I suppose it’s not that surprising after all, but my world has just been moderately shifted by the knowledge that there is such a thing as the Gay Olympics – or, to give the event its proper name, the Gay Games. Apparently it’s all kicking off in Copenhagen right now.

I often find myself thinking about Christianity whenever I hear about things going on within the gay community. I must admit that I think the idea of a gay athlete competing against other gay athletes across a range of disciplines (such as badminton, triathlon and the delicately monikered ‘physique’) in the name of ‘Participation, Inclusion and Personal Best™’ is odd. OK, perhaps not so odd for the participation and personal best – but you just know that those two are thinly-sliced add-ins to the trademarked strap line… what the gay community wants from this event is inclusion.

But how does isolation breed inclusion? How does beach-volleyball-with-a-twist-of-queen help convince a wavering homophobe that we all need to get a long a bit better?

And so now I’m thinking about the church. We like the language of inclusion and recognise the foundational importance of community, relationship and self-sacrificing love for others (unless, of course, you happen to be a moron), but given half the chance, we keep ourselves to ourselves.

Maybe we can learn from the gay community. Maybe they’ve got it right: talk about inclusion but make it something to be discussed only on their terms. Maybe we out to be more out there with our clique? Maybe we out to have a gold medal for the best Christian Greco-Roman Wrestler?

Or maybe not.

The gay people I have learned most from are those who are not bullhorning their policy of inclusion at me from within a walled event.

There ought to be a neat ending to this post, but I’ve got too much other stuff to do today. I’ll just leave you with the mental image of Joyce Meyer having Rowan Williams in a double-leg bind.

[Shudders...]

I spent a little time filling out a questionnaire for a publisher the other day. I have a love-hate relationship with these things.

I like the chance to explain why I write about certain subjects, especially since I communicate better with a little time and a keyboard rather than on the spur of the moment with an audience. And I can’t deny that it feels nice to be asked, even if it was by a standard document that started with the words ‘Please Return By 1st September 1997’.

But I feel awkward and itchy whenever it comes to the issue of promotion – more specifically, self-promotion. I don’t want to be the sort of friend that hassles his wider circle to continually get on and show their support at the next book launch, who’s always asking for just one more online review or who urges mates to buy the books themselves. I’ve known people like that – not many, I’ll admit, but enough – and it’s no fun at all.

And I don’t want to be the sort of Christian who suggests that what they have to say is important, urgent or new. I’ve known more people like this than I’d like to admit, and it always leaves a bitter taste. Hearing someone gloat over their latest accomplishments – regardless of how thinly they veneer the telling with a coat of ‘It’s All For The Lord’ – it just seems wrong. I’ve seen enough people preen themselves in the spotlight to not want to do it myself.

Besides, putting on a book launch feels to me like the ultimate blind date – only with all the bad stuff multiplied: will they all show? How can you keep them all amused, entertained and impressed? Who makes the first move? Does my book display look big in this?

Not that I’m modest. Really, I don’t suffer from an excess of humility. But I’d rather we told the truth here. Why? Why not?

Last week I saw an old friend for the first time in many years. He asked me what I was working on and then said ‘so, basically you just live off your royalties?’ I laughed. For the record, I don’t. Or, if I did, I really wouldn’t be all that healthy right now, or, come to think of it, alive in any way.

It seems to me as though there’s a bit of a veil over the whole notion of success and sales. It’s true that the richest people I know are those who have scored big with songs or books that would be familiar to most people who spent any time in a church. But that’s not a group that I’m in.

Not that I’m complaining. Please don’t misunderstand – I love writing about what I do, and if the words happen to help someone, then so much the better. But writing for big sales just isn’t something I have the head or the heart for.

Someone sent me a great quote the other day, and it indicates just how upside-down some of our thinking has become when it comes to determining what makes a ‘good’ or ‘successful’ book or song (particularly in church circles). Here’s what theologian Thomas Merton had to say:

‘If I have ever written a best seller it was due to naivety…. And, I will make every effort never to do the same again.’

There are far greater errors to make in life than to act naively, but to deliberately chase, hunger after and crave such artless foolishness – and then to call it success – well, it just seems dumb to me. Can’t we do better than that?

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.

…According to my widget, it’s currently -3 degrees. Which means that the UK is officially Unable To Function for a second consecutive day. It is a little nippy here in my shed, so I’m looking for a little keyboard exercise to get my digits warmed up before I move on to the serious business of the day.

