Last week I began a series of blogs which draw on the life and example of William Booth to help us understand how to change the cities we live in. Wherever we live and whatever our circumstances, we all have plenty to learn from the founder of the Salvation Army who transformed late-nineteenth-century London through his radical lifestyle. I’ve been studying many of the best biographies to come up with Ten Things William Booth Did Which Changed The Face of His City. I believe that they are the things which we can do to change our cities too.
In the first blog in this series, I looked at Factor #1: Radical Personal Commitment to Jesus. In this blog, I will look at factors #2 and #3.
FACTOR #2: FIERCE AMBITION FOR THE NAME OF JESUS.
Ambition gets a bad press in Christian circles, but William Booth’s example reminds us that our biggest danger is not too much ambition, but too little. Sure, the English translations of Philippians 2:3 warn us to “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit,” but they are actually a mistranslation of what Paul says in Greek. He doesn’t warn against ambition in such verses, but against strife. When he uses the Greek word for ambition, he does so positively, assuming that a Christian will naturally be ambitious for Jesus’ name. He writes in Romans 15:20 that “It has always been my ambition to preach the Gospel where Christ was not known.” What set William Booth apart from the other Christians of his era was a relentless ambition to see Jesus honoured as Lord.
Perhaps his best biographer, Roy Hattersely, writes that “William Booth believed in ‘active Christianity’ - the moral duty of God’s ministers to go out into the highways and byways and make them come in. His style of evangelism was a living reproach to every vicar in whose parish he preached and every minister whose circuit he invaded … ‘Go to the people with the message of salvation, instead of expecting them to come to you.’”
He confided to his wife Catherine that he could never be satisfied with preaching Jesus to a few faithful believers in church on Sunday. How could he, when the majority of Victorian Londoners did not honour Christ as Lord? He insisted, “The Saviour didn’t command His apostles to be preachers of sermons; He sent them forth as witnesses of their experience of saving grace. I must do no less.”
William Booth’s fierce ambition for Jesus’ name was easily misinterpreted by his enemies. They accused him of trying to build a name for himself, of interfering in their parishes, and of generally making an exhibition of himself. He retorted, “Some may find fault with me and say that I made an exhibition of myself. That is what I have been doing with myself for my Master’s sake all my life.”
If you are reading this, then it’s probably because you want to change your city like William Booth. Ask God, therefore, to give you a similar fierce, burning ambition to see the name of Jesus glorified in your city. Ask him to make you grieve over the way his name is dishonoured and used as a swear word, and ask him to show you ways to risk your own name for the sake of his. Be willing to look foolish so that he can look great. Ambition for Christ begins by seeing your city as it truly is. William Booth asks us: “How can anybody with spiritual eyesight talk of having no call when there are still multitudes around them who have never heard a word about God, and never intend to, who can never hear without the sort of preacher who can force himself upon them?!”
FACTOR #3: DEEP HUMILITY
Humility is the flip side of fierce ambition for the sake of Christ, since it is usually pride and a desire for self-preservation which prevents us from risking everything so that Jesus can be glorified. Booth was relatively unsuccessful in his first few months and years in London because the Lord wanted to teach him in no uncertain terms that he was just a frail man. He wanted to teach him to be still and know that God was God. It was only after Booth wrote to a friend that “I am waking up as from a dream and discovering that my hopes are vanity and that I literally know nothing” that God started using him in amazing ways.
Stripped of his pride and of his desire to be seen as someone great, William Booth was finally ready to be used by God. He booked one of the city’s worst brothels for a series of evangelistic meetings in order to proclaim Jesus’ name in the place where it was most defiled, and he immediately experienced an angry backlash from the city’s Christians. “Go there and you will lose your reputation at once and forever,” he was told. “It is the most disreputable den in the country, the worst slum in the city.” Booth simply shrugged his shoulders and declared, “Then that’s the place for us.” His evangelistic mission in the brothel made him one of the most hated and unpopular figures in the city, but it also reached thousands of prostitutes, gamblers and mixed-up sinners who gave their lives to God.
So let’s end this blog with a question: When did you last risk being hated so that Jesus would be loved? When did you last throw away your reputation so that Jesus would be held in high esteem?
It’s time to ask the Lord to give us a deep humility with regard to self, and to replace our pride with a fierce ambition to see Jesus glorified. It’s time for us to stop playing safe and to go on the offensive with the Gospel. It’s time for us to learn from William Booth how to change our cities.
The final four installments of “How to Change Your City” will follow over the next few days.
When Queens Road Church ran a billboard campaign before Christmas claiming that “God Still Loves Southwest London”, we really meant it. But God meant it even more.
Even as we paid the price to proclaim the good news about Jesus to Wimbledon, God was busy behind the scenes to open up a door for us to proclaim it wider.
Several months ago, I spent an hour with the man who has masterminded Holy Trinity Brompton’s strategy of planting churches in the defunct buildings of dead Anglican churches. I left the seminar and went to Starbucks for a prearranged meeting with the pastor of Kingston Baptist Church. When he shared with me that his church was in terminal decline and about to close its doors for good, I urged him not to surrender the fight so easily. I encouraged him to remember his church’s history, and to use the blessings of the past to spur him on to fight for its future.
And what a past Kingston Baptist Church has. Planted in 1662 out of the Dissenter revival which gripped London after the English Civil War, God used it in amazing ways to transform seventeenth-century Kingston. When problems set in and the church entered a spiral of decline, it was replanted through a fresh revival when John Wesley came to Kingston in 1790. The church was very fruitful but hit internal problems and decline once again, so Charles Spurgeon replanted the church in 1864. “Fight for the church,” I urged the pastor, but he was weary. He said he had no fight left in him and was leaving in a few weeks’ time, but he urged me to step up and fight for the church in his stead. He asked me to email the church members offering help if Kingston Baptist Church were ever about to close its doors.
