The undeceived don’t panic

Here’s an excellent piece by John Stackhouse, writing for the Jubilee Centre. I don’t know John, but I do know Guildford Baptist Church, of which he is senior pastor, well from the past. He sums up my own feeling that closing the door gratefully on the COVID era leaves Christians vulnerable not only to future lockdowns, but to all kinds of ungodly restrictions that might be sprung on us.

I assume from the article that Guildford Baptists did, to some degree or other, resist the closures back in 2020-21. We were less faithful here, quickly closing down for the first lockdown and imposing all kinds of scientifically absurd restrictions even afterwards on “Health and Safety” grounds that were actually simply political diktats relayed through the Baptist Union and followed blindly as “science.”

When masked worshippers, later, told me how nice the flowers smelled, I reminded them that virus particles are smaller and more mobile than lily scent – but it was water off ducks’ backs, of course, in the face of Matt Hancock’s medical expertise. The most I was able to achieve, as an elder at the time, was to insist (with one colleague) on opening the church for an afternoon service during the second lockdown. These were blessed times, albeit attended by less than a dozen people (in a church more than an order of magnitude bigger). Such was the power of political conformity – and fear.

I must add at this point that the Lord blessed us despite this. Our then pastor was admirably quick off the mark in live-streaming services as soon as we closed for the first Interdict, and everybody got behind the effort to make it successful. We even managed to record songs by the church band every week, each contributing their parts by e-mail, to promote a (virtual) sense of local community participation.

Perhaps as a result the church actually grew over the time of the pandemic, people across the world tuned in to the services, and the Alpha course we ran online attracted participants hundreds of miles away. But many churches were less fortunate – especially the Anglicans, with not only fewer technical resources, in general, but confronted by an Archbishop’s incomprehensible ban on even the incumbents entering the church premises. Even now my university prayer fellowship has reports of congregations being half of what they were before COVID, and that in Evangelical fellowships.

Following my recent sermon I’ve had some gratifying conversations with newer church members who, visiting The Hump, found that my scepticism over the lies we are told daily matches their own. A couple of them described themselves as “Awakened,” and contrasted themselves with their “Normie” former selves and disapproving relatives. This, of course, is the common experience of nearly every reader here from across the world, as some have commented in the past. And although I’ve used the “Awakened/Normie” contrast myself in blogs, I find myself uncomfortable with it, especially in a Christian context, in which my desire is to prepare the Church for persecutions and temptations to compromise yet to come, not to foster a spiritual elite.

“Normie” certainly describes our common experience of others, but is nevertheless a pejorative that is as unhelpful, in apologetic terms, as advertising an Alpha course by inviting the Heathen to eat a meal and recant. And “Awakened” is likely to be confused with “Woke,” which is the ideology currently most dangerous within the churches: “Don’t be Woke, be Awakened!” is a little confusing, you have to agree.

In fact the whole concept of suddenly seeing the light is simplistic, and ubiquitous, enough to be dangerous. The whole idea of “Woke” is that with a little help from Robin diAngelo’s books – plus constant propaganda from schools, universities, press, governments, bishops, and every institution and corporation in the West – one suddenly wakes up to the realisation that everything and everyone is racist, transphobic, Islamophobic and so on. One dyes one’s hair blue, fears for one’s very life in the company of old white males, and retires to the safe space of Islington or the General Synod.

But “Woke” is not not unique in offering such magical transformation. Getting one’s eyeballs pressed by Guru Mahara-ji supposedly revealed the Divine Light to many, and being slain in the Spirit by counterfeit prosperity apostles has much the same effect. Back in my evangelistic days, I met more than one person who claimed to have seen God and been “opened up to cosmic reality” under the influence of LSD. And if we’re being thorough, remember that the eighteenth century resort to reason over religious authority is still termed “The Enlightenment.”

We must always remember that the most radical, and the only vital, transformation has not to do with seeing through the Deep State, but our state of deep sin. And so Ephesians 5:14, probably quoting one of the earliest Christian hymns, says:

“Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.”

That awakening leads us definitively from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light. But experience shows that it is still possible for us to be deceived – or else we would never need to have been “Awakened” – and the ultimate source of all deception is Satan. So perhaps a better term for “the Awakened” would be something like “the Undeceived,” which reminds us that we once were as deceived as anybody else about how this world works.

Yet even that term should be used cautiously, firstly because Scripture’s main use of “deception” is Satan’s lie that the gospel is not true, rather than that the CIA foments wars and assassinates its own presidents. And secondly, we should use it cautiously because we are still vulnerable to being deceived, and all of us undoubtedly are in one area or another. Most relevantly, those who have been red-pilled/Awakened/Undeceived may easily find themselves falling down rabbit holes of gullibility in the other direction.

We identify the lockstep of governments, corporations and NGOs, but who do we think is behind it? The Catholics? The Jews? The Freemasons? The Rosicrucians? Lizard people? Alien infiltrators in UFOs… or the CIA in reverse-engineered UFOs copied from crashed aliens… or copied from blueprints given to the CIA by demons? Or maybe it’s just old fashioned power, money and incompetence.

So what is needed above all is that rare gift, discernment, which is greatly helped by critical thinking. And it is this last point that may be the most helpful lesson for the Undeceived to learn in relation to preparing God’s people to deal with future surprise attacks better than they did last time. To be a “Normie” is to be uncritical about what the Guardian, the BBC or government “experts” tell you. And one is likely to be as uncritical of what is taught in church, or read in books – which is how churches become heterodox under persuasive, but false, teachers. Faith does not simply accept the truth – it examines the truth critically and then accepts it.

However, once one passes through that highly uncomfortable process of realising that much of what you are told by authoritative figures, and therefore much of what you have learned through life, is untrue one learns to examine carefully whatever one is told – provided that one resists the temptation to total cynicism about the very existence of truth. That’s why Christians, who have been truly awakened from the dead by the light of Christ, ought to be the most fearless in pursuit of truth, and the most confident in standing for truth.

And so in church it begins by being willing to question – in brotherly love – teaching that strays from Scriptural truth, whether that means talking to the minister about his sermon, or challenging each others’ errors, in the right context. In that way, devotion to finding the truth (Berean style) becomes the church’s mindset, rather than loyalty to the leadership, or to the reputation of the church itself, or seeking a quiet life. In such an atmosphere self-censorship becomes less of a restraint, and therefore talking about what one has discovered regarding the deception around us is bound to affect how people think. Even if one gains the reputation of being a Jeremiah, people will be subliminally more prepared to say, “Maybe she was right” when the next repressive measure is taken against God’s people – or against the people as a whole, for it is the role of a prophetic people to stand against injustice wherever it is found. The people will have been trained to persevere rather than panic.

I can now say I speak from experience – briefly mentioning these things from the pulpit on the few opportunities I’ve had has gained me more thanks for saying what people secretly felt than accusations of being a conspiracy-theorist. Maybe that’s because when a church is full of those who have awakened from death in Christ, there is already a bias towards the truth.