Do you ever get that feeling that the teachings of the Bible, and the complex and painful things that actually happen in your life don’t always connect? Do you ever feel that when you’re in the midst of pain, grief and difficulty, you’re not exactly sure what the gospel has to say about it?
Andrew Nicholls, Director of Pastoral Care at Oak Hill College in London, had exactly that experience as a pastor, trying to help his parishioners with the pain and grief of their lives, and finding that he didn’t have a whole lot to say to them. In this episode of the CCL podcast, Andrew speaks about this experience of having not much to say, and how it led to a turning point in his ministry and his whole view of what a pastor’s job is, as well as his understanding of how the gospel speaks to the realities of our lives.
Links referred to:
- Centre for Global Mission event: Embracing hard ministry: The Bible and the practice of Global Mission (Wed 23 July)
- Next CCL event: The smartphone disciple (Mon 27 Oct)
- Support the work of the Centre
Runtime: 34:49 min.
Transcript
Please note: This transcript has been checked against the audio and lightly edited, but still may contain errors. If quoting, please compare with the original audio.
Introduction
[00:00:00] Tony Payne: Do you ever get that feeling that the teachings of the Bible, which you know and love as a Christian, and the complex and painful things that actually happen in your life somehow, don’t always connect—that when you are in the midst of pain and grief and difficulty, you’re not exactly sure what the gospel has to say about it?
[00:00:20] Well, Andrew Nicholls had exactly that experience as a pastor, trying to help his parishioners with the pain and grief of their lives, and finding that he didn’t have a whole lot to say to them. And in today’s episode, Andrew speaks about this experience of having not much to say, and how it led to a turning point in his ministry and in his whole view of what a pastor’s job is, and in his understanding of how the gospel speaks to the realities of our lives. I hope you enjoy today’s conversation with Andrew Nicholls.
[Music]
[00:01:06] Tony Payne: Well, hello everyone. Welcome to another edition of the Centre for Christian Living Podcast. I’m Tony Payne. It’s great to be with you again. And today, my guest here in the CCL studio at Moore College in Sydney is Andrew Nicholls from Oak Hill College in London. Andrew, lovely to have you with us.
[00:01:23] Andrew Nicholls: Glad to be here.
[00:01:24] Tony Payne: And you’re here in Sydney why?
[00:01:26] Andrew Nicholls: I have the great privilege of being in the middle of study leave. I work at a college in North London. They give a very generous five months away from college to enrich myself, learn some things, and I’ve headed down here to learn some things.
Learning from Australians
[00:01:40] Tony Payne: Well, it’s extremely humbling to think, Andrew, that from the motherland you’d come and learn from us colonials. But what do you think you might learn?
[00:01:47] Andrew Nicholls: I’ve learned so many things from Aussies over the years. We’ve been greatly enriched by visits from many of you to London—to England—and they’ve been really important in my own Christian life.
[00:01:58] The particular reasons why I’ve come here arise out of a conversation that I had with one of your colleagues, Paul Grimmond, who—he was walking past my door in my normal workplace and I happened to come out and my study at just the right time in God’s providence. We had no plan to meet, but God had a plan for us to meet. And out of that, we chatted for an hour or so with Paul and his wife Cathy.
[00:02:18] And when I began to hear about the kinds of things that were now part of the curriculum here in the College and increasingly part of normal life in the diocese, there were two things in particular that I very much wanted to come and learn more about. One was a part of the curriculum called Intentional Ministry Reflection, where students are encouraged to think about how they’re doing in some of the ministry experiences and how they’re responding and what they can learn from how ministry is going. And in the diocese, the decision to expect that every person in ordained ministry would have a pastoral supervisor. Those two things sounded fascinating to me and immediately appealed to me as something that I thought we could be learning from. And I’d love to think about how we could incorporate some of that expertise back in the UK.
Teaching pastoral ministry
[00:03:02] Tony Payne: We’ve had a conversation a few weeks ago here on our podcast with Caroline Spencer, who wrote the workbook—a book that’s coming out of that Intentional Ministry Reflection idea. Getting Over Yourself, the book is called. And it’s about this whole idea of self-reflection, self-awareness—of being aware of yourself in the situation. Why did I behave like that? Why did I do that? Why did that conversation that I just had with someone not go so well? And what was it about me that perhaps contributed to that?
