It was General William Booth who said,

“The chief dangers of the 20th century will be religion without the Holy Spirit, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration,
politics without God, and heaven without hell.”

‘Writing in the late 19th century, this was extremely insightful – prophetic. Prophetic in the sense of both seeing and understanding what was coming, and in the sense of calling it out ahead of time. If it was true in the course of the 20th century, which William Booth only saw 12 years of, it is certainly true, on steroids, in the 21st century’s ‘post-everything’ world.

What Booth probably didn’t see, however, is that these things would become true of the evangelical church as a whole, including his radical Salvation Army movement. If he did see it, he’d have given them what for in his own inimitable style! In fact, he also once said that, ‘when The Salvation Army ceases to be a militant body of red hot men and women whose supreme business is the saving of souls, I hope it will vanish utterly.’

I am borrowing Booth’s quote not to make comment about the contemporary Salvation Army, but about wider contemporary evangelicalism, which appears to me to be a mass of confusion in so many parts. The church is pressed down by the weight of the world’s opinions and the general oppression of truth.

As Isaiah says, ‘Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter’ (Isaiah 5:20). So many things in our contemporary society are so unlike the values of the Kingdom of God and yet we’re told by Jesus to pray, ‘your Kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.’

I heard this question the other day in relation to this: how seriously do you think they take God’s will in Heaven?

It’s a question that doesn’t need an answer to be verbalised, does it? It’s self-evident that God’s will rules and reigns SUPREMELY in Heaven. It should do here too. That’s where the rub comes for anyone fearful of causing offence or standing for truth today. To cause offence is the number one social crime, but here’s the thing: it isn’t the ‘prophetic extremist’ who should pray, believe and live these words of the Lord’s Prayer. All disciples of Jesus are invited to pray and live this way in the midst of a world that often rejects the things of God.

This matters deeply to me because it matters deeply to God.

There is no mysterious, missing unknown message, prophetic word, or key that we’re waiting for to see transformation in the world. There is no missional strategy to unlock spectacular growth. There’s no programme which will guarantee success. There’s no amount of money, or buildings, or strobe lights, smoke machines, organs, guitars or any other physical thing which will trigger a move of God. There’s no extra-special teacher, preacher, pastor or evangelist that we’re all waiting for before the shift will be made.

We already have the message: ‘repent for the Kingdom of God is near’ (Mk 1: 15; Mk 6: 12; Matt 3:2, Matt 4:17, Luke 5:32; Luke 13: 3; Luke 15: 10; Acts 2:28; Acts 3:19, Acts 17:30, Acts 20: 21; Who is the messenger? Jesus’ intent was that ‘now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms, according to his eternal purpose that he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord. In him and through faith in him we may approach God with freedom and confidence (Eph 3: 10 – 12)’. I could go on and talk about the Great Commission, you know…taking the gospel and disciple making to the nations etc etc.

This seems too difficult, too basic, too ‘primitive’, somehow, and so we hang around waiting for goodness knows what rather than proclaiming the message. I’m not naive enough to believe that this will be popular. Nor am I inexperienced enough to know that it will not necessarily produce immediate results, but it is the way the gospel spreads from one mouth, one heart, one life to the next.

And let’s just be clear: the gospel is an offence to people. Note that I’m not saying that we need to be offensive people in our communication (be a twit, in other words), but the nature of the gospel even from the kindest, sweetest of mouths flies in the face of 21st century sensibilities and no-one likes to be called to repentance and yet, it is the gate to salvation that God opens up to those he has moved to do so. We preach repentance and those who are ready, respond. Those who don’t simply continue in their disobedience.

Paul speaks of the transfer from the kingdom of darkness to the Kingdom of the Son he loves (Col 1: 13). Repentance and faith is the process of that transfer – there are no side gates to the Kingdom of God.

This is the basis message we need to rediscover the message to proclaim. It is rarer than it should be, disdained in the church more than you believe, shrunk away from like a plague, avoided as the greatest inconvenience and ultimately unknown. It will be debated by everyone who sees no need to repent, even in the church. Those who speak it or teach it will be labelled ‘fundamentalists’ and sidelined in order that the ineffectual ‘moral theraputic deism’ can reign to massage the modern ears. Paul said something about that…

There’s no particular reason why I haven’t preached through Hosea before through the course of 20+ years of ministry – there are other parts of the bible I haven’t covered either. The only reason I’m doing it now is the personal impact it has had on me in recent months and the way that is has ‘turned up’ everywhere. Sometimes passages, chapters and themes just do that: they turn up and your attention is drawn.

