We do not live by standing still, but by the quiet risking of the self— a loosening of roots that clutch the past, a leaning into weather not our own.
For growth is not a gentle, passive thing; it asks of us a breaking and a bend, a willingness to be unmade, remade by truths we did not summon or control.
And change—how shall it come if we refuse the sharp intrusion of the unfamiliar? We learn not safely, sealed from all surprise, but in the draft where certainty gives way.
Exposure is the tutor we resist: the light that finds us, names us as we are. Yet only there, unguarded, do we see what might be fashioned from our trembling clay.
So step beyond the boundary of the known. Let habit fall behind you like a husk. There is no other path to fuller life—
There’s a particular kind of reflex most of us carry around like muscle memory—the quiet, constant commentary that says, this shouldn’t be happening.
You hear it when the rain won’t stop. When the email lands badly. When someone speaks in a way that scrapes against your nerves. It hums beneath the surface of ordinary life: a low-grade resistance to what is.
And if you’re paying attention, you’ll notice how quickly it turns into complaint.
Not always out loud. Often it’s internal—small, sharp sentences we rehearse in the privacy of our own minds. But whether spoken or silent, it does something to us. It narrows the world. It casts us, almost without consent, in the role of the wronged party.
Complaint feels like clarity. It feels like naming what’s off. But more often than not, it’s something else: a subtle refusal to inhabit the moment we’ve been given.
This isn’t about pretending things are fine when they aren’t. There is a difference—an important one—between honest protest and habitual resistance. There are things in this world that should be named, challenged, confronted. Silence, in those moments, is not virtue; it’s avoidance.
But complaint—the kind that loops, that festers, that turns every inconvenience into a quiet indictment of reality—that kind rarely leads anywhere good. It doesn’t change the situation. It just changes us.
It makes us smaller. More brittle. Less able to see what might still be possible.
There’s a strange kind of dignity in noticing this as it happens. Catching yourself mid-thought: Ah. There it is again. Not with shame, but with a kind of gentle curiosity. What am I resisting? What am I unwilling to accept?
Because, in the end, there are only a few honest responses available to us.
We can act—step in, speak up, shift what can be shifted. We can leave—recognise when a situation is no longer ours to carry. Or we can accept—fully, not grudgingly—the reality in front of us.
Everything else is just noise.
And here’s the quiet surprise: acceptance is not the same as resignation. It’s not giving up. It’s the moment we stop arguing with reality long enough to actually meet it. To stand on solid ground instead of the shifting sands of what should have been.
From there, something opens up.
We find a little more space in ourselves. A little more patience. Even, sometimes, a kind of unexpected gratitude—not because everything is good, but because not everything is closed.
It’s a bit like tending to what we take in. Our minds and hearts have diets, too. And complaint, for all its familiarity, is not especially nourishing. It fills us up without strengthening us.
So perhaps the invitation is simple, if not easy: pay attention to what you’re feeding your inner life.
Notice what you return to, again and again. Notice the tone you take with your own experience. Notice how quickly you move to resist, rather than receive.
And then, gently, choose otherwise.
Not in a grand, dramatic way. Just here, and then here again.
A breath. A moment of honesty. A small shift toward what is.
Because from that place—strangely, quietly—something like freedom begins.
“True dialogue begins not when we defend ourselves, but when we begin to listen.” — Paolo Ricca
There is a moment in the Gospel of Mark that feels almost nautical in its theology. The disciples are in a boat on the Sea of Galilee, rowing anxiously, while another boat drifts nearby. The miracle that follows—the great catch of fish—does not remain contained within a single vessel. The nets strain, the ropes creak, and someone begins waving frantically toward the neighboring craft. The Gospel says they signal to the partners in the other boat to come and help (Luke 5:7).
The image is irresistible for anyone thinking about Christian unity. No boat is large enough to hold the whole catch of the kingdom.
