Jon Rogers

Not many posts on my blog are personal, mostly they are about an idea or a viewpoint on a topic that I’ve been thinking about. But I thought that, given the break I’ve taken from that kind of post, it was time to fill you in on what’s been happening and some plans and ideas.

December’s blogging output mostly went on the Provoketive website. I wrote an Advent series, trying to see what we might learn from taking the beginnings of each of the four Gospels in the New Testament on their own, at face value. It was a valuable exercise for me, I hope one that others could learn from too. You can go back and read it even now – it’s in four parts: Mark, John, Matthew and Luke.

December was the date set for the exam board at LST, the meeting that approves the marks given for my MA. They have awarded me an MA with merit – a very good result for a student switching disciplines as I have. I am thinking about how best to make my work available to read – especially the dissertation on Rob Bell’s book Love Wins, as I think it may be interesting to some. Watch this space, as they say!

My job search goes on, as does the fantastic time I get to spend with my little boy. It seems unbelievable that he’s almost a year old, but I suppose a lot has happened in that time.

I have plenty of ideas for writing and 2012 is full of wide open spaces to fill with imagination!

You’ll need some mincemeat for this – I’m sure shop-bought would work fine, though. The pastry is the important bit here  – this is Ainsley Harriott’s recipe from the BBC, though with some adjustments! The result is very popular – with all ages! Read More

This recipe for mincemeat comes from an old book that my Mum uses every year. It’s a cooked mincemeat, which means (according to both my Mum and the recipe book) that it will keep for not just weeks but even years! You can, of course, try adding some other things to it – Mum adds ground almonds, I think, while I added some dried cranberries. 2011 is the year of the homemade mince pie!

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This is a recipe that I tried last year (2010) and found that even my Christmas cake hating wife enjoyed! It only needs to be made a week before Christmas, though I suppose earlier would be fine and it keeps well – if you can stop people eating it! Shamelessly lifted from cottagesmallholder.com and minimally edited.

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Today is November 30th, strike day across the UK. Universities across the country are being occupied in protest against the ‘reforms’ that are planned to come in next year, public workers are protesting against the changes to pensions that will see them paying more for longer in return for a smaller payout in many cases. As an NUT member, I joined a rally in Coventry, where I live, but the other thing I can do is blog about why this government’s actions are so regressive.

The reasons why the pensions are so important to teachers and other public sector workers have been very publicly and cogently discussed, so I want to write about education specifically, from the earliest years to university. The plans of the government do in fact make sense if you are comfortable with the ongoing comoditisation of education. If it makes you at all uncomfortable, now is the time to speak out and call for a cultural change at all levels of society.

Comoditisation is the process of industrialising education – in the way farming is industrialised, think chicken farm. All that matters in highly comoditised education is the results, the outcomes and grades that are achieved at the end. What matters in secondary education at least is the overall results that the school achieve, it is those grades that to a very large extent determine what assessment the school inspectors, OFSTED, give the school. There is an incentive for schools, in particular the leadership, to not focus on teachers or individual students, except as means to achieving their overall targets.

You might think that the commercialisation of education would bring benefits to students as they gain power as the ‘customer’ in the game. I think that’s a wrong view of things – the customer in this game is not the one you might expect.

You can see this effect at play at Facebook. You might imagine that as a user with a profile at Facebook that you are a customer. Wrong. the advertisers are the real customers who actually are sold a product: you. When Facebook makes changes the site that make life more difficult for you, or change your privacy settings to make more things public than you wanted, you have to ask why. Why are they doing things that upset users, that make it more difficult to do the things that they want? For one, very few of the users are actually going to leave the service, but secondly, the changes are made to benefit the real customers.

It’s the same in education: the real customers are not the students, it’s the big companies that sponsor universities, it’s the government targets and funding that keep schools open. The students are a means to an end, factory-farmed animals that are fed and watered, kept alive and in reasonable health because to do otherwise would undermine their production value. Teachers and lecturers have gone from skilled small-holders to farm-hands to replaceable production line workers in the minds of the DFE, despite struggling to replace the increasing turnover. They seem to believe that the business plan, the curriculum is what will change the results that they demand, they seem to think that the contribution of teachers is minimal – why else would they cut investment. If the students were seen as individuals, as actual people, if teaching staff were the key resource in transforming the lives of those human beings, why would they be cutting them?

