I just heard that there have been floods in the corner of Uganda I visited in January. Livestock, supplies, a school – these have all been destroyed by the waters. In one village, six people have died.

The images of terraced hillsides and burnt earth are still fresh in my mind from that trip, but I struggle to imagine the sorrow and fear that must have settled on so many of those remarkable people during the storms. I feel as though they are a long way off – further now because of their suffering and struggles. I’m finding it hard to think of them. It’s as if they’ve slipped out of focus.

Depth of field – a blurred background behind something sharp in the front – it looks fine in a photo, but I’m less of a fan when it comes to life itself. Strikes me that the tight focus is part of the barrage of ailments that gets in the way of faith. We get all narrowed and myopic, obsessed by the detail and captivated by the agenda that we fail to recognise the drama that unfolds around us.

Last night a few of us were talking about the things that hold us back in our faith. I got thinking about the story of the prodigal son and wondered at the different phases of the narrative that I find myself on – at times head down in a trough, at other points wanting to take the first steps home, sometimes searching for the father, sometimes feeling the embrace.

It has often been said that the story’s title works better as The Parable of the Forgiving Father than the Parable of the Prodigal Son, and there’s something about the former that trumps the latter. There’s a wider view, a greater perspective, a fuller depth of field when we think about how the father chooses to unhitch his dignity and run. Once he was heading back, all the son had to do was look up and see him coming. Had there been Skype back in the day, I suspect that all the son would have had to have done would have been to click, call and see the father’s love straining against the separation.

The choice to live eyes down, head fixed, heart bound is one that appeals to so many of us. We reframe it as ‘focus’, ‘determination’ or ‘coping’, yet none of these tags can beat a 360 view underneath a marathon sky.

Quite what this has to do with the floods in Uganda I’m not sure. In fact, I’m tempted to think that it also has little to do with the news that I’m going to be doing some interviews on Sunday with local BBC radio stations. But, in truth, I think that both will be better for my looking up and seeing the picture as fully as I possibly can.

I travelled with my friend to Michigan to attend a conference last week. We arrived on the 4th of July, dropped our jaws at the sheer volume of the fireworks and opened up our notebooks to capture the pearls from a couple of seasoned preachers.

I wrote a lot down. But I think I’ll share a story that was told by the third on the bill, a guy who spoke in oxymoron and whose second session I skipped in favour of some mindless task back at the hotel.

There is a woman whose baby has just died. Her grief is paralysis. Her world thrown out of time. Her infant – too fleetingly acquainted with life – now cold and rigid, is held fast to the woman’s breast. The days are paced out by eternity, the sun and moon no longer dictating the tides of sleep and work. Her body and mind wage a civil war upon each other; the one prepared to nurture the infant that never lived, while the other tries to comprehend its death. The one thing she knows for sure is that she must find a reason for this loss.

Finally she understands the saint’s plan; to see her suffering as part of a chorus, to hear her question echoed across the hills. Then, and only then, can she bury her baby.

‘Suffering needs empathy, not answers.’

With these words the speaker closed the story out and we all enjoyed a brief silence punctuated by our own internal ‘mmmmmmmm’s.

But while I enjoyed the moment, I have to say that I’ve never really been much of a fan of asking ‘why’ when it comes to suffering. Perhaps I’m a slacker, but it’s struck me that the question is both completely impossible to answer on one level, and utterly easy to respond to on another; why do we suffer? Because we live in a world of action and consequence, because imperfection is part of our story, because crap happens.

That’s not what I wanted to really say about the story though. What I wanted to say was that I sat cynically throughout the guy’s first talk, resisting the urge to roll my eyes with each pseudo-heretical quote he sent up like the previous night’s fireworks.

And I realised that life comes full circle. As he criticised the vogue in contemporary worship for songs he called ‘Jesus is my boyfriend’, he spent considerable time reciting a list of provocative, artistic, creative ways in which he and his community of believers had engaged with God. It was every bit as narrow-focused as the Boyfriend thing, and in the car on the way to lunch I declared that his ‘Jesus is my Banksy’ theme made him just as limp.

I felt pretty good about that line. And I felt pretty good about writing off whatever else of his talk I remembered. And I felt pretty good about planning what I was going to do during his next session on the stage.

The circle completes. I become the fool I sneer at – or what I despise in others is highly likely to be at the root of my own rubbish. I end up unable to tell the difference between his myopia and my own. And I’m reminded of the time when I first realised that if you put an extreme right wing fascist in the same room as a hardcore dictatorial left wing nut-job, they’d probably have a good old chat about the best ways of silencing whoever happened to be winding them up at the time.

So, with that in mind, you should check out Peter Rollins and mine the wisdom for yourself.

There’s a pattern emerging here. I go to do the monthly breakfast down at the drop in centre and I return with a head full of thoughts about the nature of Christianity and the state of the Church. Yesterday it was the bacon that did it.

