“The Review was commissioned by NHS England to make recommendations on how to improve NHS gender identity services, and ensure that children and young people who are questioning their gender identity or experiencing gender dysphoria receive a high standard of care, that meets their needs, is safe, holistic and effective.”
This review comes in the wake of problems that have surfaced concerning the standard of care and lack of due process at Gender clinics in England (leading, for example, to many lawsuits and the closure of the famous Tavistock Gender Clinic).
“What if being human means being a cosmic émigré – vulnerable, exposed, unsettled, desperate, looking for a home I’ve never been to before?”
And then, “What if that someone [the triune God] not only knows where the end of the road is but promises to accompany you the rest of the way, to never leave you or forsake you until you arrive? This is the God who runs down the road to meet prodigals. Grace isn’t high-speed transport all the way to the end but the gift of his presence the rest of the way.”
From James K. A. Smith’s excellent book, On the Road with St. Augustine (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2019), 69, 284.
In the picture above, some team members and I are standing inside the home of a woman (beside me in the photo) who encountered God in a powerful way the day before. Her home stands at the top of a steep dirt hill in the slums of Alfonso López, Cordoba, not far from the church where I had met her while ministering the day before (Sunday, January 14).
On that Sunday morning, just two of us had been present: I was one; the other was Cristian (on the left in the photo above) who was serving as my translator. As we approached the area in our vehicle, we saw the signs of poverty everywhere. Makeshift homes constructed with whatever materials were available to people. Curtains for doors and windows. The sight and smell of human waste running down the side of the hilly dirt road. Dogs everywhere, wandering about. We drove part of the way into the community but had to exit the car when we could go no further, due to the large potholes and difficult terrain.
We met the pastors as we exited, a husband and wife couple, and followed them up the hill toward the church, waving at curious onlookers sitting outside their houses as we ascended.
The church was a modest but adequate and clean space. The pastora (the woman pastor) took the lead in speaking with us and in leading the service. Before the service began, she had arranged for large fruit bowls to be brought to Cristian and me. What a lovely and sacrificial gift – a true honour! We ate with gratitude and humility as we took in this gracious act of hospitality.
The service began with the pastora giving a passionate and lengthy prayer and then a lively worship time followed. The only instruments were percussion (some drums, a tambourine, and something like a guacharaca but made of metal) and voices, yet the worship was jubilant, fervent, and contagious! I could not understand the lyrics (mostly), but the language of heartfelt worship is universal, and it brought me to tears. There were 30-35 people in attendance – not a huge gathering, but the place felt full and expectant.
Left: The worship team, leading the congregational singing. The woman to the left of the podium is the pastora. Right: A photo taken after the main part of the service; some people are outside at this point.
My role in the service was to train the church in healing, evangelism, and Bible study ministries. The training included both teaching and participation, so that people could try out and practice the various ministry activities after each teaching session. I had asked Cristian if he wanted to teach any of the sessions himself, but he wasn’t yet comfortable with that and preferred to stick with translating for the time being. Many who came on this trip, both North American missionaries and Colombian translator-missionaries, had not done this kind of ministry and teaching before. It was really inspiring to see that, as time progressed, everyone was engaged and excited to do more. Many who were initially reticent were speaking and preaching powerfully as they took steps of faith, which God rewarded by moving hearts and changing lives. In fact, when opportunities arose and the leaders asked for volunteers, there were often more volunteers than specific ministry spots. A wonderful ‘problem’ to have!
The healing portion of the training time was powerful beyond my expectations. As part of the training, congregants practiced praying for each other in groups of three. Those needing healing shared their maladies and others laid hands on them and prayed for them. Of the 30-35 people gathered, about 20 people reported experiencing healing for various things, mostly related to injuries and pain. those who reported being healed said that they experienced 70% or higher improvement in their condition(s). It was quite an awesome and overwhelming response!
