Pete Greig's Blog: Scrambled Greig

“You are my God; eagerly I seek you;
my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you,
as in a barren and dry land where there is no water.” (Psalm 63:1)

There is an insidious charade propagated continually in certain wings of the church: that intimacy with God can be experienced continually, on demand, whenever we pause to pray, whenever we raise our hands in worship, whenever we sip from the cup of communion.

We propagate this delusion in many ways: by smiling ecstatically in worship when in fact we’re thinking about our dinner; by teaching some parts of the Bible but not others; by assuming responsibility for God’s PR; by conflating the ancient heresy of Gnosticism with the modern heresy of experiencialism; by spotlighting our occasional moments of ecstasy, epiphany and breakthrough, whilst relegating entire seasons of mild disappointment, dullness and doubt to the conversational wings.

Many years ago, U2 upset a lot of Christians by releasing that song “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.” We liked the bit where Bono sings:

“You broke the bonds

And you loosed the chains

Carried the cross

Of my shame

You know I believe it.”

So far so good. But then he added…

“But I still haven't found what I'm looking for.”

Those who objected to this lyric were forgetting their Bibles and denying the actuality of our common Christian experience: Joseph wrestles the angel, David rages at the Almighty, Jesus himself cries out ‘My God why have you forsaken me?’, Thomas doubts the resurrection, John of the Cross is plunged into his dark night of the soul, enslaved Africans turn their suffering into song. .

The honest truth of the matter is this…

the predominant experience of true disciples is less a continual delight in God's intimate presence than a continual desire for that presence.

As the Psalmist says, it is a thirst, a fainting of the soul, a gnawing hunger. And just as hunger for a feast (as the aroma of cooking fills the house) is sweeter than the bloatedness and the aroma after the event, so the desire for God is a delight in itself. This is the very condition we find the Psalmist celebrating here.

It's not the comfort of God's presence but of his distance that draws us to himself. His gift to us therefore is dissatisfaction and desire. It's the splinter in our shoe. The things the dawn implies. The funeral that whispers in the shadows of every wedding.

And so whenever I pretend to other people that my experience of God is more common, more enjoyable and more immediate than it truly is, l damn them to disappointment - with themselves as much as with God.

I am not for one minute advocating here the kind of morose faith that moans continually about God's absence. The 'dark night of the soul' is precisely that - a night and not a protracted season. When you have moments of startling encounter, of answered prayer, of pure delight please celebrate them. Shout your hallelujahs from the rooftops! God knows we need such hope.

But a deepening relationship with God progresses pretty quickly from the primary colours of K-pop and power ballads to the ambiguity of jazz and the demeanour of blues. The Word of God, so flirtatious at the start, quickly becomes a question for every answer, driving me crazy like a cryptic crossword clue gnawing at my mind.

And surprisingly, reassuringly this is consistently the experience of saints down the ages from Augustine of Hippo to Eugene Peterson of Montana: they don't feel holier but hungrier as the years go by, they trust more because they know less and less, they are marked out by the relentlessness of their desire because certainty has been displaced by seeking. It's a kind of homesickness that intensifies as the holidays approach.

And so (I am being as honest as I can here), I sometimes feel God's presence tangibly, but often I don't.

Like a marriage in its third decade, my relationship with the Lord is certainly a concrete daily reality but it is not - it cannot and should not be - a continual emotional high. I find myself unlike an atheist less in the vitality of my experience of God, than the consistency of my quest for God.

This unresolved chord, this scanning of the crowd for a familiar face, this curse is my delight. It is the impulse in me that cries out with the psalmist even in the darkest night and the driest desert:

"You are my God; eagerly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you, as in a barren and dry land where there is no water." Psalm 63:1

📷 pilgrim shell from St Columba's Bay on the Isle of lona, travelling with me along the long, slow trail to Lindisfarne

After 18 years leading Emmaus Rd, Sammy and I stepped down as Elders and Senior Pastors on Sunday September 14, 2025.

It’s been a wonderful journey from the early days in the back room of a pub to the regional resource church Emmaus has become today - with congregations in Guildford, Woking and Aldershot and a network of Lighthouse social transformation centres.

We will now be focusing more of our time on 24-7 Prayer, Waverley Abbey and Lectio 365, alongside Sammy’s counselling practice and my writing.

