Pt 4. A third story

Ten years ago, a church felt Jesus leading them to engage with marginalised and oppressed people in their city. They got in touch with other poverty-fighting organisations, did their research, identified a need for a homeless drop-in at the weekend. They started having homeless and other vulnerable people in to their church for Sunday lunch, and have pretty much done so ever since.

Some people have decided to follow Jesus. Some have volunteered in church catering for a while. Some have come on Alpha courses. Some have got accommodation and jobs. Some have exceeded everyone’s wildest dreams and ended up leading things in church. Some have died. Many have disappeared. And many still come along every week, every time they’re let out of prison, every time they waste their benefits on the gear, anytime they can to eat decent food and talk to another human being. The majority of people never seem to change at all. Change doesn’t seem possible.

This church aren’t doing anything badly. Their story just emphasises the extraordinary impact the others have had (along with their share of heartbreaks and setbacks, for damn sure). But because of Jesus, because I’ve seen him achieve change in my life, because these other stories have managed to effect change, I can’t be satisfied with ‘change doesn’t seem possible’. I want to write their story a better ending.

Pt 3. Precedents

So what decent precedents have I got? I guess you’ve got to look at other people who’ve wrestled with this question, worked with similar people and been led by Jesus into enabling real transformation.

In 1995, my Dad and a couple of friends from church ran a course with unemployed people in Southampton. It was helpful for people, and so they ran another one. And another. He left his job and started his own business to help enable the friends to do more courses. The more they worked with people, the more they discovered about the many things that were stopping people getting jobs – apparently it wasn’t just people being lazy. And so the Get That Job course developed from some interview practice, encouragement, and careers advice to include CBT, fun games, group support, life coaching and wisdom from the Bible to set the people free.

15 years on, Southampton university department of psychology concluded a 3-year quantitative study with the finding that SAFE and the Choices course produce ‘a statistically significant result’ in improving mental health. That’s no joke. Pretty much every single course participant saw the symptoms of medically diagnosed depression and anxiety disappear. People who’ve been labelled by doctors as ‘disabled’ – “you’ve got a chemical unbalance in your brain and you’ll always need to take these pills” – are simply not depressed anymore. They’re remaking their life how they once dreamed it might be.

Another one: I’ve nearly finished reading about Jackie Pullinger, who ended up working with Triad heroin addicts in Hong Kong in the 70s. She had a vision not just to help one or two, but clear up a whole area that was outside government control and therefore completely dominated by drugs, prostitution, poverty, and gang violence – the Walled City. Possibly an unrealistic ambition for a naive white girl from Surrey.

But the young gangster addicts she befriended began becoming Christians, getting filled with the Spirit, and experiencing no withdrawal pains when they prayed in tongues. And as they were helped to follow Jesus, living in community away from their old environment, they began to do crazy things like hand themselves in to the police for crimes they’d got away with, do housework, and help set others free like they had been. Gang bosses got set free, and the walled city began to change.

Today, after 30 years of setbacks, heartache, danger, blood sweat and tears, the Walled city is a beautiful garden.

Pt 2. The Question

Now, this whole ‘magic bullet’ thing is a nice illustration/ analogy/ proverb/ thing, but it’s not incredibly rigorous. The abstract question behind that specific situation is actually more significant to me now. I got into working with people in poverty by copying Jesus, but I’m hitting some serious complexity.

A little way into the story, Jesus sent out his friends to do his thing, with quite a simple toolkit: hang out with people, share the good news about me, heal sick people, set people free from demons. Now although these are all still key tools in setting people free from poverty (trust me), I’m still left uncertain how to tackle other major forms of poverty we come up against in the UK: addictions, mental illness, emotional and psychological damage. For most people in poverty in the UK, these (often people suffer from all of them) completely control their life and keep them from any fulfilment or happiness. So tackling them is a serious priority for us.

The problem is, I’ve not found clear precedents in the Bible for how to go about this. With blind people, it’s daunting but obvious: God’s solution is for a Jesus-follower to ‘proclaim sight to the blind’ – heal them, now. Bang. Just like that. But what would Jesus do when he met the depressed abused alcoholic? Without a few examples of how God does it, it’s difficult to avoid just taking tactics from somewhere else.

I’ve slipped into a couple of camps, doing just this. I’ve copied religious crazy people (‘come on, you’re a Christian, why are you still feeling depressed?’), and scientific crazy people (psychologists have just ‘discovered’ that a caregiver having a good relationship with a patient makes them more likely to recover. Kindness helps people. You think?). It’s amazing how good all of us are at ignoring facts which don’t fit our point of view.

