an addict or a criminal as a father they would naturally have a very warped view of any God they called Father. That is the thing with metaphors. They are very powerful, but they are sometimes too powerful – so powerful that that they lead people down false paths instead of towards the truth.

      But here is something that you may not have thought of before: when we call God Father, we have all kinds of ideas and images that we associate with that metaphor, some of them helpful and some of them not so helpful. But what if I were to tell you that the ideas that we associate with that metaphor are not exactly the same ones that Jesus, his disciples and the people who wrote the Bible had? I mean, we all realize that on some level that the Bible was written in a very different world from the one where we find ourselves. But one thing that means is that words didn’t mean exactly the same thing back then as they do now.

      The Bible was written in a patriarchal society. And I know that we often use that word “patriarchy” today to refer to the power that men hold in society in general. But the word actually means something much more specific than that. The word literally means “father-rule” and it means that the most basic and fundamental organising principle of that kind of society is the father. It means that everyone in the entire society belongs, in some sense, to a family and that each family is under the control of one powerful male individual. Fathers rule in the sense that absolutely everyone in society must answer to a father somewhere.

      And, as you have probably already imagined, there can be a downside to that sort of a structure in society, at least for those who don’t get to be the fathers. Fathers are given near absolute power. They can tell any member of their family what to do, who to marry, control most every aspect of their lives and even have the power of life or death with few limitations. The father, in such a society is an absolute dictator and you can easily imagine that many fathers could and did abuse that kind of power.

      But there was also a bright side to this structure – after all, how could it endure so long if people didn’t see some benefits. There was also a clear understanding that this amazing amount of power and authority given to a father could only be used to one purpose: to ensure that every member of the household had what they needed to survive and to thrive. The system wasn’t there in order to serve the fathers, at least not in theory. It was there to protect, support and bless the entire family.

      And that family could include an awful lot of people. It wasn’t just what we call a family today – the basic family unit of parents and offspring living together under one roof. It was an extended family that might include multiple generations and various degrees of relation. A family also included slaves, servants and hired workers on the farm and it even included livestock and working animals. The father was responsible for all of those people and not merely responsible to keep them alive and fed, but responsible to see that each and every one of them had what they needed to meet their highest potential.

      Now, if that sounds like way too heavy a burden for any individual to bear, it absolutely is. How could one person know enough about every individual in his household to know exactly what each one needs to thrive? And how could he find the means and resources to make that happen?

      The evidence seems to indicate that fathers suffered a great deal in order to meet such impossible expectations. They had a terrible life expectancy; they worked themselves to death. And the stress of the job manifested in many other ways. I am sure that many of the men that Jesus healed in his ministry – the so-called demon possessed, the paralytics, the hysterically blind – were men who had been overwhelmed by all the expectations that were put upon them and upset at their failure to meet those expectations in the midst of an economic crises that had been caused by Roman greed. The stresses on them were so extreme that they had started to manifest in physical ailments; their bodies literally began to shut down.

      But there didn’t seem to be any escaping it; it was just the way that the world worked. Fathers were given an extraordinary amount of power, but not really enough power if they were going to live up to everything that was expected of them.

      But then, we’re told, Jesus came along. And Jesus spoke about a different way of doing things – of a kingdom that belonged to God rather than to any human power or authority – including fathers. (Jesus even once explicitly said that there should be no “fathers” in his entire movement.) And perhaps the greatest indication of the radical newness of this kingdom that Jesus spoke of was the way that he talked about God. Jesus, you see, called God his father and he taught his disciples to pray and do likewise.

      Now, Jesus wasn’t the first person to ever think of calling God a father. That is indeed a very ancient idea – that, just like a father ruled over a family, maybe God ruled over the whole world. In other words, they took their understanding of how the world worked below (where fathers ruled with iron hands) and mapped that onto heaven.

      What is unique about Jesus isn’t just the fact that he called God father, it is the way that he did it and what he meant when he said it. The passage we read from the Sermon on the Mount this morning is perfect example of how he used the word. “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.”

      But you can tell from the way that Jesus uses that image, that that is not what he has in mind. Instead of authority, Jesus puts his emphasis on that huge burden of care that a father bore for every person in his household. Jesus says that God, as father, takes very seriously that need to make sure that every member of his household, which encompasses the whole world, has what they need not merely to survive but to thrive. And, as father, God does not have the luxury of playing favourites. He must pour out his blessing – his rain and his sunshine – on those that the world sees as good, and those who the world sees as evil. These gifts must be for the righteous and the unrighteous alike. He must take all of them as they are and do what is best for each person to meet his or her potential.

