Paul Poulton enters the fray

Paul Poulton

Some of my friends don't always look kindly when I tell them I go to church. I used to think that it was because they were unspiritual or hated God or something, but I've begun to change my mind.

Journalist Max Harris said, 'Christians are a dim, ego tripping minority, dead set on telling everybody why they ought to become Christians, instead of finding out why they aren't'.

Okay I can understand what Max was getting at when he said that but every now and again we get a Christian who is able to speak common sense to ordinary people and generally speaking most people love it. After all Christians spread God's love around and we call the gospel 'good news' and people do enjoy listening to good news.

CSLewis was one such Christian and though he has been dead since 1963 he is still speaking to ordinary people of all ages through the Narnia movies and books, which still sell well. GK Chesterton was another one; a journalist with flair and intelligence that people still often quote.

God loves people and has a way of reaching us whether we go to church or not. Sometimes it's with the help of churches and other times without them.

Christians sometimes get bad press because of their reliance on predictable obtuse arguments that they can't support intellectually other than quoting scriptures; sometimes to people who don't even believe the scriptures.

Scripture bashing is a term that is coming into common use to define the people who like to take the Sword of the Spirit and use it like a hammer rather than a skilful swordsman.

We have to admit that scripture bashing does seem to be a weapon of choice for some church-goers. Have you been bashed over the head with a scripture touting enthusiast? I sometimes listen to phone-ins on local radio and I've heard people use verses from the Bible like bullets from a Tommy gun. It's true that all scripture is profitable and when we use it with grace, compassion and discernment it can help people find help, encouragement and faith in God. Jesus himself sometimes quoted scriptures, but he did so with discernment and in the right spirit. However he mostly spoke to the crowds using stories and explained the deeper meanings to the disciples later.

The worrying element of jousting with scriptures is when two Christians get together (on the internet or the letters page of a magazine or face to face) and both try to attack each other's position using Bible verses. It's almost comic, like two cartoon characters taking turns to pull bigger and bigger weapons out of a sack. Someone nearby shouts 'fight' and a crowd quickly begins to gather.

I recently spoke to a church leader who told me of the tension in his church because some people thought traditional hymns should be sung during worship and others wanted to move on and sing modern songs.

I've seen this battled out in churches before; if we go back a few hundred years the argument was about whether to allow people to sing harmony in church or only unison. Later the difficulty was whether to allow instruments to accompany the singing. There are still some churches around who don't allow instruments, but that's up to them. In fact in February a minister of the Free Church of Scotland resigned from his church because the denomination voted to relax its rules and allow the use of hymns and musical instruments to accompany the singing. Previously, unaccompanied psalm singing was the only music permitted. However most churches have moved on from those days, but I've heard scriptures used by both parties to support their stance.

Observers quickly pick up on these battles as did the people at BBC News in February who seemed keen to state that the minister who resigned thought the relaxed rules "were against the teaching of the church's summary of Bible teaching". When bullets fly around there will be collateral damage, why should people come to church to be involved in skirmishes that only add stress to their lives?

If you take isolated scriptures you can probably make a case for your position. You can find scriptures to support freewill, but someone else will find scriptures to support predestination. You can find verses to support your view of how the second coming will unfold and someone else can find verses to support their version of the end times. And so it goes on, battles about all sorts of issues that church-goers seem to love to argue about.

In the 1830's a church in New England had a division about whether putting a stove in the church was demonic or of the Lord. The winters were freezing but it was thought that hardship is part of our service. The church members introduced the subject into conference meetings and prayed over it. It was finally decided to resolve the matter by ballot and was carried by one vote. So a stove was introduced into the church. The first Sunday after it was installed into the church two ladies fainted on account of the dry atmosphere that the stove had created; they were carried outside where their swoon soon abated. They were then informed that on account of a shortage of piping the stove wasn't actually lit that day.

Scripture bashing must surely be a device that the enemy of our faith loves to use. We are told to be alert because he uses fair or foul means to deceive us, yet some people state so emphatically that a certain issue is either of the Lord or of the Devil. Isn't there a third path here? Some things are of the Devil or God but many things are of man's making and that's fine. In fact God expects us to use the brains he has given us to sort things out in a spirit of love and grace.

When England was going through its change of Church leadership from Rome to England, John Dudley an adviser to young King Edward, (Henry V111's son) told the teenage king that his sister Mary should not be able to celebrate mass even in the privacy of her own home, saying, 'The mass is either of God or the Devil'. This was an important point because people lost their heads because of it and when Mary suddenly came to power it was Dudley's head that rolled. It was a hard time for England and it's not easy for us to wade in saying what should or should not have happened, but there are lessons there for us.

Most styles of worship are man-made, what God is looking for are those people who worship him in spirit with a truthful heart; what form we do that in is largely up to us. If we can rise above the short sharp shock weaponry that we love to wield, we will find that people will listen to the good news we have to share and enjoy it.

There must be other CS Lewis's and GK Chesterton's out there who lift their communication skills far above the banal and dull habit of scriptural happy slappers.