[00:03:28] Andrew Nicholls: Well, exactly. I think the idea that there are reasons which, in some way, will often relate quite deeply to some aspect of me and my relationship with God, and that the gospel has a power to change the way in the end that I react to things—that kind of thinking is—has been really exciting to me, and it’s the heart actually of what I teach in my day job.
[00:03:47] Tony Payne: So your day job at Oak Hill is what, then? What do you teach?
[00:03:49] Andrew Nicholls: Well, I’m director of pastoral care at Oak Hill, and that job has two parts. One is that I teach pastoral ministry to students. There’s a bit that I get to teach them in the first year and the second year and the third year. And in the other half of my job, I get to have individual conversations with students, counselling—supportive conversations with students who are working through particular tricky things. So I hope that I’m teaching them some of the skills they need and some of the foundations they need to have those conversations themselves as part of their ministry.
[00:04:18] One of the passions that drew me to this job was the opportunity to help students think about their future ministry, not just as a public pulpit-based ministry, but as a conversational, let me get to know and love people as individuals and care for the souls of individuals, especially some of the wounded sheep, some of the bruised reeds that Jesus has a particular concern for and a particular gentleness with that needs to be reflected in the character of the pastor. So the pulpit serves the heart of a church’s life, but conversations are pretty important too.
[00:04:48] Tony Payne: So this has come out of, I’m assuming, your own experience in ministry your own way of thinking about ministry? Is that how you always thought about ministry?
[00:04:55] Andrew Nicholls: No, it isn’t. And I think you’re absolutely right: it does come out of my experience. I trained as a medic and I picked up some skills there about having conversations with people. What a privilege a doctor has! You can ask literally, if you think about it, about any part of a person’s bodily functions, and they will expect to tell you. I mean, it’s a wonderful privilege, in some sense.
[00:05:15] But I then learned a lot of theology, because I was transferring—I was persuaded of the huge significance of life—afterlife. Life in the new creation. Life after death. Because all my patients were dying. And it’s not only because I wasn’t a great doctor; it’s because every patient dies. And the value, therefore, of speaking about Jesus impressed itself upon me as something that might be even more useful thing to do for people than to care for their bodies.
[00:05:39] I think at the time, I was convinced by a slightly more overstated version of that than I would now articulate, if that makes sense. That I think God still cares for and loves our bodies, and indeed people are whole people, body and soul. So I was making too much of a divide, I think. However, the Lord used it to move me from focusing on care of people’s bodies to the care of people’s souls.
[00:05:58] And having been myself as a student at Oak Hill and ending up in church ministry, I realised that a number of people would come to me for help with things that I didn’t have a clue really how to answer. So I remember a number of such conversations—people coming, for example, saying, “Our marriage is in trouble. Can you help?” A different marriage saying, “I think my husband’s being unfaithful. Can you help?” A completely different situation: a very difficult experience in childhood of abuse in a different culture. They wanted help to work it through as part of their Christian discipleship, and I didn’t have really a clue what to do apart from to pray. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know where to start actually connecting. All that I’d studied in Scripture in Greek and Hebrew. I didn’t know really where it to go to be helpful to them.
[00:06:44] And it struck me that that couldn’t be a satisfactory position for a pastor to be in, as a pastor’s supposed to have the cure of souls. And the burden in their souls was something I thought Jesus had something to offer, but I didn’t know how to find out what that was.
[00:06:57] And after a few years in ministry, the Lord opened up a possibility for me to build into my weekly calendar—I had a study day, and I began studying some modules with a wonderful organisation based in Philadelphia and other states called Christian Counselling and Education Foundation, and what they have been doing over many years—they’re part of a movement called “Biblical Counselling”, but really, it’s about connecting the riches of Scripture with the realities of life.
[00:07:22] And as I began studying those modules, the first thing that happened was I changed. I understood more about how Scripture really connected with my own heart and what it meant for me to grow as a Christian—what the normal Christian life should feel like for me as a Christian before I was a pastor. And that became a big part of the foundation of how then I have a conversation with somebody else.