I sent the email but several months went by without an answer, so the rest of the Queens Road elders and I focused on God’s mission to Wimbledon and the surrounding area. Then suddenly, out of the blue, I was contacted by the Baptist Moderator who wanted to talk urgently about KBC. They had voted to close their Sunday services in December and to give the keys to Queens Road Church so that we could launch a fresh new chapter of fruitfulness. This triggered three months of meetings and discussions with lawyers, accountants, builders and prophets so that we could weigh up whether this was a distraction or a call from God.
God was really good to us in this period and gave us compelling direction whilst we analysed the detail. He arrested me one morning in my daily Bible readings by Jesus’ statement in Mark 1:38: “Let us go on to surrounding towns too, so that I can preach there also - that is the reason I have come.” He also spoke to us through a prophetic picture from Guy Miller (CityGate Church, Bournemouth) of two wells of living water. One well represented Queens Road Church and was pumping life-giving water to the area surrounding Wimbledon. The other well represented Kingston Baptist Church, but it was so full of rocks and mud and muck that it looked as if it had no water. Guy prophesied that it was an artesian well, and that we would find the same living water flowing under the muck if we simply rolled up our sleeves and started digging. We came to the conclusion as elders that God was behind this opportunity, and that he wanted to use us to reopen this disused well in Kingston.
Finally, following a series of miracles, we met with what was left of Kingston Baptist Church on Sunday 15th January. We told the church that we were willing to help them so long as they accepted the Queens Road elders as the new leaders of KBC, brought us into membership and then resigned themselves. They needed to give us the authority we needed to lead the church into all that God has for it in this fresh season. Remarkably, they voted us in as the new elders and membership of KBC before standing down en masse as members themselves. This remarkable remnant of one of Kingston’s oldest and most influential churches decided to sacrifice their present so that the future of KBC could be as glorious as its past.
There are many practical questions which are raised by this wonderful, God-given opportunity. You can find some answers by coming to our Pray For This City event from 6:30-8:00pm on Sunday 5th February at Queens Road Church, and from 6:30-8:00pm on Sunday 4th March at the Kingston Baptist Church building. There will be a tour of the building and a chance to celebrate its past as we lay hold of God in prayer for its magnificent future.
In the meantime, you can find some immediate answers by reading the Q&A sheet below. We have tried to keep it to two pages for the sake of brevity, but if your question isn’t included then any of the Queens Road leaders would be happy to give more in depth answers.
God still loves Southwest London. When you hear the rest of the amazing story of how he has entrusted us with Kingston Baptist Church, you’ll believe it even more than ever!
SOME ANSWERS TO YOUR QUESTIONS REGARDING KINGSTON BAPTIST CHURCH
Written by Phil Moore (QRC, Wimbledon) and Simon Virgo (King’s Church, Kingston)
Kingston Baptist Church has been declining in size for quite some time. At the request of its outgoing lead pastor, the elders of Queens Road Church began to offer help to the few people who were left. KBC decided to close its Sunday service in December and have made a historic decision with regards to their future.
1. What was agreed at the KBC Special Church Meeting on Sunday 15th January?
The members of Kingston Baptist Church voted to close this chapter of their history and to open a new one with the help of Queens Road Church. The existing members all resigned their membership, and before they did so, they voted Phil Moore in as their lead pastor, the other QRC elders in as their assistant pastors and deacons, and the six QRC elders and their wives in as the new church membership.
2. So what will this mean for the future of KBC?
The QRC elders have committed to replanting a Sunday worship service in the KBC building as soon as possible. Given the current state of the church building, this will need to be after renovation works are completed, which probably means early in 2013.
There is no viable KBC congregation, so QRC will initially establish a new QRC service in Kingston. QRC currently has two Sunday morning services in Wimbledon and will move to having three Sunday morning services: two at Queens Road in Wimbledon and one at Kingston Baptist Church.
The long-term aim is for Kingston Baptist Church to stand on its own two feet again. However, this replant is such a large project that QRC has committed not to cut the church loose before it is ready. We want to build towards strength rather than weakness, and this may mean being linked together for quite some time.
3. Why didn’t KBC simply give their building to King’s Church Kingston?
Like most Baptist churches, the KBC building is held in trust by the Baptist Union. They were unable to give their building to King’s Church because it is not a Baptist church, but they were attracted to help from QRC because it is a Baptist-Newfrontiers church, which King’s Church is not. (Meanwhile, King’s Church has been in pursuit of a different building, which they feel God has been leading them towards.)
4. Isn’t it a bit strange to have two Newfrontiers churches in Kingston Borough?
Not at all. King’s Church currently gathers 0.1% of the borough on a Sunday morning, and KBC currently gathers 0.01% of the borough! Kingston borough is home to almost 200,000 people – more than double the size of Bedford where there are currently 4 Newfrontiers churches!
Given how unchurched most people who live in Kingston borough are, the strange thing to have done would have been to have said no to KBC and let a church with great potential die.
5. To what degree have the leaders of Queens Road Church and King’s Church worked together in this decision?
Phil Moore met with the King’s Church elders within a week of the members of KBC asking for help. Phil and Simon Virgo have been in regular meetings and phone contact throughout this decision.
