Stafford Carson : Presbyterian Pastor

My mother, Jean Carson, died today. For all of her 90 years, apart from the past 7 months in a nursing home in Portadown, she lived in Larne, Co. Antrim. She was born and raised at Larne Harbour, one of Jack and Rosena McClean’s six children. She is survived by her brother, Billy McClean (Larne) and her sister, Rose McBride (Sydney, Australia).

In 1939, as an eighteen year-old girl, she committed her life to Jesus Christ, and that commitment was the enduring and dominant feature of her life. She married my father, Willie, in 1950. My father came from Waringstown, Co Down, and following their marriage he worked at the linen factory at Millbrook, just outside Larne, and then for over 20 years he was the Parks Superintendant in Larne Borough Council.

As young people, my mother and father had met at meetings held in the Ulster Temple, Ravenhill Road, Belfast. Both were members of the Elim Church, and for a lifetime they worshipped in the Elim Church in Larne where my father was an elder. In recent years my mother belonged to the fellowship that meets at Larne Mission Hall. She began her working life in The Cash Drapery in Larne, then in Tweedy Acheson’s, and for a number of years worked in Joseph Semple’s drapery shop on Main Street. She loved her home town and lived all her married life in the same house in Kent Avenue.

Today I give thanks to Almighty God for the memory of a good and godly mother.

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One has to feel sorry for the Wales rugby team following their exit from the Rugby World Cup. It just seems as though their defeat by France was inevitable following a dubious red card decision by an Irish referee. Yet up to that point in the tournament, they had performed so well, playing with great skill, passion and unity as a team.

Part of their success was attributed to the fact that they had learned to sing together as a choir. Everywhere they went, they took their hymn sheets, and their togetherness was nurtured and enhanced by doing what the Welsh do better than most other nations — singing! Every rugby supporter knows that the Welsh rugby players seem to raise their performance to a new level when the sounds of Cwm Rhondda echo around the stadium. There is something about the melodious Welsh support that raises their players’ spirits and calls them to new efforts on the field. And there was clearly something about their singing together as a choir that created and maintained unity in the team during this current tournament.

Music and singing is one of the handful of practices which has been, and which remains, a universal feature of Christian worship. “Sing joyfully to the Lord, you righteous”, says the psalmist in Psalm 33. There is something about music and song that is appropriate and fitting for Christians to do when they want to praise and worship their Saviour.

Augustine observed that when sacred words are joined to pleasant music “our souls are moved and are more religiously and with a warmer devotion kindled to piety than if they are not sung.” He bore witness to the power of music in his own life:

When I remember the tears which I poured out at the time when I was first recovering my faith, and that now I am not moved by the chant but by the words being sung, when they are sung with a clear voice and entirely appropriate modulation, then again I recognise the great utility of music in worship. (Confessions, X, xxxiii)

Music moves us. It engages one’s soul and one’s emotions. Our hearts are “kindled to piety”.

When Paul writes in his letter to the Ephesians, his view of music is instructive. He understands music as having a role to play in our sanctification. Most of Ephesians 4 and all of Ephesians 5 address what it means to live as children of light, or how to live holy lives. Paul gives many commands and instructions, but ultimately men and woman are made holy by the Spirit who is called Holy.

The command in Ephesians 5:18, “Be filled with the Spirit” is the culmination of these chapters, both rhetorically and theologically. The passive imperative, “be filled”, is followed by four subordinate, participial clauses: i. speaking to one another in psalms, hymns and spiritual songs, ii. singing and making music in your hearts, iii. giving thanks to the Lord, iv. submitting to one another. These participles are grammatically dependent on the verb, and they give substance and content to the command to be filled with the Spirit. Remarkably, two of the four clauses (three of the five participles) have to do with making music.

Many commentators simply absorb the command to sing into a general exhortation to worship. But if Paul had wanted only to indicate a relation between the filling of the Spirit and worship in general, he could have done so. Instead twice over he indicates a link between the Spirit and this particular aspect of worship. Whatever explanations we might offer, Paul binds together singing and the sanctifying work of the Spirit.

Why is that? Song is an apt response to sensuality because music engages body and sense. Music is one way in which the Holy Spirit brings the life of sense and embodied experience from the darkness into the light. In psalms, hymns and spiritual songs, the world of bodily experience is enlisted in praise, and reoriented toward the worship of God, and the benefit of others. The senses are not held down, but by the Spirit are lifted to God in song. Our whole beings are drawn into worship of Almighty God.