Hosea is a heart-punch to the reader. And if that’s how much it impacted me, the reader, imagine being the initial recipients of the message? Hosea is told to marry an unfaithful woman and Gomer fits the bill in many ways. God is making a living parable of the unity of his faithful man and an unfaithful woman. It is pointing us prophetically towards the perfect Bridegroom, Jesus Christ, and his one-day perfect Bride, the Church (see Rev 19; Eph 5).

I can only preach this out of a deep sense of conviction responding to the truth that I have not always been a pure, faithful part of the Bride of Christ. My heart has wandered and likely my actions in numerous ways again and again, and I’m pulled back into grace that I really don’t want to be cheapened by my weakness. I don’t want to tarnish the Bride’s pure white linen. God, have mercy in all the times where there should be none apart from grace.

Preaching on chapter one was easy in only one sense: God reiterates his promised to his covenant people. There is something stronger than the sin and spiritual whoredom: God’s mercy. But before he would come close to dispensing mercy, he tells them there is none in this particular moment – the only way through this situation is exile and some hard restorative justice.

Hand on heart, as I consider the collective life of the church in these days, I weep. I weep for my pathetic part in it, but I weep for the stains on its wedding garments. In a world where dirt is called clean and clean is called dirt, the church has in so many was capitulated to ‘the world’. I’ve seen the ways in which, millimetre by millimetre, centimetre by centimetre, I’ve experienced the ‘drag’ of the world too, and we do it without a consideration for the implications. Israel’s troubles didn’t start in the time of Hosea – it was a long slippery slope.

We need to ask serious corporate questions beyond the limits of our own individualist faith. We also have to get out from the denominational or congregational rut that says ‘well, we’re alright…but them down the road…!’ No – in the same way that there was only one covenant people of God in the Old Testament, there is only one genuine body of Christ hidden amongst so many things that go under the label ‘church’ or ‘Christian’. We’re in it together. We’re also the Church of Gomer in many ways although we’re supposed to be Christ’s.

For me this throws up lots of challenging questions. How do we stop using grace as a cover-up for worldliness? How do you play your part in calling out, healing and restoring corporate sin and corruption by God’s grace? How do you speak across denominational ‘lines’? If it calls itself a church, do we really have to believe that it is so when the evidence goes in a different direction? What exactly does ‘come out from among them’ mean in the context of our complex set of 21st century idolatries that set themselves up against God and his Word?

In addition, even if you have a sense that there’s something deeply wrong, it’s very unpopular to call it out. Like Hosea’s prophetic marriage, our weddedness to Christ should fly in the face of a compromised Gomer Church. Returning to the Lord in repentance is a key to the renewal of God’s people, and this has a direct relationship to the return of Christ and him taking his Bride.

Plus, every one expects that faithful and/or prophetic preaching will be ‘nice’, mainly because we’re caught in the nicey-nicey age where preaching of the gospel is reduced to nice stories or self-help massages of conscience, where we’ve all been de-radicalised into limp ineffectiveness where we are no longer a threat to the enemy of Christ.

It is so hard, humanly speaking, to be faithful and raise your head above the parapet. May the spirit of Hosea, Elijah, Joel, Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, John the Baptist and of Jesus Christ be upon us as we ‘prepare the way for the Lord.’

I’m in my old bedroom at my mother’s tonight as I write, and this room is filled with all sorts of memories, but my mind is on none of those things tonight except when the Holy Spirit came and gave me such a deep assurance of his presence and my salvation in a way that only God could. It’s what I meditate upon when I sleep in this room now.

My other thought is the faces of the fellowship I was gathered with this last Sunday morning and that I’m privileged to serve. 50 or so believers of all ages and a few exploring faith, the gospel, and the presence of God among us. I understand in fresh ways how Paul could write with such longing to be with his people when away or detained.