We couldn’t be more delighted to announce that the new Lead Pastor of Emmaus Rd is Sarah Yardley. Originally from California, Sarah is a regular host on Lectio365 and led Creation Fest for many years before joining our staff team at Emmaus at the start of this year. She’s brilliant!

Sunday was a big, emotional day for us but we know that the Lord has spoken clearly about repositioning ourselves for the next season, and we’re confident that the church is in really great hands.

Next steps

We’re excited to take a sabbatical now, before returning to Emmaus in December as ordinary members of the church. We will preach occasionally, advise informally, and serve relationally as ‘Founding Pastors'.

We have been absolutely blown away by the outpouring of love from the church at this happy-sad moment. Looking to the future we are excited, and looking back, as Marilynne Robinson says:

‘There is so much to be grateful for, words are a poor thing.’

Tribute video (made us cry!)

On Saturday May 10, 2025, Sammy and I announced that after 18 years leading Emmaus Rd, from its earliest days meeting in the backroom of a pub to the thriving, regional church it has become today, we will sadly be stepping down as its Senior Pastors and Elders in September 2025.

We love Emmaus and have poured our lives into its service, so this hasn’t been an easy decision. However, we know this is the time for transition because all the congregations are growing, Alpha courses are buzzing, and @t.lighthouse hubs have been established in every town to serve those whose lives are tough.

What’s more, there are formidable leaders in place locked and loaded, primed and pumped, ready to take the many ministries forward. This team will be led by the amazing and irrepressible @sarahyardley.

STEPPING DOWN & STEPPING UP,
BUT NOT STEPPING OUT

I will preach my last message as Senior Pastor on Sunday, Sep 14 and the following day we will head off on a 3 month sabbatical, returning in December as ordinary members of this church family we so deeply love.

Personally, the Lord has been speaking to us very clearly indeed about repositioning ourselves for the new thing he is doing in the nations. We are simply seeking to be obedient to that call, readying ourselves for the #QuietRevival which appears to be beginning.

From January 2026 we will therefore be investing more time into 24-7 Prayer, Waverley Abbey, book-writing, mentoring leaders, hosting Lectio365, and into Sammy’s burgeoning counselling practice.

AGE OF MAJORITY
When Emmaus Rd began our two sons were little. They’ve literally grown up with the church and miraculously (or so it seems), they are now young men readying themselves to get married!

Emmaus has grown miraculously in size and maturity too. Our spiritual sons and daughters, like our biological ones, are now after 18 years ready to move forward into the world without us. This they will do with our undying affection, our unceasing prayers, and our resounding cheers in their ears.

As for Sammy and me, preparing to step into our own next chapter, we do so with great gratitude to God and growing excitement for all that the future holds.

C’mon! 🔥

THE TIDES AND TIMES OF FAITH

Tracing the context, contesting, and conflagration of awakening

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

~ Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach

It was a bright setting for such a dark poem. The British Empire was at its golden zenith, and one of its beneficiaries, a twenty-eight year-old school inspector called Matthew Arnold, was celebrating his honeymoon on the south coast of England.

But standing there on Dover Beach that night, listening to the ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ of the sea pulling shingle across the shore, Matthew Arnold mourned the Sea of Faith ebbing England’s increasingly secular shores. ‘Ah, love, let us be true to one another’ he says to his new wife –

for the world, which seems

to lie before us like a land of dreams…

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.’

Arnold’s contemporary, William Butler Yeats, attempted (and singularly failed) to lift the mood in his four-line response to Dover Beach:

Though the great song return no more
There's keen delight in what we have:
The rattle of pebbles on the shore
Under the receding wave

How are we to live when ‘the great song’ falls silent and the Sea of Faith recedes? All we can do, says Yeats, is make our own music from ‘the rattle of pebbles on the shore under the receding wave’, attempting to create beauty out of chaos, and to impose meaning upon the loss of all meaning.

“Perhaps all we can really do is cling helplessly to one another, like Matthew Arnold and his new wife, seeking some kind of comfort in love and sex.”

150 years later, Arnold and Yeats seem vindicated in diagnosis and prescription alike. The Sea of Faith does appear to have retreated far from Western shores replaced by an advancing tide of secular humanism. Old plausibility structures have almost entirely changed. And the poets’ prescription for such times is also widely accepted: Perhaps all we can really do is cling helplessly to one another, like Matthew Arnold and his new wife, seeking some kind of comfort in love and sex. Or like Yeats we should merely make music from the sound of shingle on the shore. In the loss of all meaning find what comfort you can in subjective aesthetics and experience.

