Dear Friends
Roald Dahl’s “Tales of the Unexpected” are pretty tame fare when set alongside all the tales you find in the Bible.
The Scriptures start with a bang and announce a God who sets the scene, and writes the script, and manages all the story-line – and all in a way which makes the nail-biting twists in the sagas and soaps which we watch seem utterly bland by comparison.
If you don’t like surprise, then you’re best to avoid the God who made the universe and runs the course of history.
Except, of course, you can’t! There’s nowhere to run to and nowhere to hide: for just when you thought that you’d managed somehow to evade His righteous radar .. well, surprise, surprise, He’s there! A good few steps ahead of you.
We’ve been seeing that this month in the studies we’ve all been addressing (well, that’s been the intention, certainly – that we should all be looking at this together!) in the book of Acts. I mean, who would have thought that a mild-mannered complaint about some (alleged) queue-barging at a local church’s Food Bank (Acts 6) would issue in the wonderful conversion of a violent opponent of the gospel (Acts 9) – and beyond that see a plethora of other churches getting planted right across the Roman Empire?
Yet that’s what happened, in the surprising evolution of the sovereign work of God.
The Food Bank stramash resulted in Stephen’s appointment as a deacon: and he’d hardly had time to read and digest the remit he’d been given before he was fast-tracked on by the Spirit of God into something which wasn’t even in the small print of his latest job description.
And all of a sudden this problem-solving Food Bank supervisor is out at the front as a preacher in an influential city-centre synagogue: and my, it’s some preaching he’s doing! Stephen in that ‘pulpit’ in Jerusalem is nothing less than a cat among the pigeons of the cultured Jewish piety, which didn’t have the time of day for Jesus Christ. Feathers are not simply ruffled, they’re flying all over the place! And before he’s had time to draw breath, the poor young man (well, he’s not poor at all, of course, not in the truest and deepest sense of the word: this is riches beyond all price, to share in the ministry of Jesus) – before he’s had time to draw breath, this deacon-turned-preacher is facing not some kindly, bruising brickbats with the hand-shakes at the door, but a venom-driven barrage of the dusty, deadly stones and rocks his hearers found at hand.
Hardly has he made his first appearance when the man has breathed his last: we’ve barely got to meet the man, and there he is lying martyred in the cause of gospel truth. Talk about a high, make-a-difference cameo appearance!
Was that in the text of his remit? Did they spell out these dangers of life as a deacon when he took on the job at the Food Bank? Of course not. They didn’t need to. Jesus had done that already. It’s an integral part of the DNA of anyone’s discipleship.
And it didn’t end there! Even in the very act of dying he’s discovering there’s another role he’s being called upon to play. This deacon-turned-preacher-turned-martyr will now become the catalyst igniting all the anger and the hatred which has simmered in the heart of his contemporary, a young man by the name of Saul of Tarsus; Saul’s still young, like Stephen, and he’s standing there, a student-turned-spectator, consenting to the murder of a man whose face now shines just like an angel – and the more of the angel he sees in this man, the more there’s an anger erupting in Saul’s rebel heart. It almost drives the man demented; and it certainly drives him on to Damascus, ‘til he’ll be stopped in his tracks by the Lord.
Jesus Himself is living through the dying man, you see. And do you grasp what’s happening in Stephen’s life? The story-line is simply getting longer by the moment.
The deacon-turned-preacher-turned-martyr-turned-catalyst-towards-conversion (because that’s where this story will lead, isn’t it; we know the whole tale well enough) – Stephen will now assume an almost ‘apostolic’ role: he’ll start to produce the result the apostles themselves were supposed to effect.
They were ‘sent out’, remember (that’s what the word ‘apostle’ means), they were ‘sent out’ by Jesus – sent out into all the world to make disciples. Into all the world. And there they all are, still stuck where they started in down-town, city-centre Jerusalem; bogged down with the growing demands of their rigorous pastoral discipline (Acts 5) and the exasperating problems which resulted from their ever so practical care (Acts 6). They haven’t budged an inch!
Sent out into all of the earth? They’re increasingly stuck in the mud and the mess of a growing and grass-roots new church.
But all that suddenly changes when this Stephen comes along, and sets in train (unwittingly, I grant you) the process which then implements a God-ordained ‘eviction order’ policy which sees all these believers upping sticks and driven out of dear Jerusalem. And about time too! There’s gospel work to be done out there in the world. Bemoan it as persecution if you want: and no one says it’s comfortable or nice. But if that’s what it takes in the sovereign, ‘tough-love’ providence of God to get His people out there where they’re meant to be, well, so be it!
None of that was in the script for the Food Bank remit, of course! But one thing led to another, and Stephen’s story snowballed very swiftly into something with a marvellous (and frightening!) momentum of its own.
And if the whole thing starts to scare you just a bit, then it’s scarier still. Stephen’s experience is far from unique. It’s almost invariably just how God works.
If He told you the end of the story before you began .. well, you just wouldn’t start!
Would Joseph, for instance, have willingly served as a message-boy for his father (Gen.37.12ff), if he’d known that a pit and a prison, being betrayed, being forgotten, being sold and being framed, all on the way to becoming a ‘foreign missions’ pastor and evangelist (that’s what he was and became in effect) – would he have taken on the challenge of a message-boy in his father’s house if he’d known that all of this was down the line?
Most of the time the Lord simply won’t take that risk. He’ll lead us simply one step at a time.