The elders of both churches met together for a whole evening at the start of January in order to weigh this opportunity together. The meeting ended with the leaders of both churches feeling positive and beginning to talk about how we might reach Kingston Borough as two churches with a common goal.
6. How important will working together with King’s Church Kingston be for QRC & KBC?
Queens Road has a fantastic relationship with King’s Church. King’s was planted out of Queens Road 20 years ago and there are many deep friendships across the two churches which go back decades. Both churches are also firmly committed to the vision of Newfrontiers. Working together is therefore crucially important.
King’s Church has some fantastic momentum of its own, with a major building project likely and with Terry & Wendy Virgo having recently moved to become part of the church. The QRC elders want to reach Kingston for Christ alongside King’s Church without hanging onto the King’s Church coat-tails in an unhelpful way!
7. What is the history and background of Kingston Baptist Church?
KBC’s history dates back to the 1660s, when a church was planted by faith in reaction to King Charles II’s Act of Uniformity in 1662 which threatened to limit the spread of the Gospel. After many fruitful decades, it fell into decline and was replanted in 1790 by those who had been transformed by John Wesley’s revival. It met from 1790 onwards in a barn on the site of the current Kingston Baptist Church. After more fruitful decades, the church once more fell into decline and was replanted by one of Charles Spurgeon’s students in 1864. This student was friends with Charles Ingrem who planted Queens Road Church a few years later. It was this historic link which made the members of KBC want to turn to the leaders of QRC for help.
8. How will this development affect people at Queens Road Church?
Finance Although the membership of KBC was very small, the church has considerable assets. It already has a third of the estimated costs of refurbishment in the bank. The church has a claim to the remainder of the money from another charity, which we will pursue. If that is unsuccessful, then the Baptist Union has agreed to loan any outstanding funds to KBC at a discounted interest rate.
Staff Workload Like any of the church plants which Queens Road has been involved with over the years, this is going to require hard work from the Staff Team. However, there is money within KBC to pay for a six-month project manager to oversee this project for the elders. Talks are in progress – watch this space.
Vision Queens Road Church has had a vision from the time it was planted in 1872 to plant new churches across Southwest London. Charles Spurgeon instructed the first QRC pastor, Charles Ingrem, in 1880 that “Near to you at Wimbledon you will find [other places] all needing Gospel work. As soon as you have got your own little church in working order, start something at each of these places. I’ll help you – go and blaze away.” The elders of Queens Road are very excited that this is not a distraction from the church’s vision, but a chance to recommit to it.
9. If I am part of Queens Road Church but live in a KT postcode, will I be expected to become part of the third service at Kingston Baptist Church?
Not at all. The QRC elders let people choose whether to come to the 9:30am or 11:30am services in Wimbledon, and they will also let people choose whether or not they wish to become part of the service in Kingston.
As launch day approaches, there will be an opportunity for people to sign up to become part of the core team which will start the new service. The QRC elders expect there to be Kingston people who choose to remain at Queens Road, and Wimbledon people who choose to travel to Kingston for a pioneering adventure. Some may even choose to support the launch for the first year before returning to a service back at Queens Road.
10. Will Queens Road Church be looking for members of King’s Church Kingston to join, to help establish the new plant?
No. As QRC sets out to re-establish KBC, the ambition is not to re-distribute the Christians in Kingston, but to establish a work which will reach out to those who as yet don’t know Jesus. QRC is replanting KBC in order to build the Kingdom of God, not a Queens Road empire! The goal is to do the same thing in Kingston as in Wimbledon: helping unbelievers to come to salvation so that they can love Jesus and live his mission with us.
11. How can I find out more details about this development?
QRC will be hosting an event, called “Pray For This City”, where there will be news and an opportunity to pray into this development. This will be held from 6:30-8:00pm on Sunday 5th February at Queens Road Church, and from 6:30-8:00pm on Sunday 4th March at the Kingston Baptist Church building on Union Street.
12. Who can I talk to if I have questions in the meantime?
If you are part of Queens Road Church, then talk to one of the QRC elders. If you are part of King’s Church, then talk to one of the King’s elders. The leaders of either church will be very happy to answer your questions as best they can at this stage.
God is good and he has great plans for Southwest London. Thanks for partnering with us in Jesus’ mission!
Phil Moore & Simon Virgo
Lead Pastors, Queens Road Church & King’s Church
A few weeks ago I posted the first part of a six-part series of blogs entitled “How to Change Your City”. I then got distracted - fittingly enough! - with plans to plant a new church in London. We heard a few days ago that the hard work had paid off and the church plant is going to be live by the end of this year. I can now focus on giving you the full series of blogs outlining “How to Change Your City”, and I am reposting the first blog to restart the series. The final five blogs will all be posted a few days at a time. Enjoy…
The cities of our world are in desperate need of the power of God. If you haven’t worked that out yet, then you must be living in a monastery. Last summer my own city, London, was on fire as rioters and looters roamed free. It’s time for Christians to get serious with God, and to find out how he tells us we can change our cities through his power.
A few months ago, I began looking for someone whom God had used to change my city in the past, and who might prove to be a model for a fresh move of God today. That led to me reading three biographies of William Booth, and over the next few weeks I’m going to blog Ten Things William Booth Did Which Changed The Face of His City. I believe that they are things which we can do to change our cities too.