Setting a target at the national level seems fine, even appropriate, until they filter down levels to the micro scale. Students are not numbers or points to be banked. They need to be seen as individuals, cared for and cultivated into the successful people they can be by skilled educators given the resources and support that they need. Students are not merely the future of this nation, they are present now, with needs and dreams now.

Taking on massive debt is sold as an ‘investment’ in the future to students, which underscores the production mentality of twenty-first century education. Nothing is done for the now, for the benefit of the student and the enrichment of her life. It is all so that in the future they might be productive. We are creating a generation of students for whom learning is either a luxury or a chore to be endured until they can do something actually important. Teaching is set up as different to doing, inferior and passive – a production line task. Life long learning is rhetoric, unreal and undesirable in the culture that is being created.

The US is often used as an example of the success of high-cost, ‘high-value’ education, with the Ivy League colleges regularly topping the lists of best universities in the world. Yet the high cost of education is one of the key reasons that despite the ‘American dream’, social mobility is lower in the US than in Europe – high cost education means the rich keep on being rich and it is harder for the poor to become rich.

Education is not the only public service to go down this road in the UK, many others are seeing the same process – the health service is another good example. Commoditisation is a dehumanising process, one that we must oppose and suggest practical alternatives to. The strikes and the Occupy movement are a chance to say ‘no’, but we must go on to start exploring constructive ways to change the system.

I’ve written a post for Provokotive Magazine touching on Michel Foucault and the shift in power that the use of mobile phones and other highly portable video recorders has made in the protests this year. The all-seeing ‘panopticon’ has been inverted and state surveillance has almost been overtaken by the people providing their own view of events and the actions of the police.
It’s really exciting to have my writing published by another site, bringing my thinking to a new, mainly US based audience. I hope that it will also demonstrate my attitude and passion as I’m applying for new jobs in the next few months. I’ll have more posts published there very soon – including an advent series that will be starting today! I’ll keep linking to what I’ve written there from this blog and I’d love to see your comments on what I’ve done on either site.

Reading ‘The King Jesus Gospel‘ by Scot McKnight had moments of that bizarre experience of someone thinking your thoughts after you, then having the analytic insight to go deeper and find answers that are intuitively right but you hadn’t reached.

Though I posted a quote on the subject of ‘what is the gospel‘ just a few months ago, it was years ago (the start of 2008 to be precise) that I started an email conversation with a leader at our church on the exact question of ‘what is the gospel’ – asking (among other things) if Jesus preached the gospel. I think we concluded at the end that Luke wanted us to see the continuity between what Jesus did in the early chapters and what happened in Acts, right up to the last verse of the last chapter. But the relationship between what Jesus taught and what we find (for example) in the epistles and in Acts remained nebulous.

McKnight has thoroughly gone through each aspect of the ‘gospeling’ (yes, it is a verb, especially for Luke) of Paul, the four gospels, Jesus and Peter to make, as he puts it, a ‘four-legged chair’. He starts in 1 Corinthians 15, probably the earliest recorded gospel statement (as when 1 Corinthians was written Paul was only halfway through the missionary journeys that the second half of Acts describes and each of the gospels were written probably at least a decade later). McKnight draws out four themes that he then goes highlights in the rest of the gospeling of the New Testament. I summarised them like this for the housegroups at church:

The gospel message that the apostles preach is the story of Jesus – that’s why the early church called the first four books of the New Testament “the Gospel”. It’s the story of his life, death and resurrection, and it’s all wrapped up in the story of Israel, the Old Testament. We can’t understand the gospel without trying to understand what God had been doing since the start of human history through to the Kingdom of Israel and on towards the time that Jesus was born.

When that gospel is preached it requires a response, faith and repentance, aligning ourselves with what God is doing. Responding to the gospel means sharing in its benefits and effects – the saving and redeeming that God is doing in this world.

Now this sort of ‘narrative’ reading of the gospel works well for me, especially with some of the things that I have been reading and writing over the past year. If the gospel is Jesus as the pinnacle of God ‘s saving mission through Israel and now the Church, our response is not just to ‘accept Jesus into my heart’ (as if the gospel is all about me and that all God’s efforts from eternity have been about me!) but to start to put ourselves into the story.