This is precisely the intuition behind the deceptively simple line from Paolo Ricca: true dialogue begins not when we defend ourselves, but when we begin to listen. Ricca’s remark is not merely etiquette for polite conversation. It is a theological claim about how truth is discovered within the body of Christ.
The Ecumenical Instinct
Much of modern theological debate still operates according to a courtroom model. Each tradition arrives with its doctrinal brief already prepared. Arguments are marshalled, historical precedents cited, and confessional boundaries carefully guarded. Dialogue becomes a carefully choreographed defense.
Ricca suggests something quite different. Dialogue does not begin when the opening statements are read. It begins when the lawyers stop speaking.
Listening, in this sense, is not a passive act. It is an act of theological humility. The assumption beneath it is startling: the other tradition may be carrying part of the catch.
This conviction runs deep in the ecumenical imagination. The churches, after all, did not begin as isolated vessels but as a flotilla of communities—Jerusalem, Antioch, Corinth, Rome—each navigating the same gospel through different waters. Diversity was not an unfortunate byproduct of history; it was present from the beginning.
To listen, therefore, is not to abandon conviction. It is to acknowledge that the Spirit may have spoken elsewhere as well.
The Temptation of Self-Defense
The instinct to defend ourselves is powerful. Churches have memories. Those memories include controversies, condemnations, and centuries of mutual suspicion. When dialogue begins, the reflex is often apologetic: clarify our doctrine, correct misunderstandings, secure our identity.
But Ricca’s insight exposes the hidden irony. The moment we begin defending ourselves, we are no longer listening. And the moment we stop listening, dialogue has quietly ended.
Ecumenical conversations sometimes fail not because disagreements are too large but because the participants remain trapped in self-explanation. Each boat is busy describing its own nets.
Meanwhile, the fish are escaping.
Signalling to the Other Boat
The image from Luke’s Gospel suggests a more imaginative posture. The fishermen do not abandon their boat when the nets begin to break. They do something more interesting: they signal to their partners.
Signalling requires two things. First, it requires the recognition of need. The catch is too large for one vessel. Second, it requires trust. One must believe that the other boat is not an enemy but an ally.
Ecumenical listening begins here. It begins when a church recognizes that its own tradition—however rich—does not exhaust the fullness of the Christian inheritance. The liturgical memory of one community, the biblical scholarship of another, the contemplative wisdom of a third: each holds something necessary for the shared task of faith.
Listening becomes the act by which the boats draw near enough to share the nets.
The Theology of Humble Hearing
At its deepest level, Ricca’s insight echoes a fundamental biblical principle. In Scripture, hearing precedes understanding.
“Hear, O Israel” begins the central confession of the Hebrew faith (Deuteronomy 6:4). The prophets cry out for ears that will listen. Even Jesus’ teaching ends with the refrain: “Let anyone with ears to hear listen.”
Theologically speaking, revelation is not primarily an argument to be defended but a voice to be heard. Dialogue, therefore, mirrors the very posture of faith itself. The believer listens before speaking; the church listens before defining.
One might even say that listening is a form of discipleship.
The Risk and Promise of Dialogue
Of course, listening carries risk. If we truly hear the other, we may discover that some of our assumptions require revision. Dialogue can unsettle comfortable narratives. It may reveal blind spots within our own traditions.
Yet this vulnerability is precisely where its promise lies. Listening allows the church to recover the breadth of its own inheritance. The ecumenical movement has repeatedly shown that traditions once regarded with suspicion often contain spiritual treasures long forgotten elsewhere.
Sometimes the neighboring boat has been carrying the very tools we need.
The Shared Catch
The great irony of Christian division is that the gospel itself refuses to remain confined within any single tradition. The catch keeps exceeding the capacity of our nets. Scripture, sacrament, mission, prayer—these overflow the boundaries we attempt to construct around them.
Ricca’s observation, therefore, is not merely about interchurch diplomacy. It is about recognizing the abundance of the gospel.
True dialogue begins with listening because listening acknowledges that the other boat may be responding to the same call of Christ.
