Helpful thoughts to prepare us for Communion

I have been trying for a long while to track down these words of the old Congregation service for the Lord's Supper. We used to use them when I was a girl and I found them such a helpful introduction to the Communion Service. While I would never want to lose the spontaneity of our non-conformist services I think perhaps we miss out by a wholesale rejection of liturgy, and some of these old pieces of liturgy form a marvellous focus for our thoughts and hearts as we meet together as believers. I especially like the final paragraph:-

"You that do truly and earnestly repent of your sins and are in love and charity with your neighbour, and intend to lead a new life, following the commandments of God and walking henceforth in his holy ways ...draw near with reverence, faith and thanksgiving, and take the Supper of the Lord to your comfort..."

"We do not presume to come to this your table trusting in our own righteousness but in your manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs from your table"

"We come to this sacred table, not because we must but because we may. We come, not to testify to our righteousness but that we sincerely love our Lord Jesus Christ and desire to be his true disciple. We come, not because we are strong but because we are weak. We come not because we have any claim on heaven's rewards but because in our frailty and sin we stand in constant need of heaven's mercy and help."

[See 'Devotional Services for Public Worship' by John Hunter, 1880]

Harvey Weinstein - the symptom not the disease

The Harvey Weinstein saga seems to contain strong echoes of the case of Jimmy Savile and the BBC in that his behaviour appears to have been an open secret, people who had the power to act did nothing and the seriousness of his behaviours was dismissed as being just the norm at the time. Weinstein has been sacked from his own company and the BAFTAs; no doubt the Oscars will soon follow suit and the police look set to investigate. This is, hopefully, the end of Harvey Weinstein’s reign of terror and no doubt Hollywood will breathe a collective sigh of relief and get back to business as usual.

However, the film world is deluding itself if it thinks that with Weinstein gone, this thing is now over. Harvey Weinstein is only one symptom of the disease which riddles Hollywood from top to bottom – and not just Hollywood but infects everyone who runs after the Hollywood culture. Hollywood is a place without any values whatsoever when it comes to relations between men and women. Absolutely anything goes. In such a moral vacuum it becomes a case of the survival of the strongest and men like Weinstein have sat at the top of the food chain using sex as weapon to ensure that they stay there.

In Hollywood - judging not only by the films which come out of it but by the lives of its stars - infidelity, insincerity and indecency are not only treated with total moral indifference but are actually glorified. Hollywood has for generations been  constantly pushing back push back standards of what is and is not acceptable in terms of behaviour and dress.  Now it is throwing up its hands in horror at the consequences which all of this has had for many women in the industry. But we cannot have our cake and eat it; if we refuse to live with the rules and standards which protect society from this sort of thing, we should not be surprised ourselves to find ourselves in a dog-eat-dog environment where the weakest come off worst.

We will not accept that standards of sexual behaviour given by God were actually given for our own good. Because we want freedom. Well, freedom is what we will get - the kind of freedom that you get in anarchy, which is generally the freedom to be slaughtered by someone stronger than you who wants what you have got.

Hollywood is a long way away over in the US and yet it is also here in our living rooms, on our screens and in our newspapers and magazines.   It impinges on us every day of our lives but we do have a choice in how we engage with it. Every time we watch a Hollywood film, buy a celebrity magazine or read an online interview with a film star we providing a little more sustenance to this serpent at the heart of our Western culture. Perhaps we all need to think more carefully about where our money goes and what we might be unwittingly supporting. And we all need to stop praising and emulating the celebrity world that has given birth to such unpleasant offspring as Harvey Weinstein.

Veganism and Christianity: worldviews on a collision course

Veganism is in the news at the moment as folk are encouraged to go vegan for the New Year. Once apparently the preserve of a few off-beat, left wing, hippy types, increasing numbers of mainstream figures are now declaring support for veganism. Unlike vegetarianism which encompasses a wide range of motivations, veganism is underpinned by a set of quite strict values which make it a world-view rather than mere set of dietary choices, but it could be argued that veganism is pseudo-religious in character. 

It is easy to disregard veganism as just a rather extreme lifestyle choice but in fact these principles that make up veganism are in aggressive opposition to foundational Christian doctrines. They are also increasingly seeping into mainstream thought via the media, especially in areas like conservation and agriculture.

These principles include the following:

• Humans have no special status. Veganism explicitly places the same value on animal life as human life. Human beings are just another animal. Some vegans even go so far as to compare society's use of animals for food to the Holocaust, and human ownership of animals to pre-Abolition slavery. (Ironically, however, vegans actually place humans on a different level from other animals, as other animals feel no compunction in killing and eating one another, and by expecting humans to behave in ways completely counter to natural selection, a theory which has done so much to shape veganism.)
• Rejection of the so-called 'commodification' of animals, so vegans will not, for example, keep animals captive or use for milk production, clothing, riding/ploughing, keeping pets or taking any medicines that might have been tested on animals.
• Veganism asserts that meat eating is immoral and veganism is therefore a moral obligation. One prominent exponent of this position is the philosopher Peter Singer, who at the same time advocates full term abortion and even infanticide at the choice of mothers.

Christianity, on the other hand asserts that:

• Human beings are distinct from the rest of creation because they possesses a soul and are created in the image of God.
• God gave mankind special status as steward of his creation: Man may have abused this role at times but God still regards him as the pinnacle of his creation and as the steward of the rest of creation.
• God gave all living creatures to human beings for them to use including as food and for sacrificial purposes. 
• The killing of other life for food and sacrifices can be viewed as a shocking necessity meant to bring home to human beings the seriousness of their sin. God determined to provide the animals to act as these substitutes and symbols 'before the foundation of the earth'. They were provided to point forward to the final true sacrifice, that of his son Jesus Christ who offered himself 'for the sin of the whole world'.
• To say that it is wrong to kill animals therefore a) denies God the right to utilise things he created as he chooses, b) challenges the rightness of God in giving them to people for that purpose and c) therefore attacks substitutionary atonement for sin which is the heart of the gospel.

Veganism is the combined result of pursuing Darwinism to its logical conclusion and attempts to provide an ethical framework for life which specifically excludes any reference to any being outside the physical world. Veganism and humanism therefore go hand in hand. Most Western vegans have explicitly rejected belief in God although some follow atheistic forms of Buddhism. Some proponents of veganism, like Peter Singer, are among the most obnoxious and vociferous critics of Christianity.It can be seen from this that veganism is not a neutral lifestyle choice but an ideology which is on a collision course with Christianity.

We can see from this that, although it is quite possible for a Christian to adopt a non-meat eating lifestyle, it is not possible to be both a vegan and a Christian. More importantly, we can also see that below a relatively innocuous surface lie a set of ideas which are distinctly anti-Christian, which  are increasingly seeping into mainstream thinking  and which Christians need to understand - both in order to engage with them in contemporary culture and to guard our own hearts against erosion in confidence in God's providences and principles.