"A prophet without honour"

I approached a man I guessed was from Hong Kong while working on the stand yesterday. As usual, I asked whether he had time to hear more about Toybox and our work. Instead of answering my question, he asked me where I was from.

"Hong Kong," I said.

"Are you studying?" he asked.

"No. I work here."

"You work here?" he cried. He tutted. "Let me tell you something." He moved the flyer I had give him away. "Don't sell to me, I don't like people selling to me."

Then he proceeded to dole out lengthy advice on what I should be doing with my life and career for about 5 minutes before leaving the stand abruptly.

It was incredibly rude and pretty judgemental. I have to say I was quite affected by it. The crux of what this guy said to me was that I should be doing a PhD in the university degree I got, then going into research and becoming a specialist. "Then one day, when you are a specialist and people ask you for advice and expertise, God will use you."

Sadly, I have heard this all before. It's nothing new, and I have received this spiel from so many people from my hometown - many of whom have virtually been strangers to me, who have seen fit to weigh in to my life and tell me that everything I have done is wrong. But I rarely get it in such an explicit way from someone from.Hong Kong who claims to be a Christian.

I don't know why so many people from Hong Kong seem to love telling me what to do with my life. That what I am doing is wrong. That I should be pursuing an affluent lifestyle, a lucrative career, or academic prestige and credentials.  I am not doing these things and I really believe in the path I have chosen. I don't doubt myself when harangued by these views. But it just gets annoying and very old.

Never mind that these mindsets are counter-gospel, but what I don't understand is where people find the presumption to give someone they don't know this kind of arrogant judgement on their life choices.  I don't know whether this occurs as much in other cultures.

If I'm completely honest, sometimes I am apprehensive about meeting people from Hong Kong here in the UK. I expect this kind of unwelcome judgement from them, this scorn of my choices to try and live in solidarity with the poor and needy, to live out of the love of Jesus. Sadly this happens too often for me to feel like this anxiety is unfounded.

It's the reason why I don't like going home. Who likes feeling like they are looked down on all the time? I am proud of my choices though. I am not ashamed of Jesus. As I said, it just gets old and wearisome.

I was reflecting on Jesus' words, "A prophet is not without honour except in his own town and in his own home." Maybe this is just the way it is. It certainly has always been for me.

I listened to an interview on the radio a while ago with a Pakistani lady who recently immigrated to the UK. She said that she actually preferred living here, even if she couldn't speak English well and didn't have much involvement in the community. She said that her neighbours were kind and warm to her. At home in Pakistan, she was looked down on and gossiped about. Here, she wasn't judged and under pressure to conform to the standards they imposed. She didn't like being with other Pakistani women there.

I really resonated with what this lady said. I know it sounds awful, to say you would rather not be with your own kin. That you are anxious about being with people of your ethnicity. I don't know if anyone else will understand this, but it is how I have felt for a long time.

And I think that Jesus understands it. I hope and pray he does, anyway.

Teaching, ignorance and stigma

I went to a session this morning on emotions and how we should deal with them as Christians. Although the talk was good in parts and the speaker was obviously a really nice man, some of it made me feel very frustrated, sad and worried.

I'd just like to say first that I am glad New Word Alive have decided to put in a sermon series on emotion. Emotion is an issue that has been neglected in many evangelical circles and it is great that the New Word Alive leadership have decided to give this issue an airing. The importance of and hunger for teaching on emotion is obviously at the forefront of people's minds, as the venue for this session yesterday couldn't accommodate everyone who was interested and we had to move into a larger theatre today.

The speaker was obviously a man who loved Jesus deeply and wanted to live a godly life. I want to make clear that I am not trying to disrespect him.

What I want to do is draw attention to some things I found worrying about his talk, and some beliefs that I feel are counterproductive and dangerous.

"I dont know much about psychology"

I approached the speaker after his talk to feed back some of my concerns. I thanked him for his talk and for how he had shared. I said I had worked with acutely mentally ill people, and that although what he had said might be relevant to many people without mental health issues or emotional disorders, I didn't think what he said was true of those with mental illness. For them, emotions were not just a matter of "heart values" which they could control using their will and self-control. And their origin wasn't primarily in their "heart values" but a range of complex genetic and social factors.