And perhaps that is the most hopeful image of all: a sea scattered with small vessels, each straining under the weight of the same miraculous catch, waving urgently to one another across the water.
The nets are full. The boats are small. And the partners in the other boat are closer than we think.
There are moments when history does not announce itself with ceremony or spectacle, but slips quietly into the present—almost apologetically—while you are doing something else. Waiting, perhaps. Killing time. Glancing about.
I was waiting for an MOT.
Not thinking about war or memory or the moral weight of the twentieth century—only about tyres, emissions, the low-grade anxiety of repair bills. And then, just off to one side, half-noticed at first, a small metal plaque fixed beneath a tree.
It began simply enough: “This tree was planted in 1959 by Len Harding…” An office clerk, it said. A man who joined a cork manufacturing company on that very site in the 1930s. Ordinary enough. The sort of detail that belongs to local history, to the quiet dignity of work, to lives that do not expect to be recorded.
But then the text shifted register, as such texts often do—almost without warning.
When the Second World War began, he was called up. Sent to the Far East. Captured after the fall of Singapore. And then the line that arrests you, that reorients the entire scene: he spent three and a half years as a prisoner of war, helping to build the “Death Railway” through Burma—“a name it was given due to the number of prisoners who died in its construction – said to be one for each sleeper laid.”
You read that once, and then again, because the mind resists the arithmetic of suffering.
And all the while, the present continues undisturbed. Cars pull in and out. Someone checks their phone. The receptionist calls out a registration number. Nothing in the visible world marks what you have just encountered. The tree stands there, untroubled. Leaves in season. Roots in the same soil where a factory once stood.
But now the space is altered.
Because the plaque does not end in tragedy. It turns, almost stubbornly, toward return. He came back to England. To his old job. To colleagues who welcomed him as a hero. Promotions followed—Quality Control Manager, then Works Manager. A life resumed, though one suspects never quite as before.
And then, the detail that transforms the whole narrative: a cork sapling, brought back from a business trip to Portugal, planted in the factory grounds. The very tree before you. A Cork Oak, cultivated for its wonderfully rich, soft bark. The stuff corks are made of, of course. A living thing, grown slowly, quietly, across decades. Rooted not only in soil, but in survival.
Len retired in 1977. Lived another 35 years. Died in 2012, aged 96.
It is, in one sense, an unremarkable British story: war, endurance, return, work, modest longevity. And yet, standing there, you realise how much is contained within it. The industrial world that formed him has largely vanished. The empire that sent him to Singapore has dissolved. The war that defined his generation has receded into textbooks and documentaries.
But the tree remains.
And so does the fact of him.
What strikes you most is not simply the scale of what he endured, but the way it is now encountered: not in a museum, not in a lecture, not even in deliberate remembrance—but obliquely. Out of the corner of your eye. While you are waiting for something else.
This is how history most often reaches us—not as a subject we study, but as a presence we stumble upon. A plaque. A name. A fragment of narrative embedded in the everyday landscape.
And perhaps there is something fitting in that. For most lives—however marked by events of immense consequence—are lived, and then remembered, in precisely this way. Not as grand arcs, but as interruptions. Glimpses. Sudden recognitions that the ground beneath us has been walked, worked, suffered upon by others whose stories we only partially apprehend.
The tree does not explain itself. It does not insist. It simply stands, offering, to those who pause long enough, a quiet testimony: that history is not elsewhere. It is here. Layered into the most ordinary of places.
Even a car park.
Even an enforced wait.
And perhaps the task, if there is one, is simply this: to notice.
The strange humiliation of Nebuchadnezzar in Book of Daniel is best not read as punishment in the crude sense, but as a dismantling—a necessary unmaking of a self that had grown too large to remain human.
He builds a world, and then mistakes himself for its source. He surveys the city—brick, gate, empire—and says, “Is this not mine?”
And something in the fabric of reality answers: No. You are standing on borrowed breath.
So the collapse comes, not as annihilation, but as descent.
He is not struck dead. He is returned.