We might choose to extend the story metaphor in two directions – we might be all journalistic, our response could be to report the story to others. I don’t think that goes far enough. As I’ve written before, as actors, we become part of the story, acting it out as a dramatic improvisation – and acting has to come with both words and ‘actions’. This in turn leads to the understanding that gospeling goes beyond seeking conversions, it is about making disciples and fills every part of a Christian’s life.

Trying to get this kind of idea across to church on Sunday I experimented with a different, more interactive, style of teaching. It seemed to go down well, with some very positive feedback from a wide cross-section of the church (including some who I wouldn’t have expected it from!) I’ll probably blog about the experience, but one thing to note now is that I at least have an idea where people missed the point of what I said! Anyway, the sermon audio and presentation on Prezi are available from the Canley website and you can also download the notes I wrote for the church housegroups – ‘Jesus is the good news!‘

This also adds to the post earlier in the week on discipling and mission.

An interesting article titled ‘Why the missional movement will fail‘ was posted in one of the Facebook groups I’m a part of earlier this week. While my immediate church context would not identify itself as ‘missional’, we’ve often been described as a ‘mission church’ and we’d probably often accept the label. I also have friends who would unselfconsciously  describe themselves as missional and would in fact seek to be leading the conversation where they can. I’ve read a little on the subject and I feel I have some kind of a handle on the approaches that characterise the movement.

In very brief summary, Mike Breen says that the missional movement is bound to fail because it focusses on the wrong thing: mission should come as the natural response to discipling. He uses a couple of colourful metaphors – a car that’s all wheels and no engine and the Red Army in WW2 – which have drawn mixed opinions, but should not mislead us from the key issue here. For me, the key issue is not ‘will the missional movement fail’ – it is just a part of a movement to reinvigorate Christianity and  Evangelicalism in particular. No, the far more concerning thing to me is the false dichotomy that has been drawn between mission and discipling.

Drawing clever distinctions is an easy way to write an impressive blog post (or even a thesis!) but does not necessarily draw us closer to understanding the problem. But this contrast is not newly drawn up for this one blog post – it is one that is common among many Christians, but one that I think is dangerous and un-biblical.

Now it goes without saying that the church structures that we’re used to were not present in the New Testament church. There were no youth programmes, no ministerial training, no women’s meetings or fellowship for older people – and these are all important, even necessary, in the contexts of today. Still, there is absolutely no distinction that I can tell in the New Testament between discipling and mission. I suggest that they are both aspects of one action: gospeling.

Gospeling is not to be identified solely with mission. It is the declaration that Jesus is Lord of all, the climax of all God’s redeeming action in the world and an invitation to get involved. The response that is called for is not simply a moment of decision, not ‘asking Jesus into my heart’ but an ongoing quest to engage in. And at least part of that quest must be the telling and acting out of the story itself. So gospeling includes both what we call ‘mission’ and ‘discipling’, for each is really about making Christians who are truly engaged in the plans of God.

Perhaps the problem can be seen as a definition of ‘mission’ that is far too short sighted and small scoped. ‘Mission’ has been reduced to a stripped down, sound-bite message that aims for the bare minimum response that will switch the hearer from one camp to the other. While salvation is a part of the gospel message, it is certainly not the whole thing. Modern Christianity, especially Evangelicalism, has relegated the bigger picture to another category, implicitly reducing its importance and so has shrunk the gospel. I’ll be back with more this week on what gospel really is (following up on something I did at church on Sunday).

Maybe I’ve missed the bigger picture of what Mike Breen is trying to say. Perhaps his real suggestion in his book is the same as I’m trying to say but framed in different language. I certainly agree with him that any movement that focuses merely on conversions and not on growing fully developed Christians will struggle to make a lasting impression. However, I don’t think the answer is to perpetuate this small gospel, but to call people to a big, astonishing life that is a real mission.

It was an interesting experience to go along to a new church housegroup, discussing the notes I’d written. A good experience, it can certainly help me reflect on what I write and what I leave out. That’s for another day, however, as I’ve been set off by a thought that was shared by someone in the group.

