Prepare for GAFCON 2018

The English are very good at saying, ‘Sorry’. We say ‘Sorry’ for the weather, ‘Sorry’ when we sneeze, or ‘Sorry’ when someone else bumps into us.

In fact I have a friend who is so English that he even apologises for saying ‘Sorry’!

Negative-face politeness

Sociologists have a word for this – apparently we live in a ‘negative-face politeness’ culture – this means we are very aware of not intruding on the freedom or autonomy of those to whom we speak – meaning we use apologies to avoid the appearance of making demands on another. ‘I’m sorry,’ we say as someone sits down in an apparently empty chair, ‘I think someone was sitting there’. We expect them to move – but it would be rude to make that clearer.

And so we use ‘Sorry’ to oil the wheels of our social interaction, rather than express true repentance. In his book, Sorry!: The English and their Manners, Henry Hitchings wrote: ‘The readiness of the English to apologise for something they haven’t done is remarkable, and it is matched by an unwillingness to apologise for what they have done.’

Is this something of a danger for us as Christians in England? Certainly, the Church of England’s attempts to apologise for the scandals of the past appear to have somewhat missed the mark.

Over Christmas I read an advance copy of The Goldilocks Zone, a collection of the Revd Dr Mike Ovey’s writing; a book which is worth buying purely for the Revd Dr Mark Thomson’s introductory chapter. Reading the best of Mike’s published works, one after the other, left me humbled by his intellect and in awe of the God he served and described. Mike was acutely aware of his own sinfulness and yet utterly secure that through Christ he was not just forgiven but imputed with a righteousness that was not his own. Knowing this, Mike was not afraid to look deep into the human heart and name the sin and darkness that remains there.

The penultimate chapter is the text of Mike’s justly acclaimed talk at GAFCON 2013 – ‘The Grace of God OR the World of the West’. This talk developed Bonhoeffer’s idea of ‘cheap grace’, ‘repentanceless grace’, which apologises for the sins condemned by polite society, whilst minimising the sins revealed by God’s Word; and self-bestowed grace, that sense of entitlement which pervades our culture, leading us to presume that God cannot help but bless our self-righteousness.

Costly grace

He showed how attractive, plausible and powerful the call of ‘cheap grace’ can seem, but then declared: ‘But while the world may want cheap grace, it is not what the world needs. To cheap grace Bonhoeffer opposed costly grace, a costly grace which costs us everything, in that it is a grace we receive repentantly and with humility, not presumption. That is the grace associated with forgiveness of sin and peace with God. The world’s needs are many, we all know that, but this is the greatest need: that its sins be forgiven. And that is why it is absolutely imperative that we at GAFCON preach not cheap grace, but costly grace to the world.’

When I heard Mike give this talk in Nairobi it seemed like a challenge to the ‘church’, but as I read his words this Christmas the challenge seemed more personal. So, as many prepare for GAFCON 2018, perhaps we all need to be challenged to move beyond the very English ‘Sorry’, with its presumptions and politeness, and instead, like Mike, seek God’s forgiveness day by day, secure in the knowledge that it is not our righteousness, but Christ’s, that covers us.