William Booth was born in 1829, and converted as a 15-year-old in Nottingham. He moved to London in 1850, aged 21, but made little impact on the city which would one day be transformed through his godly example. The real breakthrough only came in 1865, when aged 36 he began to preach to the drunken inhabitants of London’s poor East End. In the three years leading up to 1868, he saw 4,000 converted and planted 13 preaching centres which held 140 services per week. After ten years more, this became 81 preaching stations which gathered 27,280 worshippers each week. By 1884 - less than two decades after his initial breakthrough - he had started 910 corps comprising 2,332 officers, who took revival across the city and to the nations of the world.
We are at a stage in history where God wants to transform not only London but all the other great cities of the world. The question is whether we will imitate the example of William Booth and others like him? In this blog post, let me start with the first factor through which he changed his city:-
FACTOR ONE: RADICAL PERSONAL COMMITMENT TO JESUS
William Booth’s revival began very simply with a personal revival in secret. Although he was only a 15-year-old boy when he was converted, he was determined that Jesus should have all there was of him. He was instantly convicted that some of his friends had given him a silver pencil case to say thank you for a favour he had done for them, but that he had actually only done them the favour because it was in his own interest to do so. He felt a fraud and agonised over the Holy Spirit’s conviction that he had sinned and must make amends. He remembered later:
“The entrance to the Heavenly Kingdom was closed against me by an evil act of the past which required restitution. In a boyish trading affair I had managed to make a profit out of my companions while giving them to suppose that what I did was all in the way of genuine fellowship. As a result of their gratitude, they gave me a silver pencil case. Merely to have returned the gift would have been easy, but to confess the deception I had practised upon them was a humiliation to which, for some days I could not bring myself … I remember, as it were but yesterday, the spot in the corner of the chapel [where God gave me strength], the resolution to end the matter rising up, the rushing forth, the finding of the young fellows I had chiefly wronged, the acknowledgement of my sin, the return of the pencil case – the instant rolling away from my heart of the guilty burden, the peace that came in its place, and the going forth to serve my God and my generation from that hour.”
The reason he moved to London in the first place, aged 21, was that he made another stand for what he saw as God’s call to serve the Lord with all his heart. He was working in a Nottingham pawnbroker’s and Saturday evening was the busiest time of the week, as factory workers pawned their possessions to pay for a night out on the town. William Booth was convicted that he should not work past midnight and therefore “labour on the Sabbath”. He understood the Sabbath to be an expression of Christian faith, where believers put down their tools and stopped working to express their faith that God was God and they were not. His boss might want to work into the early hours of Sunday because he did not trust the Lord to provide for him on the other six days of the week, but William Booth did not. When his friends at church advised him he was being too radical, and when his boss threatened to fire him and throw him out of his lodgings above the shop if he left work early, Booth decided to honour the Lord anyway. “I am willing to begin on Monday morning as soon as the clock strikes twelve and work until the clock strikes twelve on Saturday night, but not one hour or one minute of Sunday will I work for you or all your money,” he told his boss and was duly fired. The most common word which William Booth used for Jesus throughout his life was “the Master”, and he lived from his early Christian days as if he really meant it.
William Booth was asked in an interview towards the end of his life to describe the secret of his success. He replied: “I will tell you the secret. God has had all there was of me. There have been men with greater opportunities; but from the day I got the poor of London on my heart, and a vision of what Jesus Christ could do with the poor of London, I made up my mind that God would have all of William Booth there was. And if there is anything of power in The Salvation Army today, it is because God has all the adoration of my heart, all the power of my will, and all the influence of my life.” The interviewer commented that “I learned from William Booth that the greatness of a man’s power is the measure of his surrender. It is not a question of who you are or of what you are, but of whether God controls you.”
The question, of course, is will we do the same? Many people claim that they want God to revive their city, but few are willing to pay the price-tag of the personal revival which precedes Jesus using us like William Booth. We need to understand what he meant in his hymn, made famous by my friend Lex Loizides, when he wrote a revival prayer for his Salvation Army to sing together: “Oh, see us on Your altar lay, We give our lives to you today, So crown the offering now we pray: Send the fire today!”
Perhaps you are a church leader, longing for God to revive your city. Take note, then, of what happened to Miriam when she was one of the leaders of God’s People in Numbers 12. When she failed to deal with the sin of gossip and maligned someone to her brother privately in her tent - a seemingly innocuous sin - the Lord stopped the whole nation from advancing until she had repented. Verse 15 tells us that “the people did not move on till she was brought back.” Could it be that your church is not moving on because you view your secret sins as innocuous, but God views them as deadly?
Perhaps you are a Christian who is simply passionate to see God’s Kingdom come in your city. If so, you are just like William Booth, the student and the pawnbroker’s assistant. Learn from his life and from the experience of other men like him, such as the missionary CT Studd. He wrote that “What I would have you gather is that God does not deal with you until you are wholly given up to him, and then he will tell you what he would have you do.” If you want your city to turn to Christ through you, you must first turn to Christ in radical obedience yourself. If you want your city to know Jesus as Master, then you must first start living as if he is truly Master of your own life.
This is the first of ten factors from the life of William Booth which I will blog over the next few weeks, but it is the starting point from which the others flow. If you love Jesus and hate sin with the same radical devotion as William Booth, then you are embarking on God’s great training course in how to change your city.
I was Ebenezer Scrooge this morning, and it felt fantastic.
Everybody knows the Charles Dickens classic “A Christmas Carol”. Even my young children know it, because one of our family traditions is to watch the Muppets version of the story every year during the run-up to Christmas. It charts the conversion of Ebenezer Scrooge from an old miser to a repentant sinner during the short space of a solitary Christmas Eve. None of us want to be Ebenezer Scrooge in a bad way, but there’s nothing quite like being Ebenezer Scrooge in a good way.