A pork-related incident occurred towards the end of the breakfast, when one of the – what do we call them: clients? Diners? Customers? – anyway, someone came up and asked for a bacon roll. She’d been on the computer for a while and had missed the rush, and as there was no more up with us at the serving hatch, my little buddy went back to the cook to see if there was any more that was ready to eat. There was. Just four rashers. Cooked and lip-smackingly-ready to get bapped up. But there was a problem: these last rashers were not intended for local homeless and rootless. They were for the cook.

It struck us as wrong, so we liberated said bacon and served the lady in question.

Part of me wanted to be able to slate the cook. I mean, you don’t turn up to serve at a breakfast for local homeless people and then deny them the very breakfast just because you feel a little peckish. What was it, a reward? And what’s with the four rashers; there were seven of us on the team – was he planning on trying to do it without us noticing?

But I couldn’t go through with the character assassination. For all his weird motives, awkwardness and curmudgeonly-air, this guy had given up his Sunday morning yet again to place himself alongside the poor. He had served, faithfully, in front of people he clearly struggled to connect with, when there must have been any number of excuses to give it a miss. Heck, the guy had even bought all the bacon. Did I really feel OK slagging him off?

My curly little tail somewhere between my legs, I left and came home. But the thoughts stuck with me for the rest of the day. How tempting is it to want to point out when fellow Christians get it wrong? How keenly do we feel the need to jump up and down and gesticulate wildly whenever we come across someone who acts in a way that is at odds with all that we understand to be at the heart of following Christ? How badly do I want to apologise on behalf of all the others who fall short of my standards?

Very.

A friend emailed me some thoughts about a book written by a wounded and saddened ex-member of Australia’s Hillsong church. She comes across better in this interview than she does in this article, something to do with the fact that I suspect that she’s not 100% convinced about some of her criticisms. But you should check them out for yourself.

There’s nothing new about the criticisms of Hillsong. In fact, many of these words could be said of thousands of other churches around the world. And for every church there must be a whole load of pre-prodigal sons, backs turned, wounded, saddened.

Perhaps that link’s a little clumsy. I don’t want to imply that Levin has no cause to complain or little ground to feel the pain and sorrow that she does. But it just strikes me that she’s writing a story that’s far from finished. What comes after the anger? What follows the pain? She talks of finding new hope in a quieter church, but she’s not fooling anyone: there’s bile and claws all through her article.

So, I have a challenge for Tanya Levin. It is this: you’ve written the book, but what about the rest of the story? Hillsong messed up, and your sales figures will reveal quite how much of a shared experience that is. But what comes next? Retelling the Worst Of… is easy. Grab some fellow Christians – the wounded, the ex-members, the gloriously-still-attached-at-the-heart and help them on the journey out of all this. Build something stronger, something bolder, something that fixes the bugs you’ve experienced.

And I have a challenge for Hillsong. You’ve found a message that resonates with people all over the developed world, but will you lean on and learn from others? You’ve been criticised for years, but is staying quiet really working? Will you step out, will you bring to the Church the very best of what you are and learn to refine that which needs work? Will you humble yourselves, strip back the signifiers of success and hear the questions?

This Church – global, local, fragile, human, incredible – it limps as it walks. There are signs of failure and error all over what we do, and yet this Church still walks. Even with our held back bacon, our bitter indignation and plastic-lite version of celebrity culture… this Church still walks.

That’s the story I’m interested in hearing about. That’s the one that’s got my attention.

Picture this: you’re helping serve Sunday breakfast for homeless men and women. There are other Christians there too, drawn from churches around the area. Like the breakfast you’re serving, the team of improvised cooks is an odd affair; a little over cooked in places, perhaps a tad quirkily-presented at times, but together you think you’ll manage to pull it off.

Before the doors are opened there is a time for prayer. Someone pipes up; all passion and furrowed brow and eternal angst. There’s no doubting that the feelings are genuine, but it’s the presentation that, well, bugs you. You can feel the old cynicism begin to flow, tempting you to label him a nut job, a Christian fundamentalist but without any of da fun.

Things continue and you follow the script. Someone gives a talk to the diners, you can’t hear because you’re trying not to burn the beans, but you can see enough to confirm your assumptions about the Earnest One: he’s there, slightly stage left, praying again with massive intensity while the speaker’s explaining what part faith plays in his own life. It all looks a little odd from where you’re standing, prompting your cynicism to give way to wearied embarrassment and jaded questioning. Why is the church made up of such people? Why do we give such credibility to these oddballs? Is this really what it means to be ‘on fire for Jesus’? Can’t someone put him out? You decide to be kind and humour him, but inside you know the truth – you think he’s missed the point.

It’s nearing the end, and something occurs to you: the fact that there has been pretty much no interaction between volunteer and client. Some of the apron-wearers are sat in the office, munching back egg sarnies, while others are just standing around looking awkward. And that includes you. The only one who isn’t hiding is the guy you pretty much wrote off earlier on. Play back the tapes and you conclude that he’s never once been in the kitchen, but has spent the entire time out front, serving, cleaning, smiling, talking and listening. It’s time to join him.

