St Paul's, the protestors and the parallel universe

The anti-capitalists-on-the-steps-of-St-Paul’s saga rumbles on. Somewhere, in a parallel universe, a bunch of demonstrators recently turned up on the doorstep of a large church in central London. Here’s what happened next…

The people who worked for the church went out to chat to the protestors. They didn’t preach to them, they talked with them. They didn’t wear strange dresses, they wore normal clothes.

They pointed out to the protestors that other people wanted to get in to the church so that they could meet together and hear from God’s word together. They invited the protestors to join them, but asked if they would move their tents a little, to create a way of access into the building.

The protestors refused, so the church leaders hired a hall nearby to meet in, and closed the main building. The drawback of this was that tourists couldn’t look at the church (it was a famous one), but this didn’t matter much because (a) it wasn’t the main purpose of the building anyway and (b) the church leaders never charged anyone to look in the building anyway.

They continued to talk to the protestors. They made three main points:

• The Lord Jesus was very firm with those who worshipped wealth and lived for money (Luke 16 v 13). He said it would never deliver (Luke 12 v 15). He challenged them to give it all away (Luke 18 v 22-25). He Himself had nothing (Luke 9 v 58).
• The Lord Jesus was clear that the wealthy needed not only to turn away from treating money as a god, but needed to turn to Him as God (Luke 19 v 1-10). And He was clear that everybody needed to do that, too (Luke 13 v 1-5).
• In fact, while the Lord Jesus was pretty tough about wealth, He also said some challenging things about the poor. He claimed that there was something more important than alleviating poverty, and that was treating Him as God, and giving our best to Him (Mark 14 v 3-9). Why? Because He came to die and to rise, not to make us financially rich (or even financially OK), but to make us spiritually rich, in His perfect kingdom beyond death, the only place where poverty really is history.

The church showed its unity. And the church leaders made sure that whenever they spoke to the media, they mentioned in every sentence the name of Jesus, and what He had come to do—to rescue us not from material poverty, but from spiritual poverty.

Mind you, in this parallel universe:

• Evangelical churches continually challenge themselves to find the balance between spreading the gospel, but also being a blessing to their community through acts of sacrificial love to those in need.
• I am personally, practically and regularly involved in helping the poor in ways that I find hard…

Now back to the real world