First blog for about eighteen months.... just to say that I am in Edinburgh for a week to attend the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. it will be a heavy week because of tensions in the denomination and I have not had a break for a while. So i will take some time off to go fishing for 'brownies' (brown trout) in the river Clyde near Biggar. It is good to catch up with friends and make new ones this week - always the best bit of the Assembly. Staying with Jim and Jean Dewar is a wonderful experience and this morning I go worship in the church that Jim is minister of (Juniper Green, Edinburgh). It is wonderful to live in Rotterdam but i do miss Scotland sometimes - so I am taking deep breaths of air while I am here. :)

Making sense of the Bible

I like the saying about a follower of Jesus Christ reading the bible on one knee while on the other he had an open newspaper. The bible should be read in dialogue with the news of the world. From my youth I always believed that the Bible to be the Word of God, carrying his authority and I read it avidly together with many books on Christian doctrine. When I was a university student, unknown to me, I came under Dutch Reformed influence. Louis Berkhof’s “Systematic Theology” shaped my ideas about the bible and what it taught. I also recall hearing Klaas Runia defend the bible as the Word of God and not that which merely became the Word of God. I interpreted the bible in a kind of prescriptive manner. I saw it as a handbook of Christian doctrine and prescribed about creation, sin, Christ, salvation and judgement. The way that I read the bible changed, however, after I served as a minister for twelve years on a Glasgow housing estate and now for sixteen years in the centre of Rotterdam. The conditions and problems that people faced need to be taken seriously and not quickly dismissed as the effects of human sin and divine judgement. I think it was when I was in Glasgow preaching through Nehemiah that I realised that the bible could be interpreted descriptively. I used to interpret as a story of spiritual leadership of Nehemiah or the spiritual renewal of God’s people. Without denying these, I began to see new things such as the people left behind. Chapter two contains a long list of difficult names? Who were they? Why were they so depressed? Then I realised that this was the situation with the majority of the 25,000 people on the housing estate who had missed out and were unemployed. There is renewal in Nehemiah but it does not come until chapter nine and there are lots of conflicts to face in between – just like human life you might say! The descriptive approach recognises that the bible is more than prescriptive but actually describes human experience. To read the bible descriptively is see it more like a mirror of human life than simply a book of doctrine. I began to see that all of the spiritual heroes had feet of clay. Every family in the Old Testament would in contemporary terms need to be assigned a social worker. I found the bible had a lot to say about unemployment and poverty in Glasgow and about migration and welcoming aliens in Rotterdam. This is how I came to discover Jesus Christ in Glasgow as the urban Saviour and in Rotterdam as the universal Saviour.

Housing Estates and Hope

Last Sunday I preached in a housing area of 37.000 people on the outskirts of Budapest. It reminded me of the twelve years we lived on an estate in Glasgow before moving to Rotterdam. What had been a small village had become a huge housing area near the airport and home for some of the poorest in the city including many Roma people (Gypsies). Budapest is a city of over two million people. The increase of population has been mostly contained in these housing areas. It is encouraging that the Hungarian Reformed church is giving more attention to them. It was good to meet again my friends Eszter Dani and Otto Pescuk in that congregation of about two hundred people.

In 1983 Lesley-Ann and I came to live on a housing estate with our two week old son. Drumchapel was on the north-west edge of Glasgow and referred to as a peripheral housing estate. The population of 25,000 (once about 40,0000) had experienced large unemployment after the downturn in the shipping and engineering industries. I am not proud to admit that as a Church of Scotland minister it took me four years to see what was in front of me and to shape my ministry around it. There were three giant tower blocks in the middle of our parish. These were the days when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister and the churches and voluntary groups co-operated to develop the community with government-aid funds. We began to build a community development corporation that employed and served local people.

Housing estates are a feature of some parts of Europe. In the United Kingdom they were built after the war to house people relocated from the inner-city. In Glasgow the people of Govan were promised a house in the country with an inside toilet and front and back door. Other big cities like London, Manchester, Birmingham, Newcastle and Belfast have housing estates that became socially and economically challenged. In the Netherlands the distinctive integrated policy of urban planning has avoided these excesses but in central and eastern Europe the story is not a happy one. I remember visiting possibly the largest housing estate in Europe which four metro-stations long in the south of Prague. In 1998 I visited Romania and became familiar with the faceless housing blocks put up by the dictator Ceaucescu for military personnel. These housing areas are cheap to live in for many refugees and Roma people.