But Paul’s exhortation to sing is also connected with his emphasis throughout Ephesians on the unity of the body of Christ. As we sing together we are conscious of the activity of our own voices in making sound, and we respond to our own song as we hear it resonate in the space around us. But we also hear and attune ourselves to the sounds of others’ voices. We respond not only to people, but to the physical qualities of the sound we are creating with others as well as the physical and acoustical properties of the space in which we sing. More than that, we submit ourselves together to a tempo and to a pattern of melody and rhythm.

In that way, music and singing gives voice to the shared life of the church. It is not accidental that the commands to sing in Ephesians 5:19 lead on to the exhortation in verse 21: “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” Music is both an image and a means of attaining to this unity, and of how we are meant to relate to one another.

Some commentators have pointed out that the command to sing is the hinge which connects the two sections of the epistle. Chapters 4 and 5 urge the Christian to put away the self-gratifying and self-interested behaviour that destroys community. The second half of chapter 5 and the first half of chapter 6 paint a picture of healthy community life, in which each member senses and responds to the needs of others.

When a congregation sings together, a new entity emerges. A sound is created which has qualities and properties that the individual voices do not have. But the special power of singing together is that one voice, the voice of the church, is heard. Many, diverse voices become one sound. The singing of the church then becomes an aural image of the unity of the Body of Christ, in that it creates a symphony and a harmony comprised of different people with different backgrounds and abilities being united in a common activity.

So music and singing make a distinctive contribution to growth in the Christian life and to the unity of the church. It is no surprise then that the unity of the Wales rugby team was enhanced as they sang together. Even in their sad defeat, they played defiantly and bravely as a team.

At the end of many international matches which were likely to be a victory for Wales, the great rugby commentator Bill McLaren was often heard to say, “They’ll be singing in the valleys tonight.” Sadly, not tonight. But once the Rugby World Cup is over and they return home, there will, with such a young and talented team, be many opportunities to sing again. Don’t lose the hymn sheets, lads.

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Once in a while I come across something that makes me think again about what’s important in Christian ministry. This article, The Genius of Wrong, made me think again about what church and ministry are supposed to be about. The challenge of making disciples of Jesus Christ must be one of the main things that every church accepts. Rather than just registering “decisions” for Christ or “conversions” to Christ, the New Testament sets us the goal of “teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:20). That disciple-making goal must remain, and take precedence in the life and ministry of the church and its leaders.

I have included the entire article below.

Read more…

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No one can fail to be impressed with Euan Murray’s muscular approach to the Christian life. He seems to bring the same strong, uncompromising approach to his Sunday observance as he does to playing in the front row of the Scottish scrum. Even though he would be first choice for this week’s Scottish team to meet Argentina in the Rugby World Cup, he has chosen not to play because the match is being played on Sunday. I love his line:

“It’s basically all or nothing following Jesus. I don’t believe in pick ‘n’ mix Christianity.”

That kind of sentiment is an accurate reflection of the kind of commitment that Jesus required and would have approved of: “Any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple.

It’s also a contemporary reminder of a point which was made very eloquently by Deitrich Bonhoeffer in his book The Cost of Discipleship. One of the most quoted parts of the book deals with the distinction which Bonhoeffer makes between “cheap” and “costly” grace. Bonhoeffer defines cheap grace as “the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ.”

Or, even more clearly, it is to hear the gospel preached as, “Of course you have sinned, but now everything is forgiven, so you can stay as you are and enjoy the consolations of forgiveness.” The main defect of such a message, says Bonhoeffer, is that it contains no demand for discipleship. In contrast to this is costly grace:

“Costly grace confronts us as a gracious call to follow Jesus, it comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart. It is costly because it compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him; it is grace because Jesus says: “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” “

Bonhoeffer argues that as Christianity spread, the Church became more “secularised”, accommodating the demands of obedience to Jesus to the requirements of society. In this way, “the world was Christianised, and grace became its common property.” But the hazard of this was that the gospel was cheapened, and obedience to the living Christ was gradually lost beneath formula and ritual, so that in the end, grace could literally be sold for monetary gain.

But, as Bonhoeffer describes it, there was, within the church, a living protest against this process in the form of the monastic movement. This served as a “place where the older vision was kept alive.” Unfortunately, “monasticism was represented as an individual achievement which the mass of the laity could not be expected to emulate”; the commandments of Jesus were limited to “a restricted group of specialists” and a double standard arose: “a maximum and a minimum standard of church obedience.” This was a dangerous state of affairs for, as Bonhoeffer points out, whenever the church was accused of being too worldly, it could always point to monasticism as “the opportunity of a higher standard within the fold - and thus justify the other possibility of a lower standard for others.” So the monastic movement, instead of serving as an incentive for all Christians, it became a justification for maintaining the status quo.