I need to stop at this point to confess my own scepticism about some of this (just being honest here 😊). I wonder: how much of this is genuine healing, where God moved in power to bring a permanent improvement and alleviation of suffering and pain to his people? How much of it is an emotional response, where people report (i.e., project) experiences that are based on their own expectations? Or their desire to show a positive response to God and to the mission team? How much of it is a placebo effect? (Placebo effects can be quite powerful in terms of their impact on human subjects.) I confess that I don’t really know. My suspicion is that the numbers represent a mixture of all of the above.
As I’ve reflected on this theologically, three things have come to mind. First, in the New Testament (and especially the gospels and Acts), amazing and miraculous things do seem to happen when people come to God/Jesus expectantly and in faith. This is not to say that people who are not healed lack sufficient faith and are thus blameworthy in some sense (although Mark 6:5 complicates this a little bit). Indeed, true faith is inthe God who heals, not in our own faith. Nevertheless, faith and expectation seem to be necessary ingredients to healing and other miracles.
Second, part of my scepticism arises because God seems to do many more minor works of healing than dramatic ones. I’m not sure why this is. It’s occurred to me, however, that what God most wants to give to us is His very Selfin the person of his Holy Spirit, moving and dwelling within us. What appear to us to be relatively minor works of healing, cleansing, deliverance, and restoration often bring great comfort and encouragement to those who receive them. They receive healing, but more importantly, they receive God Himself, personally. Who am I to question that? And since God works both directly (miraculously) and by secondary means and causes (‘naturally’), perhaps ‘God working’ and (even) the placebo effect are not necessarily mutually exclusive categories or events? God is not only in the gaps; God is the God of the whole show (to paraphrase Bonhoeffer). I’m not trying here to reduce everything to the ‘natural,’ but rather to say that God by His Spirit works to infuse everything – “all things” – for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose (Romans 8:28).
Finally, our team (myself included) witnessed many dramatic healings throughout the trip, miraculous interventions for which ‘natural’ explanations are highly improbable. We called these ‘notable healings’ to distinguish them from the more common healings we witnessed. These were significant and life-changing gifts from God. They were clear signs of God’s power and presence, and – as in the gospels – they pointed to the manifestation of God’s kingdom in our midst. I believe that God performed these wonders to demonstrate His love to those He healed (and to all who were witnesses) and to authenticate His work in our midst, both in what was clearly miraculous and in what might be regarded as more ambiguous. I will share some of these dramatic stories in another post (my son, Samuel, actually got to be part of one of the most dramatic healings our team witnessed).
But now, back to the old woman pictured at the top of this post. God did something in her life that turned out to be a blessing both to her and to me.
After the healing time, I asked if there were a few people who wanted to share a testimony about how God had healed them. This woman came forward excitedly, with both hands up in the air, and shared with all who were gathered (via Cristian the translator) what had happened to her. She shared that she had been suffering for a long time with severe back and neck pain, which made it difficult for her to walk and thus to get to church. So, when she does come to church, she requires help from others to support her to make the journey. (Recall that she lives in a little shack at the top of a steep, dirt hill). She had not been planning to attend church that Sunday, but something changed her mind. She explained: When she saw me walking up to the church that morning, she recognized me immediately because she had seen me in a dream the night before. In response to the dream, she knew she needed to attend church that day. And then God healed her (seemingly completely) of her back and neck pain. Wow! “Thank, you,” I said. “You just increased and encouraged my faith!”
The picture at the top of this post is from the next day (the Monday), when Cristian and me – along with two other team members – were sent back to the church to accompany their people into the local community to do ministry and outreach. I asked her how she was feeling. A big smile lit up her face and she raised her arms high and jumped up and down, thanking God. She really wanted our group to see and come into her house, which is both her home and her place of work (she sells second-hand clothing, which you can see hanging in the background).
We also had the opportunity to meet her son and his friend, both looking to be in their early to mid-twenties. I shared a brief testimony with them and my team-mate Harmen (the other white dude in the photo) shared the gospel with them.