Trying to set people free through superstitious magic, and by using clever techniques, are both examples of us trying to make something happen by ourselves. Both are pretty impotent. I find it hard to honestly take credit for the change we are seeing in people at King’s Care. The only way I can understand it (it never fits my plans) is that we’re creating space for Jesus to do stuff.

There are so many people around us just totally stuck in misery, like quicksand, and sinking fast, that we owe it to them to stop fiddling around and call in someone who knows what they’re doing.

Pt 1. The Magic Bullet

I once read that the best writing happens not when the writer is trying to get across something they’re already sure about, but when the writer writes in order to try and figure it out. I think this will be a bit of both. It'll be a few posts though.

Back in January, I went to a work meeting that ended in a great time of praying together. I suddenly felt really strongly for one of the other guys, for his confidence and his ability to relate to people, and prayed for him with a lot of oomph that God would crack stuff in him there & then (surely he meant to do what he provoked me to ask?). After the meeting the guy gave me a lift, and honestly, I felt like ‘nothing has happened. At all.’

I took this up with God as I walked the last bit home. I did that dangerous thing where you start making excuses for him, rather than waiting to listen what his actual answer is.

I said, “okay, fair enough God, maybe it’s not like a magic bullet, maybe it doesn’t work just like that.” And then God spoke up.

“Remind me, Tim, how does the ‘magic bullet’ work?”

For those of you unfortunates who didn’t get to study ‘medicine through time’ at GCSE, I offer this explanation. The ‘magic bullet’ is the nickname of penicillin, the drug which forms the basis of all antibiotics. Until penicillin was discovered (less than 100 years ago.. and by accident. I wonder..) there was nothing you could do to actually kill diseases. All you could do was make the conditions as good as possible for the body to fight the disease itself (drink lots of orange juice, get an early night, yadda yadda yadda...)

Here’s God’s point: even the ‘magic bullet’ takes time to work. So why shouldn’t he?

Doves & Serpents

A man is stranded on a desert island, with no tools, food or communications equipment. The situation is bleak. However, the man knows God. So he prays, and feels God say, ‘I’m going to rescue you.’ The man is really pleased. He sits back and waits for God to show up.

Amazingly, an hour doesn’t go by before a gleaming speedboat skims past, notices the man, and pulls up. ‘Come aboard’, cries the woman at the wheel. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ replies the man. ‘God will be along to rescue me in a minute.’ So the speedboat speeds away.

A couple of days later, a coastguard vessel appears. ‘Are you alright there? Come aboard!’ ‘Don’t worry about me,’ the man says again. ‘I’m waiting for God to rescue me.’

The man has been on the island for nearly a week when a helicopter buzzed overhead, and lowers down a rope. ‘Tie yourself on!’ they shout down, over the roar of the rota blades. ‘I’m not coming,’ says the man, quite weak now for lack of food. ‘God has told me he’s going to rescue me.’ So the helicopter flies away.

The man starves to death.

When he comes face to face with Jesus, the man cannot hold his tongue. ‘Jesus, you said you’d come and rescue me. Why didn’t you?’ Jesus looks at the man for a moment, and then says, ‘I sent you two boats and a helicopter – what more rescue do you want?’

I hope you’ve heard that one before. It occurred to me this morning, as I munched my muesli (and questionable milk), that common sense is not exactly trumpeted in my experience of church. I’ve heard a lot more preaches on faith!

Jesus teaches us to ‘be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves’ – to continually grow in faith and wisdom. My observation is that all of us tend to be better at one than the other. I’m much better at the wisdom bit, and probably a majority of you who read this will be the same, because you’ll come from a western culture, which prizes wisdom over faith (English culture is especially bad for this). Therefore it is really important to encourage faith to make up the balance. However, not everyone is a serpent.

This is a live issue for me because several vulnerable people I work with are extremely weak on wisdom, such that it is very difficult to get them to see what seems obvious, ‘common sense’, to me.

So I guess my question today is, ‘how can we effectively communicate the value of wisdom from a Christian point of view?’ We’ve developed lots of inspiring ways of selling faith to people, but wisdom doesn’t seem such an appealing, saleable idea. I’m sure that’s only because we haven’t worked enough at how to communicate it. We need to, to protect our well-meaning but vulnerable brothers and sisters.

Any ideas?