He was polite and gracious. He said, "I don't know much about psychology." He told me he thought there may be original feelings that sparked everything else up in mental illness, and these feelings were rooted in heart values. And they could try and deal with these in the ways that he'd outlined - that is, to evaluate your heart values and try and love the right things, based in scriptural truth.

What this speaker said really disturbs me. I worry because it is not based on research and well-established psychological insights, but just based on what he thought might be true. This man has written a book on emotions and claims to be an expert in this area - but he doesn't know about key psychological evidence and practice.

This is extremely worrying. In that room there were hundreds of people listening to his teaching. Although he had claimed that the area of emotions is very complicated and muddy, he did put forward his approach as a universal one. He didn't make a disclaimer that this wasn't appropriate for people with mental health issues, which is dangerous, given that, as he confessed he doesn't know much about psychology.

To be honest, I am pretty appalled by this. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that someone speaking with authority on a certain issue would have done in depth research about that issue, and would actually be teaching true, solid and evidence-based information. I understand that he was trying to base it all on the Bible, but the Bible doesn't tell us how to deal with mental illness. Like many other issues, we have to figure it out using discernment and wisdom.

I don't know in what other sector it would be acceptable for an expert speaker to say outright that they didn't know much about the issue they were talking about, and to still have their opinion treated with the sort of authority speakers have here.

"I'm not an expert on phobias... I'm not keen on people going to expert counsellors"

I was really disappointed - and frankly, quite angry - by one bit of the talk in particular. The speaker mentioned phobias. "I'm not an expert on phobias," he said. "In certain situations, it might be good for someone struggling with a phobia to go and talk to a counsellor. But I'm not keen on people going to expert counsellors, as I think we should deal with things within the church. The reason why it might be good for some people to go to an expert counsellor is because they know what kind of questions to ask to help people understand what values are driving them."

Huge alarm bells went off in my head when he said this. First of all, he offered advice about phobias - a serious mental health issue that needs expert care and management - while at the same time professing to not know much about them. If I offered you medical advice about a chronic heart condition,  then said I wasn't an expert on chronic heart conditions, would you accept that? Would that be worth listening to?

Would that be responsible if I were a massively respected teacher and speaker, being heard by hundreds?

The other thing that disturbed me was this notion of keeping things inside the church; . I confess that I was angered, having encountered lots of resistance within certain Christian circles to counselling and emotional support in the past. If you are struggling with a serious mental health issue (like a phobia), you need help from a qualified professional. It is not appropriate to go to a church leadership team, who are not qualified to give specialist help to people struggling with mental health issues.

Again, a medical analogy. If you have a broken leg, is it appropriate to go to your church leadership team to help you recover? No. You go to a doctor.

It's a no-brainer.

So why do speakers like the one I heard today openly say they are not keen on people going "outside the church" to see expert counsellors, including people with mental disorders like phobias? Why is this ignorance about mental health so prevalent in churches?

Ignorance and stigma

Like I said before, I honestly think that the speaker was a nice guy. I got the sense that he genuinely doesn't know much about mental illness and mental health. He genuinely thinks that with the help of God, Christians should be able to control their emotions by making sure they have the "right heart" and "love the right things"- primarily, salvation, Scripture and God.

But the whole situation saddens and angers me. Because as Christians, as the Church, we should be at the forefront of standing up for truth and fighting against stigma when it comes to mental health. But instead, ignorant beliefs about mental health abound within Christian communities.

The speaker claimed that emotions originate from our "heart values"- that if we have the right values and perspective, that we desire godly things, our emotions will be right and godly. He said at one point that they are ultimately our responsibility and can be controlled by our will. Although there are influencing factors, like our upbringing and our health, the origin of our emotions is our heart.

Beliefs like these are out of touch with solid evidence and psychological research that has been accumulated over the past decades. In cases of mental illness, this kind of explanation is just circumspect. And it is loosely extrapolated from Scripture - the Bible doesn't offer a theory of emotions, just metaphors and descriptions of. So much research has been done into the origin of emotions and mental health issues, which the speaker just doesn't take into account at all.

