Trauma

Beth, our Pastoral Worker, recently attended the Biblical Counselling UK conference. Here she shares what it was about and some of what she learned...

Trauma arrives. Trauma is real. Trauma intrudes. Something happens, sometimes keeps happening to someone. They cannot cope, helplessness pervades. It disrupts normal life, it overwhelms, it’s dark, ugly and the effects remain and keep remaining. How do we navigate trauma? Where is Christ in our trauma?

Trauma was the focus at this year’s Biblical Counselling conference which I had the privilege of attending. It was a mixture of the hard and hope. Hard, because sitting in the ash heap of extreme suffering and seeing the effects on our lives hurts, is messy and complex. Yet mingled in the darkness was hope. Comfort arising in the depths of the anguish, found as the beauty of Jesus emerges, crushing the ugliness of trauma by breaking “the powers of chaos and evil ... by taking the ugliness of the cross and making it beautiful” (S Midgely). How do we navigate helping one another when reeling from deep anguish and distress and the impact which this dark intruder has on our lives? How do we care well amidst the darkest of evils in our world? How can we love and care for one another in the face of our trauma?

As we walk alongside one another at the Village Church, here are five things to reflect on and chat about when considering how we care for one another when trauma invades (taken from Helen Thorne and Steve Midgley’s Church Based Care session at the conference):

1. Our calling as community - As Church family, broken and messy and living alongside each other, we seek to bring God’s hope to light in the darkness of the fallen world. We seek to be a good friend by walking alongside others, sharing our lives and gifts. This will look different for each of us but we remember we all have a part to play in a variety of ways and it’s in our variety God brings rich blessing to His children. In the middle of trauma, we seek to be devoted to: Prayer, for and with each other; listening rather than probing, by having a firm hold on our tongues, and, slow to speak, so, radiating a willingness and compassion to hear what our brother or sister desires to share with a sympathetic heart posture; speaking in wisdom faithful to the truth of Christ and confident in His promises; humble servant hearted love, the foundation for sharing in each other’s pain and leads us to encourage and serve in the deep pain. Humility and sacrifice are the heartbeat of our actions, remembering we can’t do everything but we are willing to do what God asks of us.

2. Our calling in conversations and continued support - As we provide support as God’s church we lovingly seek to embrace the beauty and power of small things. We love someone by including them in our family meal time once each week, giving them a place at our table. We do  life together whatever that might look like; cleaning the house, making meals, baking, watching a football match, shopping, sharing hobbies, going on holiday, having times that are antisocial, giving space. We check in with no pressure to share something they don’t want to share. We desire to help one another in our darkness to make small steps to safety and security, feeling connected and loved. We chat, wisely finding out how the week has been and how we can pray. We rest content in helping each other trust God a little more by praying together, memorising scripture, looking for God together and “being a rock solid encourager, who is certain of hope”. And as we walk together so we keep praying for each other. It’s the most loving and powerful thing we can do.

   
   

3. We remember the reality of the darkness and battle: Satan is real. Satan is evil. He wills and schemes evil, and trauma reminds us that we are wrestling against him, against   “rulers…authorities…cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 6).

   
   

4. We remember who God is and what He desires: It’s God’s responsibility to heal, that role does not belong to us! We cannot make someone better. As we look at Job’s experience of trauma and see how hope emerged in the darkness, we remember that,  “Trauma is not beyond God, it belongs to God” (S. Midgley). Satan is kept on a leash. God has the ultimate control. So, we can  simply be content to know that “what God wants from us in Job like suffering is neither repentance nor deep spiritual discipline. All He wants for us is to hold onto Him - not to curse and walk away, but just to maintain our relationships with Him through tears and sackcloth”.  (Erin Ortland)

   
   

5. We remember our calling: To be a faithful, present friend, who  personifies the beauty of God Himself by lifting  each others  eyes in the  darkness and ugliness of trauma to see Jesus’s beauty.  God does just this with Job! Amid  Job’s deep anguish, torment and pain He turns up, listens then  speaks and as He does He turns Job’s eyes to Himself and all that He is and  His startling beauty through creation. Might this be our hearts desire here at Village Church  “…to gaze on the beauty of the LORD and to seek him” (Psalm 27), the One who has entered the darkness of our world and defeated the most heinous evil.

Easter Evangelism

Glen Scrivener, the director of Speak Life, writes about where he's got it wrong in evangelism. Hopefully it will encourage us to scatter the good seed of the gospel this Easter...

This is a dangerous topic. It’s not dangerous because my confessions of failure will spoil my otherwise flawless projection of Evangelistic Success. No, in the words of Austin Powers, that train has already sailed. 

I’m the evangelist who once met a man who only spoke Aramaic so I tried out on him the only Aramaic I knew. Perhaps you know it too. Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani. (I know! What was I thinking? The words of Christ on the cross!). His eyes widened at the man with a Bible who seemed desperate to communicate just how godforsaken he was. He simply patted my hand and moved on. I like to think he silently prayed for me in that moment, thus redeeming the whole encounter.