[00:07:43] And as I began to learn that, actually, I think my preaching changed. There was more application in my sermon. There was more gentleness in my ministry, I think. And instead of—I had developed the reflex when people were asking all these challenging questions, the reflex of withdrawing internally. “I hope they don’t bring their complicated problems to me, because I won’t know what to say and I’ll feel like I’m letting them down. So I’m going to withdraw.”
[00:08:05] Tony Payne: Make myself, perhaps, less accessible.
[00:08:07] Andrew Nicholls: Yes! Keep going with the idea that my main thing is to preach a sermon, and that takes a lot of time. So I may not be available for you. But something in me flipped. And actually, I began feeling encouraged—glad that people would come to me with questions, because I knew that Jesus had something to offer them. And it wouldn’t always be that I would know what it was or be brilliant at it, but the idea that someone would bring a problem, bring a struggle with sin, bring a pain and a suffering to the Lord to find out how he might help, and I might have a part to play in working out what that was. That’s extraordinary. A great privilege. And I’ve loved learning that, really, Christ does meet us and equip us to be Galatians 6—to carry each other’s burdens; to talk to each other, winsomely and gently about sin; to listen in ways that are constructive and careful before we start to speak. All kinds of things are built into all of that.
The gospel in life
[00:09:02] Tony Payne: You were saying that when you were doing some of those modules with CCEF that it changed you. It changed the way you, in a sense, saw the gospel relating to your own life and your own soul. Can you give, just without divulging anything too personal, an example of what sort of thing you mean?
[00:09:22] Andrew Nicholls: I can, because it’s an example, I’ve used quite a lot so I’m very used to speaking about it publicly, and there’s no embarrassment there. We used to have recycling that was collected in green crates that would often get a bit too full before the time came to put them out for the recycling lorry to collect them. And one of these crates had several lemonade bottles in it—empty lemonade bottles, which were very light, and it turns out, very bouncy. And as I was picking up one of these crates, the bottle rolled off, bounced across the floor, and I picked it up, put it back on the crate, but it bounced off again. This time, I picked it up and shoved it back on a bit more forcefully, with the result that three lemonade bottles now bounced off, and I found myself saying, “Nnnggh!” and getting cross with bouncing lemonade bottles.
[00:10:00] Tony Payne: Very understandably, I would’ve thought!
[00:10:02] Andrew Nicholls: Well, I’d been doing some study in this kind of way of thinking, and so I became more self-reflective at that point than I would otherwise have been. And I think I felt that there was something irrational about being cross with a lemonade bottle, and then I went—
[00:10:15] Tony Payne: True.
[00:10:15] Andrew Nicholls: —“The right person to be cross with was myself.” But then why was I being irritated by it?
[00:10:20] At the time, my reflection went in all kinds of directions in a very short space of time. But I realised that I wanted to be the kind of person who achieved what they set out to achieve first time, every time. I didn’t want to face the limitation of being not brilliant at everything I did, even ever something as trivial as the recycling.
[00:10:36] And actually, I think, in some ways, I felt justified because I thought that I was doing this in service of my family. You know, I hadn’t drunk all this lemonade. And so there was an irritation at whoever had put this here and made a job that was difficult for me. That was going on in my heart at the same time.
[00:10:49] Even, I think, I was expecting that, in some way, sovereign God, if he really cared for me, would suspend the laws of nature so I could get away with doing whatever I wanted without having lemonade bottles bouncing. Now that’s insane.
[00:11:02] But I think something of all of those threads was in my heart behind that “Nnnngh!”. And again, because I’d been looking at it at the time, the Lord very kindly and very gently led me to repent. And I actually praised him that I was a very limited and finite being who couldn’t, like him, do everything I wanted first time.
[00:11:20] And to be able to enjoy that and for that to become an act of worship was entirely the Spirit’s work in me. But a very, very ordinary moment of life transformed by thinking about the Lord.
[00:11:32] So that’s an example that was going through my mind at the time. And actually every single time I take out the recycling now, I’m experiencing something of the very same battle. But I’m a little bit quicker to either try and carry a little bit less, or if I try and carry too much and it falls off again, I say, “Thank you, Lord, for reminding me.”