Not only are the beliefs based on ignorance, but they also feed stigma. The notion that our emotions can be controlled by our will in this way is hugely simplistic. It feeds the notion that "bad, ungodly emotions" are our fault. And this is plainly untrue for mentally ill people. They can't control their episodes by will. Their conditions don't have anything to do with their moral goodness or their acceptance of God's salvation. They are ill, and it isn't their fault. They can't control it in this way, even if they are faithful Christians.

People are mentally ill not because they are weak or at fault or can't snap out of their wrong emotions. To preach these kinds of stigmatising, ignorant things is unworthy of the gospel.

Christians need to be the best at what we do

A church leader can't be expected to be an expert in psychology and mental health if they have not been trained and qualified in this field. This goes without saying. So they shouldn't claim expertise in this issue and go on to give guidance that affects 1 in 4 people struggling with mental illness. It's inappropriate and highly dangerous. It can destroy lives.

So why shouldn't churches work with counsellors and mental health professionals "outside the church"? They are trained, qualified and are in the best position to give people the help they need. And there are committed Jesus-followers who work in these fields. We should be working together.

Dave said some wise words to me a while ago. He said that as Christians, we should be the best at whatever we do. If you're a teacher, you should be the best teacher in your school. If you're a nurse, you should be the most caring and effective nurse in the hospital. If you're a social worker, you should be the most compassionate, well-informed person in the sector.

We are doing what we do for the Lord.

So we need to be at the forefront of advances and discoveries in every field in which we work. Christians are everywhere, and we need to do what we do well.

This is partly why this talk made me feel so frustrated and sad. Because it was so symptomatic of churches' lax engagement with important discoveries in "secular" culture. Discoveries that really benefit humanity and would help us in our mission to bring the Kingdom of God to earth.

As followers of Jesus, we really need to stand for truth, justice, and love. If we don't, then what hope is there for the world? 

Denying Christ

Today is my second day at New Word Alive. I am here with Toybox and have been working shifts on our stand, trying to spread the word about our work with street children. Outside the exhibition times,  we have had the chance to get some rest and attend some sessions, which has been a welcome change.

This morning, I went to a session on Mark 14 which focused on Peter's denial of Christ. There were lots of things I struggled with about the talk - whether it was reactionary or genuinely theological, I'm not sure - but the main thing that stood out to me was this question:

What would it mean for you to renounce Christ?

One of the things I struggled with about the talk was that I felt the speaker presented things in an oversimplistic way. In the gospels, Peter famously denies Christ three times. He is asked whether he knows Jesus and he lies.

But what does that look like in our lives? In our culture, where we have religious freedom and can profess to be Christians without being imprisoned or killed, we are highly unlikely to be presented with this kind of dramatic choice. We aren't often asked whether we know Jesus in the same direct way that Peter was, with the threat of persecution atnour heels. Our denials of Jesus are not as straightforward as that.

This is where I get confused. Because what actually counts as denying Christ as a Christian in the Western world?

What counts as a compromise of faith? What should we be defending? Aside from our faith in Jesus - which is generally left alone and accepted as a valid worldview in our society - what beliefs would, if rejected, count as a denial of Christ?

This is where I feel like it all comes down to interpretation. Whether it's marriage, sexuality, the church, the Bible, creation - people from all sorts of standpoints and movements will insist that denying their point of view is denying Jesus.

So how can we know what beliefs we need to defend in order to say we are not denying Christ?

The gospel is so complicated, and faith is not simple. In our culture of comfortable Christianity, I struggle to get a handle on what extreme concepts like  renouncing Jesus mean. How can we be sure we aren't denying him? What do we hold onto if we follow him? How do we know what to fight for when we are bombarded with people from all sides telling us what faithful Christians should believe?

It is clear that if faced with the question of whether or not I follow Christ, to say that I do not is a denial of Christ. But if such an explicit question doesn't come (a common occurence in our society) - what does renouncing Christ actually mean?

On what the central beliefs of Christianity are, there is more dissent than agreement. That's why I don't think oversimplistic presentations are helpful. There bring up so many more questions.

Most committed Christians want to be faithful to the God that they serve. They don't want to follow in Peter's footsteps. But sometimes, it isn't clear what choices lead to this path. It just isn't always as black and white as some people suggest.