Asking an African Bishop where he thinks the church in the West is going wrong may not have been my most tactful opening salvo while away in Uganda. But his response was both measured and unsurprising. Asking a couple of Pentecostal lads the same question a few days later while on the way to the airport brought a sharper, less politically nuanced reply. I think I’m going to wonder and write about the future for the Anglican communion at some point soon, but, meanwhile, I’ll pause a while here:

Yesterday The Children’s Society published A Good Childhood: Searching for Values in a Competitive Age did exactly what the church needs to do; held up a mirror and offered us all a look.

Here’s how The Times introduced its report:

Children’s lives are being blighted by “obsessive” testing, relentless advertising and a long-hours culture that contributes to family breakdown, the Archbishop of Canterbury says in a report published today.

In a scathing attack on a society that he says is organised around the needs and desires of adults, Dr Rowan Williams argues that people must change their ways if Britain is to become a better place for children to grow up in.

The signs of our living in the middle of a cultural shift are everywhere. The pace of change has accelerated so much that, as one futurist/pastor told me last year, ‘the pace and chaos caused by all this change makes it almost impossible to decipher. We may think that there are few defining moments going on around us, but we’d be wrong. The truth is that we’re surrounded by white noise and static as values, trends, ideals and powers shift with each rising sun.’

In my mind these words go well with those of Rowan Williams. In the middle of our obsession with progress, change and transition, we have found it too easy to ignore the potential consequences on our children. We have become isolated, insular, segregated and small. Our eyes have dulled and all around are family units that appear to be constructed on the sole, fragile belief that bringing up a family is a matter of holding your breath until normal service resumes.

I can think of many families who live like this. Long hours at work, crazy scheduling of childminders and pre/afterschool clubs, weekends where each partner carves out their allotted ‘me time’, trips to play-facilities where the two kids will happily wander off and be amused while dad takes a break, holiday-breaks anticipated with dread as the family are forced into the unnatural position of togetherness again.

Life like this is hard. Having it all – the career, the marriage, the body, the wardrobe, the bank balance, the social life, the Perfect Family Unit – is a fools gold. And because we’re fully signed up to the consumerist mindset we believe that just like personal trainers and cookery courses, our parenting can be taken care of if we just buy in the right resources. Cram the week with after school activities, bloat the weekends on sport, take holidays in places where the kids will be Taken Care Of and – according to the brochure – you’ve succeeded in being a good parent.

For some reason I’m now remembering the scene from Fight Club where the narrator gets his hand burned:

Tyler Durden: Shut up! Our fathers were our models for God. If our fathers bailed, what does that tell you about God?
Narrator: No, no, I… don’t…
Tyler Durden: Listen to me! You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you. He never wanted you. In all probability, he hates you. This is not the worst thing that can happen.
Narrator: It isn’t?
Tyler Durden: We don’t need him!

It’s clumsy, but it makes a point; when all we have is what we can see, when our aspirations are printed on matt covers or in a million pixels, there is no need for God. And when life begins and ends with us, the sense of responsibility breeds the temptation to circle the wagons, trim the horizon down to size and use lame metaphors that indicate smallness.

I’m rambling. But I’m proud of Rowan Williams and the church for speaking out on this. I’m sure my friends in Africa would agree.

Perhaps it’s because I spent Saturday night dressed up as a woman for a friend’s 40th birthday, and I am therefore far further down the slippery slope of immorality than I previously thought, but I can’t quite see what all this Phelps-Bong fuss is about.

Apart from the fact that it clearly explains where that appetite for those famous breakfasts comes from, it seems like a non-story to me. And as for spelling an end to his career, surely that’s going too far?

I’ve always liked pot – or, at least, the idea of it. I don’t touch the stuff now, but it seems clear that if you’re going to have a drug of choice (and I can’t really think of a society that doesn’t) then stoners are far more preferable to drunks any day of the week. Violent crime? Just pass the pasties over and I’ll be fine.

My mum used to come back at me with the ‘it leads to other things’ argument, seemingly unaware of the irony of her having started a charity that picked up the pieces if lives ruined far more by drink than drugs. Illegality? The law’s changed so much – and it appears to be at the discretion of individual police forces here in the UK – that we seem only to know that if you keep it quiet you’ll probably be fine.