So far, so bleak, especially for those of us navigating the Sea of Faith, still singing the songs of the ancient Mariner, anticipating that the earth will one day soon ‘be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.’ (Habakkuk 2:14)

Are we utterly deluded? Pitifully naïve? Living in arch denial?

Now of course, since I am preaching here to the converted, we immediately cry ‘No! We are not deluded! The tide must surely turn! Our hope is still secure!’ 

But perhaps we may just pause a moment to admit the profound disappointments we continue to endure; the big prayers we’ve prayed which have patently not been answered. We have worked extraordinarily hard and the church in our nation is still in depressing and distressing decline. Where once our song was sung throughout the land, now we stand and sing alone.

And so, yes, Matthew Arnold is right: the Sea of Faith does appear to be about as far out as it can possibly be. And what makes this hard is that, unlike Arnold and Yeats, we cannot just shrug our shoulders as if we don’t care. The ‘great song’ still resounds in our hearts. We cannot take any kind of ‘keen delight’ in its ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.’

The answer to our predicament must surely lie in the very meta-narratives that seem to be receding. If they are true they remain true even when they’re not in fashion. (And how very unfashionable such an assertion now sounds!)

“when a tide recedes on one side of the world, it advances on the other.”

But of course, when a tide recedes on one side of the world, it advances on the other. If we will just rise above Mathew Arnold’s limited vantage point standing on Dover Beach at the zenith of the British Empire, we will see an astonishing sight:  Globally the church is growing at 2% per annum, double the speed of the world population. In Africa there are now more Christians than there are people in America. In most of the world the Sea of Faith which may have receded far from our shores, is advancing with unstoppable force.

And then there’s the other big picture – the historical timeline (perhaps we might say ‘tide-line’) upon which we find ourselves. The Kingdom of God has always ebbed and flowed, never advanced steadily along a continuum up and to the right. Throughout Scripture and subsequent history, the Sea of Faith has receded and advanced, ebbed and flowed from rebellion to repentance, apostacy to awakening.

Matthew Arnold’s analogy couldn’t be more apt but he misses its most important implication: when the tide is at its lowest ebb, it is readying itself to rise again with  an inevitable, unstoppable force.

We see this principle at work in creation – seasons advance cyclically, each one making way for the next. And we see it again and again in the ancient story of God’s people ebbing from covenant election into slavery, and rising from Egypt into freedom. Ebbing away from Jerusalem into exile, and flowing back again with joy into Zion.

SIMEON AND ANNA

When Simeon and Anna held the baby in the temple courtyard that day, the Sea of Faith must surely have seemed far out. The age of the prophets appeared to have ended, and here they were living under Roman occupation, praying their whole lives for a messiah, interceding with a mixture of faith and despair for ‘the consolation of Israel.’ But in that single moment standing in the temple somehow they perceived the very moment that the tide began to turn with unstoppable force.

Was this what they thought the answer to their prayers would look like? Is this what they had been envisioning all those years as they wept and prayed for Israel? A vulnerable, incontinent, inarticulate baby screaming blue murder (having just been circumcised at a time before anaesthetics!) born to a teenage mum from an inconsequential family in a nowhere place?

Like Simeon and Anna we live under Roman occupation. Like Matthew Arnold we stand upon Dover Beach. Which posture is ours? Will it be the faith of the prophets, or the gloom of the poets with which we interpret ‘the signs of the times’ (Mt. 16:3)?

And of course there are many legitimate reasons to despair with Matthew Arnold rather than rejoicing with Simeon and Anna.

Simeon and Anna remind us that our answered prayers rarely turn out looking the way we anticipated. Revival when it begins is unlikely to fit comfortably with all our current political, cultural or theological convictions. For the Pharisees Jesus was not strict enough, for the Zealots he was not militant enough, for the Sadducees he was not political or pragmatic enough, and for the Nazarenes he was not exotic enough. When the waves of God begin to advance, they will not tickle our toes. We may well be displaced from our sure-footing entirely, swept up into new places, bruised and broken by the very thing for which we have prayed.

It’s always fascinated me to think of those who didn’t bother to join the crowds when Jesus turned up in town (perhaps because I worry it might well have been me!) There must have been those who chose to stay at home, busy in their kitchen or their workshop, weary and wary of all the hype. They literally missed out on seeing God because they had become jaded by all the hype, or preoccupied with lesser things. Because they had allowed apathy or cynicism to root in their hearts, they missed out on the greatest moment of their lives.  