What an amazing couple of days of ministry and mission! Though, ‘officially,’ I was the minister and missionary, I was also very much a recipient of ministry and mission, as God worked through these precious people to impact me in deep and unexpected ways.
As the missionary-theologian Lesslie Newbigin liked to emphasize in his writings, genuine mission is always a mutual, two-way exchange, wherein people encounter God at work together, in and through each other through the sharing of the gospel and the diverse, mutually edifying gifts of the Spirit of Jesus. What a gift and a privilege it is to be included together in God’s work!
A friend recently posted part of a prayer, written by Thomas à Kempis, from chapter 42 of his classic book The Imitation of Christ. It resonates with me, so I thought I’d share it here. I’ll likely post the whole section later.
“O Heavenly Father, Father of my Lord Jesus Christ, blessed be Your Name for ever, for You have deigned to consider me, the poorest of Your servants. Father of mercies and God of all comfort (2 Cor. 1:3), I thank You that, unworthy as I am, You sometimes refresh me with Your consolation. Blessing and glory to You, with Your sole-begotten Son and with the Holy Spirit the Comforter, now and through endless ages. You are my glory (Ps. 3:3), and the joy of my heart (Ps. 119:111); for You are my hope, and my refuge in time of trouble (Ps 59:16).
As yet my love is weak, and my virtue imperfect, and I have great need of Your strength and comfort. Therefore, visit me often, I pray, and instruct me in Your holy laws. Set me free from evil passions, and heal my heart from all disorderly affections; that, healed and cleansed in spirit, I may grow able to love, strong to endure, and steadfast to persevere.”
I will be offering a new online mini-course, beginning on Wednesday March 6 (7:30 – 8:45 p.m.) and running for 6 weeks.
The course title is “Why Church?” We will be exploring how the nature of the church, as depicted in Scripture, should inform and inspire how we do church together. Attending properly to what the church IS encourages a holistic approach to the church and helps us integrate life together in community with worship, mutual ministry, spiritual formation, and mission.
One of the things that struck me when I travelled to Colombia recently is how holistic, Spirit empowered, and transformative the church is there. Returning to Canada was a little bit like moving from a world of vibrant colour and texture to something more bland, flat, and monotone. While I realize that the contexts are very different, and therefore the church will be different, I still think the church in Canada is in deep need of a wake-up call and a thorough renewal. Church attendance is at an all-time low, even though people are desperately seeking connection and community. Why is this?
What would it look like for the Kingdom of God truly to come and become manifest in Canada? In your city, region, and neighbourhood?
What would it mean for the church to embody in common life together everything that Jesus said and demonstrated about the Kingdom?
Rather than trying to be all things to all people, I believe that the church needs to return to its biblical roots, to return to its first love, to “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness/justice,” and to live out together the social implications of the gospel.
Join us, as we explore together what it means to be the church and the implications for ‘doing church’ today.
A very good article in the NYT, summarizing findings that I’ve studied and confirmed in more depth elsewhere. We need to reject the culture wars and enter into good-faith conversations and relationships, seeking both compassion (rather than reactionary judgment) and wisdom (rather then slogans and naivety).
On Saturday, January 13, most of our team travelled (in one large van/bus + three cars) to visit a church and participate together in our first day of ministry. We would be training and equipping the church and then going out with them into their surrounding community to do outreach.
[One of our many bus rides; not from this day]
The training typically takes about one hour for each topic, so if we train healing, evangelism, and Bible study, that’s about three hours. Some churches ask for the full training, others ask for training in perhaps one or two of the three areas. (And one of our leaders, Wayne Broadland, has begun also to offer training in dealing with trauma, of which there is a fair bit in Colombia.) The training combines teaching and modelling with practice – what we call ‘activation,’ which is actually getting people up and involved in doing the ministry themselves.