Returned to the field. Returned to the body. Returned, almost painfully, to creatureliness.
He goes out to eat grass—not because God is cruel, but because he has forgotten that he is an animal who eats at all.
This is the deep logic of the story: pride is not thinking too highly of oneself; it is forgetting one’s place within the great web of dependence.
And so the king becomes what he has denied.
Hair like feathers. Nails like claws. Mind unfastened from its throne.
It is a kind of anti-coronation.
Where once he was lifted above all others, now he is lowered beneath them— until the illusion breaks.
Richard Rohr might say: this is the necessary “falling upwards.” The ego must be relativised, not by argument, but by experience. The false self cannot be corrected; it must be exposed.
And so Nebuchadnezzar is not destroyed— he is deconstructed.
But we must notice the tenderness hidden in the strangeness: that even here, in the madness, there is a boundary. An “until.”
“Until you acknowledge…”
There is always an until with God.
The grass is not the end of the story. It is the pivot- the necessary place where the story turns.
Because eventually, the king looks up.
Not out—at what he controls. But up—at what he cannot.
And in that moment, his humanity returns to him like a gift, not an achievement.
Which is perhaps the point.
We do not become human by rising above the earth, but by remembering we belong to it.
And sometimes— when we have built our little empires of certainty and self—
the kindest thing God can do is to let us eat grass for a while,
Every choice you make is not just about outcomes; it is about formation.
With each decision—quiet or dramatic—you are shaping the very core of who you are. The self is not static. It is being carved, moment by moment, by habits of thought, patterns of desire, and the moral weight of action. Over the course of a lifetime, these innumerable choices accumulate into something far more consequential than success or failure: they determine what kind of person you become.
This process is slow, often imperceptible, but relentless. You are either being formed into a person whose inner life is ordered—at peace with God, at peace with others, and at peace within—or into someone defined by fracture: estranged from God, embittered toward others, and divided against oneself. There is no neutral ground. The direction may not always be obvious, but the movement is constant.
The modern instinct is to treat choices as isolated events, morally weightless so long as they do not produce immediate harm. But this misses the deeper truth: every decision is formative. Every compromise, every act of courage, every indulgence or restraint leaves its mark. Over time, these marks cohere into character.
And character, in the end, is destiny.
To become a person aligned with what is good, true, and eternal is not merely to secure a better afterlife; it is to begin living a different kind of life now—one marked by clarity, stability, and a deep-rooted joy that is not easily shaken. Conversely, to drift into disorder is not just to risk future loss but to inhabit, even now, a life marked by confusion, anger, and isolation.
We are always becoming. That is the unavoidable condition of being human. The only real question is what we are becoming—and whether, in the quiet accumulation of our daily choices, we are moving toward wholeness or toward ruin.
There are some sayings of Jesus that Christians have spent two thousand years polishing, embroidering, contextualising, and occasionally placing in a nice decorative frame so we don’t have to look at them too closely.
“Love your enemies” is not one of those sayings.
Because the trouble with that line—found in Matthew 5:44 and echoed in Luke 6:27—is that it comes without any helpful escape hatch.
No footnotes. No pastoral exemptions. No quiet clause that reads: except for people on the internet.
Just: love them.
Which is frankly inconvenient.
Now, we Christians are a creative people when we need to be. Faced with a command like this, our first instinct is to start looking for interpretive wiggle room.
Perhaps Jesus meant love them spiritually but not emotionally. Perhaps he meant pray for them while still ignoring them in Tesco. Perhaps he meant love them in theory but absolutely destroy them in committee meetings.
Or perhaps—and this is the theological equivalent of putting the command through a blender—we redefine the word enemy until it means something manageable.
“Enemy,” we say, must refer to really evil people. Or perhaps ancient Roman oppressors. Or maybe just the sort of villains that conveniently exist only in the movies.
But Jesus appears to have anticipated this strategy.
Because right after saying “love your enemies,” he adds: “pray for those who persecute you.”
Now we’re in trouble.