Remember Nehemiah, to whom I referred last time? You’ll maybe figure out just why this man has often in these past few months been much upon my heart. He was happy enough (in human terms), we assume, in the life which he lived in the lands to which the people of Israel were exiled. And the whole surprising adventure started for him with a harmless conversation. That soon led to a burden of prayer, which in turn birthed ridiculous thoughts. And before he knew what he was doing he was taking his life in his hands and asking his boss (who happened to be the king) for something like a mid-life, open-ended gap year.
To go and repair the walls of old Jerusalem. That’s the sort of thing you do in gap years, after all. But that was all: just repair the walls. An undertaking big enough to stretch to almost breaking point this man’s faith-fuelled commitment to the will and cause of God.
I don’t suppose it ever crossed his mind that, far from just repairing walls, he’d end up with the challenge of reforming lives, renewing faith, and exercising God’s own rule among the people of Jerusalem: I don’t suppose it ever really dawned on him that this demanding gap year might evolve into a dozen years of ministry and more.
Because if it had .. well, he maybe would have balked too much at any sort of call to such a work from God. The Lord is surely wise enough to know that. It’s one step at a time, the way He works. So the cup-bearer becomes the prayer-warrior: then the cup-bearer-turned-prayer-warrior becomes the mid-life gap-year wall-builder: and before he has scraped all the lime and cement off his hands, the cup-bearer-turned-prayer-warrior-turned-wall-builder has become a reformer who’s running a city, and turning its whole life right around.
That’s just the way the Lord works. He makes things grow. He makes us grow.
And so it has been through these past twelve months. Isn’t that so? It began with a prayerful concern on my part to step into the breach, at a time of great sorrow and pain, and to make myself available to chair an elders’ meeting and conduct a morning service. That was all. An elders’ meeting and a morning service.
But bit by bit the Lord has surely simply grown that call, expanding it out ‘til it’s bigger (and better!) by far than the challenge involved at the start. Chairing a meeting and leading a service soon grew under God to the role of a part-time interim moderator: and barely had we settled and agreed this terminology, when it became redundant and a role as interim minister became the import of the Lord’s clear leading at that time. And so the whole evolving logic of the growing and expanding call of God has pulled us on, until He laid upon the hearts of all concerned the powerful conviction that what He really had in mind was something still more permanent, which thereby would ensure that as a fellowship we’d find ourselves together moving on instead of simply somehow merely ‘marking time.’
Is the Lord not scarily wonderful in the wisdom and grace of His ways? Is the snowballing nature of all that His call will entail not a mark of His consummate kindness and care? And if that’s how He works (so consistently works) in the life of a single individual (check it out with Stephen, Joseph, Nehemiah and a score of other folk), may we not be encouraged together to trust that that’s how He works in the life of a fellowship, too?
Growth is His trademark. He makes things grow. He makes you grow. He makes us grow. It’s with trembling excitement at what the Lord’s future may hold that all of us therefore will take this next step, as we follow our Lord Jesus Christ.
Yours in His service and with a sense of real thrill and expectation,
Jeremy Middleton
Didasko Fellowship
Over the past 8 months or so we’ve been deeply grateful for the willing involvement of a number of church leaders from outwith the congregation who have shared with us fully as part of the Transitional Leadership Team. The benefits of their support and guidance have been many, and, I trust, obvious to all.
The time they have given, and the lengths to which they have gone to be a help to us, have been way beyond the call of any ‘duty’ there might be: and the essence of that lies in the fact that their commitment to us as a fellowship here has been built upon relationship. They are bound to us through relational ties which have roots which span the years.
In many ways, the Didasko Fellowship is simply the practical expression of just such relational ties on a slightly larger scale. It’s not in any sense some sort of embryonic new denomination: rather the Didsasko Fellowship seeks simply to recognise the relationships which already exist between many of us – as leaders, members, and congregations – and give, even if only for the short-term, some genuine practical substance to that in a “light-touch but real interdependence.”
Some congregations and ministers who have left the Church of Scotland have quickly found a welcome home in other Presbyterian denominations within Scotland. Not all, however, have been fully persuaded that that’s the right course for their church family; and others have simply not been ready in the midst of all the challenges they’ve faced to make that sort of decision.
In such cases, instead of being left on their own, their every presbyterian instinct has recognised not only all the hazards of a wholly independent life, but the value and importance of a mutual interdependence.
In the changing, turbulent landscape of the present time, where it’s folly to travel alone, and yet where it’s hard to discern the ‘shape’ the Lord is giving to His re-configured church, it’s surely true that each such congregation as ourselves is more likely to flourish and to see the gospel spread if we stand with each other in real and tangible partnership.
The Didasko Fellowship is simply a way in which those who have shared history, shared friendships, and shared gospel values, are able in the meanwhile to do just that. A relational commitment to one another, rooted in the common life we do already share, means that help is always at hand, support is always assured, and some necessary ‘checks and balances’ are always in place.
It does not preclude other options, of course. But it does provide some ‘breathing space’ in which the benefits of that mutual interdependence, which lies at the heart of the biblical perspective on church, can truly and fully be known.
And as the Transitional Leadership Team has pondered at some length the way we best move forward from the present interim pattern of our leadership, moving from the participation on the part of the five external church leaders in the TLT to an association on our part with the Didasko Fellowship has seemed a helpful and natural next step which is well worth our exploring at this time.
A document which introduces more fully the Didasko Fellowship is available on request.
Jeremy Middleton