Like Zacchaeus in Luke 19, Scrooge instinctively realises that genuine conversion affects how we treat one another. He sees that there is no point in claiming that we love Jesus and want to follow him unless our claim is matched with heartfelt love towards the people he has made. The story ends with Ebenezer Scrooge rushing around London on Christmas morning to give gifts to anybody he can find who is in need.
I’m so thrilled that Queens Road Church has acted like Ebenezer Scrooge in a good way this Christmas. We’ve challenged one another to put our love for Jesus into action by donating food for the Wimbledon Foodbank so that it can be put into food parcels and given out to some of the families in Southwest London who are most in need. So far (and we are still collecting donations for two more weeks) we have collected a third of a ton of food which I drove to the Foodbank this morning in time for Christmas. Marcus Bennett, who leads the Foodbank, tells me that this makes Queens Road Church the single biggest donor to the Wimbledon Foodbank since it was started. A lot of people are going to be helped through the generosity of many.
So if you are part of Queens Road Church and have been involved in this offering, then well done. You have been like Ebenezer Scrooge in a good way.
And if you’re not part of Queens Road Church, then enjoy this Christmas season and mark it by becoming like a converted Ebenezer Scrooge too. Jesus told us that the poor would be with us wherever we live. Look for ways to meet the needs of those around you in Jesus’ name this Christmas time.
And finally, in the words of Tiny Tim Cratchit in the last line of “A Christmas Carol” - “Merry Christmas, one and all!”
Christopher Hitchens believes in God. He didn’t when he died last Friday.
One of the sharpest, wittiest, most intelligent modern British writers, Christopher Hitchens published his best-selling book “God Is Not Great: Why Religion Poisons Everything” in 2007. He spent the last four years of his life promoting his book and its message before cancer of the oesophagus forced him to cancel his preaching tour. There may be more dangerous things for a person to do with their final four years of life, but I can’t think of any and it makes me feel great grief for a man who grieved so very little for himself.
Christopher Hitchens was superbly intelligent, but he failed to turn his intelligence into wisdom. When Psalm 14 tells us that “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God,’” it isn’t being rude to atheists. It is simply pointing out that when they rage against the idea of a divine creator they fail to notice their instinctive knowledge of who he is. Hitchens’ writing doesn’t rage against the Buddha, pagan idols or any vague sense of the divine. He is very clear about the God he doesn’t believe in. He instinctively rages against God as described in the Bible.
Christopher Hitchens was superbly inquisitive, but he failed to turn his curiosity into investigation. Although he admitted in his book that “Exceptional claims require exceptional evidence,” he failed to offer due diligence to the evidence for Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. American historian Professor William Hamblin reviewed his book and concluded that “It is quite clear that Hitchens’ understanding of biblical studies is flawed at best … Hitchens’ understanding of the Bible is at the level of a confused undergraduate.” God gave Christopher Hitchens a brain which could have delved as deep as any professor into the all of the exceptional evidence he was looking for in the life of Jesus. The great tragedy of his life is that he used God’s gift to resist the one who gave it to him.
Christopher Hitchens was articulate about what he thought of God, but very poor at listening to what God thought of him. God asks in Psalm 2, “Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers gather together against the Lord and against his Messiah. ‘Let us break their chains and throw off their fetters,’ they say. But the One-Enthroned-In-Heaven laughs; the Lord scoffs at them.” Even Christopher Hitchens, the king of the clever one-liner, had nothing in his arsenal to reply to God the Judge. It is destined for everyone to die and then face judgment. Hitchens’ book was loud and popular, but it was God who had the last word.
That’s why it gave me no pleasure whatsoever to hear that Christopher Hitchens had died as blinkered and deaf towards God as ever. It simply made me sad that he held his soul so cheaply that he gambled it away without self-analysis, detailed study or humble listening. He wrote in his book that “The Gospel story of the Garden of Gethsemane used to absorb me very much as a child, because its ‘break’ in the action and its human whimper made me wonder if some of the fantastic scenario might after all be true. Jesus asks, in effect, ‘Do I have to go through with this?’ It is an impressive and unforgetable question, and I long ago decided that I would cheerfully wager my own soul on the belief that the only right answer to it is ‘no.’”
It was a flippant wager, one which meant destruction for his soul, and one which warns us all not to let our clever rhetoric drown out the gracious voice of God. Christopher Hitchens’ died an atheist, but moments later - too late, tragically - he suddenly believed in God.
Great news. The first Kindle and eBook versions of the Straight To The Heart series of devotional commentaries are now out and available to download from Amazon and other good online retailers.
Just in time for Christmas. What could a husband or wife, son or daughter, mum or dad, and boyfriend or girlfriend possibly find a more romantic gift on Christmas morning?!
Colliers Wood is normally famous for the wrong reasons.
If you aren’t from the UK then you probably haven’t heard of Colliers Wood at all. If you are, then you probably know it as home to the office block which was voted “Britain’s ugliest building” or as the place where looters set fire to PC World and attacked police cars last summer. You may know it as one of Southwest London’s lesser-loved communities, but that’s only because you don’t remember the things that God does. And I got excited last night when he started to remind us.
Nine hundred years ago, a group of Christians built a monastery at the heart of the community which is now known as Colliers Wood. On 3rd May 1117AD they opened Merton Priory on the bank of the River Wandle and started praying that God would work in power in their community. Day after day and year after year, the monks of Merton Priory asked God to bless their part of England and use it to change the world. In the years which followed, that’s exactly what he did.