This is another reason we can miss the turning of the tide: we are weary of the hype. Our demeanour is arms-folded, standing back, muttering “let’s wait and see”. Simeon and anna had suffered a great deal and waited a long time, yet somehow they had retained a posture of wholehearted, expectant excitement.

After Jesus’ arrest, none of his disciples (perhaps even including the two Marys and John) could see in his crucifixion anything but the death of all their dreams. The ultimate “no” to all their prayers. In no way could this be the beginning of anything – it was patently, painfully, obviously and entirely the end. Experiences of profound disappointment, brokenness, or even death can also make it hard to perceive the goodness of God at work in our lives – especiallywhen that goodness is disguised within the darkness and death itself. Perhaps we might believe in the goodness of God elsewhere, at other times, in other ways, for other people, but it takes an extraordinary level of faith and revelation to look at the corpse on the cross with expectancy, or into the darkness to see there the light.  

The disciples received the great commission from Jesus telling them to go into all the world and disciple nations and assuring them of his continual presence and unlimited authority. The sense of momentum and mission must have been almost unstoppable. But then that is precisely what he does next: he tells them to stop! To wait. To pray. Sometimes we do perceive the beginning of revival; the baby born to be king, the first glimpse of dawn, and the joy this releases in our lives can detonate an extraordinary and unstoppable momentum of activity. At this point, it the devil cannot stop you any longer, he will try to push you over the edge. He will immerse you in powerless activity (which will doubtless generate a great deal of excitement for a while). But you will be proceeding in your own strength and not in the power of the Holy Spirit.

“We take the word of God, and the promise of God, and seek to execute it without the power and presence of God.”

And so another reason why we can miss the moment is that we try to do God’s will in our own way. We fail to pray. We lose our sense of dependency upon him. We take the word of God, and the promise of God, and seek to execute it without the power and presence of God. I don’t doubt that the apostles could have started an extraordinary localised renewal sect within Judaism in their own strength, based upon the teachings and the commission of Jesus. But never in 2,000 years could that have become what the church is today. It was essential that they waited and prayed for the power of the Holy Spirit to begin the work of God in his own way and time.

And then of course, when the power of God was released, the church was born, and the kingdom of God began to advance, the ebb and flow is marked: the explosion of the church on the day of Pentecost is quickly countered with fierce persecution and threats to stop proclaiming the gospel. Once again they push into prayer and we are told that the room in which they were meeting shook and the gospel advanced.

Another season of fierce persecution drove Christians around the Roman world (diaspora) and so once again through suffering and heartbreak the gospel advances and spreads. The sea of faith that has withdrawn advances in new ways. Prior to the Wesleyan Awakening there were fewer than 5 christian MPs in the House of Commons and it is said that one struggled to find a church in London that was preaching the bible. Drunkenness was endemic. Poverty associated with the exploding Industrial Revolution was crippling the masses, helping to spark a revolution in France. The sea of faith was at its lowest ebb and then John and Charles Wesley with George Whitfield and others turned to prayer on the 31st December 1738 and the sea of faith advanced once again.

At the end of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century there was such an extraordinary outpouring of the Holy Spirit around the world (Azuza Street in Los Angeles, the Welsh revival, Mukti school in India, revival movements in Scandinavia etc) that John Mott, the leader of the YMCA and a future Nobel Prize winner, could coin the slogan “the evangelisation of the world in our generation”. In that first decade of the 20th century the key western nations at the heart of this great outpouring met in Edinburgh to conspire strategically for how they could fulfil the Great Commission by taking the gospel to every unreached people group on earth. Those 3 nations were America, Germany, and the UK. And yet within 10 years these were precisely the nations hellbent on destroying one another in the first of two world wars.

“Countless souls saved in the Welsh valleys at the turn of the 20th century bled and died in the trenches of France”

The Satanic opposition to their great ambition which threatened to usher in the return of Christ and his final destruction was not just spiritual but brutally and terrifyingly bloody. Countless souls saved in the Welsh valleys at the turn of the 20th century bled and died in the trenches of France.

And so the tide went out. It’s arguable that Europe has still not properly recovered from the agony of those wounds.