Survival, humanity and the power of fiction

I have spent the past couple of days in slacks, underneath a duvet, sniffling and sneezing my way through a bad cold. With my husband away at a church sailing week, I have found company through my dog and my Xbox. And in particular, the episodic masterpiece of a game that is The Walking Dead, which has had me in tears more than I had imagined a zombie video game ever could.

From the perspective of my cold-ridden, home-bound isolation, it may not be so strange that I am blogging about a zombie video game. Yes, I am aware of the reputation of zombie video games for gamers and non-gamers alike. Many of them are gory, bloody and lack any sense of deeper purpose than hacking and slashing. I wouldn’t willingly play a game like this (I tried Left 4 Dead with friends, and I was pretty much closing my eyes through the whole thing - not a great way to get through the game). This is not my kind of video game, and this is definitely not what The Walking Dead is like.

The Walking Dead is a character-centred, choice-centred, point-and-click video game. It is split into 5 episodes, which are amazing cinematic feats of storytelling. I don’t think I have ever played a game which has been so powerfully and simply crafted, so compelling and true to life and human nature. (Well, true to life and human nature in the event of a zombie apocalypse.) You can play The Walking Dead like it is a movie, a TV series - except that you can take part in the direction that the story goes. But it isn’t stunted in the way that RPGs often are [To non-gamers: Role-playing games, where you play as a protagonist in a story, making choices and doing quests towards an ultimate goal]. It doesn’t have many of the traditional RPG conventions that you come to expect as a gamer, which make the experience rather confusing and exclusive for a new gamer or first time gamer. The Walking Dead feels seamless and natural. Anyone could play it and have their internal world changed. It feels as if you were really there, you were really the protagonist Lee Everett, making these choices, speaking with these people, feeling the pressure and desperation and tragedy of the situation, where you can’t really win in the battle for survival.

My hours sitting with this game made me think hard about survival, humanity and the power of fiction. Actually, The Walking Dead made me think of Cormack McCarthy’s ‘The Road’. High praise for a 21st century video game I think!

The theme of survival is a common one that's been explored in fiction. In the event of a worldwide catastrophe, how would we survive? Would we know how to go about surviving in famine, hunger, illness and scarcity?

Throw in an aggressor, a threat: an epidemic which is contagious, zombies who infect and kill. And then in addition to the battle for survival, we see how human nature would fare. Would we turn on each other? What depths would we sink to in order to survive? In the absence of laws and structures which keep order, what would happen?

The Walking Dead explores this so powerfully. You are immersed in the story, making heartrending decisions that inevitably decide the fate of other people's lives. You are confronted with difficult choices that you have to make in order to survive. Every second you have to decide how far you will go to preserve your humanity, compassion, and integrity- and what you are prepared to sacrifice to keep on living.

You see characters at their most broken. Hunger, illness, exhaustion. Paranoia and aggression. Grief and mourning. Sick and brutal murders, driven by a twisted will to live. Deaths are common but you have to soldier on in a bleak reality with few hopes to cling to.

Some things really stood out to me in this game, and correspondingly, in ‘The Road’. In both of these stories, the protagonist is taking care of a child. In The Walking Dead, the child is an 8-year-old called Clementine who has lost her parents and has no one except you. The purity and innocence of the child’s way of thinking is a lifeline. It is a real juxtaposition in the dog-eat-dog, cruel world of survival, and a real connection to the most beautiful parts of humanity that have all but gone. The relationship between the protagonist and the child in both stories is heartrending - perhaps even more so in The Walking Dead, because you are the protagonist and you are forming the relationship. I don’t want to spoil the plot of either of these stories so I won’t say more. But it isn’t just the protagonist who keeps the child alive by taking care of them physically and keeping them safe. The child keeps the protagonist alive too with the innocence that is burning inside them.

Another thing that really stood out to me is the importance of humour. I hadn’t really thought of this before, so The Walking Dead was a real eye-opener in this respect. Humour is entirely absent in ‘The Road’, which makes it all the bleaker and gives it more of a heaviness and lethargy. But in The Walking Dead, the characters who can bring humour to situations are the ones who seem to preserve more humanity, showing more compassion and respect for others. 