Merton Priory became a spiritual home to King John I, and it was from there that he was forced to sign the Magna Carta at nearby Runnymede in 1215AD. The document which gave birth to modern democracy was therefore bound up in the prayers of the monks at Merton Priory who gave King John guidance when his noblemen rebelled against him.
King Henry III also made the priory his spiritual home, and it was in the Chapter House of Merton Priory that he signed the Statutes of Merton in 1236AD, the first and founding documents of English Common Law. The dawn of the modern legal system can therefore also be linked to the monks’ faithful prayers.
The monks continued to serve the community which is now known as Colliers Wood, holding daily intercession for their area and becoming known for their faith for miraculous healing. King Henry VI was crowned at Merton Priory, and thgere is considerable evidence that he played a part in its healing ministry.
But in 1538, King Henry VIII closed the priory by force, confiscated its land, and literally dismantled it stone by stone in order to build his own palace at nearby Nonsuch. Merton Priory and its monks were forgotten by the world, but they were not forgotten by God.
In the 1970s and 80s, the ruins of the Chapter House of Merton Priory were found and excavated. Although they are now situated underneath the A24 flyover and sandwiched between a Sainsbury’s hypermarket on one side and a Pizza Hutt on the other, the ruins can be accessed by a few groups each year. Last night a group from Queens Road Church were permitted to hold a carol service there, and its past began to be revived. Sixty people. Forty of them following in the footsteps of the monks, praying for God to work in their community and bless and use Colliers Wood beyond their wildest dreams. Twenty of them non-church guests who had been drawn by the venue and by the rumour that God still loves Colliers Wood.
As I took part in the carol service amidst the ancient ruins and heard Sean Hammond, leader of the Queens Road Colliers Wood Pastorate, sharing his vision for a fresh wave of prayer for the tens of thousands of people who now live within a mile of Merton Priory, I started to get very excited.
I felt God’s reminder that even if we think of Colliers Wood in terms of ugly office blocks or rioting, then he doesn’t at all. He still remembers what happened in Colliers Wood many generations ago, and he is still committed to answering those monks’ prayers. He is raising up a new generation who will continue to pray where they left off, and who will ask him to bless Southwest London and, through it, change the world.
The cities of our world are in desperate need of the power of God. If you haven’t worked that out yet, then you must be living in a monastery. Last month my own city, London, was on fire as rioters and looters roamed free. It’s time for Christians to get serious with God, and to find out how he tells us we can change our cities through his power.
At the start of this year, I began looking for someone whom God had used to change my city in the past, and who might prove to be a model for a fresh move of God today. That led to me reading three biographies of William Booth, and over the next few weeks I’m going to blog Ten Things William Booth Did Which Changed The Face of His City. I believe that they are thrings which we can do to change our cities too.
William Booth was born in 1829, and converted as a 15-year-old in Nottingham. He moved to London in 1850, aged 21, but made little impact on the city which would one day be transformed through his godly example. The real breakthrough only came in 1865, when aged 36 he began to preach to the drunken inhabitants of London’s poor East End. In the three years leading up to 1868, he saw 4,000 converted and planted 13 preaching centres which held 140 services per week. After ten years more, this became 81 preaching stations which gathered 27,280 worshippers each week. By 1884 - less than two decades after his initial breakthrough - he had started 910 corps comprising 2,332 officers, who took revival across the city and to the nations of the world.
We are at a stage in history where God wants to transform not only London but all the other great cities of the world. The question is whether we will imitate the example of William Booth and others like him? Let me start in this blog post with the first factor through which he changed his city:-
FACTOR ONE: RADICAL PERSONAL COMMITMENT TO JESUS
William Booth’s revival began very simply with a personal revival in secret. Although he was only a 15-year-old boy when he was converted, he was determined that Jesus should have all there was of him. He was instantly convicted that some of his friends had given him a silver pencil case to say thank you for a favour he had done for them, but that he had actually only done them the favour because it was in his own interest to do so. He felt a fraud and agonised over the Holy Spirit’s conviction that he had sinned and must make amends. He remembered later:
“The entrance to the Heavenly Kingdom was closed against me by an evil act of the past which required restitution. In a boyish trading affair I had managed to make a profit out of my companions while giving them to suppose that what I did was all in the way of genuine fellowship. As a result of their gratitude, they gave me a silver pencil case. Merely to have returned the gift would have been easy, but to confess the deception I had practised upon them was a humiliation to which, for some days I could not bring myself … I remember, as it were but yesterday, the spot in the corner of the chapel [where God gave me strength], the resolution to end the matter rising up, the rushing forth, the finding of the young fellows I had chiefly wronged, the acknowledgement of my sin, the return of the pencil case – the instant rolling away from my heart of the guilty burden, the peace that came in its place, and the going forth to serve my God and my generation from that hour.”
The reason he moved to London in the first place, aged 21, was that he made another stand for what he saw as God’s call to serve the Lord with all his heart. He was working in a Nottingham pawnbroker’s and Saturday evening was the busiest time of the week, as factory workers pawned their possessions to pay for a night out on the town. William Booth was convicted that he should not work past midnight and therefore “labour on the Sabbath”. He understood the Sabbath to be an expression of Christian faith, where believers put down their tools and stopped working to express their faith that God was God and they were not. His boss might want to work into the early hours of Sunday because he did not trust the Lord to provide for him on the other six days of the week, but William Booth did not. When his friends at church advised him he was being too radical, and when his boss threatened to fire him and throw him out of his lodgings above the shop if he left work early, Booth decided to honour the Lord anyway. “I am willing to begin on Monday morning as soon as the clock strikes twelve and work until the clock strikes twelve on Saturday night, but not one hour or one minute of Sunday will I work for you or all your money,” he told his boss and was duly fired. The most common word which William Booth used for Jesus throughout his life was “the Master”, and he lived from his early Christian days as if he really meant it.