As I shared in my first post, the vision is to empower people from the bottom up, not simply to do a performance from the top-down that keeps people awestruck by and dependent on the gringo (white) missionaries and the translators. Anyone can do this ministry, because in Christ all believers are called to be ‘priests’ and all ministry is a participation in what the Spirit is doing (so, a delegated ministry from Christ), not something we do in our own power, knowledge, and authority.
Since most of our team was present at this one church, only a few of us could lead the training. Yet it was a good opportunity for all, after our own training day within the safe confines of our hotel, to see it done live on the mission field and to interact with people as they learned and tried it themselves.
After the training sessions with the church, it was time for all of us to go out into the surrounding community and try out the training, in particular the training in healing and evangelism. We went door to door, asking people if they wanted prayer for healing (or anything else), sharing testimonies, and sharing the gospel if people were open to hearing it.
I need to pause to say that this was WAY out of my comfort zone. I have no trouble at all speaking in front of a thousand people, but ask me to go door to door and interact with a few in this manner and I get very anxious and feel quite awkward. Nevertheless, I did it anyway. I found that once I just focused on relating to people, loving them, and praying for them, I relaxed into it and began to shed the baggage I had carried about this kind of outreach (the sense or pressure that I’m trying to “sell” people something and close some kind of deal . . . that’s so wrong, and yet I don’t want to throw out the baby of genuine evangelism with the dirty bathwater of inauthenticity and reductionism).
We went out in groups of about 5-6, typically two gringo missionaries, a Colombian translator, and 2-3 people from the local church. (I will need to say more about the translators later, in a future post. They did a lot more than translate; they did so much of the work!). At first, we (our team) would model the ministry and then, by about the third home or so, the local church people would take over and do the outreach themselves. It was so cool to see!
Typically, we would knock on a door or – if there was no door – we would simply call out “Ola!” (Hello!). The translator would often take the lead, explaining that we are missionaries and asking if there is anything they would like prayer for. Often, people would ask for prayers of blessing and protection over their families. People also commonly asked for prayer for healing of various illnesses and injuries. We would pray, sometimes witnessing God move powerfully to heal people (more on healings in future posts) and often bringing comfort, peace, and a deep sense of love and His presence.
This opened up an opportunity for conversation and one of us would usually share a testimony at this time, beginning simply by asking, “Can I tell you a short story?” We had been trained to give short testimonies (15 seconds to 2-3 minutes, depending on context) in order to share how Jesus has made a specific and tangible difference in our lives. Some chose to share something like a ‘Prodigal Son’ story of how they came to Christ and were saved from guilt, selfishness, self-harm, feelings of inadequacy or lacking purpose, and then how they instead came to be filled with Christ’s acceptance, love, confidence, belonging, and deep meaning for their lives. I often shared about the severe health crisis I suffered in 2019 and how God miraculously delivered me from it and restored me to full health and functionality (and how this has encouraged me to trust God not just for my body and life in the present, but for everything and for my eternal future).
Sharing such a story about Jesus would typically allow us to ask the question, “would you like to hear more about this Jesus who saved me (or healed me or transformed my life)?” Usually, people would say “yes,” and this would give us an opportunity to share the gospel with them briefly (with a simple tool called The Three Circles). We followed up by asking if they would be interested in coming to a Bible study, hosted by someone from the local church (the one we had just trained) in their home. Many said they would and gave their contact information.
This outreach was quite an experience for me. I was amazed at the openness and readiness of the people to hear about Jesus and to respond in faith. I was blown away at how God answered prayer immediately and moved in ways I’m not accustomed to seeing. And I was forced to be stretched in ways I probably wouldn’t choose if left to myself and my own preferences, personality, and strengths (and weaknesses).