So why don’t I smoke now? The reasons have changed over the years – but they’ve never been all that strong. At best I can only say that it was a phase of my life that I lived through and have done with. Like driving fast or dancing like a pimp, those days are gone. Now I’m a responsible 36 year old I’ll just stick to cross-dressing at parties. It’ll cause me fewer health problems, but no doubt I’ll look back and wince at some point in the future.

Now, I like this guy called Steve Strang. Personally, I find him to be pretty good company. Of course there’s plenty that we would disagree on, but I get the feeling that had he been born in Mumbai and found his faith, Steve would have ended up being one of those remarkable influential nobodies that are quietly changing their world.

Oh, he published a book I wrote too, so that makes him a pretty rare man.

But Steve wasn’t born in Mumbai, and he’s become – for what it’s worth – the kind of guy that features in Time magazine’s list of the Most Influential Evangelicals in America.

And this is his latest blog posting:

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Life As We Know It Will End If Obama Is Elected

I was amazed that during the presidential debate this week Sen. John McCain didn’t make the point that if Sen. Barack Obama is elected, life as we know it in many ways will end. America will be more socialized and have less free enterprise and freedom.

It seems that due to the current economic crisis, a percentage of Americans are clamoring for change in the White House. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to realize that change will mean gay rights will be encoded into law and abortion rights laws will be strengthened. The result will be an alteration in our entire social structure and the likelihood that Roe v. Wade—the case that led to the legalization of abortion–will never be overturned. Recently someone sent me a video put out by Roman Catholics on the sanctity of life. Take time to watch it at www.catholicvote.com. It makes the point that protecting human life from conception to natural death is one of the most important responsibilities we have as Christians.

I believe if Obama is elected, the government will tax, tax, tax the citizens who are most productive. Yet it’s been proven that tax increases lead to economic downturn, while tax cuts lead to economic growth (which we desperately need). There will also be a “take from the rich, give to the poor” type of socialistic mind-set throughout the nation. And I believe our country will be weaker militarily around the world.

In addition, people who hate Christianity will be emboldened to attack our freedoms. Christianity is already persona non grata in academia and in the liberal media. People such as Bill Maher and Michael Moore, who hate God and God’s people, will think the election verifies that the nation as a whole believes as they do and will jump for glee. Meanwhile, Christians seem almost asleep. There is no outcry! And there is a group of Bible-believing Christians who appear to have decided to overlook how dangerous Obama will be and plan to vote for him anyway.

A few weeks ago McCain and Obama were even in the polls. However, the economic crisis seems to have pushed some Americans toward Obama. So in the 25 days to the election we must pray as never before. And we must work to wake up Christians. That is what happened late in the 2004 election—Christian leaders rallied believers, and as a result, George W. Bush was re-elected president.

Even though polls are often right, there are exceptions, and we must pray and work–before it’s too late–to see that Obama is not elected. I receive lots of interesting e-mails having to do with the election and the issues surrounding current culture wars. Below is some of what someone sent me and urged me to pass on. There are links to several interesting videos that you should take the time to watch. Much of what you will see is disturbing. I urge you to forward the information below to your friends.

The only reason Obama is competitive is because people do not really know who and what he stands for.

Barack Obama’s Views:

Endorsed by:
- ACLU
- AFL-CIO
- National Trial Lawyers Groups
- NARAL
- Planned Parenthood
- Homosexual and atheist advocacy groups
- Moveon.org
- Radical leftist national groups

These groups have provided the largest support for his campaign, along with the Saudis. And every one of them hates serious Christians and Zionist Jews. How can a Christian or a Jew vote with them? He promised the trial lawyers that he will fight against Tort Reform.

He promised the unions to vote for the Union Intimidation Act (aka Employee Free Choice Act)–a laughable name for legislation that will devastate American jobs. He promised the abortionists to vote for the Abortion Anytime Act (aka the Freedom of Choice Act).

He promised the homosexuals that he will support the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act, and he is already fighting the California Marriage Amendment. And he has no experience! Hello?