But then the tide began to come in again with the outpouring of the spirit in the charismatic and Pentecostal movements of the last 50 years which are almost certainly the greatest outpouring of the spirit the world has ever seen resulting in Assemblies of God: the fastest growing network of churches on earth planting a new church every second, the profound renewal through the power of the Holy Spirit in the Catholic church, made manifest in Vatican 2, bringing hundreds of thousands of Catholics into personal relationship with Jesus Christ and a love for scripture. A broader new outpouring of worship, countless new ministries in churches.

But then post-modernism and secular humanism rose to ascendency and took control of many of the western institutions of power, particularly the media which rose to ascendency over the other traditional sources of cultural influence (government, education, family etc) thinking people were atheists. Christian values were openly mocked and even legislated against. Scandal after scandal wracked the church and rocked wider society. The sea of faith seemed to have gone out. But then things began to shift, it seems, once again. New Atheists were discredited. The mess of the myth of a secular humanist society became increasingly evident in a loss of all absolutes, and an epistemological crisis resulting from the loss of ones own foundations. Much to the gall of secular commentators, religious belief only seemed to be growing stronger.

“Scandal after scandal wracked the church and rocked wider society. The sea of faith seemed to have gone out. But then things ”

And of course as I say these things I am conscious that voice in myself, a voice in all of us, thinks “yes but ….” It is such early days. This might be nothing. Do I dare to hope again? This is hardly the revival I had imagined or anticipated?

And so the challenge comes to each one of us: to hold the baby and say “behold the consolation of Israel”. Hear the great commission and hide oneself in the place of prayer. To look into hell itself and say here, in the death of everything I believed, at the moment where the tide is furthest from the shore, here in this moment and this way I perceive the promises of God to come.

“To believe not in nothing but in the tiny something that is not yet the everything for which we long”

In other words, it’s contingent upon us as people of faith to respond to this cultural moment with faith. To believe not in nothing but in the tiny something that is not yet the everything for which we long. To identify the small sparks of God’s favour and pour petrol upon them in prayer. To note the slowing of the “melancholy, long, withdrawing” sea of faith and perceive within it, the promise of a changing of the tide in our time.

This is what faith has always done. Indeed, it is the very essence of faith. Faith is fuelled less by facts than by possibilities. As Jon Tyson says, there really are only two choices: to manage decline in the western church, or to allow discontent to crystallize into a passion for renewal, renaissance and … yes I’m going to use the world, revival. 

It begins of course with the fires of faith being ignited once more in each one of us. From there it must spread into the church of Jesus Christ (beginning with repentance and prayer) for “judgement begins with the house of the Lord”. And once the fire is burning within the church there is a certain inevitability that it will spread from there into wider society. Renewal becomes revival and turns into an awakening worthy of our Wesleyan heritage, that can truly transform society, restore politics and civic institutions, rebuild family and the fundamentals of societal cohesion, bring reconciliation between the races, the socio economic polarities, and can result in justice to the poor.

May this day bring sabbath rest

where I am deeply tired,

May the desert of my soul

welcome water from on high,

Where relationships are broken

may my life be reconciled,

And where my heart is hardened

Lord, pour your oil and wine.

c. Pete Greig

‘Splitting’, in psychological terms, describes a person’s inability to integrate positive and negative qualities into a cohesive, realistic whole resulting in a polarised, extreme, black & white view of reality. It is, in other words, Twitter. It may even be the mass-psychosis of our modern, Western world.

Our pre-modern, non-western Scriptures seem relatively free from this psychosis. The Judeo-Christian worldview offends us repeatedly with nuance, paradox, and complexity. Pharisees are rebuked. Stone-throwers are hugged, not because they are right but because everyone is wrong. The overarching trajectory of history, according to the Bible, is a movement towards shalom: ‘the reconciliation of all things together in Christ.’ (2 Cor. 5)

The Psalmist wraps poetry around it, of course. Here’s one of my favourites: “Mercy and truth have met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” (85:10)

What an exquisite picture for our world today (for my life today) where, all too often, mercy and truth are locked in mortal combat.

On one hand, people with a strong mercy chip can sometimes sweep truth under the carpet. We see this all the time: abuses of power get concealed in the name of grace; unrighteousness is tolerated and not confronted; economic systems that oppress the poor and benefit the rich are enjoyed and not addressed, conveniently received as tokens of grace by those the system privileges.

And then, on the other hand, those inclined towards truth and justice can easily end up being vindictive and self-righteous. 60 seconds of social media demonstrates this point. They split the world starkly into victims and perpetrators (as if we were not all a bit of both), demonising others and refusing to see any good in them.