[00:11:50] Tony Payne: So it sounds like it’s a little bit, as we were talking about intentional reflection and self-awareness, it’s almost pausing at each moment, and you’ve given us a sort of almost ultra-trivial moment of everyday life. And you can imagine just transferring that thought process into slightly less trivial moments of relational conflict—
[00:12:10] Andrew Nicholls: That’s right.
[00:12:11] Tony Payne: —of frustration and anger and suffering and all kinds of things, and asking, “What is it about this situation? What is it about me and how I think about the world—what I desire, what I’m hoping for, what I expect, what I think I deserve, what is it that’s triggering feelings of anger, frustration, sorrow, grief? What is it about this particular situation that is exposing something about me?”
[00:12:33] Andrew Nicholls: Exactly. And you’re quite right that in many senses, this was an ultra-trivial moment. But in another sense, relationally, it wasn’t, because there was something in my heart that was pretty significant about my attitude to the Lord, and there certainly was about my attitude to my family.
[00:12:47] Tony Payne: Yeah.
[00:12:47] Andrew Nicholls: You know, the resentment. So that—picture me coming back into the house, having done that, feeling cross because they drunk too much lemonade, versus coming back into the house feeling grateful to the Lord, because he’d humbled me. You know, I’m going to be a different dad. I’m going to be a different husband. So yes: it’s a little tiny window of the kind of thing that I do all the time that’s always revealing my heart.
The nature of church leadership and ministry
[00:13:09] Tony Payne: So it sounds like in your interactions with CCEF, in your own reflection on how you were trained for ministry—what you thought ministry was about, what you thought the care of souls now really was—it sounds like you were coming to different convictions about the nature of church leadership, about the nature of ministry, and obviously that’s what you’ve now been called into theological education to teach others. But if you could capture what was it that changed in your view of the nature of church ministry and leadership and how we prepare people for that task?
[00:13:42] Andrew Nicholls: Yeah, great question. I think one big change was that I realised that ministry was about a good deal more than the public one-to-many ministry—that there was a more personal one-to-one aspect of ministry that fitted with that. And actually, the conversations would help me be a better preacher, because I’d know better the people I was actually preparing God’s word to feed.
[00:14:03] But it was also that I, as a minister, and everybody else were basically inching our way along, with the power of God’s extraordinary Spirit, in little tiny steps, growing more like Christ. But that there was a therefore—and if we’re going to be honest about that—people needed to see me inching along—me progressing, you know, as Paul says to Timothy, to watch my life and doctrine closely so that people will see my progress.
[00:14:30] Now, I think what I thought that really meant was—could largely be satisfied by watching my doctrine closely. But it doesn’t say, “Watch your life or doctrine closely”; it says, “Watch both”. And if people see progress in both, that means they’re going to have to know that I’m a sinner. And they’re going to have to see that in some way that convinces them I really am so that they can see me progress in that as well. I think that must be what Paul is requiring of Timothy.
[00:14:56] So that means I have to have a willingness to be known as a kind of—I don’t feel embarrassed now to say that I shouted at a lemonade bottle. But it wasn’t only that; they needed to know a little bit about what it was like in my family—the fact I was not always a perfectly patient husband and father. And that would be obvious from time to time when people came into our home.
[00:15:17] But I also needed, I think, to help people understand when I’m preaching, I actually am willing to apply Scripture to myself and say, “How has this spoken to me this week? What sin have I been convicted of? What promise has reassured me this week?” And that carries through into training, because I think we need to help pastors as they start out in ministries for themselves to have something of that kind of willingness—that they’re not just going to be preaching a sermon, which will—going to be up for criticism; they’re going to be living a life which needs to be open to—
[00:15:51] Tony Payne: Correction?
[00:15:51] Andrew Nicholls: Correction. Thank you. I was going to say “inspection”, but what that really means is open to correction, open to—so that people can see you grow. And also see when you don’t grow. And see you struggle with things. Like they will be.
[00:16:05] Tony Payne: It strikes me as you speak about it, I can imagine—if I can put myself in the place of being trained for ministry and going out into ministry, fresh and new again, it’s easy to think, I think, that we’ve got to get the Bible right, and we must stand for doctrine and fight for the truth, and not take a backward step in contending for the truth. And we want our lives to be an example to those around us. But perhaps it’s easy to conflate those things and therefore, almost think my life has to be as blameless and as perfect as my doctrine. Or it’s not seen to be that, somehow I’m less than a good minister or something.