Or the time I was reading Luke 12 on the tube and just had to share verse 32 with my neighbour. He leapt from his seat and exited the train just as the doors were closing. I’m pretty sure it was not his intended stop.

Or the talk I gave, very recently, where I put—onto the lips of Jesus no less!—a swear word which, after 20 years in the UK I hadn’t grasped was a swear word. As my hearers gasped I thought they were falling under unusual conviction of sin. My friend put me into my misery at the end of the meeting.

And it’s not just amusing faux pas. There’s the time I invited a dozen friends to the Carols Service with the promise of mulled wine and mince pies when actually they felt ambushed by a talk speaking frankly about hell. God used it all but my invitation should have been prosecuted under the Trades Descriptions Act. Or the Christmas talks I’ve given when there’s been the palpable sense, bubbling away under the surface: “Sure, you’re enjoying your once-a-year sing-song now, but where have you sinners been the OTHER 51 weeks of the year!”

Lots of mistakes to share. But, really, the greatest mistakes in my evangelism have been the faux pas I didn’t make. The awkward silences I didn’t provoke. The sneers I never got because I never raised the name of Jesus in the first place. My greatest failures have been the conversations I never got around to having with my friends and family.

You see the danger of writing an article like this is that we can all identify ways evangelism goes wrong. But it’s worth remembering how D.L. Moody responded to criticisms of his evangelistic failures. “I like my way of doing it better than your way of not doing it.” This is not a free pass for every theologically questionable and relationally tone-deaf approach. But it’s worth thinking about.

Jesus’ strategy in evangelism was far less focused on success and far more focused on supply — supplying gospel words and letting the results be what the results are going to be. Think of Matthew chapter 13 — less of a strategy, more of a scattergy.  

Some will be hardened (v. 19), some will be shallow (vv. 20–21), some will be choked by worries and consumerism (v. 22), but some will welcome the word enduringly and fruitfully (v. 23). Our concern is with the supply of the word, not the success. If this soil won’t hear, we sow on another. And another. And another. If this hearer is hard, we don’t get out the crowbar. We don’t beat them into submission. We don’t cry foul because they’ve sneered at us. Sneerers gonna sneer (as Taylor Swift almost said). We sow into the next heart, and the next, and the next.

There is good soil. We have good seed. So don’t try to avoid evangelistic failure. Don’t focus on evangelistic success. Focus on the supply. Scatter. The fields are still white for harvest.

This post was first published on the The Good Book Company blog in 2019.

How awesome Jesus is

The elders are currently reading a book called The Soul Winning Church: Six Keys to Fostering a Genuine Evangelistic Culture. We'd love you to read it too - we've just reached chapter 4, about Personal Evangelism.

The authors - J. A. Medders and Doug Logan - say the essence of evangelism is simply telling people how awesome Jesus is. They write:

'People are often nervous about evangelism because they don't want to wade into the culture's hot topics, or they don't feel equipped to engage in apologetic arguments. The apostle Peter helps us reframe the content of our evangelism in 1 Peter 2:

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy (1 Peter 2:9-10, ESV).

Most of this passage is about who we are, as believers. After framing our identity, Peter sets the activity that flows from that identity - "that you may proclaim." Peter sees Christians as proclaimers, heralds, "make-knowners" of the gospel and the excellencies of Jesus. He says we are to proclaim "the excellencies of him."

In other words, the task and privilege of every Christian is to simply tell others how awesome Jesus is.

We can tell them how wonderful he is. We can tell them how incredible he is. We don't have to get embroiled in an argument. Proclamation isn't argumentation. We don't have to have every answer. We can say, "I don't know - let me think about that and get back to you. But for the moment, can I tell you why I believe Jesus is the key to life and eternity?" We can think about the ways in which Jesus is amazing - his perfections, sinlessness, deity, kindness, mercy, power, miracles, teaching - and make them known. And most of all, we can talk about how incredible it is that Jesus would die on a Roman cross for sinners like us. We can share how amazing it is that Jesus would die in our place and that he would rise again from the dead and is reigning in heaven, offering real joy-producing, life-altering forgiveness for anyone who believes in him. We can talk about amazing grace, non-expiring mercy, eternal life, and the love of God.

What amazes you about Jesus? What do you love about Jesus? Talk about that with people.'

They go on to say that people really are ready to hear. Apparently, according to a 2021 study, 66% of people are open or very open to a conversation about the Christian faith. In the UK, according to the 2022 Talking Jesus Survey, 75% of non-christians who had a conversation with a Christian friend about Jesus felt comfortable doing so, and 33% of them left the conversation wanting to know more about Jesus. That's one in three! Could it be that more people are willing to talk about Christianity than we tend to think?