How beautiful it is, therefore, to glimpse the integrated world described in this Psalm in which mercy and truth actually meet, righteousness and peace kiss, grace and grievance dance.

But how is this possible?

Human nature makes this kind of reconciliation impossible,

but the divine nature makes it inevitable.

Jesus is both all-loving and always just, all merciful and entirely righteous. These polarities of passion and compassion meet on the cross, but it isn’t pretty. It’s a fight to the death.

Christ’s body becomes the battleground of the ages. Love and justice destroy one another. Without what happens next, our world is bereft of both. Finally, in Christ's resurrection, love and justice embrace - just as the psalmist foresaw. They kiss. Decay defers to life, dismembering becomes remembering, deconstruction becomes reconstruction.

This is what we celebrate in communion: the unsplitting of our lives. In the bread and the wine the perpetrator in me meets the victim in me, and through the agony of repentance and forgiveness I am finally reconciled, restored and made whole with myself and with my world. My mind meets my heart, my flesh meets the Spirit. And together as one we dance.

"Righteousness and justice are the foundations of your throne; love and truth go before your face."

Ps. 89:14

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🖼️ ‘Mercy and Truth are Met Together’ William Blake (1803)©️ V&A

Reflecting on the wounds of Christ - surprisingly still visible after his resurrection. He heals wounds without removing scars. Makes us whole but does not perform plastic surgery. Wrestles with Jacob but leaves him limping the rest of his life. Refuses to remove St Paul’s ‘thorn in the flesh’. Promises us brand new resurrection bodies without denying or deleting the past.

My friend Charlie was round our house one day, shortly after we’d fitted a new worktop in our kitchen made from thick Spanish oak. It was our pride and joy and I’d been oiling the wood diligently, while Sammy had been asking everyone to use mats and coasters to protect the wood. But already someone had put a hot pan down on the pristine surface leaving a deep, dark circle burned into the wood.

“Like our new kitchen?” I asked while making Charlie a cup of tea. “Spanish oak.”

Charlie picked up the magazine we had carefully placed to conceal the circular burn.

“So annoying,” I said. “We ruined it already!”

“That doesn’t ruin anything,” Charlie smiled. “That gives it character. Makes it lived in. Real. You need a few more.”

A few years later, when Charlie wrote and drew his best-selling book ‘The Boy, The Mole, The Fox, and The Horse’, he left paw prints on the page from his dog Barney, and a circular stain from a cup of tea in another of his beautiful illustrations.

And after that conversation we never again bothered placing the magazine over the burn, and never again lost our cool if one of the kids made a mark with a pen or a plate or a pan on a piece of wood.

Charlie reassured me that day that it’s my imperfections which can make me interesting, real, ‘lived-in’, human, approachable, and I don’t need to try so hard to hide them.

There is no shame in a scar on your skin or your soul, because it speaks of the journey you have walked, the pain you have endured, and the authority you have gained from suffering well enough to be simply still standing here today. Scars are medals. Wear them well.

“Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.”

(Leonard Cohen - Anthem)

When the winter winds rise and the wild geese migrate overhead, I’m told that domesticated cockerels in barns below sometimes fling themselves into the air, flapping frantically as though sensing in that moment some long-forgotten ability to soar.

When we meet certain people, or when the seasons change in our lives, something similar may stir within our souls. Forgetting what we aren’t, we remember something very ancient about what we could once have been. Old dreams flutter to life and, in spite of ourselves, we imagine another geography for our domesticated lives.

When the respectable Pharisee Nicodemus came to find Jesus one night, wrapped in the cover of darkness, he was flapping like one of those cockerel, sensing in Jesus the call of the wild.

“The wind blows wherever it pleases,” confirmed Jesus. “You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

A mark of those born of the Holy Spirit, according to Jesus, is spontaneity; the wildness of wind.

Perhaps this is why Celtic traditions represent the Spirit as a wild goose instead of a dove.

When the first disciples were born of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost they learned to fly. Peter quoted the Prophet Joel predicting that the outpouring of the Spirit in the last days would be marked by an era of imagination. In every walk of life, he said, there would be fresh vision, new dreams.

n the light of such Biblical depictions of the Spirit-filled life, it’s disappointing - to say the least - that we as Christians tend to be so tediously unimaginative, so predictable and stubbornly resistant to change. All too often our default position is one of suspicion towards the disruption of new ideas, unfamiliar language, or any kind of edgy artistic expression.

