What to do as a Christian fresher

Posted at 10:19 PM

In just under a week, freshers will be arriving at Sussex University. Two years ago, Ed Goode wrote his advice to new Christian students; here’s my version.

Join a church

No one can make it alone as a Christian, and living as a student is no exception. You’ll probably be challenged about what you believe, whether in lectures or down the pub. There will be pressure to conform to a sinful culture; many Christians flirt with temptation rather than fleeing, and regret it later. You need people to support you and challenge you because they love and care for you. As a Christian you’re already part of God’s worldwide church, so make it a priority to join a local church community. Church will help you grow as a Christian, so find somewhere where as God’s Word is taught people grow to love Jesus more, love each other more and love the lost more.

Join the CU

Christian Unions are mission teams made up of students from different local churches, united around the gospel in order to better reach students with the good news of Jesus. In short, they exist to make Christ known on campus. Join your CU to get involved in student mission; to be better equipped to reach your friends with the gospel; and to be encouraged as you work as a team to bring others to know Jesus.

Join other societies/do other things!

God’s made a good world, with so many great things in it. Don’t do what I did in my first year and do so many Christian things you don’t have time to play football/sing in a choir/join the wine circle/get involved in student politics/act in a play/go to the pub with coursemates. Not only is it wrong to think such things are “less spiritual” (all of life is for God’s glory!), if you throw yourself into loads of Christian meetings to the exclusion of all else, you’ll find opportunities for mission few and far between. This is my biggest regret about my first year at university. Do something to get outside of the Christian bubble, even if it’s simply spending time with your flatmates!

Work hard, rest well

It may not feel like it sometimes, but you’re at university to study for a degree. This is a good thing to do! Your attitude to your work is a great witness to others, but more importantly God asks us to work as if working for him. My experience is that you actually enjoy your work more the more effort you put in; this is possibly my second biggest regret of my first year, as I didn’t get much out of it academically.

You also need rest, which may seem impossible during freshers’ week, but getting into good habits early on really does help. The temptation is to stay up late like everyone else, because you feel like you’ll miss out on making friendships, especially early on. God knows what you need though, and one of those things is sleep; you will not lose all your friends if you go to bed before them! (You may well find they’re waiting for someone else to suggest going to bed…) Naps are also useful, if you have been up late; caffeine less so. (I wrote about a similar topic back in my second year, on being idle and making work an idol.)

Learn to love

Your flatmates might “borrow” your food, or not do the washing up, or wake you up after a late night out. Your lecturers might not be very good, or overly harsh, and can sometimes be ridiculed or hated by others. You might meet people in the CU with whom you disagree: on theology, on style of meeting, on whether Jesus would have joined the Conservative or Labour Party, on all sorts of things you hold dear. God hasn’t put you with these people and in these situations to annoy you: he’s given you an opportunity to learn to love people. This is important with non-Christians, but possibly even more so with Christians. If members of the CU don’t love each other, that’s not a good witness. If they do love each other, learning to put aside secondary issues because they agree on the core truths of the gospel, it’s a far better witness. Graham Beynon quotes Francis Schaeffer:

Francis Schaeffer said that this love and unity were the “final apologetic”. That is, the ultimate defense of the truth of the gospel. He wrote this: “Love – and the unity it attests to – is the mark Christ gave Christians to wear before the world. Only with this mark may the world know that Christians are Christians and that Jesus was sent by the Father.” (p. 92, Graham Beynon, God’s New Community, IVP.)

Summary

University is a great opportunity for so many things, but above all to grow to know and love Jesus more, and so love other people more, through living and speaking for him in your academic work, your time with friends, your CU involvement and in your church family. My prayer is that you’ll do just that!

A conservative evangelical conference?

Posted at 10:49 AM

Early on in the week we were given a copy of Evangelicals Now, where the lead article was about New Word Alive. The opening sentence reads:

New Word Alive has become the premier conference for conservative evangelicals in Britain.

It was interesting during the week to hear various speakers (don’t ask me which ones off the top of my head) refer to us all as “conservative evangelicals”. Now, in my mind, I heard this as “conservative rather than liberal”, but in common usage the term has the sense of “conservative rather than charismatic”, so I was somewhat surprised at the vocabulary.

However, perhaps this is a sign that “conservative evangelicals” now regard “charismatic evangelicals” as part of their “crowd”. Nigel Beynon wrote most of the EN article (the first two sentences are an editorial addition), and he says this:

In the past there has often been a division between Word and Spirit, so that you are either a Bible Christian or a Spirit Christian. I get the impression that many now see that that is a false distinction. After all, ‘the sword of the Spirit is the word of God’ (Ephesians 6.17). If we want to experience the power of the Spirit we must let him use his sword on us!

Later on, describing the distinctives of the conference, he says that the first distinctive…

…is evangelical unity. It’s hard to read ‘history’ when you are in it, but there are some signs that we are witnessing a realignment of movements at the moment. The old markers of ‘conservatives’ and ‘charismatics’ don’t fit so well these days, as we find there are many from the ‘other camp’ with whom we have lots in common: the cross of Jesus, the authority of the Bible, the sovereignty of God and the urgency of evangelism – these things unite us.