[00:16:45] Andrew Nicholls: Yeah. I don’t think I’d ever thought of expressing it like that, but that seems to me to be a very helpful way to capture the problem. I mean, I think—we talk at Oak Hill quite a bit about “We want to grow people to be lifelong learners”.
[00:16:57] So we want people not just to study while they’re at college, but to gain the tools that will help them be studying and learning for life. And there’s a sense in which you can grow in knowledge just by learning more. You don’t necessarily have to have got some things wrong, but you do have to have had some areas of ignorance that are being filled.
[00:17:14] What it means to grow in life, to become more like Jesus, I think, must inevitably, and there are ways in which I’m not very like him right now, and for my patience gradually to grow, for my compassion for the lost gradually to grow, for my anger at the horror—the destructiveness of sin—to grow in a righteous way like Christ’s.
[00:17:35] Those are lifelong projects. And wonderfully, he’s doing them in me. He’s doing them in every Christian. But I think for people to see that happen in me, they’re going to have to see ways in which I’m currently not there.
[Music]
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[00:19:23] Tony Payne: And now let’s get back to our program.
Flawed leaders
[00:19:25] Tony Payne: But before we get on to talking, how this is more relevant to the Christian life, I guess it strikes me that what you are saying about the nature of ministry and what good ministry leadership is about, if we can use the pop psychology word and say, to some extent it’s about “vulnerability” or transparency. It’s about showing yourself as someone who’s making progress—showing yourself as someone who is humble, who is repentant, who is constantly repentant in their life.
[00:19:48] You think of church scandals broadly, whether in America or Australia or the UK, and let’s not be specific, but there are certainly plenty of instances you can think of where there may have been some problem, there may have been some mistake, there may have been some bad behaviour. But we need to shut it down and keep it quiet. We need to hold the line and retain our reputation. After all, the minister should be blameless, and there’ll be so much damage if we admit that we’ve made a mistake or that there’s been some sin here. And so, you can easily close ranks and put the reputation of the gospel and the ministry in the forefront. Do you know what I’m saying?
[00:20:21] Andrew Nicholls: I do know what you’re saying. I recognise that very much and I think, yeah, Scripture tells us that an elder must be above reproach. But it absolutely does not and cannot mean that they must be sinless. And therefore, we have to find ways of understanding what that means that still allows for the inevitability of the fact that leaders will sin and they will sin in ways that are hurtful to other people and that cause some damage to other people. Sin always has a horizontal and a vertical component—always in respect to the Lord and it always has impacts on those around us.
[00:20:52] And we know that our pastors, our leaders, our vicars, our rectors are not sinless. So we know that that is going to happen. We know that sin is going to happen. And that has to be part of the normal life of church. And so for an elder, a pastor, a vicar to be in the habit of, when necessary, saying quickly, genuinely, “I’m so sorry. I think I completely stuffed that up.”
[00:21:17] Someone very kindly spoke to me after church last week and pointed out that one of the things I said when I was trying to apply the passage last week had struck them as incredibly hurtful. That was my fault, and I’m so glad they gave me a chance to apologise for that. “Let me try and say again what I hoped to say and got so badly wrong last week.” I think that kind of acknowledgement in a sermon would achieve so many more things than simply healing one relationship with someone who’s offended.
[00:21:42] It would establish that this is normal—that the gospel allows us to feel secure in saying, “I really got that badly wrong, and I’m so sorry.” So that we are an example—leaders are an example not simply of getting things right, but of how to get things wrong well, in a way that’s shaped by the gospel, that believes Jesus died for me. We’re okay. We can be friends again.
[00:22:03] But it was a painful thing to say, “sorry”. It was a painful thing to acknowledge responsibility—a pain I’d be willing to bear because Christ is my example of bearing pain for the sake of restoring relationships. There’s all kinds of ways in which you don’t give up being a leader, because you made a mistake. It’s an opportunity of a new kind to lead well.