For example, I am a theologian. And theologians know that things concerning God and spiritual matters are complex. I tend to distrust simple explanations and tools, because they often lack nuance, holism, tension, and due consideration of questions, counter-examples, and critical interrogation. In its proper place (i.e., engaged critically within the primacy of faith), this can be a good thing. We need theology, we need to wrestle, we need to address the nuance and the intellectual questions that inevitably arise when we think about how Christian faith makes sense (or doesn’t) within our contemporary contexts. But we can also, unfortunately, over-complicate things. I might not ‘like’ a gospel tool because it’s inherently reductionistic in some way(s). But what I’ve realized is that if someone I meet really wants to know the good newsabout Jesus (right now!) and there isn’t much time to share it, my complexity can be detrimental because I struggle to know what to say. I’m at a loss. It is a good reminder that we need tools, but we also need to constantly revisit and rethink the tools, because they can become rote, formulaic, and non-contextual.
So, for me, being pushed out of my comfort zone was a very good thing. I saw and experienced many things on this trip that I struggle to explain or even understand. That’s o.k. God is bigger than my understanding. That doesn’t mean I’m giving up on the journey to understand, but it’s a good reminder of something I already know, something that has always informed the way I do theology but can easily be forgotten or subtly displaced: theology is not about establishing an indubitable faith built upon logical and empirical certainties (this isn’t faith at all, but foundationalism). Rather, theology always takes the form of faith seeking to understand itself. This is in keeping with how Augustine, Anselm, Julian of Norwich, Calvin, Bonhoeffer and all the greatest theologians have taught and modelled.
For me, God has used this trip and all these experiences to move deeply and subtly within my heart, to shift some things deep down, creating new openness to His movement in my life and in the lives of those around me. I don’t yet know where this is going to take me; I’ll have to just trust Him for that.
After a long journey (about 22 hours, due to layovers), we arrived at our hotel near Planeta Rica Colombia around 10:45 pm or so, having left our home at 2:30 am. The room was simple and adequate, lots of space for Samuel and I to settle into.
During the trip, we had met and travelled with many of our team members. It was inspiring to see and feel the excitement people had, mixed with some curiosity and maybe a bit of trepidation, as many of us had not done this kind of trip before. Many of us had been on service trips of various kinds, but not a mission trip involving healing and teaching ministries.
(Supper in Bogotá airport. No real idea what lay ahead of us in the coming days)
In the morning, Friday, January 12, we enjoyed our first Colombian breakfast, assisted by the translators with our ordering. A typical breakfast there included eggs (sometimes mixed with sausage), fruit (often fresh papaya), arepa, cheese (queso), juice, and coffee (either black or with mild – café con leche).
We spent the rest of the day on Friday in training, which was intense but also fun. We were being trained to practice and teach healing, evangelism, and Bible study. The training is based on biblical narratives and principles and designed to empower and equip people at the grassroots level to move into ministry and service. The approach is very much bottom-up, rather than top-down, and the vision of ministry (and its vision of the church) is that all believers should be participants in ministry and all should be equipped to do these basic Christian tasks. All of the training we would be doing would be in partnership with local churches, whose pastors desired their members to be active in the church and in reaching out to others in their communities.
I like e3’s (the ministry we went with) focus. It’s empowering and holistic, raising up people to minister not out of position or privilege or personal intelligence or ingenuity, but in response to and in participation with the power of God’s Spirit working in and through them. Healing, evangelism, and Bible study attend to people as physical, spiritual, and relational beings, in need of Christ’s presence and in need of each other as they dig further into what it means to be Christ’s Body, the Spirit’s Temple, and God’s People.
I was thankful for the training and for the practical tools we were given. The very next day we were all going to need it as we did training and then door-to-door ministry together in the community. And then the day after that, I would be sent out on my own (with a translator) to a local church in the slums to do three hours of training, covering the three areas just mentioned. And what a day that would be! God would work powerfully and in surprising ways. But more on that tomorrow 😉
Important piece by Peter Menzies concerning the plight of the news industry in Canada (one of many for those who are listening – see also several podcasts this summer hosting industry experts on Tara Henley’s Lean Out podcast).
“It’s the end of an era for news—the industry can either adapt or die. What Canada desperately needs instead is a multi-pronged, coordinated national strategy based on current economic and market realities that will allow journalism to flourish again.”
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