Falling With Style

Those One Direction boys Zayn and Louis are in a bit of bother, allegedly caught on camera with spliff in hand whilst in Peru this week. Their behaviour isn't far out of step with their contemporaries. Two of the five boy band members stand accused here, but one in five young people claim to have experimented with casual drug use during the last year.  In his Guardian newspaper column today, Owen Jones remarks on the pressure on One Direction to conform to the sort of clean living that even disciples of Jesus would find a little stringent. Jones is clearly not attempting a reasoned theological summary of the gospel here. Rather he is pointing to the micro analysis of their every move, and the need for squeaky clean lives to maintain lucrative teen idol status contracts.   He is however plain wrong, but his words say something significant about our generation's misconceptions and lack of any real understanding of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. It's just another ...

In our local church community, we've been using the story of Isaac in Genesis 26, re-opening wells which had been dug in a previous generation by his father Abraham. This narrative is a helpful prompt as we discover again some of the life of God that has been in our history. This is true in a number of areas, but no more so than with healing miracles. Although they have been significant in our past, we want them again in our present, and into our future. The need for us to dig once more into what we once confidently drew water from is apparent, as is our need to clear away the rubble of wrong thinking and the opposition of a cynical culture. Should either mindset prevail in a local church, the well of healing will remain blocked. Instead of being an oasis of life giving water for the thirsty, we become a cynical Nazareth, the kind of place where even Jesus found it hard to work miracles because of their unbelief. Our battle is to decide which water source we want to draw from...

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