Socially distanced church: our priority and our problem

We love our church. It's not always the easiest to take three young children to church but I've written before that we believe that Sundays, meeting with the local body of Christ, are good for children. Even for third culture kids who can miss a lot of what is going on in the service, we believe there are benefits and blessings from church in a second language. Being with our local church fellowship on a Sunday to meet and worship God together is the priority of our week.

Our church has now been able to meet in person for the last two Sundays. Being back together in person is special even if not quite the same with masks, social distancing and a temperature check at the door. We've attended the last two weeks as a family, all of us except the baby dutifully masked. But we're now wrestling with the question of whether we take our children back this Sunday. 

The reality is that we don't have enough space in our church building for everyone to come and remain socially distant from each other. The members of one household (e.g. a family) obviously do not sit socially distanced, but with a relatively high percentage of our church family being individuals, we don't have enough space for even a third of the normal congregation to come.

Should we keep our children at home to literally create space for others to come? 

Last Sunday one of our students brought two friends to church. In all likelihood, it was probably their first time ever attending a church service, their first time hearing the Bible read and preached, their first time experiencing a group of Christians worshipping God together. Our current family circumstances means that one of us almost invariably misses the sermon because we're out with the baby and our other two children remain in the service but do not have the Turkish language ability to understand what is said. Is it better for one of us to stay at home with the children so we do not risk having to turn people away who have never heard the Gospel before?

This is a hard issue. We believe wholeheartedly that going to church as a family on a Sunday is the most important thing we do all week. Aside from the very real concern about protecting the reputation of the church in a Muslim society, we believe it is right to willingly obey the central and local government's rules about social distancing. While social distancing is required for our church services, there is not the physical space for everyone who wants to come. We are also foreigners who have come to serve the local Turkish church; each of us must look not only to our own interests but also to the interests of others (Phil 2:4) and that is doubly true when we have come as cross-cultural workers. We must put the interests of the church, and of Turks, above our own interests. But how do we do that while also looking to the interests of our children? Added to which, we have no idea of timescales. There's a reasonable probability that we'll need to be social distancing for the next several months, possibly to the end of 2020 or beyond. I'm typing this and recoiling at even having to countenance the idea of not taking our children to church for most of 2020.

We're praying for wisdom, talking to our pastor and thinking through different solutions currently. Do we set up a video relay in another part of the church building? Do we alternate with another family and take it in turns to come to church? What about my husband and I alternating who goes to church each week and whoever goes takes either the 5 year old or the 3 year old (who can sit on a lap and not take up extra space), leaving the others at home to join by Zoom? If as a church we need to start thinking medium term, do we need to start thinking about knocking through walls in the church building to create a bigger meeting room?

This is uncharted territory for us, and for others who will be thinking through similar issues. There are no ideal solutions right now, only making the best of a non-ideal situation. But God is not a distant god waiting to punish us for not availing ourselves of the means of grace that he set out. He is our loving Father who knows our hearts and our desire to be in church together each Sunday. He understands when we tell him that we really want to be meeting with our church family to worship him each Sunday but we just can't figure out a way for all of us to do that legally, safely and while loving our neighbours. He  has given us the Holy Spirit and gives us wisdom to think through the options and decide on what we think is the best way forward.

At the same time as thinking through all of this, I've been working on writing up the testimony of a good Turkish believer friend. She became a Christian as a teenager but due to significant family pressures and the need for parental permission for under-18s to go to church here, she was unable to go to church (with the exception of Christmas and Easter services) for three years. For some of that time she had no easy access to a Bible. She desperately wanted to go to church but couldn't and the Lord kept her throughout all of that time. Her experience reassures me of God's goodness. God has given us the local church as a means of grace for our good and growth as believers and being part of a community of local believers is a crucial part of what it means to be a Christian. But when we've done everything we can and it is just not possible for us to be at church together every week, we can trust in God's goodness and faithfulness to bless, sustain and strengthen us - and our children.

People are complicated

"Look, I've killed the monster!" he cries triumphantly, cape trailing behind him, stick sword in hand. My three year old and five year old's favourite role play game is some version of "goody vs baddy". Monsters vs superheroes. Knights vs dragons. If we watch a film, they want to know who the goody is and who the baddy is. In the darkest moments of a film (and we're talking Disney and Pixar here), they crave the reassurance that the goody will win in the end. We talk about the great story of good vs evil too. They point to the picture illustrating the story of Revelation in their children's Bible, of Jesus conquering the dragon, and they tell us "Jesus wins."