[00:22:20] Tony Payne: You could almost say that a leader is to be beyond reproach, but not beyond repentance. It’s kind of—
[00:22:27] Andrew Nicholls: Absolutely. I mean, I was hugely helped, I think—I spoke already about the blessing of great Australian visitors to the UK, and Tim Keller from America would come. And I remember him saying, and it wasn’t a new thought to him, but I remember him saying it and it impressed itself on me, “If you’re the pastor, you’ve go to be the chief repenter.”
[00:22:44] And that kind of turned on its head, I think, some of what I thought about being a pastor at that point. This is very much the point that repentance is at the heart of the Christian life. It’s at the heart of the Christian church. We’re called constantly to repent and believe. And that doesn’t just mean saying, “Yeah, I haven’t done everything I could have done this week to share the faith with my friends.” That may mean that. It will mean all kinds of other things too, as a normal part of life.
[00:23:07] Tony Payne: It’s in this way that a pastor or a minister does fulfill that role of being an example to the flock, an example of faith and repentance, because faith and repentance, that is the Christian life. And if you presented an example of faith and perfection, or a faith and kind of a hard exterior that you never get beyond, it’s not exemplifying the experience that we all have as Christians.
The Christian life
[00:23:30] Tony Payne: And it kind of bridges over into talking about the Christian life, which is where I wanted to get to. Really you’re describing the Christian life, aren’t you?
[00:23:37] Andrew Nicholls: Yes. I think so. And certainly that’s the way I came at it—that I needed to learn this as a Christian, and then learn that that was how I was a pastor and how I’m now teaching pastors. And I hope I’m teaching pastors, church leaders, youth leaders and so on who will embody the Christian life that they want the people they’re teaching and training to lead themselves. There is no line really between the two.
[00:24:00] Tony Payne: No, no. That’s right. And in some ways, you can see how this does happen—that it has its versions in the Christian life in that we think to be a good church member, to be a good Bible study leader, to be someone who’s respected in the church, I need to be someone who has it together. I need to be someone who’s not notshowing my dirty linen in public. I need to be that kind of person who does all the right things and does all the activities—makes me a good Christian. And it’s quite easy to feel that way and think that way as Christians: it’s a matter of performing to a certain standard. And so you tend to keep under wraps all those many aspects of yourself that aren’t up to standard.
Talking about sin
[00:24:32] Andrew Nicholls: Yes. And it should be said that there are lots of unhealthy ways for talking about sin. The goal is not just to talk about sin. We can talk about sin in a way that plays everybody on side and says, oh, this doesn’t really matter.
[00:24:41] Tony Payne: Yeah!
[00:24:42] Andrew Nicholls: We can talk about sin in a way that says, “Do you see how open and vulnerable and transparent I am? Look at me. I’m brilliant at showing you what the—the mess of my heart.” There’s a good way to talk about sin, which is under Christ, under the gospel. If I’m preaching, I say, “It’s been such a privilege to come to this passage again and find God’s grace for me. I’ve really needed it this week.” That’s the kind of thing any Christian could say to any other Christian as they’re having a cup of coffee afterwards. “That sermon was so helpful for me. I really felt,” and people often say this, sometimes they—when I preach, “I really felt you were speaking it just for me.” But they often don’t say why. So if we could say that to each other, but—”Oh, that really touched me because I think I’ve been really struggling with being afraid of a particular situation, a particular person this week just to remember that God is so huge and kind, I don’t need to be afraid of that. I found that really encouraging.” I think that kind of conversation is the kind of conversation that we can all have and will be helped to have it, if it’s the kind of conversation that’s coming out in sermons.
Word ministry to one another
[00:25:35] Andrew Nicholls: And by the way, I think, I know we want to talk about the Christian life, but Ephesians 4: one of the key things that a pastor-teacher should be doing is equipping the saints for this kind of conversation. We need to be teaching each other how to talk.
[00:25:48] Tony Payne: Yeah. You may or may not know this, a hobby horse of mine is riding past at this point and I’m very tempted to jump on it and go for a really good gallop, because when you said before that the role of the pastor is not just one-to-many, but one-to-one. The role of the congregation member is occasionally one-to-many, not so much one-to-many. But it’s definitely one-to-one, and one-to-two, and one-to-three, and one-to-four.
