A (Short) Text for Blue Monday

It's Blue Monday again - the (allegedly) worst day of the year.  The festivities have gone, the winter hasn't and the New Year resolutions are unresolved.

Many people who have been taught the Bible as children have also been wedged full of statistics and verse numbers, books with the most chapters, middle verses and the like. 

Outstanding in this series of not-very-useful information (for none of it is any use at all when trying to help someone understand God's word for them) is the shortest Bible verse.  It is so short and memorable it has become a kind of moderate English expletive:

JESUS WEPT.

Perhaps it's the text for Blue Monday?

Just as well, then, that this is not the shortest verse in the Bible at all.  Only in the English Bible.  Originally written in Greek, the shortest verse in the New Testament is found in Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians: just fourteen Greek letters:

Translation : BE JOYFUL ALWAYS. 1 Thessalonians 5:16

It's also just the antidote for Blue Monday.

Death, the Olympics and Easter Day

About the time of the Olympics last year (2016) an alarming thought crossed some people's minds.  It was that the previous London 2012 Olympics had been cursed.

The trigger for this alarming thought was the death of Australian rower Sarah Tait from cervical cancer.  On its own Sarah's death was an ordinary (but genuine) sadness - but she was latest in the line of very many others.  British consciousness had been heightened by the deaths of sailor Andrew Simpson in a 2013 sailing accident and our tennis player Elena Baltacha who died of cancer the next year.  A French swimmer, boxer and triathlete had all died, but so had 12 others from around the world.  It seemed crazy that by the next Olympics 18 of the previous Olympians were dead and gone.

There turned out to be good news and bad news when it was researched.

The good news was that, in simple terms, over four years about 32 in a 1000 people die. There were over 10,000 participants at the 2012 Olympics so hundreds, statistically, should have died before the next Olympiad.  Except that Olympians are young and fit.

Some whizzy research yielded the expected death rate for the average age to be 25-30 over four years.  So if the 18 were the full number (though some athletes from obscure regions [e.g. North Korea] might not be known about)  it would a below-average death rate.

And this means what, exactly? Well that is the bad news.

I think it shows how unrealistic the living are about death.  Of course we know that death and taxes are the only certainties - but we live as though we will never die.  One reason why not enough people are excited enough about Easter morning is because they do not acknowledge the scale of the problem, the general curse, from which this day and its Lord potentially sets them free.

It is a mistake of Olympian proportions.

Building

Christians have every reason to be thankful for the work of Peter Brierley and Christian Research.  I hope that he'll excuse me picking some holes - some important holes, I think - in his recently-reported research reported to the Pentecost Festival.  Peter's strong point has always been collecting data and delivering it in understandable ways.  Interpreting it is tougher.

Let's take just one glaring statistic because I think it teaches alot more than it appears to teach: in 1990, there were (allegedly) 120,000 conversions and (definitely) 60,000 deaths, in 2009 there were (apparently) only 80,000 conversions and (definitely) 120,000 deaths of Church attendees.

Does this, as Peter deduced, show a lack of evangelism?

A conversion is only a conversion for sure when the pilgrim reaches the end of the journey.  Be faithful to the point of death and I will give you a crown of life.  Professions, not conversions then.  But are they even professions?  Aren't there still here the formal additions of automated confirmations, of aspirational declarations for other purposes such as getting the kids into the local faith school?  Ironically the deaths - those who have died in the body of believers - are more accurately described as converted.

And who does what here?  Instinctively we feel that the Church does conversions and God does deaths.  Yet with modern medicine we can hold death off quite significantly.  We cannot by our knowledge add a single soul by conversion.  Are these statistics a picture of what we are doing or of what God is doing?  If God is doing less converting do we do more evangelism or do we do more praying?   Is our hurt about numerical decline of the visible church more about gospel passion or our own pride and influence?

The Church is a building.  That's all it is.  A building, never a declining.  Added to, never subtracted from.  Every new believer one new living stone that will never die, not an inadequate shoring up of a wall that once had many more stones in. 

We are too earthbound.  Biblically, eternally, heaven-perspectively we belong to a number that cannot be counted but every day is added to until every last one of God's children is home and everyone left outside has to confess they never wanted in.

It is not the Church that is declining.

The statistics show that what is declining is the spiritual state of the country and the culture.