Serious Political Videos and Articles that Expose the Truth about Barack Obama

Article: See Obama’s Illegal Campaign Contributions
http://www.newsmax.com/timmerman/Obama_fundraising_illegal/2008/09/29/135718.html?s=al&promo_code=6BD9-1

Video Clip: Mohammar Khaddafi on Barack Obama. Quite real and quite damning.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSemkPChvHo

Video Clip: A History of Barack Obama’s Life and Politics
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUdjhKbImwE

Video Clip: Barack Obama on Defense Spending
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sj91NH5fvw

Video Clip: Little-Known Barack Obama Scandals
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sawN7uJ8s8s

Video Clip: Hillary Shreds Obama
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQadAAlK9c4

Video Clip: Biden Slams Obama
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EV14xqelWxY

Video Clip: The Hypocrisy of the Liberal Media Exposed in Their Attack on Sarah Palin’s Prayer for the Troops
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hpwM4Jjyrs

Video Clip: School Children Sing Praises of Obama
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08iomNFrzU4

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I know many of you are as disturbed as I am. I think this information on Obama speaks for itself. Let’s pray for a shift in our country. And let’s get this information into the hands of as many people as possible. If you missed my endorsement of John McCain, click here.

And be sure to add your thoughts to the blog.

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Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that his tone and pitch have revved up just like McCain’s, but I have to confess that I was a little taken aback by this. But what made me smile were the comments that followed. Read them for yourself here.

What I want to know is are these the final kicks and snarls of a fatally wounded beast – is this the beginning of the end of the religious right? Or is this the first signs of a drastic counter attack that will lead us into the kind of future that Atwood glimpsed in The Handmaid’s Tale?

Eight months with my head out of the loop and I finally wake up to a double portion of shame, betrayal and intrigue.

First up, Todd Bentley – the guy with all the tattoos and tv interest – has left his wife. One minute he was being heralded as the edgy, awkward deliverer of the very latest brand of God-Soaked Things. The next, he’s been far too edgy and awkward and left people are left wondering whether it was all a fraud.

Not so much need for the wondering with Mike Guglielmucci. The guy wrote a song – ‘healer’ – and added to his creation by letting people know that he was suffering from terminal cancer. It turns out, however, he hasn’t and never did suffer from cancer – just a sixteen-year addiction to porn.

Of course many are responding with shock and disappointment, and words like betrayal and fraud are never far from the screen. God TV – the station that appeared to do all that it could to promote the meetings in Florida that Bentley hosted – now has little to say on the subject, let alone show. I heard that ‘healer’ has suffered a similar punishment, having been quickly yanked from YouTube as well as various forthcoming live albums; how – the logic goes – can people sing the song knowing such lies have been woven into it?

I don’t know what I think about Bentley. I mean, I know what I think – I wrote about those thoughts a while back – but the sad news that his life is so obviously in some kind of free-fall does not really change how I feel. If anything it makes the fault lines even clearer; yet again the Church has missed the point and got blinded by the lights, pumped up by the sugar rush of something that seems New and Exciting. We wanted Bentley to have caught hold of something truly dramatic, radical and utterly transformative – something that would change our world as we know it. And because we wanted it all so desperately I can only assume that he fell into the same trap of so many others, where delivering on expectation eventually became more important than pursuing personal integrity.

We wanted the glitz and the excitement, and in a way, I suppose that’s exactly what we got. And if there’s any shame in the story I think it belongs to us, who forced our heads into the trough and gorged on the assumption that transformation, drama and radical experience could be found simply by turning up to a meeting or flicking a tv remote. We want change? Well, it comes through us, not to us. We want something that could change the world? What more do we need than the ancient and eternal truths that bind our faith together?

When it comes to Guglielmucci and his lies, I feel sad. I feel sad that he treated cancer as a dressing-up box accompaniment, a tool for advancing his art. Life deserves more respect than that. It is clear that his own freefall has been going on for some time, and it saddens me that secrets and lies lasted well into their second decade. I feel sad that he felt the need to develop a good story to help promote the song. But none of it surprises me.

I suppose I feel more sad about the reactions of others. The way I see it, the background to the song is now utterly different, but the lyrics remain just as true as they have over the millennia. Surely now, at last, Guglielmucci can sing those words out loud without having to shield the deceit? Why, then, can’t we? Doesn’t he need us to sing for him more than ever? Doesn’t the song now have far more authenticity that we know the truth behind it? Isn’t it now finally about God alone, rather than a terribly human attempt to create something to impress the congregations?

So I don’t see why Hillsong has yanked footage of Guglielmucci speaking at one of their events with an oxygen tube strapped across his face like a misplaced smile. I don’t see why this song must be buried without trace. If the work of fallen songsmiths should disappear then where does that leave us with the Psalms? By extension, what do we do with Martin Luther King’s words? Do any of us make the grade?

What I do see is that yet again this fall exposes our own failings. Once more we missed the point and made the story about us rather than God. We  got seduced by the hype and got lost in the crowd.

