It is perhaps understandable that people look around the world these days -the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the Russia/Ukraine war, the cost of living crisis, NHS and train strikes, the climate emergency, the secularisation of the West etc- and can get easily depressed by the state of the world. However, if you take the ‘long view’ and put things in perspective you are likely to come to a view that it was “twas ever thus”, as Charles Dickens wrote in ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’ (1841). Throughout time the world has been plagued by wars, conflicts, financial and personal crises, disruptions with each epoch having its own particular challenges.
For hope I look back to my parents’ generation of the 1930s and 1940s which I think can rightly be described as probably humanity’s darkest bloodiest hour. It started with the Great Depression with around a quarter of people unemployed (in some parts it was as high as 70%), the rise of Totalitarianism through dictators like Hitler and Mussolini, and wherever you looked there seemed to be wars. Japan invaded China, the Spanish Civil War, the Chinese Civil War, Italy invaded Ethiopia, Hitler tore his way through Europe leading to WWII and the Holocaust - it is estimated that up to 200 million people died through these conflicts in the space of 15 years or so.
But then as with now there was Hope. If you wanted to pinpoint an individual human relationship and a time that probably saved the world then that was probably 9th August 1941 when British PM Winston Churchill had a secret meeting with US President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) aboard the battleship HMS Prince of Wales. It was their first meeting, but they met at a critical point in the world’s history -Churchill and the British nation at that point had stood alone against Hitler-his Nazi regime had invaded Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway and France, Russia was not expected to withstand Germany’s attack upon it, whilst Japan had signed a pact with Hitler and Mussolini. It was clear that Britain and Europe would only survive with America’s help even though Americans did not want to get involved in what they saw as a ‘foreign war’.
However, the meeting of these two great statesmen led to an agreement (‘Atlantic Charter’) where both countries agreed “..to ensure life, liberty, independence, religious freedom and to preserve the rights of man and justice…and promised to strive for a postwar world free of aggrandizement, territorial or other…”. It demonstrated the USA’s support for Britain and the Governments in exile against Nazism and Fascism and of course within a few months after ‘Pearl Harbour’, America was our ally across the world-and in time and with great sacrifice, the rest is history. What though did bind Churchill and FDR together in this great cause for freedom was their shared Christian faith and the meeting in 1941 exemplified that. On the Sunday of their meeting, the two of them and the crews of their respective ships took part in a church service onboard HMS Prince of Wales where they sang ‘O God, our help in ages past’ based on Psalm 90 and the more obvious ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’. It was an emotional event and demonstrated the importance of Christian faith to unite people in moments of crisis. Perhaps Churchill’s thoughts on the event sums up not only what he and FDR put in place but also a clear point to our own futures:
“When I looked upon that densely packed congregation of fighting men of the same language, of the same faith, of the same fundamental laws, of the same ideals…it swept across me that there here was the only hope, but also the sure hope, of saving the world from merciless degradation”. You can see a clip from the church service below:
For my sins (and I am sure there are many) one of my real ‘guilty pleasures’ is the BBC TV Show ‘The Apprentice’ hosted by Sir Alan Sugar-if you haven’t seen it, it involves a group of young entrepreneurs who battle to be given £250,000 for their business idea. It is very hammy, very over the top, certainly not to be taken seriously -but great fun.
Anyway, a key skill these ‘young bucks’ tend to struggle with is the art of delegation – an art necessary if organisations, businesses, and churches are to succeed- something numerous Chief Executives will talk about in length, but in fact the origins of this skill can be traced back to the Bible and to one individual in particular-Jethro.
Jethro was Moses father-in-law through the marriage of his daughter Zipporah, which came about from Moses defending her and her sisters from being attacked from shepherds (Exodus 2:11-21). However, the point is that Moses was a real workaholic-he was doing everything for the Israelites especially acting as a judge to his people on all issues-whether they be trivial or important. Jethro could see this was not going to work telling Moses:
“What you are doing is not good-you and these people who come to you will only wear yourselves out, the work is too heavy for you, and you cannot handle it alone….” (Exodus 18 :13-26)
What he said is now known as the ‘Jethro Principle’. He advised the following:
Select capable and spiritually mature individuals from across the community and appoint them as officials over groups of people
Have these people serve as judges for the people at all times but have them bring the difficult cases to you to decide (Moses)
By doing this it will make your load lighter because they will share it with you. If you do this and God so commands, you will be able to stand the strain, and all these people will go home satisfied.
Moses, like any good leader, took on board this advice, he enacted it which allowed him time with God, his family and the important work matters that were really his concern.
This guidance holds strong today. Often people tend to keep control of situations tightly to themselves, so they determine everything rather than share their responsibility/burden. It’s clear this kind of behaviour is not only unhealthy but doomed to failure because even if you are the finest leader around, you still can’t do it all on your own.
In my working and personal life, I have witnessed the real positive changes that can flow from someone handing over some of the reins to equally capable people to help them. This wisdom applies equally to our personal lives too-certain members of our families can end up doing most things -arranging trips to see friends and relatives, doing the shopping, managing the children, caring for relatives-and if you are not careful, it can lead to burnout or what they used to call a ‘nervous breakdown’. By allowing others to help you manage your load it can also empower them -so they feel they can contribute to things, rather than just watch the same person sort things out for them.