This week I was reminded that these people deserve something better. On Friday I lost my wallet and believed it to have been stolen. Late that night I received a telephone call from the director of a social work project called ‘Job Score’ in the city. He told me how one young man, an undocumented migrant from Burundi, had found the wallet and handed it to him. I was surprised that no money or cards had been taken. I almost wished that he would have the few euros for returning it. The next day I visited to thank him and met him and his partner and two children. I could not help notice the scar on his face. He told me that the government has said he can only stay here for one more month as they believe it is safe for him to return to his own country. I do not believe that to be true and nor does the Dutchman director of the project. My friend Andrew Gardener (the Church of Scotland minister in Brussels) and I were astonished at the grace and gentleness of this man whose life is clearly at risk.  

(The photographs which portray the housing blocks and shopping centre in Drumchapel, Glasgow, were taken five years ago.)

Church Planting

This week I became 56 years young in Budapest, and, with the help of my son Daniel, I have make my first blog. I had two reasons for being in Budapest. The first was to attend a conference on church planting and renewal. Church planting has become the hot issue in Christian mission and for those who want to extend the influence of the church.

‘Church planting’ involves planting a seed and nurturing its growth into a healthy plant. The kind of church depends on the message and the soil where it is planted. A worker in Sri Lanka once said if you plant a seed in American soil it will become an American church, Scottish soil will bring about a Scottish church, and in Indian soil an Indian church, and so on. But the big cities of our nations do not reflect one national culture – especially port cities like Rotterdam where the whole world is present. As Christians migrate from different cultures they bring the Gospel with them and a church often grows up around them. I believe that is something God is doing and is not about our clever strategies. He is scattering the peoples of the world in the largest migration movement in human history. Jesus’ parable of the sower (see Matthew 13) describes the scattering of seeds where some are fruitful and others which are not. I think that migration whether because of war, education or economic advancement has scattered the peoples of the world. Churches spring up where migrants are.

My congregation in Rotterdam was a migrant church three hundred and seventy years ago. It became probably the largest Scots church in the world in 1690 with a thousand members. In the twentieth century it became a Scots-Dutch community but, after the church was destroyed in 1940, it was Dutch people who asked for a Scots minister! From the 1980s new patterns in world migration brought about a transition to an international community and now it contains more than forty nationalities and many first generation migrants. They bring renewal with them and the majority of the leaders are non-Western. As a church we also support migrant churches through a network and assist new churches in their development.

In Budapest I heard young Hungarian pastors who are my friends (Lovas Andras, Harmathy Andras and Eszter Dani) talk about their experience of church planting. Some were involved in planting new churches while others were working with slightly more established ones and seeking to renew their vision. Our cities today are multicultural though the politicians in the Western Europe are afraid of what that may lead to. Politicians and church-planters do not create communities. I fear that both politicians and church-planters are too mechanistic and need to adapt to the new realities of a globalising world. By the way, there are many church-planting movements and one of these is meeting in Berlin next month with Tim Keller from New York. “The Gospel to City” Conference is on 25-27 October – contact Martin de Jong: info@citytocityeurope.com. The latest issue of a Christian research journal is devoted to church planting and gives more information on the different movements. See “Vista”, July 2011, no. 6, contact: www.europeanmission.redcliffe.org which is particularly useful because it challenges those church-planters to evaluate their work in different ways.

The second reason I had for being in Budapest was to attend the board of regents of a new graduate university that I have been serving for the last nine years. For Bakke Graduate University, see www.bgu.edu. Ray Bakke has been my mentor since I read “Urban Christian” in Glasgow in the mid-1980s but this week I decided to resign from the board. The main reason was that the project has become too North American for my liking and I want to spend my energy on approaches that more synchronised towards effective ministry in Europe. This is what I was doing last week and I am thinking my thoughts aloud. Maybe this will be the first of more reflections – let me know what you think!

Welcome to SICR: Meet the Minister

Robert Calvert, minister at the Scots International Church Rotterdam, will be sharing his thoughts, opinions and messages on this very blog for you to follow and share with.

Feel free to comment and interact as you see fit.