In the past 12 weeks that I’ve been working at Westminster Chapel (WC), I’ve learned a valuable lesson about perspective: things look quite different from the inside-out vantage point than they do outside-in.

I’ve been at WC for more than 6 years serving in a number of different ministries, hosting, 20:20 Vision, and the Change Team. I thought I knew WC fairly well…and in some ways I did…but in some ways I didn’t.

For example, I didn’t know that one member of staff frequently burps at his/her desk and that two male members of staff are closet Celine Dion fans (in the interests of safety, that is my safety, all shall remain anonymous).

In 24 Redemption, in response to a critic, President Noah Daniels says: “Let’s talk after you’ve been sitting in my chair for a while.” He has a point. It’s easy to be an armchair critic. I become one every time England plays a football match. Armed with only half the facts (and despite appreciating the difficult task that various England managers have had) I sometimes think that I could do a better job, when in reality, I would be terrible!

In the same way that we can be football manager armchair critics, we can be church leader armchair critics too. Let’s be honest, we’ve all done it.

But as the chess player Robert Byrnes said: “Until you walk a mile in another man’s moccasins you can’t imagine the smell.”

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Last month our second son, Gideon, was born. Along with the joy of his arrival came challenges and adjustments which underline our need to receive God’s grace for each day.

As a church we are pregnant with the promises of God. We are expectant to see God move both in and through us, affecting the lives of our friends, family and colleagues in a way that we will see our church family grow as people come to faith in Jesus.

Here are a few thoughts out of my recent experience that I trust will stir us to ask God, by His grace, to enable us to honour Him in the way we prepare for and react to growth at Chapel; to receive grace for growth.

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Most weeks we get tourists hoping to look at our building.  They tend to come from the USA, but some come from as far afield as Korea, where Dr. Lloyd-Jones’ books are available.  We get visitors on Sundays who have been blessed by Dr. Campbell Morgan, Dr. Lloyd-Jones, and Dr. Kendall.  They want to see the place where such powerful preaching and timeless truths were uttered.

Campbell Morgan's Friday evening lecture (complete with chalk board), c.1911

Do we live under the weight of our history as a church?

In some ways, maybe we do.  Onlookers tend to feel that they own the Chapel, even if it has never been their place of worship.  There’s a constant feeling of being scrutinized, and that our every move is being watched.  Do they still stand for expository preaching?  Why is the place not full?

It seems silly in one sense, because when you worship at Chapel, you realise it’s just a regular church.  We’re pretty normal.  Most of the people we have with us now have joined in the last 7 years.  Why the attention?

But in another sense, I get it.  I get why people look at Chapel and feel a special concern.  The history is spectacular, and I understand why we (as the present members and leaders) need to be very aware of all God has done in the past.

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Few of us could be ignorant of the widespread fall-out of the ‘nuclear accident’ that occurred in a chain reaction of alien ideas that gained momentum in the 1960s. Man-centred philosophy and rampant secular humanism exploded and the debris and shrapnel of cultural soundbites like ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out’, ‘Free love’, ‘The Hippy Trail’, ‘campus riots’, ‘Make love, not war’ and ‘God is Dead!’ shaped that decade. The results included legalized abortion, family breakdown, easy divorce, playground narcotics, paedophile predators, and much more that led most of us to conclude with Dorothy in the film The Wizard of Oz, that ‘We are not in Kansas anymore!’ The whole spiritual landscape has changed.

The results have, for the most part, been devastating. You can’t go anywhere without meeting its tragic victims. London is filled with them. The mugged, sexually abused, depressed and suicidal, trafficked children, street sleepers, junkies, corrupt city traders, bent politicians, ‘wasted’ clubbers, abandoned single mums, fatherless kids and knifed teenagers and so on, are everywhere.

TIME-TESTED REMEDY

The only answer to this is the Gospel. The Gospel radically transforms, reorientates and remakes human lives. It affects a kind of metamorphosis – change from the inside out. No education or social conditioning can do this. Over time, the result is ‘redemptive lift’, recreating individual lives. The suicidal find hope, unshackled addicts go free, the sexually defiled feel clean again, the violent find peace. Whole communities and cultures change for the better. This is what we need so much in Britain, but only Christ’s Gospel can do it.

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