And it’s actually a travesty - a kind of blasphemy - when people who claim to be filled with the Creator Spirit, animated by the imagination which made 25,000 species of orchid, are some of the least creative, most innocuous souls on earth.

Maybe Marx was right and we’ve been opiated by religion, conned into conforming with the tyranny of social liturgy.

It’s embarrassing. Like domesticated cockerels we strut around pecking in the dirt. Utterly unlike the wind we are entirely predictable. Earthbound we have forgotten how to fly.

It hasn’t always been this way. Surely the Spirit stirred when Julian of Norwich inspired by visions wrote the first book by a woman in the English language, when Palestrina sought to capture the polyphonic sounds of monks singing in tongues, when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of All Saints church in Wittenberg, when Isaac Newton began asking questions and refused to stop, when Amy Carmichael set sail for India, when Gaudi started sketching his basilica in Barcelona, when John Coltrane picked up his trombone in Dix Hills on Long Island.

Where, we must ask, are those in our day born of the Spirit who will rise up on eagles wings, blowing wherever He pleases, going wherever he carries them, showing the world a wilder and more wonderful way to be fully alive? And where are the communities willing to innovate, pioneering today as a prophetic minority with spectacular inefficiency for the sake of the world to come?

I think maybe my favourite thing about being a pastor is watching people take communion. It is the unspoken privilege of sitting quietly studying the faces of individuals you love - whose stories you know - as they come forward to take the bread and the wine. Every single one is a walking talking prayer. Some are smiling. Some are deeply serious. Some are inevitably weeping. A few are only there by the skin of their teeth - it’s a kind of a miracle they’ve even made it.

I love the mixture of solemnity and mess. I love the way that in our tradition absolutely everyone gets to participate including the kids. I love the deep sense of belonging to something so much bigger.

I remember one Sunday leading a homeless guy to the Lord and taking him up to the communion table immediately afterwards.

He took the bread and literally threw it in the air, caught it in his mouth and grinned at me.

‘Would you prefer the non-alcoholic wine?’ the server asked him thoughtfully. ‘You kidding me?’ he replied, took the alcoholic cup and nearly drained it. “Hallelujah” he muttered.

“Maybe some morning, instead of solemnly passing these trays, we should dance for joy, Maybe we should sing every born-again song we know. Maybe we should tell our “homecoming” stories and laugh like people who no longer fear death. Maybe we should ask if anyone wants seconds and hold our little cups high to toast lost sisters found and dead brothers alive.”

~ Lee Eclov, in a Sermon entitled The Sinner’s Feast

Look, I realise it seems like a ridiculous question. Smacks of naivety. Whiffs of hype.

But as I reflect on our recent time in Melbourne (helping launch 24-7 Prayer Australia), and then on #TheGoldCoast (at the inaugural Exponential Australia church planting conference) I’m surprised to find myself wondering if revival might indeed be stirring Down Under.

I’m surprised because, well, let’s be honest, this isn’t the way we think of Australia. Beaches, blokes and barbies? Yes. A nation primed for revival? Not so much.

And of course the signs of rampant secularism and systemic church decline are easy to observe.

For instance, in Melbourne my friend Mark Sayers, a brilliant cultural apologist, took Sammy and me to a splendid, old ecclesial building in which a community is busy synthesising its own new religion blending secular humanism (all the usual stuff), with eastern mysticism, and a seasoning of those bits of the Bible which they (currently) wish to retain. Worryingly this self-confessingly ‘post-Christian church’ in the heart of Melbourne retains its membership within one of Australia’s largest denominations.

Walking a little further into the city we came upon Foundry Lane and ‘Wesley Place’, where Methodists once ministered to the urban poor, preached the gospel, and worshipped the Lord Jesus Christ. Their former buildings - a church, a manse, and a school-house / dispensary - have become immaculate monuments to truths no longer held. Perfect punchlines to long-forgotten jokes. In this place the iconography and history of Methodism have been meticulously preserved, but the beliefs that burned in the heart of its founder (who stands in stone outside) appear to have been meticulously expunged.

Seeing such signs of decline, is it really even remotely tenable to think that such a secular nation could turn again to Christ?

Writing at the end of the 19th century, when Wesley Place was in full swing as a centre of dynamic Christian witness, G. K. Chesterton observed wryly that -

“On five occasions in history the Church has gone to the dogs, but on each occasion, it was the dogs that died."