All of this changed at the time of the Reformation through Martin Luther, says Bonhoeffer, when he brought Christianity “out of the cloister”. However, he believed that subsequent generations had again cheapened the preaching of the forgiveness of sins, and this has seriously weakened the church.

“The price we are having to pay today in the shape of the collapse of the organised church is only the inevitable consequence of our policy of making grace available to all at too low a cost. We gave away the word and sacraments wholesale, we baptised, confirmed, and absolved a whole nation without condition. Our humanitarian sentiment made us give that which was holy to the scornful and unbelieving… But the call to follow Jesus in the narrow way was hardly ever heard.”

We have to say that authentic Christianity which claims to be consistent with the teaching of Jesus Christ is not a “pick ‘n’ mix” Christianity in which a disciple can pick the blessings and privileges of a life in fellowship with Jesus and avoid the painful decisions and hard choices. Following a crucified Christ means that we, too, are called to bear a painful, often bloodied, cross.

We may disagree on some of the details of Christian discipleship, and may have different views on what Christ wants us to do, or not to do, on the Lord’s Day. But men like Euan Murray are fully persuaded that their Christian discipleship requires them not to become slaves to their sport so that it is allowed to have the primary place in the way they use their time. In that area, as in every other one, Jesus Christ is Lord. It’s all or nothing. And that is a message which Christians, and the world of unbelief, needs to hear.

I still hope that Scotland win on Sunday.

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Today I had the honour of re-opening the old Principal’s House at Union Theological College as a Training Resource Centre.

Irish Presbyterians have always had a reputation for being builders. We like to build churches and halls and manses. Unfortunately that reputation has been a bit dented in recent years, not least because of the demise of the Presbyterian Mutual Society. Money and resources have been restricted and those who have served as Moderators of the General Assembly in recent years have had many fewer new buildings to open than previous incumbents.

You can imagine, then, my personal disappointment when a dreadful fire engulfed the almost-completed project in November 2009 and scuppered all the plans for the official opening of the TRC during my moderatorial year. It was one of the events that I had quickly written into my diary for January 2010, and I was very sad when that event didn’t materialize. So I was hugely delighted and honoured to be invited, in the current moderator’s absence, to be involved in this opening ceremony.

One of the interesting questions which has arisen following the PMS debacle is “What should the Presbyterian Church in Ireland be involved in? What are the legitimate concerns and interests of the General Assembly?” And of all the activities and projects that the General Assembly needs to maintain and nurture, none is more important than the training of its ministers and the discipling of its members.

Many of us who have been in ministry for a while have taken our cues from what Paul says in Ephesians 4. We believe that our job is to “prepare God’s people for works of service so that the body of Christ may be built up”. We believe that God has given pastors and teachers to the church for this very purpose.

I hope that as a denomination ministerial training and Christian discipleship will receive an increasingly high profile in our activities. Our church, and the wider Christian community in Ireland, needs ministers with the intellectual ability, the practical skills and the personal qualities to lead God’s people into effective Christian service and ministry. Unfortunately, the old 80-20 principle applies. 80% of the work in our congregations is done by 20% of our members. Many of our members need to move from being passive listeners to being active servants.

In order for that to happen, we need ministers who are effective preachers, sensitive pastors, and strategic leaders. That is a high standard, and a comprehensive calling, and that is why a rigorous and challenging programme of theological education and ministerial training needs to be maintained and enhanced.

In a comprehensive study completed a few years ago, a Duke Divinity School research team concluded that healthy and effective churches were the result of the ministry of healthy and effective ministers. It is one of those conclusions that many ordinary church members may have accurately predicted without the need for much research. But maybe it needs to be acknowledged and acted upon in a more intentional way. Whatever else our General Assembly does, it needs to encourage and enhance the training of its ministers. Without effective ministers, our congregations will remain ineffective and powerless.

In addition, ministers and elders need to be given the resources to see their congregations trained and motivated for Christian service. And these goals are promoted by the facilities provided  in the Training Resource Centre.  It is our prayer that all who work and study there may benefit from the new facilities and may be enabled to fulfill their God-given job description of preparing God’s people for works of service so that the body of Christ may be built up.

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