Because persecution is not theoretical. It involves actual people doing actual harm. And Jesus still refuses to give us a workaround.
It’s the Irritating Logic of the Kingdom
The problem is that Jesus is operating with a logic that feels almost offensively impractical.
In the kingdom he imagines, love is not a reward for good behaviour. It is the default posture of those who belong to God.
If love were only for friends, he says, what exactly would be remarkable about that?
Even tax collectors manage that.
Even sinners manage that.
Even people who argue in church meetings about the colour of the carpet manage that.
The scandal of Jesus’ teaching is that God’s generosity spills over onto people who absolutely do not deserve it.
Which is awkward, because we ourselves are standing ankle-deep in that same overflow.
When the Command Gets Personal
The command becomes uncomfortable the moment we stop thinking about historical enemies and start thinking about ourenemies.
Not abstract villains.
But the colleague who quietly undermined us. The politician whose policies feel cruel. The family member who knows exactly how to push every emotional button we possess.
And suddenly we realise why Jesus left no loopholes.
Because the moment you introduce exceptions, everyone we dislike becomes the exception.
What “Love” Actually Means
Of course, loving enemies does not mean pretending harm is harmless. It does not mean abandoning justice, truth, or boundaries.
Love in the teaching of Jesus looks less like sentiment and more like stubborn refusal.
Refusal to dehumanise. Refusal to mirror cruelty. Refusal to let hatred have the last word.
It is not passive. In fact, it is probably the most disruptive force in the moral universe.
Which is why it is so difficult.
The Annoying Conclusion
If we’re honest, we would prefer Jesus to say something like:
Love your enemies when possible, avoid them when necessary, and absolutely destroy them if they post conspiracy theories.
But he doesn’t.
Instead he gives us a command that dismantles the entire logic of retaliation.
And then—almost casually—he grounds it in the character of God.
God, he says, lets the sun rise on the good and the bad alike.
Which means the love Jesus calls us to practice is not merely moral advice.
It is participation in the strange, reckless generosity of God.
And the frustrating truth is this:
There is no tidy way out of that quote.
Jesus really did mean it.
Which leaves us with one remaining option:
Not explaining it away.
But trying—awkwardly, imperfectly, prayerfully—to live it.
Prayer
Lord Jesus, you give us many beautiful words— and then you give us this one.
Love your enemies.
We try to step around it, soften it, explain it into something smaller.
But it sits there in the Gospel like a stone in the road we cannot walk around.
So take our hard hearts, our quick anger, our careful lists of who deserves kindness.
Teach us the strange courage of your kingdom— where mercy is stronger than revenge and love refuses to give up on anyone.
If a sociologist from Mars landed in England on a Sunday morning, they might reasonably assume Christianity had been outsourced to two locations: ancient buildings and warehouses.
The buildings are beautiful. The warehouses… a little less so. But.
But the people?
Well, they are mostly at the garden centre.
This is the puzzle that sits quietly behind the influential 2004 report Mission-Shaped Church, written under the watchful theological imagination of Rowan Williams. The report recognised something the English had been noticing without quite saying aloud: the church had not disappeared, but it had drifted to the edge of cultural life like a pier left behind by the tide.
For centuries, Christianity in England operated inside what historians call Christendom. Church and culture overlapped like two circles in a Venn diagram drawn by history.
Then one day the circles quietly slid apart.
No revolution. No dramatic collapse. Just a slow rearrangement of Sunday mornings.
When the Centre Moves
In this new landscape, theologians such as Bryan P. Stone began asking an awkward question in works like Evangelism After Christendom:
What if evangelism is not about persuading people to join an institution, but inviting them into a way of life?
This is a surprisingly radical thought.
For much of the twentieth century, evangelism often looked suspiciously like marketing. There were strategies, campaigns, slogans, and occasionally the theological equivalent of a timeshare presentation.
Stone’s argument is quietly devastating: the gospel is not something the church advertises. It is something the church performs.
In other words, evangelism happens when the church begins to resemble the story it claims to believe.