William Booth was asked in an interview towards the end of his life to describe the secret of his success. He replied: “I will tell you the secret. God has had all there was of me. There have been men with greater opportunities; but from the day I got the poor of London on my heart, and a vision of what Jesus Christ could do with the poor of London, I made up my mind that God would have all of William Booth there was. And if there is anything of power in The Salvation Army today, it is because God has all the adoration of my heart, all the power of my will, and all the influence of my life.” The interviewer commented that “I learned from William Booth that the greatness of a man’s power is the measure of his surrender. It is not a question of who you are or of what you are, but of whether God controls you.”
The question, of course, is will we do the same? Many people claim that they want God to revive their city, but few are willing to pay the price-tag of the personal revival which precedes Jesus using us like William Booth. We need to understand what he meant in his hymn, made famous by my friend Lex Loizides, when he wrote a revival prayer for his Salvation Army to sing together: “Oh, see us on Your altar lay, We give our lives to you today, So crown the offering now we pray: Send the fire today!”
Perhaps you are a church leader, longing for God to revive your city. Take note, then, of what happened to Miriam when she was one of the leaders of God’s People in Numbers 12. When she failed to deal with the sin of gossip and maligned someone to her brother privately in her tent - a seemingly innocuous sin - the Lord stopped the whole nation from advancing until she had repented. Verse 15 tells us that “the people did not move on till she was brought back.” Could it be that your church is not moving on because you view your secret sins as innocuous, but God views them as deadly?
Perhaps you are a Christian who is simply passionate to see God’s Kingdom come in your city. If so, you are just like William Booth, the student and the pawnbroker’s assistant. Learn from his life and from the experience of other men like him, such as the missionary CT Studd. He wrote that “What I would have you gather is that God does not deal with you until you are wholly given up to him, and then he will tell you what he would have you do.” If you want your city to turn to Christ through you, you must first turn to Christ in radical obedience yourself. If you want your city to know Jesus as Master, then you must first start living as if he is truly Master of your own life.
This is the first of ten factors from the life of William Booth which I will blog over the next few weeks, but it is the starting point from which the others flow. If you love Jesus and hate sin with the same radical devotion as William Booth, then you are embarking on God’s great training course in how to change your city.
As I write this, riot police are gathering outside Queens Road Church in response to a tip off that the rioting and looting is going to spread to Wimbledon tonight. I’ve just been walking amongst the gathered policemen and felt the strange sense of fear which has gripped London over recent nights.
News reporters and politicians have been shocked and surprised by the sudden outbreak of violence, arson and theft, but God hasn’t. He predicted in 2 Timothy 3 that “There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.” Many of us are just waking up to what it looks like when a city turns its back on God in pursuit of self-worship and of greed. As far as God is concerned, London has been in riot for many years.
So many Christians are asking how they should respond, and many non-Christians are looking to the church for some answers. I would like to suggest three things which we all need to remember as we watch London burning and being looted on the news.
1. Remember that the Devil hates London.
If you remember this, it will help you make sense of the anarchy. When Jesus told us in John 10:10 that the Devil “comes only to steal and kill and destroy,” he really meant it. The Devil is like Professor Moriarty, the arch-criminal of London, as Sherlock Holmes describes him in the short story ‘The Final Problem’: “He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organiser of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them.” Most of the time, the Devil tries to hide in the shadows and work in secret across our city. When he steps out into the open, like this week, it need not be a bad thing if it stirs the People of God to wake up and to pray. It doesn’t matter if Satan does his worst if it stirs God’s People to do their best, and if it helps us…
2. Remember that God loves London
This is the city where the Gospel was rediscovered and championed by reformers in the sixteenth century. This is the city which sent more missionaries out to the nations of the world with the Gospel than virtually any other. This is the city of William Booth and his Salvation Army revival which spread all across the world. This is the city of the Alpha Course which God has used to reach hundreds of thousands across the world for Christ. You may look at burning London and assume God has finished with this city. I encourage you to look at this city’s history with God and to think again.
One historian of London in the early 1700s describes the situation in those days: “Robbers and murderers abounded. Gangs of drunken ruffians paraded the streets and subjected women to nameless outrages and defenceless men to abominable tortures … It seemed as if the whole population were given over to an orgy of drunkeness, which made the very name of Englishmen stink in the nostrils of other nations … Crimes of violence multiplied on every hand.” Yet when Christians began praying and imploring God to save their city, they discovered his great love for London all along. John Wesley was able to write in his letters in 1738: “In London … there is a general awakening and multitudes are crying out, ‘What must I do to be saved?’ … The word of the Lord runs and is glorified, and his work goes on and prospers. Great multitudes are everywhere awakened and cry out, ‘What must we do to be saved?’”
3. Remember that Jesus will save many in this city.
Psalm 2 describes a conversation between God the Father and Jesus the Son: “He said to me, ‘You are my Son … Ask of me, and I will make the nations your inheritance, the ends of the earth your possession.” Jesus has decided to save many Londoners as part of his plan to save people from every nation, and he has asked God the Father to turn this city back to him - either willingly through gentle coaxing, or by shaking it out of its complacent sleep. God the Father has promised to answer Jesus’ prayer. Let’s not panic. Let’s keep adding our own prayers to those of Jesus.