Could it actually, counterintuitively, be the dogs and not the Church that will take a turn for the worse in Australia?

There is increasing evidence that Westerners, far from becoming more secular, are becoming spiritually hungry. Research commissioned by Alpha discovered that one in four Australians would willingly come to church if invited. Let that sink in! One quarter of the population - more than 6 million people - await a half-decent, reasonably friendly invite to church.

What’s more, a whopping 70% of this supposedly secular nation freely admit that they regularly talk to the God they’re no longer supposed to believe in. (This is higher than the UK and many parts of America.)

“70% of this supposedly secular nation pray.”

Meanwhile, in spite of such extraordinary opportunity, another study has discovered that only 2% of Australian churches have any kind of vision for growth and multiplication.

I’m reminded of Jesus’ words: “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few.” (‭‭Mat‬ ‭9‬:‭37‬).

Turns out that the challenge we’re facing in Australia (and, I suspect, in many other Western nations too) is not at all what we’ve been told. The problem we face is less spiritual apathy in society than spiritual complacency in the church. Like Wesley Place, we have buildings and history without the faith and the fire of our forefathers.

Jesus continues: “Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.” (38‬) Before we turn in blind panic to plans, programmes and projects, looking for a solution, Jesus says that we must return to the Lord of the Harvest in prayer. We must ask because, as John Wesley himself said, ‘God does nothing in the earth save in answer to believing prayer.’ And as the late, great New Zealander Joy Dawson said, ‘Anything not born in prayer, is born in pride.’

It was in response to this specific challenge that a group of senior Australian leaders approached 24-7 Prayer, asking us to help mobilize a fresh movement of prayer in their nation. We are acutely aware that many others have been praying for many years, and that we are just a small part of something much bigger, but it certainly felt timely to be holding our first National Gathering last week in Melbourne.

Our new National Director, Trudi Sayers, had literally journeyed through cancer and chemotherapy to make it to this moment, and we were blown away by the response. So many people came from all across Australia and New Zealand that we couldn’t fit in our original venue and had to move to a larger space which was also filled.

The hunger and the stories amongst those gathered were incredible. I talked to a young Indian man called Johan who is studying in Melbourne. He explained how God had spoken to him several weeks ago, calling him to mobilise 24-7 Prayer on his university campus before he knew anything about us or our launch! Over the years I’ve learned to pay attention to signs like these; indicators that the Lord is going ahead of us.

From Melbourne Sammy and I flew up to the (distinctly sunnier) Gold Coast for the first Australian Exponential Conference. Exponential is a proven and powerful ministry with which we’ve partnered elsewhere in the world, committed to catalysing effective church multiplication. Their thrilling vision in Australia is to grow the number of multiplying churches from just 2% to 10% over the next ten years.

One of the other speakers was Melinda Dwight who said that Alpha in Australia expects to welcome one million guests this coming year. This means that one in every 26 Australians will explore the gospel in the coming year through Alpha, not just once, but over an eleven week journey. (To put a grid on this, it’s like 13 million Americans doing Alpha in a single year.)

Clearly a couple of cool conferences can’t change the world! I don’t want to overstate their significance. The challenges are vast and we are very small. And of course many others have been at this far longer and far better than us. Millions of Australians in many different denominations are reeling from public scandals, whilst weeping over loved-ones who’ve abandoned the Family of God. For them the church still seems very much to be going to the dogs and if anything the dogs seem healthier and more numerous than ever.

But these two conferences do at least represent something bigger than themselves: a new ambition in the nation; a willingness to conspire cross-denominationally to serve existing networks and ministries with new spiritual and strategic resources at a time of increasing spiritual hunger. They are at the very least a Wesleyan ‘method’.

These initiatives are not everything we’re praying for, but they are certainly something.

It’s something significant when prayer is growing again in Australia, and when churches are being mobilised in new ways to multiply. It’s something significant when the vast majority of Australians are actually praying, and one quarter of them are interested in attending church. And it’s certainly something significant when one million Australians will soon, God willing, be exploring the gospel through Alpha.

There is good reason for hope, but none for hype. Many parts of the Australian church do indeed seem to be ‘going to the dogs’, but Jesus insists, “I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.” (Mat‬ ‭16‬:‭18‬)

Perhaps Chesterton’s right and it’s the dogs of secular humanism that really need to worry!

C’mon!