How to be a Bad Christian

... And a better human being

Dave Tomlinson

• Publisher: Hodder Faith
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781444703849
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

In the course of his work as a vicar, Dave Tomlinson meets lots of people who describe themselves as 'not good enough' to be a Christian, thinking that faith involves going to church a lot, or believing in a list of strange things, or following certain rules. But being a Christian isn't about any of that - and actually, following Jesus is a lot easier, and more fun, than most people think...In this handbook to Christianity for people who describe themselves as spiritual but not necessarily religious, Dave sketches out some key practices for how to be a 'bad' Christian, including how to talk to God without worrying about prayer, how to read the Bible without turning off your brain, and how to think with your soul rather than trying to follow rules. With beautiful illustrations from artist Rob Pepper, this is an accessible, light-hearted book, but one with a powerful invitation: to be the person you've always wanted to be, following a God you've always hoped is on your side.

1. God without the guff

how to keep faith and ditch religion

Every day people are straying away from the Church and going back to God.

– Lenny Bruce

It was a cold, damp Thursday in mid-February. A good day for a funeral, some might say. The church was jammed with mourners, standing room only, gathered to bid farewell to a larger-than-life seventy-three-year-old Islington man known as ‘Fast Eddie’.

After a moving service, punctuated with tears and laughter, we left the church and travelled to the crematorium for the committal. A few cars carrying important family members got lost on the way, so proceedings were held up. Most people took refuge from the biting wind in the crematorium chapel, where the atmosphere was surprisingly upbeat for a funeral – but then, we had been warned that Eddie wanted no glum faces. Apparently he told his wife, ‘If anyone starts bawling, I’ll come back to bloody haunt them!’

So, yes, most people tried to honour his wishes. Eddie wasn’t someone you would want haunting you.

Waiting for the latecomers, and chatting with the funeral director at the front of the chapel, I was approached by Eddie’s niece who had with her in a car seat her three-month-old baby. ‘This is Arthur,’ she said. ‘Would you bless him, please, Dave?’

‘What, now?’ I replied.

‘Yeah, whenever,’ she said.

So right there in the crematorium for all to see, I cradled little Arthur in my arms and said a blessing over him, tracing the mark of the cross on his tiny, silky forehead. Cameras flashed. Mum and Dad beamed. Grandparents looked on proudly. The congregation applauded. The organist looked baffled. And Arthur gazed up at me, no idea what was going on or where he was, but looking perfectly at peace with the whole thing.

‘Bloody hell, Dave!’ the funeral director said. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this before! This is definitely a first on me.’

‘Eddie would have loved it,’ someone said. Everyone agreed.

Eddie’s funeral took up most of that day. And while it’s always sad to be the one hitting the button at the crematorium, triggering that final surge of emotion as the coffin slides away, it was one of my more satisfying days – being a priest to a part of God’s family who mostly don’t appear in church, but who are God’s family all the same.

The conversations in the pub afterwards were the sort I often have with people who don’t go to church. I lose count of the times folk say to me, apologetically, ‘I’m not a very good Christian . . .’

The underlying guilt in the statement disturbs me. Where does it come from? These are fine people, whom I like and respect and enjoy spending time with. I find no substantial difference between them and the people who appear in church every Sunday. Are they less decent human beings? Do they love their children less, or try less strenuously or sincerely to make good choices in life? Of course not!

So I often say, ‘Well, I’m a bad Christian too!’ At which point they pull back, eyes wide open with shock. Or they smile. Or giggle at the idea of a vicar admitting that he’s a bad Christian.

Michael, one of Fast Eddie’s friends, actually apologised to me that he didn’t come to church. ‘No need to apologise,’ I replied. ‘Most people don’t come to church. But if I thought for one moment that God gave a monkey’s fart whether or not you come to church, I’d become an atheist here and now!’

Ironically, the upshot of this conversation was that Michael did turn up at church the following week.

Don’t get me wrong: I think there are good reasons to be part of a church community, which we’ll get to later in the book. But I cannot believe that God divides the world between churchgoers and non-churchgoers, or between people who believe and people who don’t believe. What an absurd idea. Surely God has more sophistication to his judgement than this! Surely God has to be more interested in the kind of people we are, the choices we make in life and the way we treat people than in what we do with our Sunday mornings?

I know from untold conversations with the sort of people who attended Eddie’s funeral that there is no shortage of spiritual insight and sensitivity in the lives of folk who never darken the doors of a church. Plenty of people mull over the meaning of life – while lying awake in bed at night, or over a couple of pints of beer in the pub. Plenty have genuine spiritual experiences of one sort or another. Plenty have delightful theological insights – mostly expressed in refreshingly non-religious terminology.

However, very few of these people imagine that going to church will add anything significant to their lives, or provide them with any useful skills or resources for coping more effectively with life. In the minds of most non-churchgoers, religion and church are for goodie-goodies, religious nerds and Bible-bashers – or even, sadly, for people who they think are better than them.

But this doesn’t mean that God is not a part of their lives, or that they are not on some sort of spiritual journey. Far from it: some of the most moving and impressive spiritual insights I encounter come from people who never go near a church or consider themselves religious. Indeed, I can’t tell you how many of my sermons contain wise titbits from non-religious friends and parishioners.