At the end of Revelation 2, Jesus turns to his church and tells us that the promise of Psalm 2 belongs to us as well as him. He tells us to pray for London as it reels from rioting and looting - with a promise that will use the Devil’s worst to bring about his best plans for our city.
“Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established.” (Romans 13:1)
Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not, so is the Gospel a call to political revolution? The fact that this question is so surprising to most of us is simply proof of how far from Paul’s message we have strayed. We treat “Jesus is Lord” as a spiritual pleasantry, while both his disciples and his enemies understood that it meant far more. How could the Christians at Rome continue to live under Caesar in the light of the fact that Jesus is the new King in town? Paul answers their question at the start of chapter 13, because if the Gospel doesn’t change our politics then we haven’t understood it.
In verses 1 to 6, Paul insists that the Gospel makes Christians the most loyal of subjects. Unlike unbelievers, who submit to their rulers out of fear, the Gospel teaches us to submit to them out of conscience towards God. It tells us that even the Emperor Nero’s reign did not begin with his mother’s murder of Claudius. It began with the Lord, who planned his accession and established him as Emperor to be “God’s servant to do you good.” Astonishingly, since Nero would order Paul’s beheading, Paul tells the Romans that Nero only “bears the sword” because God entrusted it to his hand. Perhaps inspired by David’s refusal to lay a hand on King Saul because he was the Lord’s anointed ruler, Paul tells his readers to honour their rulers and be more loyal to them than any of their unbelieving courtiers. Paul’s fellow martyr, Peter, gave similar instructions: “Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every authority instituted among men: whether to the king, as the supreme authority, or to governors … Fear God, honour the king.”
In verse 7, Paul adds that the Gospel makes Christians the most courageous of subjects. They pay their rulers honour and taxes and everything else that they are owed, but they are not afraid to point out where that obligation ends. The Hebrew midwives refused Pharaoh’s wicked command in Exodus 1:15-21. Peter did the same in Acts 4:19 and 5:29 when he saw rulers overstepping their God-given authority: “Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God’s sight to obey you rather than God … We must obey God rather than men!” The Romans did as Paul commanded and were able to tell Caesar that “We pray without ceasing for all our emperors. We pray for long life, for security to the empire, for protection to the imperial house, for brave armies, a faithful senate, a virtuous people, the world at rest, whatever an emperor would wish … but we refuse to swear by the Caesars as gods.”
How you apply these two principles to the politics of your nation will vary depending on the country you live in. But to help you do so, let me tell you about three people who have tried to apply them under difficult conditions in Germany.
We have already seen that Martin Luther loved the book of Romans, so he was thrown hard against these verses when the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope commanded him to stop preaching its message. When they put him on trial at the Diet of Worms in 1521, he remembered verse 7 and told his rulers that “Unless I am convicted by Scripture and plain reason – I do not accept the authority of popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other – my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise. God help me.”
Four years later, however, Martin Luther panicked. The German peasants had rebelled against the princes who had power to undo the Reformation and restore the Church to Rome. He grasped at the fact that Pilate found Jesus innocent of rebellion when he told him that “My kingdom is not of this world”, and used it to separate the world into two distinct realms: the spiritual Church and the secular State. So long as rulers didn’t meddle in spiritual affairs, he taught believers that Romans 13:1-6 meant silent submission towards political injustice. He wrote a pamphlet against the peasants in 1525, arguing that “Nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful or demonic than a rebel … Fine Christians they are! I think there is not a demon left in hell; they have all gone into the peasants!”
This was Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s view initially, as a Lutheran pastor in early-1930s Germany. Yet he came to believe that this Christian withdrawal from the political arena was effectively condoning Adolf Hitler. He led the Christian opposition to the Nazi regime, arguing that the Church must not just “bandage the victims under the wheel, but jam the spoke in the wheel itself.” He submitted to Hitler’s government but became its most vocal critic. This led to his being hanged naked, using piano wire, in one of the Nazi concentration camps in the last days of the war. The medic who witnessed his death testified later that “In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.”
Christian Fuehrer drew inspiration from Bonhoeffer as pastor of the St Nicholas Church in Leipzig, East Germany. He was sickened by the injustice of his Communist rulers, and decided to apply Paul’s teaching in Romans 13. He refused to treat secular politics as a no-go area for Christians, and in 1982 started ‘peace prayers’ every Monday evening at his church. For seven years he led ever-growing numbers of East Germans in prayer that the Lord would save their land. Finally, on Monday 9th October 1989, a crowd of seventy thousand gathered at his church to demand that the injustice end. Their placards bore Christian Fuehrer’s message of “No Violence!” and, as the protest quickly spread to other cities, one month later the Berlin Wall came down. One protester was asked who had planned this revolution, and replied that “There was only one leadership: Monday, 5pm, St Nicholas Church.” Horst Sindermann, the former Prime Minister of East Germany, agreed: “We were prepared for everything. But not for candles and prayers.”
The political situations around the world are very different, but my prayer is that these three examples will help you to apply these seven verses to your own. Paul tells us in his first six verses that the Gospel means we are to be more loyal to our rulers than anyone else in the land. Then he tells us in his seventh verse that we must also be courageous enough to point it out whenever they overstep the line. If we render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, whilst remembering he is “God’s servant to do you good”, then we can be the best of citizens because Jesus is the new King in town.
This chapter is taken from Phil Moore’s new book “Straight to the Heart of Romans”, which is subtitled “There’s a New King in Town”.
To read more chapters, go to www.philmoorebooks.com