Feb 17 10.30 a.m. Geoff Pritchard

Helping people to find faith

The text for today would be a good one to have on the wall at home, as some people do.

Acts 8, verse 31: The Ethiopian said, “How can I understand, unless someone explains it to me?”

I have been given the subject: “How do we help our friends to faith?” You will ask, why me, of all people? I’m no evangelist. Ashley put me down to do it because he knows I have passed my sell-by date. So I must have seen many people come to a new faith in Christ, in various ways. To be honest I have also seen others turn away saying “It’s not for me”. There’s no simple formula for success.

Except that if we are to share our faith with our friends, it goes without saying that we must have friends. Unbelieving friends. Christian friends are no use at all. And making friends takes time; if church meetings take up three week night evenings, if we are always networking with each other, keeping tabs on what goes on, any chance we have of making new friends will be reduced.

One other thing that would kill off our chances would be for us to be like secret agents, living double lives. Having worked in commerce as well as education for several decades, I have to admit it is hard to be the same person at work as at church. Fortunately, we are only asked to be channels for God’s grace. God can soften hearts, even those of the unpromising people we write off.

If I had been a first century Christian, I would have written off the chief persecutor of my friends, Saul of Tarsus. A young Christian woman of good family that I met recently said she had tried making new unbelieving friends by going on a lesbian bingo night. It’s the sort of thing Jesus did.

For some reason best known to himself, God has chosen to work in partnership with human beings in this matter. He wants us to do things for people, tell them things. The trouble is, frankly, we often don’t want to.

We could simply pray for people to come in here and hope they’ll stand amazed at our wonderful worship. They do that occasionally, but such an approach evades the instructions Jesus gave his disciples to go outside the door, meet with new people and tell them things and do things for them.

Jesus said, go out, meet people on their home ground, not ours. Why, otherwise, would Paul have made his long and hazardous missionary journeys, facing beatings and mobs? Why would he have said, “Knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade men?” Notice the “we”. He rarely went far by himself.

Jesus have sent people out in pairs. Charles Wesley wrote many of his hymns while riding on horseback in all weathers, rather than sitting in a study with a nice wood fire.

If we follow today’s Bible passage very literally, we will immediately say, well, if you want to win new disciples, what you have to do is go out on the main road and look at all those people sitting in their chariots, find one who is reading the book of Isaiah the prophet, chat him up, ask him whether he understands, answer his questions, and within half an hour you will be baptising him. After all, that’s what Philip did.

Please don’t do it yourself. You might get run over.

The plain fact is that although the apostle Philip is often called Philip the Evangelist, he didn’t do very much. So what happened?

Suppose we think of the business of growing new Christians as like growing fruit. When you start an orchard, you first have to select the ground, clear it of stones, dig it over, make sure there are some nutrients, find some young apple trees, plant them, water them, keep the pests away, keep small boys away, and finally, after quite a long time, harvest the fruit.

What Philip did in that story was simply stroll up to the tree that somebody else had planted and nurtured, see that the fruit was already ripe for the picking, and pluck it. When I was a small boy, we called that scrumping. Some people are good at scrumping; they will push your unbelieving friend over the edge into the Christian faith and a life of discipleship. It only works, though, if some obscure person has already done the spadework long ago.

Ideally spade work should start with parents bringing up very young children to pray and trust the Lord. Incidentally, militant atheists are now calling this “child abuse” and demanding that it be stopped. But parents have this responsibility, and what we do at home with our children is even more important than what others do with them in church.

If the child grows up without spiritual instruction, we might find ourselves persuading a by now rebellious teenager that God really means something to me, or you.

I have a friend in his 60s who met some teenagers in the street in Worcester; they were obviously getting ready for a bit of spare-time vandalism. Having been a policeman once, he chatted to them, and asked them if they had ever thought of a better way to spend the evening.

Then he told them how he thought throwing stones was wrong and how he had started to think seriously about God for the first time when his father died.

Most of the lads ignored him, but the big one came up later and said quietly, “you know my dad died last week”. A connection had been made.