The image of God as a master craftsman, shaping and forming our lives and identity was raised, especially of God as a sculptor, carving a statue out of a block of wood or stone. As he chips away at the block, bits are removed and lost, there is the idea that it might seem painful, but the end result is beautiful. But there is also an idea that I dislike mixed up in it, that of a ‘perfect version’ of me that God can see beneath the surface of what I currently am.

I think I react poorly to the sense that this ‘perfect version’ in a stone statue is a fixed, completed state, that no more change can happen when it is reached and that it is singular and must be frozen in time. I don’t have that kind of image of being – I want to image that the person God wants me to be will still be developing and growing. When I think of heaven, it is a place of activity and life – a place where I do and learn – it is somewhere that there is still development.

The image of topiary or bonsai came to me as I was thinking about it. There is still the exact same sense of bits being removed to make a better and healthier sculpture – in fact the image of pruning is thoroughly scriptural. There is also the sense that only a master artisan can see the potentiality contained in a rough form and shape it to what it could become, but it comes with a recognition that when the tree achieves its maturity it is still not finished. It will continue to be shaped, pruned and guided into more perfection. It can even be shaped into new forms if the gardener wants that. It is organic, alive, always growing and changing.

I know I am far from perfect or reaching maturity, but it gives me a glimmer of hope to know that being alive is the only way to reach it. A dead tree is no longer shaped or pruned, it’s thrown out. So when I feel I’ve gone backwards, not made progress, I am still growing, and though the resultant pruning stings, it is essential.

I may not recognise maturity when (if) I reach it, but that’s OK, so long as I keep growing and I let the master continue to shape me as he wants to

I’ve now written or spoken about four of the churches in Revelation 2-3 and you might be interested to hear and read it.

Letters to tolerant and compromised churches: Pergamum and Thyatira (Revelation 2:12-29)

First, the churches of Pergamum and Thyatira: you can hear my sermon and see the presentation on the Canley website.

Second, my notes for the Canley housegroups on the next two churches, Sardis and Philadelphia.

Letters to a sleeping and an obedient church (Sardis & Philadelphia) Rev 3:1-13

Review: We’ve looked at the letters to four churches, each with good points and most with some kind of problem. We’ve been using the letters to help us pray for God’s guidance as to how CCC should be moving forward.

1. READ Revelation 3:1-13

What you need to know about names

In both these letters, Jesus talks about ‘names’. If you didn’t spot it in the letters to Sardis and Philadelphia, go back and read it again! (For bonus points, which other letter(s) in Rev 2-3 talk about names?)

In the first century names were very important, they were supposed to give an idea of who the person was, what he or she was like. Roman Emperors took a new name when they became the supreme ruler – Caesar. Other Romans changed their names as they progressed politically or in the military, adding titles and dropping family names that were less important.

However, if someone went out of favour with the Emperor or local rulers, their name would be removed from books or monuments so it was as if they had never existed. In the 20th century, the Soviets did something similar, removing people from photos so that no trace of them remained.

2. REFLECT

1. These two letters are all about names and identity. How does Jesus identify himself to the two different churches (v 1, 7) and what do you think these mean
2. The stained garments probably would have come from joining in a certain pagan worship celebration and form a play on words with the ‘blotting out’ of their names. What do you have to do to be recognised by Jesus before his Father and the angels? Is it the reward for some heroic act or great evangelistic effort? How does this translate to Canley in 2011?
3. Philadelphia is an obedient church with no criticism. Though they seem weak, Jesus makes a lot of promises to them. What do they have to do to get the promises?
4. What does it mean to be made a pillar in the temple of God? Why are the names written on them?
5. Our personal identity is in view here as well as the bigger identity of the church. What are the things that give you identity – name, family, job, hobbies… ? What shapes the identity of Canley Community Church?
6. What might it mean to have your identity formed by the name of God, the name of the hope to come and the name of Jesus?

3. RESPOND:

It could be that the things you have discussed need a personal response – perhaps to the idea that your identity should be shaped by God, or needing the confidence that you can be secure in your identity as a Christian. It would be great if other members of the house group could pray for you as you explore these things.

One way of reading the promises in the letters to the seven churches is that they are not far off rewards for a distant future in heaven, but a hint of the type of church God is going to make them into. Pray, asking what kind of church is God calling CCC to be if we are to be ‘conquerors’? What promises does he have for us?