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Letter from AmericaGod's glory and national prideIt is an interesting experience having lived for so long as a foreigner. Before coming to America, I lived for a year in the former Soviet Union, and before that for a year in Canada, but by and large most of my life was spent in England (a good ten years of it in Cambridge). Having now lived for seven or so years in America, it’s becoming increasingly true that I feel the sense of being without home that, for the Christian, underlines the spiritual reality of this world not being our home but that we are ‘just a-passing through’. As I think of nations, then, and national character from a stand point of developing cultural confusion (Rochelle and I have brought up our children in America; they are not ‘nappies’ to us they are ‘diapers’ — we just never had nappies in England), I wonder how this relates to the matter of God’s glory. Allegiance to the flagAmerica, of course, is a nation, from an international perspective, that is famous for its national patriotism. Every morning millions of children in America pledge allegiance to the flag. I remember our Granny wanting silence as God Save the Queen was played at the end of the Queen’s Christmas broadcast (should we have stood?), but that’s about it for national themes during the impressionable young years. Yet, I suspect, scratch beneath the surface and your average Brit may be no more nor less patriotic than his or her American counterpart. Was it Winston Churchill who said that the British were a nation given to long bouts of somnolence followed by periods of gigantic world-shaking activity? Certainly, the hairs stand up on the back of my neck when I hear ‘we shall fight on the beaches… we shall never surrender.’ Kingdom of GodHow does this all play into a Christian’s desire to be caught up first and foremost in seeking the kingdom of God and his righteousness? Can I long for God’s glory to be more greatly manifested, for his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven, and yet be proud to be English (or British, depending on whatever the politically correct thing is to say these days, and I keep on forgetting — another sign of cultural confusion, I suppose)? We may say that under God’s sovereignty, nation-states have developed to provide safety and security for us all. We may be glad that we are born in the West where still (by and large) religious freedom pertains. But if God’s glory is partly revealed in the gathering of all nations through faith in Christ (in whose person God’s glory is fully revealed) then what does that say for me and my national pride? When I cringe at having to twist my vowels (even after these years) to be understood at all to say some word in American-glish, when I feel smug about our more sophisticated sense of humour, or general level of education, or what have you, am I really betraying a rather still unformed lack of real first, and before all, commitment to God and his glory? World missionCould this be the case with our haphazard commitment to world missions? Could it be that, crystal clear as the Bible is about the place of the church in mission, that we tend to assign finances to the home front not only because in England the needs are so many but also because, well, it’s England after all? And what does that say about what we really feel about the glory of Christ, as opposed to the glory of our role in Jesus, our part to play, our member in the body? How much do we know with Paul, leaving his home comforts, to be able to say that he boasted in nothing else but Christ and him crucified? I have a sneaking suspicion that family, and culture, and nation, and (even) class, connected together tribally as they all are naturally, need to be far more radically reinterpreted in our churches by the gospel of Christ if we are more effectively to evangelise the nation(s). Josh Moody,
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