Jesus told about a man who went to sow some seed. He said that if the ground wasn’t right, and it was too stony, the seed did not grow. Even if it did grow, it needed nutrition. The incident with the vandals was like clearing the ground of stones. It tells the young lad that there are people for whom God is real. One day, he may find the same thing.

With adults, too, there are stones to clear away. What those stones are depend on the person. Some think we are all escapists, determined to avoid the hard questions in life, or else bigots. The Western world has been told that science has disproved religion. The Bible and Science meeting we have on March 10 may be suitable for sceptics.

I was not fair to Philip in saying he “just picked the fruit”. He did a crucial last job; quite a skilled one, and explained something that the Ethiopian didn’t understand. Verse 34 says, the eunuch asked Philip, “Tell me, please, who is the prophet talking about? Himself or someone else?….. Philip began with that very passage of scripture” -- Philip began at the point the seeker had got to, and no further. The Ethiopian did not know enough about Jesus. No one can become a Christian unless he learns about Jesus.

Strangely enough, new converts can hardly ever remember what they were told when an evangelist put in the last piece in the jigsaw puzzle and brought them to the point of decision. There’s too much going on in their mind. They have to be told again later.

We like to think that the church today is friendlier than it used to be, more plugged in and switched on; after all, we sing modern songs and we use PowerPoint, and we don’t tell women off for not wearing a hat. But one nasty remnant of the old church we inherited from our grandparents remains.

Jesus’ instruction to go out and preach the gospel has been completely reversed. We say, “Here’s a better idea than the one Jesus suggested. Instead of going out and telling people, as he suggested, why not invite them all in, to a place of our own choosing, at a time that suits us, with our own chairman or presiding official to keep order, someone who can tell people when they should stand up and when they should sit down, what they should sing and what they should say, when they should be hushed and when they should face the east.”

That’s no way to win hearts and minds. People are fed up with it.

They would be much more relaxed and prepared to talk about faith and love and death if we met them on their home ground, or at least neutral ground, and shared something to eat and drink, and allowed them to tell their own stories. That’s why the men’s organisation, Mantle, meets at Worcester Rugby club rather than at a church.

Jesus taught his disciples over a meal. Eating relaxes people. Notice the alpha courses have done well by starting with informal meals. We should not automatically segregate faith and teaching evenings from social meals, or we lose that relaxing effect.

Another thing Jesus teaches us in the parable of the sower is that even when the soil is good, the seeds don’t always grow well. Because they need nutrition. People are the same; their minds need healthy food.

Remember, even those of us who go to church every week only get 17 minutes of Christian teaching---except at Manor Park Church in St Johns of course---whereas our fellow-countrymen get on average twelve hours a week of television, three or four of radio, and an hour a week of the daily newspaper and Hello magazine.

Plus the Internet, the only popular medium completely open to Christians today. Do any of us have what it takes to exploit the Internet? A website for special interest groups perhaps? Bloggers shape the world nowadays; their influence can be huge. If we don’t shape the world, someone else will.

We must think about the culture we live in. It’s like a child’s kaleidoscope, constantly changing. Guilt is commonplace, but it may have nothing to do with sin in the Christian sense. Someone once said that people feel more guilty about eating too much chocolate cake than about (say) cheating a big insurance company. But we must never lament or moan about the times we live in. We can’t live in another age. This is the only age we shall ever be given the chance to help to redeem.

I mention guilt because Jesus asks much more of us than membership of a club. He asks us to repent of our sins. Some Christians are now saying that sin was a Jewish concept, and people won’t buy the idea any more. Certainly we have to present the old message in new ways. But it must be the same message.

So let’s look briefly at someone whose repentance did change England. His life has many lessons for us, and illustrates some of these principles. John Newton, the slave trader, was certainly not a Jew, yet he felt eternally grateful for the forgiveness he didn’t deserve.

Having committed more atrocities in his youth than most of us will ever see ---one page of the book about his life made me feel quite ill for the rest of the day, and I’m not easily shocked---

he went on to become a famous preacher and campaigner against the slave trade.