It will happen again, I suppose. These wanderings off course have a familiar feel to them. But we really ought to know better. And if we continue to pursue excitement and frills and easy-answers to complex questions, if we reduce our part in the faith to hopping on a plane or singing a sing with enough passion, then the world will rot on our watch as this bride of Christ flirts with the wedding guests.

Forgive the jargon here, but this one’s for the flock.

Every once in a while the word revival makes an appearance among the faithful. Like some astronomical phenomenon that slices the skies its warning signs are often quickly followed by a sparky display of light and power. Pretty soon it seems like every believer who’s in the know will be transfixed by its power; head, eyes and heart straining to catch whatever stardust falls from its trail.

It’s happening right now. In Florida, so they say. I don’t know any more than the basics of the equation – (guy with tats + divine healings) x media exposure = great excitement – but I’ve heard a couple of stories.

I picked up the first one third hand last week. It concerned a woman whose husband has been impacted by the recent events in Florida. She returned home one evening to find blood in her front room, trailing to the bedroom. There she found her crimson-stained husband, doubled over in what I can only assume was a unique combination of post-adrenaline woosiness, drastically-crashing blood pressure and pure, unchecked agony.

She asked what on earth had happened.

‘The Lord told me to self-circumcise.’

The second story is this. I was talking to a friend about it all. He was cynical – I mean, really cynical. He went after the guy in tats – questioning the authenticity of the claims being made – as well as the integrity (and intellect) of those flying out to get a slice of the action. He made sense at times, but mostly his blanket declarations that it was wholly corrupted just sounded like the mirror image of those voices who claim that everything the guy with tats says right now is touched by the divine.

I love the smell of dualisms in the morning.

It’s hard to hold opposing truths in the same mind. It’s hard to see good and band, corrupted and innocent, utterly stupid and profoundly wise in the same place. But I suspect that what’s going down in Florida right now is a mixture of both.

In fact, I’d go further. I don’t think we need to obsess so much about whether it is or is not branded by the divine – or, at least, we don’t need to look at the numbers or the tv exposure or the level or mainstream interest or even the quality of healings in order to make up our minds. I think that God deals in a different currency to all that. He doesn’t just put on a show or try to make occasional headlines. He deals in partnership with those that follow him, and it’s the impact on those people – and the impact they then have on the world around them – that really counts.

It’s probably bad form to quote yourself, but here’s a bit I wrote once before:

‘I heard that Jackie Pullinger brought up the subject [of the ‘revival’ in Toronto back in the 90s] among a number of Christians over a series of visits a few years back. She told them the story from her perspective, of how over in Hong Kong, amidst the drugs and the gangs and the death, they had all heard of the phenomenon that was taking place.

“Rich Christians were jumping on airplanes to visit the place where the laughter was,” she said. “We thought to ourselves, It will only be a matter of time before they board airplanes to visit the places where the crying is. We waited. But you didn’t come.”’

Click here and you can see a sample chapter I wrote about another ‘revival’ I once experienced. Unlike the current one this was smaller, but no less powerful. And it made a dramatic impact on the lives of those living near it. The only trouble was the fact that it took pace among a poor, unimpressive community. Who’d want to hear a story like that?

There are temptations all around us. The chances are that it won’t take you too long to remember some of the ones that have drifted through your mind over the last 24hours. But while some of them are obvious, there’s a range of temptations that are subtle and sometimes harder to spot.

Take this one, for example: our prayers don’t matter that much.

This myth comes in many forms, plaguing us with thoughts about God being too busy, that we are too small or that the world’s problems just too great.

Giving into these temptations leaves us muzzled, blindfolded and deaf, like those three brass monkeys all wrapped up in one. Giving up on prayer cuts into our potential and reduces our impact. Giving up on prayer is giving up on God.

There’s more to being a Christian than being a brass monkey.

In the days of the early church with its ever increasing roll call of martyrs, the numbers of Jews and non-Jews joining the Christian sect grew with phenomenal power. By the end of the first century – and not more than seventy years after Christ’s handful of followers were told to go and make disciples – there are as many as one million Christians spread across the Roman empire. Within another three centuries 40 million people would count themselves As Christians – almost a quarter of the world’s population.

The numbers are different today. There are even more of us: almost one in three of the world’s 6 billion people are Christians. Within the next week we could do more to change the state of the word than any single government could do in a decade.