There's a developmental appropriateness to young children's desire to divide the world into goodies and baddies, to categorise them neatly as one or the other. Recent events have shown that adults are not immune either to the temptation to divide people into simple categories of 'goody' and 'baddy'. For instance, there has been a move to recategorise historical figures from 'goody' to 'baddy' with the toppling of statues; in the UK, protestors toppled the statue of slave trader philanthropist Edward Colston and threw it into the harbour. A statue of Winston Churchill has been boarded up ahead of planned protests; he is regarded by many as a great wartime leader. He also believed in racial hierarchies. 

Christians are not immune to these problems either. We fall in love with our spiritual heroes and then belatedly realise they too have feet of clay. Martin Luther and his anti-semitism. Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield and their ownership of slaves. John Wesley's marriage. William Carey's family life. It can get more personal too. Church leaders fall into sin. Christians we looked up to let us down. And with the tangle of thoughts and emotions that we're left with, it's easy to either turn a blind eye to someone's sin, rationalising it away, or to go to the other extreme and dismiss every good action or truthful word they've ever done or spoken.

We might also take groups of people and automatically assign them to be goodies or baddies. Cops. Protesters. Politicians. Civil servants. Journalists. Bankers. Climate change activists. Climate change deniers. Creationists. Evolutionists. Social workers. Home schoolers. Baptists. Anglicans. J K Rowling. The list goes on.

The world would be a simpler place if we could just think of everyone as either a goody or a baddy.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously wrote, "If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being." In the same vein (but not quite as literary high-brow), British comedy actor John Cleese recently tweeted a clip of his from 30 years ago in which he says, "the great thing about having enemies is that you can pretend that all the badness in the whole world is in your enemies, and all the goodness in the whole world is in you." 

Both Solzhenitsyn and Cleese are echoing the truth that people are complicated. As image bearers of God, every one of us is able to do good. As people who have rejected God and trampled on his law, every one of us does evil. That is not to say that we are all equal in our degree of goodness or evilness. The line that divides good and evil does not cleave every human heart equally in two. But the history of humanity is a history of complex people. Heroes have flaws. Villains are capable of good deeds. David who killed Goliath was the same David who took another man's wife and had her husband murdered. A towering theologian can hold appalling views (and not just be excused as a 'child of his time').

The line dividing good and evil cuts through my heart too. As I look back at Christians of the past and wonder how they could have got some things so very right and other things so terribly wrong, I wonder what a Christian living in fifty, one hundred, two hundred years time would say if they could look back at my life. If they nodded their heads in agreement with my reformed, Baptist theology, what words and actions of mine would cause them to wince? On what issues would they ask how could someone who held to those Biblical principles end up so far from the mark in that particular way?

As our children get older, we're slowly teaching them that while good and evil are real and clear categories, labeling people as good or evil isn't quite so clear cut as they'd like to believe. We're reminding them that in the ultimate good vs evil story, we're the baddies and the only goody is Jesus. And yet we're also baddies who image God and so we can still reflect God's goodness, albeit in a distorted way. 

And so this is my plea to the adults: resist the caricatures. Recognise that people are complicated. Good and evil swirls together in each of our hearts. It's not that good and evil don't matter. I'm not saying that you should never describe someone as evil. I'm not saying that we should never apply church discipline, call out false teachers or judge that a leader is unfit for church or public office.

But we need to be nuanced in our thinking. It's a whole lot easier to view the world through a lens that views individuals (or groups of individuals) as simply goodies or baddies. But good and evil are too important to simply take the easy option. We must be honest about both the failings of people we admire and the good deeds of those we don't. We need to praise the good and we also need to be unequivocal about the bad. We need to be people of truth and integrity.

Post script: the following articles have been helpful for me in educating myself and sharpening my thinking on this issue, particularly regarding Christian heroes.

"Jonathan Edwards, Slavery, and the Theology of African-Americans", Thabiti Anyabwile

"Luther's Jewish Problem", Bernard Howard

"Some thoughts about statues..." Michael Ots

"When Our Heroes Don't Live Up to Their Theology", Thomas Kidd

"How I Process The Moral Failures of My Historical Heroes", John Piper

Smartphones and a simple change

It doesn't grab your attention. It was pretty cheap. The children like to play with it so it's been dropped on the floor a couple of times already; if you shake it, you can hear an ominous rattle of some loose parts inside.

A basic digital clock has been hands down my best purchase of the last year. 

I've been using a mobile phone as my digital clock and alarm since I was a teenager. I'd fumble for it in the night when I woke to check the time. It was often the last thing I checked at night and the first thing I looked at it in the morning. 

It had some good uses. Sometimes I used the last few minutes before I slept to catch up on my Bible memorisation. Sometimes I started the audio Bible app as soon I woke and let the Word of God flow over me for the first few minutes of my day. But far too often I checked my messages and emails first, followed by the news, followed sometimes by social media or random Internet browsing. 

I've read a lot in these last couple of years about smartphones and how they are changing us and the distraction they can be. I've read how getting rid of a smartphone temporarily or permanently, can be helpful and considered that option, but the reality is that I need my smartphone (or, more precisely, Whatsapp) for life here and for communication with those in my home country. Then I stumbled across this article on wrong reasons to check your phone in the morning and it resonated with me.

So I took the simple option and bought a digital alarm clock. I developed a new habit of leaving my phone in another room at night. My digital clock tells me the time. It wakes me up in a morning if I need it to (although with three children under the age of 5, that feature is rarely needed right now). And it does nothing else. I no longer start my day by looking at my phone and then get sucked into messages, emails, news or social media. 

And the crazy thing is that I've only gained with this change. If I have a few moments to myself before I need to get up in a morning, I get to use them in more spiritually profitable and mentally healthy ways. There have been no negative consequences from delaying checking my messages for an hour or two after I wake and only positive effects from framing my day with the most important things, thinking first of God and then the people he has literally put in front of me.

I'm not saying I've got it all sorted. Sometimes I get up early with the baby and grab my phone as soon as I get into the kitchen. Occasionally I forget to leave my phone in a different room. There are also times where, for ministry or family reasons, I need to be able to be contacted in the middle of the night. In those times, I keep my phone in the bedroom, all notifications muted except for incoming calls, and well out of arm's reach.

Buying a digital alarm clock sounds incredibly simple. It is incredibly simple! In fact it's so simple that it seems a little ridiculous to be writing a blog post about it. But it turns out simple changes can be some of the most effective. 

Ten years on

I'd like to say that I remember the first time the nine of us met together but I can't find the memory. I have plenty of other memories of the nine of us together to choose from though.

We were the new Executive Committee of our university's Christian Union (CU). A bunch of eager 19 and 20 year-olds who had the responsibility of leading the CU for the next year. We were all from different tribes of evangelicalism and attended a variety of churches between us. Between us there was (and continues to be) differing views over several 'secondary' theological issues and so there was plenty of potential for disagreements. But we were all united in the fundamentals of the Gospel and committed to helping our fellow Christian students make Christ known at our university.

That year we organised evangelistic events and talks, encouraged each other and our fellow students to pray, tried to help Christian students to get stuck into local churches, hosted CU meetings and weekends away, supported our small group student leaders and tried to share the Gospel with our own friends. We worked hard together, as well as being involved in our own churches and even managed to fit in some studying for our degrees as well.

We hadn't chosen each other as friends but had been thrown together by virtue of us all being asked to, and then agreeing, to take on different roles on the 'Exec'. But we spent a lot of time with each other and we grew close that year. We prayed together a lot. We laughed until we cried and sometimes we actually cried. In fact, after we'd finished our official duties and were no longer constrained to spend time together, we voluntarily went away for a few days as a group. I'd been a Christian since I was a fairly young child, but I grew so much that year and a lot of it was due to those people.

One conversation we had made a strong impression on me. I don't remember the specifics but I do remember the atmosphere becoming serious and the sober looks passed between us. Somehow it had come up in conversation that many people who were professing, active Christians at university slid away from the faith after graduation and during their 20s. Someone might have quoted some statistics about the percentage who fall away - I have no idea how substantiated they were. But we were mature enough to realise that having been CU leaders, dedicated in our Christian service, was no guarantee of continuing on in the faith. I remember the feeling of looking at each other, hoping that we'd prove the genuineness of our faith by keeping going.

Since then life has moved on and we've lost contact as a group. Some of us have kept in touch with others and, predictably, we've mostly seen each other at weddings. So it was a joy last week to have a ten year virtual reunion via a video call. Eight of us were able to make it, and there was news of the ninth person too. For one evening, we picked up where we'd left off in our friendships as we talked and laughed together. And I could have cried to hear that we are all continuing to follow Jesus.

As we all shared our different stories of what we've been doing in the last decade and how God has been at work in our lives, God's faithfulness shone through so clearly. There were happy updates of marriage, children, church life, work and house moves. The disappointments and griefs were given space too. They were all a monument to God's goodness.

This is not to boast in our own staying power though. For one thing, we're all only 30-ish years old! God willing, we have a lot of the race yet to run. Yet much more importantly, it is the Lord who keeps us. I firmly believe that no genuine Christian can fall away from the faith; the God who has called us will bring us safely home.

It's been a strange and difficult last couple of months. But in the midst of everything going on, I'm so glad that we were able to take a couple of hours to celebrate God's goodness to us. We raised our virtual Ebenezer and proclaimed that the Lord has helped us this far. And we prayed that God would keep us over the next ten years - and beyond - and finish the good work that he has started in each of us.

Guest post on gospelcentredparenting.com

Friends over at www.gospelcentredparenting.com had the great idea of a blog post series looking at different Christian families' daily lives in lockdown and how the Gospel is our hope in this.

It was a privilege to be asked to participate and you can read my contribution here.

Collecting grass in lockdown days

Yesterday morning found me collecting grass from our nearest park after my morning run. Our children, like all under 20 and over 65 year olds who live in the 30 biggest cities in Turkey, are banned from going outside at the moment as part of the coronavirus lockdown measures here. Like most people here, we live in an apartment. Collecting grass to make a play farm and give them a small connection with nature is the best I can do right now for my children who haven't been outside in nearly three weeks.

We're grateful for the way that the Turkish government has been working to halt the spread of COVID-19. In addition to children and the elderly being banned from going outside, everyone is being advised to stay at home as much as possible and those who are able to should work at home. Social distancing is encouraged and masks must be worn in markets, crowded public places etc. Places for leisure and entertainment, along with restaurants and cafes, are shut. Charity meetings are forbidden - most churches here are registered as charities, so church meetings are not taking place currently. The last two weekends many cities in Turkey (including our city) have been under curfew - no one is allowed to go outside of their homes at all for 48 hours. And with a national holiday tomorrow, we start a four day curfew at midnight tonight.

Being a cross-cultural worker and living in a different country is like living your life with a low level but constant background noise. Uncertainty about visas, conducting your life in a second language, raising Third Culture Kids, communicating with supporters, keeping on top of all the additional 'life admin' tasks that come with living abroad and the ways those tasks interact with and depend on each other. They all add up to make this hum that sits on the top of the normal goings-on of your life. Mostly you just live with it. A lot of the time I don't even notice it now. However COVID-19 has added a whole new layer of noise. What is usually a manageable level of background noise to live with has suddenly increased in volume.

We are meant to be returning to the UK for a summer home assignment in seven weeks. As international flights to and from Turkey are currently grounded and both countries are in lockdown, our summer 'plans' have been turned completely upside down.

So life seems hard right now. Hard when one of our children comes to us with a hopeful look in their eyes and tells us that they really like going outside. Hard not to be able to meet with our church family. Hard not to be able to see friends. Hard to think that it will be even longer before we get to see family and to introduce our baby (who is already nearly one year old) to many of them. Hard to think of all the things we'd hoped to do back in the UK this summer. Hard to live in the midst of ongoing uncertainty regarding visas anyway and especially when the uncertainty is compounded by coronavirus.

And yet.

We  know we have so much to be thankful for. We're at home, safe and healthy. My husband was already working several days a week from home with his computer programming business and that has continued as normal. We don't have to worry about a loss of income. We have enough food. We might be stuck in an apartment - but it's a relatively large apartment, with a balcony. We live in a stable country with good healthcare and the government here is taking the fight against coronavirus seriously. We might not be able to return to the UK this summer, but we will return at some point. Our unearned privilege of being born in a particular place assures us and our children of the right to enter a country that many people are desperate to get to.

I've been trying to work out how to reconcile the two concepts of "this situation is hard" and "we have so much to be grateful for". Can they even be reconciled? Is it even appropriate to describe our situation as hard when so many are in harder situations? When everybody is living through this strange time, does my situation have to be extraordinary to justify being acknowledged as hard? Did our choice to move to Turkey come with the duty to unflinchingly accept all the consequences of that decision - even when the consequences were unimaginable a few months ago? Does that same logic apply to doctors, nurses, hospital cleaners, supermarket workers who probably weren't imagining a global pandemic when they signed up?

As I've pondered these questions, I've come to the realisation that the key, for me at least, is self-pity.  Self-pity is never God-glorifying behaviour and yet it is so easy to slide into. My internal monologue starts to recount the difficulties and disappointments in my life right now. All these things we have to live with. All the things we can't do. When I'm focusing in on the hard things in my life through the skewed lens of self-pity, my perspective gets warped. I end up only being able to see those hard things. I miss the good things. I lose the ability to have compassion for other people's hard things. And I know from experience that the slide into self-pity rarely ends there. It twists into discontentment, envy, bitterness, resentment, anger.

I have another option though. I can look my troubles straight in the eye and say, "Yes, these things are hard. I also have many good things in my life. Other people are experiencing hard things too. Some of them are experiencing hard things because they are doing vital work. I can be thankful for their sacrifice. For others, circumstances combined with their personal situation determines their hard things. I can be compassionate towards them without being judgmental."

That could be the end. Gratitude, not self-pity. Simple, if not easy.

And yet.

From where do I get the strength to squash self-pity? When I've given out all of my emotional energy, where does the power to choose gratitude and contentment come from?

My husband is preaching this Sunday on why we don't need to fear the future, from those glorious verses at the end of Romans 8. So perhaps it was natural that the other evening, when the house was quiet and we were able to drink our mugs of tea in peace, that our conversation swung around to uncertainty and difficulties in the light of God's sovereignty plus goodness. And we reminded ourselves once again of why we can be thankful in the midst of difficult circumstances.

I can face disappointments and difficulties without an ounce of self-pity because God has promised that he's going to use the hard things for his glory. If God did not spare even his own Son for me, I do not need to doubt his goodness. I can go about my days armed with a grateful heart because God has said that nothing can separate me from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus.

And when my child asks again about going outside, I can sweep him up for a hug and tell him the truth. "I know it's hard, sweetheart. I know you want to go outside. I wish I could take you outside. But you have to stay inside right now to keep you safe and to keep others safe. And you know what? God is still God. He loves us. God says that he will use the virus to make us more like Jesus. He planned this virus because somehow, in a way I don't understand, it will help people to see how amazing and special he is. And that is a good thing. It's the most important thing."

Lockdown silver linings

Last week I wrote about Ferdi and the unexpected blessing that our church's online meetings have been to him.

Today I want to share about another person who has benefitted from the online meetings of a church.

Me.

As both a mother of little ones and as a cross-cultural worker, I'm limited in being able to attend church prayer meetings. But the move to video chat prayer meetings has been an unanticipated silver lining of lockdown. This week my husband and I were able to join our Turkish church's virtual prayer meeting, and our UK sending church's prayer meeting.

Our Turkish church's weekly prayer meeting is early evening because young people (including those in their 20s who are unmarried and so still live at home with parents) are typically required to be home in evenings or by dark. That time slot coincides with the hour that I really need to be at home to nurse and get to bed a tired and clingy baby. When he was smaller, I could take him to the prayer meeting and I'd rock him in the carrier or someone would happily hold him. That's not a feasible option now he's out of the tiny baby phase, so we'd accepted that for this season my husband would be the one going to the prayer meeting.

And even when I can start going to the prayer meeting again, L and I will be alternating going. Like many other parents of small children around the would whose churches have evening prayer meetings where it's not practical or loving to bring the children, one of us will stay home with the children while the other goes out to the prayer meeting. Then we'll switch the next week.

But then our prayer meeting became a virtual prayer meeting. So Wednesday night we rearranged our evening routines, and we both got to join the prayer meeting. What a blessing!

Later on, once the children were in bed and asleep, we logged in to a different video chat application for our UK home church's prayer meeting. As workers who have been sent overseas, we're fairly used to making a brief appearance in the prayer meetings of our supporting churches. Usually they are all gathered together in a church hall or someone's living room, we appear on the screen and give an update and there's a few minutes of conversation and somebody prays for us. It's a great benefit of technology. But they are all there in person together, and we're the odd ones out appearing on a screen. We are guests in those prayer meetings.

Yet this week we were equals. All of us were sitting in our homes sharing prayer requests and praying over the Internet. Not only did both L and I get to join, but we got to pray with a group of people we know and love in English. Just as Bible translators talk of the way that God's Word resonates in a person's 'heart language', praying in your native tongue brings with it a freedom and a naturalness that doesn't come so easily in your second language.

Real life prayer meetings are better than video chat prayer meetings. But video chat prayer meetings are better than missing out on prayer meetings.