      And that was indeed a revolutionary idea. It opened the door to so much of where the Christian faith went from there. If God was that kind of father and if the household that he was looking after was as wide as the whole world, then many of the old notions that people had about how God related to the people he had created had to be broken down. No more could hope and salvation just be restricted to one ethnic group, the Jews. Surely a loving father would not want to exclude any member of his family from salvation; and so the barrier between Jew and Gentile was broken down.

      In the same way, if God, like that ideal ancient father, was really committed to giving the best opportunities for all his children no matter who they were, then surely God’s concern for them wouldn’t be limited by social status. Rich or poor, slave or free, noble or peasant, God would seek the best for all and so the barriers between slave and free would be demolished. Nor would God care all that much about things like gender, so the barrier between male and female would fall. These were all radical ideas for the times, and yet they were reached for in the early Christian church, as we see in the writings of the New Testament. These radical ideas had their origins in the unique way in which Jesus spoke of God. The metaphor is that powerful.

      I hope that many of you were blessed, as I have been, with a good father who was involved in your life, who tried to give his very best for his family. When you have someone like that in your life, it helps you to grow up with a strong sense of who you are and of security – that everything is going to be alright. If you got that from someone who is or was a father in your life, then, when you imagine God and speak to God as a Heavenly Father, you will automatically make all of those associations with God in your own mind. It will help you to approach all of life with a strong sense of yourself and of security – a great foundation for a good life.

      Of course, if you didn’t have that kind of presence in your life, you may not get very much from the imagery of a Father God – you may even get very negative associations. That is alright. There isn’t anything wrong with you because the metaphor doesn’t help you to better know God. And if meditating on the image of a Heavenly Father doesn’t help you to grow closer to God, it is okay to find other imagery that does that for you. There is nothing wrong with speaking to God as mother, as caregiver, as friend if those images do help you towards a deeper and more positive understanding of the God who cares about you.

      So don’t underestimate the power of a metaphor. The way that Jesus could talk about God as his father actually changed the world. It offered peace and hope to people who were struggling to find their way in a very difficult time. We don’t necessarily need to be wedded to particular metaphors, but I would hope that we, like Jesus and the early church, could find the courage to speak about the God that we have come to know through Jesus and say what that God is like. Such talk still has the power to change the world.

      

At this Saturday's Spaghetti Dinner there will also be a Silent Auction.

If you aren't able to attend the dinner, but like any of the items up for auction please feel free to ask us to bid for you!

All proceeds will be directed to PWS&D's work in Malawi.

Here are pictures (admittedly not the best quality) of only 3 of the items.  There are also, hand made greeting cards, hand knit items, a gift bag from Ferrero Canada (yum - chocolate), dinner for two at The Stables, a manicure at Tips & Toes, a shampoo & cut at Continental Hairstyling, a special "Hespeler" package and more.

The dinner is at 6:00 pm, but feel free to come a bit early to view the auction items and put your bid down.

Hespeler, 28 January, 2018 © Scott McAndless

Luke 17:5-6, James 2:14-26, Psalm 26:1-12

      The catechism defines the true nature of faith as it is understood in the New Testament quite well: “Belief or faith is a wholehearted trust in God.” It is about trust, not just about believing a bunch of things about God or being certain about those things. It is the same kind of trust that you might put in another person – someone that you felt that you could have confidence in because you knew that they would never let you down.

      Because it is defined as trust, we realize that the object of faith matters a great deal more than the quantity of faith. You have to put your trust in someone or something that is reliable. Say, for example, you need to take a flight to go somewhere. When you get on the plane you are placing your trust in the airplane, in the mechanics who maintain it and the pilot who flies it. If that trust is well placed – if the plane is well-built, well-maintained and well flown – how much faith do you need to have for it to get you to your destination? Not much. All you need is enough faith to get yourself on the plane because, if you have zero trust, I tell you that nothing is going to get you on that plane. But if you have enough to get on the plane (you know, small like a grain of mustard) and even if you are trembling with fear and full of doubts, your fear and your doubts won’t affect the flight of that plane, will they? That’s all up to the plane, the mechanics and the pilot. Your part in flying someplace (apart from paying for your ticket) is to chose wisely in which airline you are going to put however much or however little faith you have.