[00:26:11] And the teaching and example that is heard in the sermon, in the ministry of leadership, and in particular, the framework of gospel that begins to fill our minds and shape our minds, the understanding of everything in light of Jesus, it starts to shape us and change us through teaching and preaching. That’s what we bring to those conversations. When we not only admit to somebody else, “This is where I’m struggling”, but we apply the word of truth to the brother who’s struggling and who can open up to us and say, “This is what’s going on” and provide—in many respects, the kind of location for the one-to-one Word ministry of Christians is in that everyday granular existence where we’re bringing the Word to bear on what’s happening here and now on this particular instance of struggle or of challenge or of joy or of thanksgiving or of learning.
[00:27:00] Andrew Nicholls: Yes, exactly. There’s a huge potential for great spiritual benefit in something as ordinary as a WhatsApp group. People can express their sense of bodily weakness and they often do. We often share prayer needs for hospital visits or whatever. They’re always there in my group, but God cares about our bodies. God loves us and cares for us as whole people. It’s a good thing to be sharing and then to hear that someone is praying for that thing that you are fearful of, and praying that you’ll know the Lord’s strength and presence, and praying for healing, and praying for confidence in him, come what may. Those are really significant ways that we minister to each other.
[00:27:35] And that kind of interchange of what’s really going into my life—”What am I really worried about? What am I really enjoying?”—and helping each other see that in a richly three-dimensional context as joy before the Lord—of here before the Lord and seeking him for help. That is, I think, the ordinary Christian life.
Word ministry in Bible study groups
[00:27:51] Tony Payne: It is. You’re making me think of Bible study groups I’ve been in, and led poorly and well, and mostly poorly at different times in life—
[00:27:59] Andrew Nicholls: Me too.
[00:27:59] Tony Payne: —in which, I don’t know. I just feel it’s so easy to fall between two stools here. It’s so easy to have a group that is, there’s all Bible and all learning, and almost ends up being a reprise of the sermon, but in a slightly different form. A slightly more interactive sermon.
[00:28:15] Or it’s possible to have care and share groups where it’s all care and share, in a sense. It’s just mutual—it’s like a mutually supportive grievance session or just a session where we just all share everything that’s going wrong, and there’s no gospel or word that brings a different perspective in it, and we leave with a sense of having shared something. That usually feels good to get something off your chest. But not left with a word that changes our perspective, perhaps, or that challenges us or comforts us or in some way draws us towards either what Jesus says into this situation or what I can learn about myself in this situation. “Why am I so upset about this? What is it about me that I need to learn in this situation as well?”
[00:28:55] Andrew Nicholls: Yeah. I think it’s not very hard to imagine a group where you are having Bible study, but the leader knows that they don’t have to get necessarily to the end of question 12, and they don’t have to have got every possible point that will constitute a right and excellent answer to that question. That’s not the goal. The goal of the study is that something true and glorious from Scripture gets connected with the lives of the people that are studying it together.
[00:29:20] So someone might say, “We were praying last week for the fact that your child has just started a new school. And it just struck me as we were reading that bit about Jesus’ care for the children, that just really encouraged me, because I just imagined him saying something like that to your child.” That’s fairly rough and ready, just off the top of my head. But there’s a kind of immediacy about actually seeing Jesus’ love and care for little children and thinking, “Yeah, well, he’s not unconcerned about what it’s like for my child to go to school”—that the Scripture and the life coming together.
[00:29:49] And there are all kinds of ways in which that boundary can be blurred in a wonderful way. But we’ll need to help our group leaders. If we are leading a group, we’ll need to feel enough freedom to let—it can feel a little bit uncomfortable because there isn’t a question that leads you to have that discussion necessarily. But I think groups take off when that kind of thing happens. Leaders that feel a little bit freer, they need to spot the red herrings, because they’ll still happen.
[00:30:14] Tony Payne: Yeah. It doesn’t mean you—it doesn’t mean—
[00:30:15] Andrew Nicholls: It’s got nothing to do with the passage, nothing to do with our lives. It’s just a personal little—yeah. There are all kinds of skills needed in a good leader, but you’ve got that.
