As a church we believe in excellence. It’s one of our core values. But it is so easy to confuse excellence with perfectionism. Perfectionism is: setting impossible goals; motivated by a fear of failure; meditating on failures/mistakes and discounting successes; taking criticism personally (value as a person is related to performance); unhelpful comparisons (with other people and organisations, leads to pride/discouragement); frustrating; elitist: some people will not be able to achieve an ‘A’, their best may be a ‘B’; expensive: lots of money being spent unnecessarily on state of the art/super luxurious stuff (yet Jesus crossed the Sea of Galilee in a fishing boat not a 30ft luxury yacht); always out of reach, a perfectionist’s bar on excellence is constantly being raised, which gives the impression that leaders and God are never satisfied; exhausting; puts a person under the law.

Excellence on the other hand is: giving your best efforts; going beyond (your) mediocrity; motivated by God’s grace (Romans 12:1); about learning from mistakes how to fail forward (Proverbs 24:16; Psalm 42:5); learning from criticism (Proverbs 9:8-9); deriving our value as people from God (not performance); doing all things well for God’s glory; each believer reaching his/her greatest potential; being better tomorrow than you were yesterday; matching your practice with your potential.

As we pursue excellence together, let’s try to avoid the perfectionist trap by drinking deep from the wells of God’s grace.

The Labour Party’s recent proposed amendments to the Equality Bill, already rejected by the Lords, are a matter of heated controversy. The Pope has just strongly denounced them as against natural law and an attack on religious freedom, so this gives us all pause for thought. Labour MP Harriet Harman has crafted these new clauses fired by what we hope were sincere motives to advance justice, human dignity, and fair-minded treatment of others. It will inevitably produce the very opposite for some. All faith communities, and particularly evangelical Christians, would be forced to violate ethical standards taught in scripture. They would be compelled to employ church leaders and staff members who openly engage in fornication and immoral sexual activities as well as others who hold religious beliefs contradictory to their own. Conscientious objectors could face expensive lawsuits and heavy fines if they do not comply.

Some beliefs are totally destructive to Christian faith and culture for they are denials of it. Christ charges us to change the world for the better, not bed-down with its shallow-rooted ideas! This legislation is akin to enforcing the freedom of British National Party members to join the Labour Party and hold office, or a radical Socialist revolutionary’s right to work as an adviser to David Cameron and the Conservative Party since we’re all ‘equal’. Thankfully, this ain’t going to happen, for reasons fairly obvious to people of common sense! Sadly, this highly valuable commodity – common sense – once thought essential in decision making and public discourse in Britain, is increasingly hard to find.

I recently re-read a very old letter from a wise and highly respected thinker, who voiced uncommon wisdom on some very important issues that relate to this legislation and should concern everyone who’s worried about the erosion of the foundations within our culture. He urges us to embrace uncomfortable truths and make a stand for them, due to their importance to us all. Here’s an extract:

“I feel very strongly about this huge obligation to tell the truth to all kinds of people across the whole spectrum of human ethnicity and beliefs, even if I’m mocked as a fool for this. The fact is I’m not remotely embarrassed about the life-changing truths I feel compelled to pass on. I’ve already seen their power to transform countless human lives for the better. God can fix anything and anybody up. He plans to rectify everyone who believes this, and then everything else around them.

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