Discipleship is such a key priority for all churches, but of course we do struggle getting Jesus’ message of love, forgiveness, hope, redemption and the Kingdom of God across to a society assaulted by alternative messages from all angles. We are competing with the likes of Tiktok, Instagram, What’s App, Facebook, YouTube and Facebook- social media outlets that allow its users to disciple people more effectively than we as Christians have able to.
We can make the mistake of thinking that ‘discipleship’ is purely a spiritual activity when in fact the dictionary definition of discipleship is about encouraging someone or some people to follow the philosophies of someone or something-it should be acting out the message of Jesus Christ of course, but companies and society disciple us day in, day out in one form or another – you only have to look at how our world’s thoughts have been transformed through movements such as ‘Black Lives Matter’, ‘#Me Too’ & ‘# CancelCulture’ to see how successfully other people have been able to disciple society by changing the thinking and actions of organisations, businesses, governments and a lot of us -and depending on your point of view that may not always have been a positive thing.
So it heartened me a few weeks ago to see on the London Tube the above advert for the ‘Bible App’ (3,000 bible versions in 2,000 different languages) which in a marvellously inventive and funny way is going viral and interesting the ‘unchurched’ (part of its aim). If you cannot clearly see the advert, it is in the form of a review (like ‘Trustpilot’) of the Bible App where it is given ‘zero stars’, and the reviewer comments about it “would not recommend”. The user’s name is ‘Satan’. It is brilliant and instantly gets the message across to people about how good and powerful reading something like the Bible App (others like ‘The Bible with Nicky and Pippa Gumbel App are available!) is -so much so that the Devil doesn’t want people to read it. A great way to showcase humour to disciple people- as one person tweeted on ‘X’ : “I saw this on the train yesterday-I absolutely love this advert!!!”
What is refreshing is that the evangelical American church movement ‘Life. Church’ who run the Bible App is taking Jesus’ message out to the people, as Jesus and the original disciples did, to spread the Gospel amongst commuters, to make them smile and hopefully to be one of the 700m+ users who have downloaded the App. This is the kind of thing churches need to do to get people reading the bible and gospels again.
One of the many extraordinary things about the Bible is that there are relatively unknown passages that sit amongst the more celebrated and talked about parts of the Old and New Testaments, but which are often overlooked. One such example is the ‘Book of Ruth’-it sits sandwiched between ‘Judges’ and ‘Samuel 1&2’. It consists of just 4 chapters and in my Bible it runs to less than 3 pages, but for its size it has led to numerous interpretations about why it was written and what it means.
If you are unfamiliar with it, it is a tale of two people, Naomi, a Judean woman, and Ruth a Moabite woman, both of whom loses their husbands (Ruth has married one of Naomi’s sons) and rather than stay in that country, Ruth elects to travel with her mother-in-law to Bethlehem-a foreign land to her. There, depending on what interpretations you accept – Naomi instructs Ruth to seduce or get to know an old, rich man (Boaz) and they later marry giving her and Naomi the financial and emotional security they need. Ruth as an outsider is accepted into the Jewish faith, they have a child (Obed), who becomes the grandfather of King David-and we all know that leads us to Jesus.
The story can be understood in a variety of ways- how someone outside of a faith can be accepted, how women needed to find themselves a financially secure man for them to survive in a fiercely patriarchal society, you can see it as a story of God’s love for the dispossessed and oppressed or a justification for ‘mixed marriages’: the choice is yours.
I feel though to understand its story we need to appreciate the legal and historical background to Ruth’s predicament. At that time (we are probably talking about 500BC) a widowed woman such as Ruth was not allowed to marry a man outside of their family in that someone within the family had to accept them and the inherited land-again except in rare circumstances, women were not allowed to inherit their land. Ruth was a Moabite – a land now part of modern Jordan across the water from modern day Israel- but who were disliked by Jewish people. Moab was a son who was conceived following Lot’s daughters tricking their father into an incestuous relationship with them to carry on the family line and they worshipped a local icon and not God, so the combination of a Moabite and Jewish person having a strong relationship was unexpected.
Sex rears its head again here, as Naomi realises that a wealthy landowner Boaz, who just happens to be related to her late husband, is on good terms with Ruth. Naomi who can be viewed as a bit of a schemer or ‘gold digger’ asks Ruth to in effect ‘tart it up’ and seduce Boaz for his affections telling her “Wash, put on perfume, and get dressed in your best clothes. Then go down to the threshing floor, but don’t let him know you are there until he has finished eating and drinking. When he lies down, note the place where he is lying, then go and uncover his feet and lie down. He will tell you what to do.” (Ruth 3:3-4).
After their night together, Boaz, an upstanding individual, realises that there is another member of the family closer to Ruth who could marry her, but that person wants her land but not her! That leads to Boaz and Ruth marrying, starting their family and ultimately that leads to Jesus.
What though are we to make of Ruth and her story? To me it demonstrates the strong commitment Ruth had for Naomi her mother-in-law. In Ruth 1:16-17, she says this to Naomi when she is asked to go back to the kingdom of Moab: “Don’t urge me to leave you or turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me”. Strong emotional words that tell of their sisterlike bond.
Although it is rather uncomfortable to see how Namoi effectively acts as matchmaker to ensure she and Ruth are well looked after, it is understandable-how else were women like themselves to survive as they were not allowed to marry men outside of the family and were not entitled to their husbands’ land?
I also love how Ruth, although being an outsider to the Jewish faith is accepted as part of the greater family, accepts and honours God and of course ultimately plays a key role into Jesus’ earthly family heritage.
For a book that can be read at one small sitting, it packs a big spiritual punch!
