There are some real characters: the people selling ‘anointed’ prayer shawls that will give you dominion over your business concerns, smiling preachers who seem to have an answer for every problem in life and beautiful, shiny worship leaders playing packed theatres. And while the messages across the many channels are varied, ranging from finding financial freedom to the signs of the Last Days, there’s one theme that unites them: victory. In Christian TV land, everyone is a winner.
No–one ever talks about failure. Which is interesting, when so many of the people who now locate their ministry in a TV studio are preachers and teachers who have suffered a moral ‘fall’ in their past. Their response to this seems to have been a focus on a redemption narrative - God’s undisputed ability to wash away our sins and give us a bright future. Usually they’re also fundraising. It’s a lot easier to do that against a bombastic backdrop of victory than a humble place of repentance.
Of course, on one level they’re absolutely right. In an eternal, non-linear-time sense, God will win and has already won the great battle of good against evil. The resurrection assures those of us that love him that we too are a part of that. So talk of victory isn’t premature; it’s theologically appropriate. Yet it’s not the whole story. Easter isn’t a one-day festival. The whole of the Christian faith rests on a moment of apparent failure – the cross.
No-one relishes failure. Growing up, as an overweight youth who only really flourished in one school subject, I became a master of it.
PERHAPS THERE’S VALUE AND GROWTH IN ACTUALLY EMBRACING OUR FAILURES
Sport, school, girls - I was what the football manager Jose Mourinho calls ‘a failure specialist’. Life has somewhat improved since, but along the way I’ve had more than my fair share of mishaps and erroneous endeavors, and my youth ministry certainly hasn’t been exempt from that. A few years ago, I tried to set up an innovative youth congregation that my church at the time just wasn’t ready for; a few years before that I convinced another church to invest heavily in starting an ‘evangelistic’ sports ministry which ended up voting to drop its Christian connections.
Funnily enough, I don’t talk about these things very often. None of us do, except as part of one of those great redemption stories. Yet, alongside the classic failure narrative, in which we point out that God used an assortment of screw-ups like David, Moses and Samson to change the world, maybe we’ve lost sight of another, no-less-important story. Perhaps there’s value and growth in actually embracing our failures. That’s not to say we should celebrate slips of morality, but when we try something and it doesn’t work out, we shouldn’t be quite so quick to bury the bad news and move on.
Jesus’ words to his disciples on this issue are telling. ‘Whoever wants to be my disciple’, he says in Matthew 16:24, ‘must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.’ His invitation isn’t to resurrection - at least not in the immediate sense - but to join him in that moment of apparent failure. So when we find ourselves being less than victorious, perhaps we’re just being good disciples.
When we fail around young people, there’s a key opportunity to impact their lives - they notice, and they watch us keenly to see how we’ll react and respond. So when that happens, am I a model of humility, coming to terms with my shortcomings, or do they see me become short-tempered and blame other people for letting me down?
In the most over-used, out-of-context verse in the Bible - Jeremiah 29:11 - God tells the exiles in Babylon, ‘I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you.’ It was said to a specific people, at a specific time. The grinning patriarchs of Christian TV love that verse of course, but they’re getting it all wrong. Sometimes God allows us to endure seasons of failure, when things don’t go our way. It’s time we were ok with that.