B

      So this is the title that Andy gave me for today’s sermon: “School of Hard Knox; They never taught me this!” Now, when I heard that title, I knew exactly what Andy was asking for, but it might not be quite so obvious to some of you so I’ll explain. The Presbyterian Church in Canada has three colleges in which they prepare people for the Ministry of Word and Sacrament. There is one in Vancouver called the Vancouver School of Theology, one in Montreal called Presbyterian College and one in Toronto called Knox College. But Knox College in Toronto is the largest and the best known of the three so by asking about the school of “Hard Knox,” Andy was asking me to comment on how well or how poorly I feel the education I received prepared me for the reality of working as a minister that I have faced.

      It is a very good question, one that many people have been asking in recent years as we have seen the problems being faced by our clergy – problems that make people wonder if they have been adequately prepared. We are in a situation today, for example, where we are seeing high proportions of those who enter into the ministry drop out of it within a few years. Those who stay, often suffer from burnout, depression and other problems. It is well worth asking whether the preparation that they were given has let those clergy down.

      Also we have the issue of the pressure that the church in general is under – especially when we see a general decline in church attendance and membership across the board – even if there are some notable exceptions in particular churches. We surely cannot blame all of that exclusively on the clergy, but it doesn’t seem out of line to ask how the failures in educating clergy might have contributed to that.

      So I do welcome the opportunity to reflect on the education that I received, how it helps me and how it may have failed me. I will raise just one quibble with Andy’s title however. I didn’t go to Knox College. I studied at Presbyterian College in Montreal. But I get that “School of Hard Presbyterian College” really wouldn’t have worked, so we will just go with Andy’s title.

      I did learn many things in my studies that I valued and continue to value. I appreciate the fact that I wasn’t just trained to be a minister; I was educated. I wasn’t just told what to do or say in various situations or how to carry out ministerial tasks. I was given the tools I needed to think for myself. Rather than being told what a certain Bible passage meant, for example, I was challenged to discover the meaning for myself. I believe that this was the only way to do it.

      People often suggest today that our ministers should be trained for particular tasks – how to plant a church, how to run a project, fund raise for particular goals or whatever it might be. But I really feel that such training would have been almost useless to me in the long run. After all, the methods I would have been taught back then, 28 years ago, would not have included using the internet, social media, PowerPoint projection and all kinds of other technologies that didn’t exist or were priced out of reach for churches back then. The world in which we live has changed at a breakneck pace over the last quarter century that I have been a minister and the role of a minister has changed along with it far more than we realize. I have gone from using the mail and telephone to initiate most contacts to email and am now in a post-email social-media contact mode for most of the time. That is but one key way in which things have changed.

      So, it was much better to give me the ability to think out how I would make use of any tools that became available and any changes in culture that arose than it was to simply tell me what to think, say and do. I hope that we never forget that the task in preparing a minister is to educate her or him, not merely to train.

      So I do feel that I left school with a good basis that would help me to learn how to approach the Bible, think through various theological questions, preach and teach. But Andy’s question is about what I didn’t learn so let me turn to that question.

      When the Apostle Paul speaks to the church in Galatia – a church that he founded and to which he gave extraordinary leadership – he says a few words that always convict me when I think about my ministry over the last quarter century? “Am I now seeking human approval, or God’s approval? Or am I trying to please people? If I were still pleasing people, I would not be a servant of Christ.”

      Seeking human approval – trying to please people – is natural. It is something that we all do. And you know why we all do it: because we all want people to like us. We always feel better and safer when we are part of the group and so when we get the sense that people don’t like us we often feel that inner compulsion to do whatever we possibly can to regain that sense of being liked.

      And I, like most people, grew up with that desire to have people like me. And when I began my studies at Presbyterian College and began to work as a student minister (I had, for most of the time that I was studying, a student placement as the effective minister for a small United Church in Laval, Quebec) I would say that I set out with the expectation that all of the people in all of the churches that I served would always like me. How would I accomplish that? Well, I certainly wouldn’t preach things that people might disagree with. That was almost guaranteed to get someone mad at me. I would only choose music that everyone always loved (good luck with that by the way), I wouldn’t mess with any longstanding traditions and wouldn’t rock the boat by suggesting things that someone (even just one person) might have a problem with. Oh, I had all kinds of subconscious strategies that I thought would guarantee that everyone would like me.