There is a scene in The Walking Dead where a guy called Omid makes (awesome) jokes about a bust head statue he sees in the attic where the group are trapped. His girlfriend yells at him to stop, that it isn’t the right time to be joking around. Omid eventually yells back at her. “I’m just trying to ease the tension a bit here,” he says.  He continues to do make clever and funny comments throughout.

For me, Omid was a sanity check. The humour he was able to preserve and bring to bleak situations helped me not to succumb to the hopelessness of the situation. It reminded me that we were still human, and still had the capacity for joy and laughter. It made me think of Doug Stanhope’s philosophy - that the only real weapon we have against the crappiness of the world is our ability to laugh in its face. Even more important and relevant in a destroyed and hopeless world full of tragedy, death and brutality.

There are obvious things to learn. The value of compassion, above all other things. That it is worth being compassionate, even if it means there is ‘another mouth to feed’. Even if on the face of it, it reduces your chances of survival. Because without compassion, love and care, what is the point of surviving?  What is the point of living if we don’t have the things that make us human?

In The Walking Dead, your group of survivors discover a barricaded area called Crawford where the survival of the fittest mentality is king. In an attempt to survive, the residents of Crawford form their own stringent rules and principles, casting out all those who are vulnerable and who are what they term a ‘drain on resources’. Children, the elderly, and the sick are left to fend for themselves outside Crawford, which has a monopoly on all essential supplies like food and medicine.

A young woman called Molly tells her story. “When the dead started walking and Crawford shut itself in, it seemed like a pretty good deal at first. We were safe, we had everything we needed to survive. Then the rules started coming down. No one who couldn’t justify their place, earn their keep. No one who required special care. My sister was a diabetic, and by Crawford’s rules, that made her a liability… Crawford, they always talked about how their system worked, how anything was better than becoming ‘one of them’. But I saw what they’d already become. I just wish I had seen it before it was too late. Before they came and took my sister away.” 

I think the scary thing about all of this is that I can imagine it happening. I lived through H5N1 and SARS in Hong Kong, which is maybe why all these movies and games about contagion, epidemics and apocalypse strike a chord in me. I remember sitting on empty trains, being told to stay at home, being afraid to eat with others. Empty streets and suspicious eyes behind medical masks. I remember that time of mistrust and fear. I can see how, pushed to the extreme, people would turn on each other and chase after survival, leaving all semblances of love and compassion behind.

This is the power of fiction. It helps us to see through to our core, our broken human nature. It helps us to think deeply about the things that make us human, the things that are worth fighting and dying for.

I am, as many of you know, a massive gamer. I love video games. I think a great video game is the most powerful media of them all. The Walking Dead is a prime example of this. I know we are not living in a zombie apocalypse, forced to kill for our survival. I know this is a fictional universe with a fictional premise. But the things that drive the characters are so true. They are so real. The relationships, their motivations and fears, the beliefs that hold them together - they are close to us too. And if the world were to go to hell in a handbasket today, much of what happened to them would probably happen to many of us.

So I think there is a lot that we can learn from games, books and movies like The Walking Dead. About our humanity, about what we cannot lose even if all else is lost. About the true meaning and purpose of survival.

Sometimes we need some fiction to remind us of the deeper reasons why we are alive. 

Open email - Please read!

Dear friend,

Would you take a few moments to ask your MP to read an important report about truth, lies and poverty?

Four major Christian denominations have produced a report The lies we tell ourselves: ending comfortable myths about poverty. They have sent a copy to every MP in the UK.

This report is important because it shows that common myths about poverty are demonstrably untrue - yet they underpin much thinking about poverty in the UK.  These myths have allowed vulnerable families to be blamed for their poverty, and they pollute the debate around poverty and welfare.

I believe that the issues of poverty and welfare are too important to allow myths and half-truths to influence the political debate. So I emailed my MP to ask them to make sure they read the report, and respond to its contents. 

Could you email your MP too? It only takes a couple of minutes, using this simple e-action. 

Thanks,

Mel

For more information, please check out:

Joint Public Issues - Truth and lies about poverty 

Church Action on Poverty - The blame game must stop