Confronted with the wide range of opponents to the gospel we face today, we can ill afford to withdraw into fractured groups. Rather, we must find unity and strength together, and New Word Alive is a place to do that. We are unashamed of our core convictions and will give them the emphasis they should rightly have. Meanwhile, we might disagree over various secondary issues, but with a spirit of humility and generosity we can learn together and learn from each other.

Adrian Warnock wrote a few weeks ago:

…throughout most of my Christian life I was defined as clearly not belonging to that group [namely conservative evangelicals]. Conservatives were by definition it seemed not charismatic, and I would have held them in as much suspicion as they would no doubt have held me. But, as the bridges have been built, and the neoliberal assaults have unfolded, I do think that bible-believing people from many different backgrounds have been finding that we have more in common with each other than we previously realised. The internet and conferences such as Together For The Gospel, The Gospel Coalition, and New Word Alive have all been a major force for that discovery.

His post is titled “Is This A Conservative Evangelical Blog?” and is worth reading the whole thing. (He also defines what he means by neoliberals). It seems to me that people up front at New Word Alive are operating with this “conservative as opposed to liberal” definition¹.

This can only be a good thing! What are secondary issues doing attached to how we refer to ourselves as Christians? I don’t call myself a “credobaptist evangelical”, or a “Calvinist evangelical”. (There is such a thing as a Reformed evangelical, though I’ve never been absolutely sure whether that implies paedobaptism or not.) If I’m asked where I stand on something, I’ll say, but certain terms can pigeonhole us unhelpfully.

In fact, in many respects I’d happily describe myself as a charismatic. Adrian defines a charismatic as one who has a “belief in the continuation of spiritual gifts” – well, I’d go with that! I’m in a culturally “non-charismatic” church, but I’d be surprised to find that the leadership were cessationist, and I’m definitely not. On our feedback forms at the end, we were asked to tick boxes to describe our church. Two of the options were “Theologically conservative” and “Theologically charismatic”. I crossed out “theologically” on the first and wrote “culturally”, and then ticked both. Not a perfect description, but when summarising beliefs in boxes it’s never going to be.

Adrian writes elsewhere:

I genuinely believe that we have much to learn from each other. For too long different wings of the church have ignored each other.

Nigel has a related comment:

[W]e might disagree over various secondary issues, but with a spirit of humility and generosity we can learn together and learn from each other.

Amen to that! That’s one reason I love New Word Alive. This year I’ve been challenged by many “outside my constituency” as it were – and that’s great! More on this soon.

¹ Incidentally, I think the EN quote is referring to “conservatives as opposed to charismatics”, but in doing so is not implying that the conference is exclusively for conservatives – merely that for conservatives, it’s the “premier” choice.

Back from Forum

Posted at 6:42 PM

I didn’t manage to get back online during the week, so over the next few days (hah!) I’ll be writing a bit more about what happened. As ever, Dave Bish is worth reading, and Mo McCracken, Rosemary Grier and Dan Hames have more.

For me, the highlight of Forum was the family feel of it all – and I mean far more than just homeliness! I’m sitting with my Bristol family, but in the rest of the marquee there are near a thousand of my relatives, all united with the same love of God, the same passion, the same mission. It was exciting! I can only imagine what that must have felt like for those from a small CU with just a few members.

I loved spending time with the Bristol guys; getting to know the small group leaders whom I didn’t know so well in particular. My understanding is that in the past, our small groups have felt quite separate from the rest of the CU, so I loved that so many of their leaders were there with the committee.

After the World Service on the Wednesday night, we had conversations about long-term cross-cultural mission, as well as short-term trips. Having been encouraged to all study Mark’s gospel with our friends, we then prayed that this might be the case. At every step, all of us, from different churches in Bristol, studying different things, with all sorts of different views on everything, felt a unity beyond words. This is what Christ died for – to bring together a people to worship God for ever – and here and now it’s wonderful to see.

Going back to Bristol we’re not going to spend this amount of time together – we’re going to be meeting once a week centrally, as well as a prayer meeting and small group meetings in halls. The temptation is to band together in a clique and become inward-looking when we meet. This mustn’t happen. When we meet, it should be like a mini-Forum: we meet to encourage each other to live and speak for Jesus the rest of the week; we sing because the gospel is worth singing about, and God made music excite emotions for a reason; we hear about what’s going on because we want to be involved, at the very least by our prayers; we spend time together so that our lives lived in the university are changed ones, in which we’re supported, encouraged and prayed for by each other.

Back in Bristol, too, the temptation might be to get irritated over little issues, and start dividing, even in small ways (for example, whether we refer to the CU by saying “we” or “they”). This mustn’t happen either. We still believe the same gospel, and still want it to go out to our university, so when issues come up we all (and that means me too, even if I’m convinced I’m right!) put aside secondary issues and love each other enough to give up our ideas sometimes.

Forum is great because it’s our own CU meetings done right, writ large. The challenge now is to keep the focus and get out into the university as a united witness! May the Lord let it happen.

Currently listening to Jon Foreman – The Cure For Pain