      But the Apostle Paul seems to make it very clear that pleasing people is not the goal of Christian ministry and that seeking human approval often comes at the expense of seeking God’s approval. This natural tendency that I had to want to please people looked likely to be a problem.

      Now what is Paul really trying to say here? Is he saying that a good minister should intentionally set out to antagonize the people in her or his congregation? Is he saying that I should make the church a place where people are never happy and nothing ever happens that they like? Clearly not!

      But anyone who has put some time into ministry knows exactly what Paul is trying to get at here. You can preach things that people like to hear, of course, but if you are never dare to say anything that someone might disagree with, there will definitely be times when you are not preaching the word of God and that is your job as a minister.

      But it’s not just about preaching; it is even more about leadership. If you try anything new in a church the simple reality is that somebody (at least one) won’t like it because change makes people uncomfortable. So, if you are people pleasing, you will always pull back from doing that new thing even if it is the right thing to do, even if it is what God is calling you to do and even if, ultimately it will prove to be something so good that everyone feels a deep sense of satisfaction that they are doing a worthwhile thing. That’s right, you can be so focussed on pleasing people that you pull back from doing the very thing that would make them feel the most pleased. That is messed up! But I know that ministers do exactly that all the time.

      So I think that Paul has a point here. Leaders in the church who are primarily motived to please people and draw their sense of worth from doing so, will not be the kinds of leaders that they need to be. And I must confess that many of us church leaders are still stuck in the people-pleasing zone and our education did not necessarily help us to break out of it. That is one good reason why burnout, dropout and things like depression hits the clergy so hard. It is simply impossible to please all of the people all of the time in ministry – perhaps more impossible than in many other professions because we are dealing with things that people take very seriously – and if you base your self-image and worth on how people see you, your self-image will take a hit.

      Even more important, we need to remember that the church itself doesn’t exist in order to please people. Yes, we certainly hope that people will enjoy much of what they experience in the church and, even more important, that they find a deep sense of satisfaction as they fulfill what they were called to be by knowing, serving and loving God and others. But that happiness is not the purpose of the church, it is a secondary effect of the church’s fulfilment of its mission. We are not here to please, we are here to serve, to love and to live out the word of God. If we spend all of our energy on pleasing people and keeping them happy, we will never get around to our true mission.

      But the problem is that it is so hard to let go of that people-pleasing impulse. It is part of one of our deepest drives – that desire to be loved and accepted. The antidote, I feel sure that Paul would say, is to find our sense of self-worth in God rather than in people. “Am I now seeking human approval, or God’s approval? Or am I trying to please people? If I were still pleasing people, I would not be a servant of Christ.” But how do you do that? The approval of people seems so real and tangible (even though it is, in fact, quite fickle and changeable) while the approval of God seems less real.

      What you need to do, of course, is to cultivate a correct view of God and particularly a correct understanding of God’s opinion of you. Meditate on passages like the one we read from the Psalms this morning: “You who live in the shelter of the Most High, who abide in the shadow of the Almighty, will say to the Lord, ‘My refuge and my fortress; my God, in whom I trust.’” When you let go of the notion that God is just out to get you – dead set on punishing you for all your wrongs – and accept that God really is on your side and delights in all that you are, you can begin to be less reliant on the approval and the pleasing of other people to tell you who you are.

      But it is a long journey. I would say that, in many ways I have spent the last 25 years since I was ordained, learning how to please God before I please people and I am hardly done. If I had learned more in my Presbyterian College days about all the ways in which I seek to please people and how I deal with it (wrongly) when I fail to please others, maybe I could have accelerated my advancement; I don’t know.

      Ironically, I suppose, I would have to say in response to Andy’s question, the things that I failed to learn at school that matter most are not the external things – theologies, scriptural interpretation, philosophy and so on. The things that I failed to learn that matter most were the things about myself – how I am motivated, what are my triggers and fears. To know yourself and what drives you is the beginning of true leadership because it is only then that you can understand what drives others.

      I’m not saying that the college could have laid all of that out for me. But just as they gave me the tools to understand the Bible, theology and preaching that I have been able to build on in years since, maybe they could have given me some tools to understand myself. In any case, I am thankful for all that I have received. Ministry in the church is hard – far harder than I think any of my fellow students realized at the time – but I am very thankful to have been given the privilege of being part of it.