The fact is this: up and down every country, behind every door and under every rock, in every social class, behind the make-up of the whore and the society princess, under the street uniform of the thug and the suit uniform of the banker, lurks precisely the same lifeless and sin-spewing heart. Every man and woman, boy and girl, is by nature dead in trespasses and sins. Every one of them lies beyond every power to deliver them apart from God working by his Spirit through the gospel of Christ preached to every creature. All of them need the good news.

A little while ago, a friend wrote an article entitled “My Ministry is Harder Than Yours (and Other Lies We Tell).” The author, Mez McConnell, is a pastor in Edinburgh and one of the architects of 20schemes, a ministry seeking to establish gospel churches in some of the poorest communities in Scotland. Mez has a hard line to walk – straight as a die himself, he has to deal with the fact that his conversion story appeals to the seekers of the spectacular and that many people in more outwardly comfortable circumstances perversely think that there is a certain glamour to really hard ministry and, frankly, that helps to win some attention and some funds to the cause. After all, paying other people to go where you don’t and do what you won’t really eases the conscience.

One of the ways that Mez deals with this tension is to mock the middle classes. He is happy to do this in general and more specifically and personally. Recently, he lampooned (I can hear him sharpening the knives just because I used that word) the outlook and attitude of those who applaud him for having such a hard life. His response?

When I listen to men battling away around Europe (and the states) in well off areas, it makes me break out in a cold sweat.

How the heck do you evangelize in an area where everybody has a decent paid job, a nice place to live and possibly a car (or two) on the drive?

How do you break through the intellectual pride of a worldview that thinks religion is beneath them and that science has all the answers?

How do you witness in an area where the average house price is over £250k? How do you talk to a guy who feels no need for Christ because he is distracted by his materialism?

How do you make it work in an area filled with nice, law abiding citizens, who don’t cheat on their wives, beat their kids and spend their days stoned on the sofa watching reality TV?

Now that’s hard.

That’s more than hard. That, my friends, is brutal.

He went on to sing the praises of the straightforward, straight-speaking Schemer, the noble savage of the Edinburgh wilds, a square-jawed all-round good egg (come on, Mez, rise to the bait), open of heart and hearth.

Now that Mez has publicly admitted that I am harder than he is, I thought I might offer a friendly rejoinder – better, a supplement – to Mez’s piece, confident that we probably see eye to eye on these things and the principles that underpin them.

I am writing not from the soft streets of Niddrie but from the rocky spiritual wastelands of middle England, from the London commuter belt, from . . . Sussex! Admittedly, I live in a ‘new town’ called Crawley, which has a reputation – perhaps unfairly – for being the local sinkhole (the descendants of London’s dregs rehoused after the Second World War), so perhaps I get a little more credibility from those who count filth and crime as badges of honour. Indeed, Crawley is so little esteemed that one of the neighbourhoods to the east of the town, a richer part of this area, has removed the name from its signs so that it does not get dragged down to our level.

That said, even though it is notoriously difficult to classify the middle classes (even the BBC says so), I don’t think that there is much doubt that I try to reach many middle class people with the gospel. Many of my labours outside the church building are either in the town square, or door to door in a neighbourhood which calls itself – perhaps inappropriately – a village. Our church planting endeavours are currently centred on an undeniable village outside of Crawley that is the very picture of middle England. All this to demonstrate that I am, largely, in the environment that Mez describes as so unpromising a field for gospel labour.

And it is.

Mez’s questions are good ones. He puts his finger on some of the real problems that exist. There is a carnal self-sufficiency that cushions many against the truth of the gospel. There is an educated arrogance that disdains the facts of scriptural revelation.

Read More

[Editor’s note: One or more original URLs (links) referenced in this article are no longer valid; those links have been removed.]