Incidentally the book was written by a former Conservative Cabinet minister, Jonathan Aitken, who became a Christian recently, probably as a result of being sent to jail. God uses a crisis to precipitate spiritual progress.

It is often said that Newton came to faith suddenly, when his ship was in danger of sinking in a storm. But before he even got on that ship, he had become discontented with his own condition. Discontent is the usual starting point in the search for faith.

The driving force in his case was the teaching he had received at his mother’s knee and in the gospel hall she used to take him to, until she died when he was six. The storm was just the tipping-point.

On board ship, Newton was in absolute control of a large number of young African slave women, and it was the custom for the crew to rape them. It took a while to realise that this, together with the drunken behaviour and the whole scene of leg-irons and neck braces and thumbscrews, was incompatible with his new faith. Later, Newton met a Christian friend in the West Indies, who shared his faith and advised him. Poor old John had been struggling to live his Christian life in isolation; he had never learned to pray aloud, and he had never discussed the practical side of the Christian life with others.

It is important that converts should do both these things early on, or progress may be held up.

After many years, Newton got himself ordained and became a close friend of John Wesley and spiritual adviser to William Wilberforce. In an age when the Church of England was not sure whether to allow hymns of any sort in church, he became a writer and populariser of them.

His best known song remained in obscurity in Britain until well into the 20^th century. After it had been altered and popularised in the southern states of America, ironically by descendants of his African slaves, it reached the top ten in the British music charts.

It is now sung more often than any other hymn in the English language, and was used at Ground Zero in New York after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, as well as after the Challenger space shuttle disaster.

Why is it so popular? Because it tells in such simple language how God’s forgiveness is on offer even to the worst of sinners. Out of 145 words in the original version, 125 were words of one syllable.

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me! I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see.

Newton wrote it one Christmas to help a member of his congregation, his closest friend and his lay preacher, the famous poet, William Cowper. Cowper was a genius with words, and he wrote some of the best hymns in England.

Although he had a fine sense of humour, Cowper suffered from attacks of what was then called madness; it would now have a different name, such mental disorders are not uncommon, and the sufferers can be clever people. During one of his bad times he became convinced that God had sentenced him to everlasting damnation, regardless of what he did. So he said that he would take his own life, and one day he had a good shot at it.

Amazing Grace was Newton’s desperate last attempt, after many face to face pleadings, to save the life of his closest friend, who had shared his home; his right-hand man. He tried to say, if God could forgive John Newton after all his wicked exploitation of human flesh, He could forgive a gentle man like Cowper. And if this present world did seem grey at times, a new heaven lay ready for us.

“Yes, when this flesh and heart shall fail, and mortal life shall cease, I shall possess, within the veil, a life of joy and peace”.

“The earth shall soon dissolve like snow, the sun forbear to shine; but God who called me here below, will be forever mine”.

We too can remind people that this world is not all there is. There is sometimes a need to tell Christians how to get back to having a faith again; life can be tough for many, and there is said to be a broken heart in almost every pew.

I learned last week that it takes on average five visits by an export salesman to persuade a company to purchase a big machine. No wonder, then, that it takes a mature British adult seven years from first hearing the gospel to becoming completely committed to it. There are many pieces to place in the jigsaw; if our piece is not the last one, don’t worry. They can’t all be the last one.

Despite the title of Newton’s hymn, few people today know the meaning of a word like grace; they think, isn’t that the word for the cute way swans swim? Grace really means “God doing us a favour that we haven’t deserved”. Perhaps we should use only words that can be understood.

A teenage European tourist visited a cathedral in (I think) Spain and asked the guide why the number 33 was on the wall inside. The guide said, it’s the age that Jesus was when he died. The teenager replied, Goodness! That’s young! What did he die of?

We cannot complain if people are ignorant of the Christian faith; they would soon know if somebody told them. Who is going to tell them the good news of the resurrection to eternal life? You may not think, as I do when in a pew, that you do not have much of a role on Sunday in this congregation, but there is no more important role than the one we take up when we go out of the door. The Christian church is always just one generation from extinction.

As the Ethiopian said, “ How can I understand, unless somebody explains it to me?”