I’ll tell you what I’m feeling in this moment. Deep joy, celebration, and love for all these people under my care. I also feel exhausted because I’ve preached from the heart – the only way I know. And I’ve preached with a sense of the weightiness of God’s word and its implications for us. And I’m excited at what God has done and is doing.

In myself, I feel both the weight of responsibility and the excitement and privilege of it. They are regular people, but they are also extraordinary. In over 20 years in ministry, I haven’t met the equal of their full-hearted devotion to God and the gospel, and to prayer.

It is a beautiful thing and the glory goes to God alone.

It was the timeliest meeting – a ‘divine appointment’, if you like. You have no idea the extent to which my heart has been troubled by certain things in this first part of 2024 – not relating to things happening now or the ministries I’m in, I should add. I hadn’t long prayed the prayer, ‘God, I need a kick start to know what to do with this to recover some ground.’ The kick start arrived.

As I mentioned in my blog yesterday, I’ve been increasingly troubled by the way I’ve allowed myself to be silenced on things that I know to be foundational, and woolly on things that were once crystal clear. I’ve put this gradual ‘softening’ down to maturity and, fundamentally, being ‘nice.’ All the while, the inner movements of the Spirit in my spirit give me no rest and no sense of consistency. 

I’ve been on a reforming journey since 2010 when I left The Salvation Army. I chose, at that point, to question everything I’d learned up until that point. Not because it was all wrong, but because I’d been wrong at one key juncture and God deserved a thorough repentance – a thorough rethinking. I’ll be truthful, that journey has led me down some false tracks too – tracks with a stinking pool of death and lies at the end.

I’ve just been tracing back the path, not of the incidental wrong turns and dark alley explorations, but the central path of my following of Jesus to seek to understand where my gait started to wobble. It does no health to name them now, but I understand what the pebbles (aka boulders) in the shoes were.

So, I suppose I am at a the other side of a multifaceted crossroads, having stepped back onto the ancient path. Jeremiah told Israel they were at a crossroads and that they should seek the ancient path. Today, we think that’s looking at saints of old or something like that, but it’s much more radical than that. It’s hearing the call of Jesus to ‘take up your cross and follow.’

I know where I left my cross, and behold, by grace here it is.

Someone asked me this week, when talking about a whole load of things that I’m actually quite passionate about, if I blog. I said, ‘not really’. It wasn’t a lie, but what I wanted to say was ‘yes, but I kinda stopped because it’s too painful.’ Seeking my own comfort, I stopped expressing what God was laying on my heart about many things because people didn’t like it, to the extent that my questioning of the leadership structures of a part of the church I was serving in led me having no choice but to leave. Water under the bridge.

Boiled down, this is about the courage of convictions and the boldness to share them. In the film musical ‘Guys and Dolls’ (ironically!), there’s a song lyric that says ‘and the people all said “sit down, sit down you’re rocking the boat!”‘  Being an outlier, a minion, in that system, I proved myself to be dispensable for even daring to raise the possibility of standing up.

None of that is to say that in my immaturity I couldn’t have done it better, but I realise even now how much of a guard I now keep on my heart and on my mouth because the institution of the church has continuously told me to ‘sit down, you’re rocking the boat’ even although many of them have paid me to stand up and speak! (But only if we actually agree, Andrew…) He who pays the piper calls the tune?

I am just noting here today how much I have been silenced and, actually, how much the church has continually tried to dampen my heart to the extend that I’ve capitulated to saying nothing, or at least very little ‘in public’ about many thinks. Not a great state for leadership to really arise.

I notice now the fear that can still arise, even when empowered by the Spirit to speak, the natural fear that rises up in my chest… and then the sense of having been made feel like an ‘extremist’. Stuff like ‘that’s too challenging, Andrew.’ And I’m like, ‘what?’ I read the bible and I am rocked to the core again and again about my faltering allegiance to Jesus compared to what he asks of us. I think, on the whole, my life is ridiculously not like a radical follower of Jesus.

So, that’s the story of the blog and its author, really. Many might not know that this is the act of spiritual warfare that comes against me. The enemy delights in trying to find ways to silence and discredit me and I’m pretty good at taking myself out of the fray too.

Every faithful follower and lover of Jesus in these days needs a ‘band of brothers’ to fight alongside as the days get more evil. By God’s grace I look to him.