It takes just one comment for your cynicism to be exposed for the shallow, arrogant, selfish scam that it is. It comes from a 40-something ex-heroin addict whose face tells two distinctly different stories; years of abuse and struggle combined with a hint of optimism and newly nurtured self-belief. He tells you a little about his life, and it doesn’t take long before he reaches the climax:

‘It was this man,’ he says, pointing at the one sat next to you, the one you wrote off so swiftly, ‘he pulled me through. Every week he’d bring me this beautiful spicy soup and homemade bread when I was living on the street. Every week for well over a year. Never failed.’

It’s one of those moments where a choice has to be made. Do you accept that you got it utterly wrong, that your judgements were completely bogus, or do you continue to patronise and discount?

It wasn’t hard choice to make. I knew I’d been wrong, that I’d been an idiot. But what surprised me was the way that instead of leaving with a feeling of conviction and what-a-fool-am-I, something else was added to the mix. Sure, I still felt like an idiot, but one whose idiocy does not bar him from inclusion. As we sat and talked, me and the man and some of the diners, we disagreed on more topics than most, but yet again I was struck by the sense of being utterly alive in the moment. My bullshit was momentarily dismantled and together we were doing something good, something right. Is this what the kingdom looks like?

I suppose grace is one of the most intoxicating things of all. Just a hint of it, a millimeter crack exposed as you prize back the lid and inhale, it’s enough. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that without it cynicism leads to a dead end. Grace – accepting the input and truth from a wiser, kinder, bolder source (as well as giving it out ourselves) – is surely the destination to which our cynicism should be leading us.

I’ve just finished writing a manuscript that, among other things, wonders what the next 150 years will look like for Christianity. It seems to me that, like always, there will be good and bad examples of faith in action. But there’s more to come too, I believe. The cocktail of cultural shift, climate change, geopolitical unrest, technological advances and internal conflict within the church itself makes me (and all those people far cleverer than I whom I asked) convinced that this time next century we’ll be looking out on a dramatically different world.

I just saw this list of nations with the worst records of persecution of Christians. It’s from Open Door who, if you’re not already aware, are fueled by the lungs and heart of Brother Andrew.

I once heard him say that it is ‘easier to calm down a radical than to wake up a corpse’. I like that. And I’m thinking that there is probably a far greater density of Christian radical within these ten countries than there is round here.

While writing the book it was the stories of the martyrs that got me. It’s a nice idea, having a to die for kind of faith. But do I really want it?

I don’t know whether it started with death or not, but there’s every chance that it did. Somewhere this year I started thinking about the future, the past and just about everything else in between. This book outlined the science of beating death, and somewhere among the pages there’s a point he makes that has squatted in my brain ever since I first heard it; that if we can get around the problem of cell degradation (not such a ridiculous proposal after all, so the author suggests) then our thousand-year lifespans will turn up something extra intriguing. Just as we cannot fully recall what we were like as an infant, so will we at age 387 struggle to remember the person we were at 126. In that way we will become a series of people during our epic lifetimes, not just one.

Which brings me round to a reflection I had with a friend on Monday night. We were reminiscing about the Acid Jazz days – the phase that lasted the first half of the 90s. There we were, middle class, British and white and channeling the urban American black pimp for all we were worth. Being a lanky, long haired type I opted for brown suede safari jacket, 2 inch heeled hand crafted Romanian boots (which were impossible to dance in, but good for drug smuggling) and a viscose bowling/barbeque top that left me both drenched in sweat and severely restricted around the lung area. I looked, as you can guess, fantastic. Or, as one old schoolfriend who saw me dressed up one day en-route to see Primal Scream support Norman Jay at the Brixton Academy in Easter 1992, like a complete tosser.

The whole routine was based on the secret that we all shared; none of us were black, all of us wanted to be black, and if someone who was genuinely black turned up to one of our functions he would be greeted like a returning Spartan war hero, particularly if he had some new dance moves that we could copy and adopt like the rest of the second hand items we wore. Of course, if it turned out that the guy was unimpressed by our attempts to revere his cultural roots running numbers in Brooklyn during the mid 70s, then we’d just shrink a little like busted children.

So that was another me. I don’t recognize the person that was so captivated by the idea of being exclusive, and I’m not sure I remember quite why I thought I wanted to adopt an entirely new identity in the first place. It was only fifteen years ago, but it was seems now like a different me entirely.

If we met now, I wonder what I’d say. I’d probably just play it safe, compliment the boots and move on. It’s probably all that the other me could cope with.

It’s time I got over my aversion to Christians talking excitedly about Bono. The truth is that I worry that we’re getting too sycophantic, that we’re simply outsourcing our activism or that we’re admiring him more for his celebrity than his faith-in-action.

But I just saw this clip. And I felt stirred. So I’m sharing it.

‘True religion will not let us fall asleep in the comfort of our freedom…’

Amen to that.

…then surely there’s hope for this world? Read the story here about how he’s still buzzing form his first philanthropic-high.

He’s right. There’s something about giving stuff away that brings out the flavors in life.