There is also a common misconception that being a Christian means you have to believe certain things – give the nod to a pile of religious ideas and theories. This is simply not so. Beliefs are important; I have lots of them. But I don’t think any of my beliefs are going to get me into heaven – or keep me out! I can’t see St Peter standing at the Pearly Gates with a clipboard checking up on people’s beliefs. Jesus himself made no requirement that people subscribe to particular doctrines before becoming his followers. But he did call on people to change their ways: to stop being greedy, to become peacemakers, to love their enemies and so on. Jesus never wrote a book, never created a creed, never started a church and never intended to begin a new religion. He simply demonstrated the way of love – the golden rule in any religious tradition – and invited people to join him in that.

Jesus certainly didn’t invent the term ‘Christian’, which actually appears only three times in the entire Bible. It was probably originally devised by critics of Christ’s followers, at least a decade after his death, as a term of derision. But it stuck – for better or worse.

Before they took the name ‘Christian’, early followers of Christ were simply known as ‘people of the way’ – people who identified with the way of life Jesus taught and demonstrated. I like that, ‘people of the way’. It suggests being part of a journey, rather than part of an organisation. And I know lots of people who never turn up at church, who struggle with creeds and doctrines, who shrink from the thought of being religious, yet who are very much in the way of Christ. They would deny being Christians. But they are lying through their teeth! They are people of the way – ‘bad Christians’ through and through.

Let’s get it clear: Christianity is about faith, not belief. There is a difference. Faith is about having trust, whereas belief is more akin to having opinions. It’s possible to hold beliefs passionately and to argue about them until the cows come home, without them making a scrap of difference to us. But trust is not about beliefs, creeds, opinions, arguments; it’s more instinctive, more fundamental. It doesn’t need words. It’s in your belly.

Carol is someone I spent time talking with in the pub after Eddie’s funeral. It’s amazing what people tell you just because you’re wearing a dog collar and seem half-human. As she told me about the abusive marriage she escaped from a couple of years before, I couldn’t believe her story. Barely avoiding weeping into my beer glass, I listened to her tale of violence and brutality, of cigarettes stubbed out on her body and bruises concealed so friends and family would not know.

‘I don’t go to church, Dave,’ she said. ‘I’m not religious or anything like that. But the thing that got me through was knowing that Someone or Something was with me – God, Christ, whatever. And this voice said, “Don’t worry; you’ll get through this. It will stop.” And it did. I don’t know what it is, Dave, but I know, rock solid, that Something is there. Something got me through.’

Carol had faith – trust. Lots of it. She wasn’t strong on religious patter. She couldn’t use nice churchy phrases. But she had faith in some kind of loving, supporting presence that got her through. She had God without the guff!

The Spanish writer Miguel Unamuno wonderfully dramatises the difference between belief and faith in his short story ‘Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr’, which tells of a young man at his mother’s deathbed. With the local priest present in the room, the woman grasps her son’s hand and asks him to pray for her. The son sits in silence. When he leaves the room, he tells the priest that he can’t pray for his mother because he doesn’t believe in God. ‘That’s nonsense,’ the priest replies. ‘You don’t have to believe in God to pray.’

The sort of prayer the priest referred to – the sort of prayer the dying woman hoped for, the sort of prayer Carol offered as the punches fell – wasn’t the sort of prayer from a prayer book, but the kind that comes from the gut. It’s visceral, almost physical. It may seem absurd, illogical, when analysed, yet it’s instinctive and irresistible. It’s about having faith – not words and beliefs, but deep trust.

But what is it that we’re trusting in at such times? To whom do we cry out in our need? God, yes, but not the old man with a beard in the sky. No one in their right mind believes in that sort of God any more. God is, surely, a mystery – the One who transcends everything that we humans can imagine. And yet . . .

And yet, even though we know that God isn’t any kind of human being – not even Superman! – the only way we can imagine God is in personal terms. Traditionally, Christians have portrayed God as a father figure, but we can equally picture God as a mother, a loving parent, a constant presence in good times and bad, who is there for us. Often, we would like God to intervene and miraculously transform our circumstances, and occasionally something like this does seem to happen. However, more often, as Carol’s story shows, God is experienced as a supporting, strengthening presence that gets us through painful circumstances.

You don’t need to be religious to sense God as a loving presence in your life. Personally, I think that the Church would be far better to stop trying to pump the gospel into people’s lives, and recognise that God is there already – named or unnamed. The Quakers have a wonderful way of understanding this with the idea of an ‘inner light’, or ‘the Christ within’. They hold that there is ‘that of God’ within everyone, and that this has nothing to do with religion or churchgoing; it’s part of being human.

I think that the word ‘Christian’ is much better thought of as a verb than a noun. Jesus didn’t call people to wear a badge or join a club. He called them to follow him: to join him in spreading love and healing in the world. When we treat ‘Christian’ as a verb – a ‘doing word’ – instead of a noun, it changes everything. We stop saying ‘I am a Christian’, and start looking at how we can behave in Christian ways. The Christian faith is then seen as a spiritual practice rather than a belief system.

So what does Christianity look like as a spiritual practice rather than a belief system? That’s really what the rest of this book is about. For now, let me pinpoint just three things.

First, Christianity as a spiritual practice means learning to live in the presence of a loving God – knowing that you are never alone and that God’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Imprint Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Quotation
• 1. God without the guff
• 2. Bumping into God
• 3. It’s all you need!
• 4. It’s not about the rules
• 5. Wakey! Wakey!
• 6. Dumping the guilt trip
• 7. Laughing with God
• 8. Change what you can
• 9. God is not a Christian
• 10. Never mind heaven, what about now?
• 11. Good God/bad God?
• 12. A wing and a prayer
• 13. Did God write anything else?
• 14. Knock down the walls!
• 15. The quiet revolution
• 16. It’s over to you!
• 17. The last word
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Appendix 3
• Notes