[00:30:23] Tony Payne: One is the ability, you’re saying, to sort of notice when a fissure is opening up in someone’s life as you are having this conversation and something’s going on here and is being expressed. And we need to set aside getting to question 12 and just sort of wander in there together and have a talk and see what’s going on there, because the Word will do that. It will start exposing things and bringing things out in our lives. And we’ll bring things out in our lives that the Word will need to address.
[00:30:47] Andrew Nicholls: Yes.
Andrew’s book
[00:30:48] Tony Payne: Andrew, you were telling me before we started recording, you’re writing something or have written something in this exact space we’re talking about actually, isn’t it? About Bible studies, Christian leadership, how we do things a little bit differently.
[00:30:58] Andrew Nicholls: Yeah, so my main project for study leave has been trying to get to a fuller sense of completion a short course that I’m writing with church small groups in mind that will help the group think about the possibilities that exist in Christian conversation. The Bible has such amazingly encouraging things to say about the power that God has given the words Christians say to each other. Your words to me will stop my heart being hardened. Your words to me will help me keep going until Jesus comes back. And I need to hear words from you today, according to Hebrew’s 10.
[00:31:30] Tony Payne: Yes.
[00:31:30] Andrew Nicholls: I need to hear words from you today according to Hebrews 3 to stop my heart being hardened. That’s an amazing power that you have—that every Christian has in each other’s life. So excited by that power and shaped by the humility that we’re all in need in just the same way, we can learn to get a little bit deeper in talking well about the suffering in one another’s lives and about how God is our refuge. God meets us. God strengthens us. God holds us. God refines us.
[00:31:58] And the sin that is an ongoing reality in all of our lives, God redeems us, God transforms us, God saves us. And those are huge ideas, and we can feel totally disqualified. But actually, if you break it down, we can begin to take little steps forward in having conversations that are meaningful, life-giving, Spirit-enabled ordinary conversations between Christians. And the course is aiming to give groups a little experience of taking a step or two on in that.
[00:32:24] Tony Payne: That sounds like something very much worth investigating. It’s just at the manuscript submitted to publisher kind of stage?
[00:32:29] Andrew Nicholls: Yeah.
[00:32:30] Tony Payne: It’s a little way away. And you don’t have a title yet?
[00:32:33] Andrew Nicholls: Don’t have a title yet, no. I’ve got a couple of very bad titles, but I’m hoping the marketing department’s going to sort that out.
[00:32:38] Tony Payne: Well, dear listener, look out for Andrew Nicholls’s little course on small groups and how to do better at digging deeper into one another’s lives, encouraging each other through the Bible in small groups. Sounds like a much-needed and really valuable thing, Andrew. I’m certainly looking forward to it. It’ll come out probably several months’ time. But keep an eye out for that. I think Good Book Company in the UK are publishing that.
[00:32:58] Andrew Nicholls: Yeah.
[00:32:59] Tony Payne: Our good friends. Keep an eye out for that sometime, probably later this year.
Conclusion
[00:33:03] Tony Payne: Andrew, thanks so much for talking with us about this. We started talking about ministry and your role and what you’re learning, and ended up talking about, really, the nature of the Christian life and our encouragement of each other, which is wonderful. Thanks so much for being with us on the Centre for Christian Living Podcast.
[00:33:16] Andrew Nicholls: It’s a great pleasure.
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[00:33:32] Tony Payne: Well, thanks for joining us on this episode of the Centre for Christian Living Podcast from Moore College. For a whole lot more from the Centre for Christian Living, just head over to the CCL website. That’s ccl.moore.edu.au, where you’ll find a stack of resources, including every past podcast episode all the way back to 2017, videos from our live events, and articles that we’ve published through the Centre.
[00:33:57] And while you’re there on the website, we also have an opportunity for you to make a tax deductible donation to support the ongoing work of the Centre here at Moore College.
[00:34:07] We’d also love you to subscribe to the podcast and to leave a review so that people can discover our podcast and our other resources.
[00:34:15] And we always love and benefit from receiving your feedback and questions. Please get in touch. You can email us at [email protected].
[00:34:26] Many thanks to Karen Beilharz from the Communications Team here at Moore College for all her work in transcribing and editing and producing this podcast; to James West for the music; and to you, dear listeners, for joining us each week. Thank you for listening.
[00:34:41] I’m Tony Payne. ‘Bye for now.
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Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash
