Most of us why try to practise the Christian faith are aware of forces within us that pull in opposite directions.  We could liken our Christian experience to being a bit like the ‘push me pull you’ animal in the Dr Doolittle stories.  One such pressure is a strong attraction to the past while simultaneously knowing that we have to engage with the present and the future.  Some traditions and denominations make it a mark of their identity to refuse to engage with the present.  Examples come to mind of the strong supporters of the Latin Mass or the preacher who insists on tackling themes and debates that have not made a lot of sense since the 16^th century.  The present/past tension is played out weekly in the mundane job of choosing hymns.   Everyone who is responsible for this task knows the problem of keeping a balance between old and the new.   The normal compromise, which is to choose music from every style, may cover up the cracks of this tension, but it does not really solve the dilemma of a church, one that is required to look simultaneously to the present, past and future.

Another ‘push me pull you’ factor for the conscientious Christian is the tension between reassurance and challenge.  Both the experience of feeling ‘safe’ within the Church and the opposite feeling of being challenged to take risks for God can be read out of Scripture.   The Bible contains many verses which speak of refuge and safety.  God is the one who feeds the hungry, comforts the sad and binds up the broken.  The gospels also contain those memorable words of Jesus. ‘Come unto me all you that are heavy laden and I will give you rest.’

Many Christians would like to remain at the comfort end of things and receive only these messages of reassurance.  Sermons which emphasise constantly the message of salvation, both as a present reality and a future promise, will always be popular.  The idea of being safe evokes many things but it may also carry an echo of being rescued by a parent from a situation of perceived danger.  The experience of being gathered up into a parent’s arms and removed from something frightening is probably a common memory imprinted on most of us.  The idea of being kept safe and the teaching about salvation will, no doubt, evoke such primal memories of rescue and safety.  One might go further and say that without such memories, the language of ‘being saved’ would have little meaning at an emotional level.

The challenge part of the Christian faith taps into a different stage of our growing up.  It evokes the time in our lives when we were convinced that we were sufficiently mature to go out on our own.  We no longer needed to be taken everywhere by a parent.  We were able to negotiate the dangers of the street and other children by ourselves without parental help.  The transition from being kept safe to taking risks is particularly associated with the teenage years.  The wisdom of parenthood is knowing the right moment to allow the child to tackle each set of new challenges alone.  Even when the parent gets it right it is likely that there will still have been disagreement and conflict with the child.  It is hard to imagine that there will ever be complete unanimity between parent and child on this issue.  Somehow or other the growing child enters the adventure of doing things on their own, taking risks in the journey of life.  This sense of adventure, the overcoming of barriers of fear and uncertainty is an important stage.  The memory of it enables us to take seriously the challenges that are implicit in the Christian faith.

I recall the sermons I have preached on the words of Jesus ‘Launch out into the deep and there cast your nets’. This passage can be read as a straight invitation to move forward from the nursery slopes of being ‘safe’ to a discovery that the Christian faith is also all about adventure.    Then there is the passage which speaks about meeting Christ in the hungry, the imprisoned, the naked and the thirsty.  These passages remind us that the challenge of faith is not only about reassurance and comfort, it is about accepting risk, danger, newness and challenge.  The ‘safe’ part of the faith draws on memories of infancy; the challenge part of faith draws on the memories of the teenage years and later.

These push me pull you aspects of Christianity need to be held in tension and reconciled, both within the individual Christian and in a congregation.  A church which preaches only one part of this equation is always going to be lop-sided.  This would also be true of an adult whose preparation for adulthood had consisted only of the memories of being kept safe by parents.  Hopefully, the creative tension of wanting to go it alone and the arguments with parents about the implications of this, are also part of what we take into adulthood.  Being adult is about the acceptance and resolution of conflict as much as it is about learning to be loved and nurtured.   

Lop-sided and unbalanced is an accusation that can be made of many churches that emphasise ‘salvation’ above any other teaching.  Such a church will not be wrong in one sense.  What they teach is clearly biblical.  But there is still error present because a needed balance to this approach is not being presented alongside this classic teaching.   We all need to hear the side of Christianity which challenges religious complacency.  One area of complacency, which we refer to constantly on this blog, is indifference to suffering and abuse experienced in the Church itself.  Large parts of the church are very successful at shutting out the stories of those who have suffered in this way.  Different sets of priorities are put forward so that the uncomfortable parts of Christian responsibility do not have to be faced.  There is probably no church that succeeds in finding exactly the level of balance that I believe the Christian faith calls for.  I offer this notion of balance, not because I think I have found it, but because I believe we should all be striving to reach it both within our personal Christian journey and in the lives of our congregations.

Many liberal Christian bodies are under attack from conservative groups because they do not teach the ‘truth’ according to their accusers.  The implication of this challenge from conservatives who question the ‘orthodoxy’ of others, is that it is possible to encapsulate ‘truth’ in a series of precise verbal formulae.  These seem very much to focus on the notion of salvation.  Anyone failing the test of repeating the correct words is deemed to be ‘unsound’ or worse, destined for hell.  My response to this kind of attack is to ask a quite different question.   Does the accusing Church as well as the Church under attack preserve balance, a balance here between ‘salvation’ and service of others?  Are the Christians in your Church taught, as a matter of high priority, to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and visit prisoners?  Are these actions, commanded by Christ himself, just as important as believing a list of statements prepared by a small group. Those who decide on what is orthodox belief may simply be a cluster of leaders who happen to be in charge at a particular moment in history. The idea that their version and articulation of saving truth has to be considered universal in scope, applying to every culture and language for ever, seems impertinent to say the least. We need to rediscover within all the churches generous engagement with those who differ from us as well those whose position represents a balancing up of the beliefs we hold with great conviction. Truth is seldom an ‘either-or’ scenario. It is is most likely to be found as a ‘both-and’ and requires from us the gift of generosity and fresh imagination to embrace it in this form.