My Adventures with God 36 : The Wager

Chapter 36: The Wager

I had thrown down the gauntlet to the received wisdom of managed adaptive decline in country parishes. I believes it was at God's direction. But I really needed God to back it up with a miracle.

I had declared that I would personally fund half my salary for six months. I had publicly wagered that in ths time the parish finances would recover to the point where it would be able to fund me 100%. If the experiment succeeded, I would return to full pay; if it failed I would quit.

The purpose of this experiment, as I saw it, was to show three things:

1. That God could provide.

2. That for denominations like the Anglican church, accepting decline as inevitable and simply reducing ministry in the face of it was wrong-headed.

3. Lastly to vindicate my belief that the church was – to use one popular story – meant to be a life boat station not a clubhouse.

On #1 and #2 I was challenging their view of God. True they cried out to God for help. True that help was, in so many country parishes conspicuously not forthcoming. But I believed the Bible gave the reason “I gave you cleanness of tooth (famine) in city after city yet you did not return to me says the Lord” is a recurring Old Testament theme. Sure they prayed for help – help to go on being the sort of church they wanted to be. God didn't answer, so they acted as though God could not help them and adapted and kept going as they wanted to. They never said: “The God of the Bible can act. He clearly is not acting – so what are we doing wrong?” To which the obvious answer would be: you are not giving him anything more than lip service; you don't act like he really exists; you don't act like Jesus wants all people everywhere to turn to him and be saved.

On #3, early in our time at Lang Lang whilst studying Ephesians a current application had struck me so forcefully that I felt God was using it to open my eyes to something which was important to him. In the early part of Ephesians Paul was on about the dividing wall between Jew and gentile being demolished and the two being united as one body in Christ. It was brought home to me that we faced an analogous situation. There was a dividing wall between the church community and the general community.

On the side of the church community, they were every bit as introspective as the first century Jews. They were happy to have “outreach” programs to encourage the secular community to donate money (which the general community often did),  for at least the right sort of people to swell the numbers in church (which the general community mostly didn't). What they never considered was that it might be their duty to take the Gospel of salvation to the secular community without strings or ulterior motives. Definitely they did not to allow, let alone welcome, an influx of “unchurched” who might be messy, might change things or want to do things differently or threaten their personal sense of identity.

Christ was not like that! He humbled himself and sacrificed his life to woo us rebellious humans.

As recounted earlier, God had blessed the efforts prompted by this insight with a spectacular revival in Lang Lang. However diocesan officialdom had been openly contemptuous that we had sought to convert young people and those from the less prestigious social classes to Christianity. When the three-pronged attack of the devil had brought an end both to the revival and to visible material success in the parish it was to them proof that we had been wrong to take the Gospel to young people and the “unchurched”.

At the time I opposed the Dioceses decision to reduce the Lang Lang parish to a half-time ministry and proposed this experiment, our church already advancing in spiritual recovery. We had the prayer group I mentioned previously. We had already seen God at work providing as we laid the needs of people and the parish in believing prayer before him. We had seen him take a hand in directing our path as we actively submitted our personal ideas and preferences to his. For Sue and me the devastating effects of her post-natal depression and my own chronic depression were lifting. All round God's hand could be seen destroying those works of the devil which had caused the collapse of the revival.

However, what the diocese saw was just the bank balance and that was going from bad to worse. Money was where God had to demonstrate his approval of us in order for the diocese to recognise it as that. This was the substance of my challenge. Could we with God's help – or more accurately could God, even through us – turn the parish finances around in just six months. That would be a miracle!