Which sounds obvious until you realise how often institutions forget it.
The Early Church’s Embarrassing Secret
Oddly enough, the best evidence for this idea comes from the ancient world.
In Evangelism in the Early Church, Michael Green demonstrated that Christianity spread through the Roman Empire in a way that would give modern church strategists mild panic.
There were no national campaigns.
No denominational branding exercises.
No glossy leaflets explaining the benefits of membership.
Instead the faith travelled through ordinary people—traders, soldiers, migrants, household servants—carrying the story of Jesus along the same roads as olives and textiles.
Christianity moved through friendship networks.
Through dinner tables.
Through the quiet credibility of communities who cared for plague victims when everyone else fled.
In other words, the gospel spread in exactly the way human life actually works.
Which is inconvenient for committees.
The Rise of the “Fresh Expression”
This is where the phrase Fresh Expressions enters the story.
The insight of Mission-Shaped Church was not that the parish system should disappear. England still loves its parish churches in the way people love old oak trees—perhaps not visited daily, but deeply reassuring that they exist.
Instead the report proposed a curious ecclesial experiment called a mixed economy.
The old structures remain.
But alongside them appear strange new creatures:
café churches workplace congregations skateboard ministries small networks meeting in living rooms or pubs
Christian communities that look less like institutions and more like ecosystems.
The church, in other words, stops expecting people to cross a cultural moat and instead begins wandering into ordinary life.
Which is suspiciously close to what Jesus did.
Incarnation at the Coffee Table
This shift is often described with a rather theological word: incarnational mission.
The idea is disarmingly simple.
If God entered human life in the person of Jesus, then the church should probably stop waiting for people to enter church culture and start entering their culture.
Which explains why, in modern Britain, the gospel increasingly appears next to cappuccinos.
Somewhere in England right now, someone is encountering Christianity for the first time not beneath a stained-glass window but across a café table.
This would have seemed bizarre in 1950.
But it would have seemed perfectly normal in AD 150.
The Quiet Return of the First Christians
If you line up these three books— Evangelism in the Early Church, Evangelism After Christendom, and Mission-Shaped Church— something rather ironic emerges.
The future of mission looks suspiciously like the past.
The early church: ordinary believers, relational witness, everyday hospitality.
Post-Christendom theology: communities embodying the story of Jesus.
Contemporary practice: small, flexible Christian gatherings emerging in unexpected places.
It is less a revolution than a rediscovery.
A Small English Hope
England has always been quietly good at improvisation.
The parish system itself was once an innovation. Methodism began as a network of field-preachers and lay societies long before it became a denomination. The church has reinvented itself before.
Perhaps it is happening again.
Not with fanfare.
But with coffee.
And conversation.
And the slow, almost unnoticed reappearance of communities who believe the gospel is not merely a message to explain, but a life to inhabit.
Which may be exactly how Christianity survived the Roman Empire.
There are a couple of moments in the Bible when someone looks around—slightly embarrassed—and realises they have been living in the presence of God without noticing.
The first comes from a runaway named Jacob. The second from a travelling rabbi named Paul the Apostle.
Between them lies the connection of mis-recognition.
First, the Surprise at Bethel
Jacob is not having a spiritual retreat. He is fleeing family drama, carrying the kind of guilt that does not fit comfortably inside a sleeping bag. Somewhere in the wilderness he stops for the night, places his head on a stone—because apparently the ancient Near East had not yet invented pillows—and falls asleep.
Then comes the dream: angels moving up and down a ladder between heaven and earth. God speaking promises over a fugitive.
Jacob wakes up startled and blurts out the line that should probably be engraved above every church door:
“Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it.” —Genesis 28
The funny thing about Bethel is that nothing about the landscape changes. The rock is still a rock. The desert is still a desert. The only thing that shifts is Jacob’s perception.
God had been there all along.
Jacob simply hadn’t recognised him.
Second, the Athenian Version of the Same Joke
Centuries later, Paul the Apostle walks through Athens and notices something peculiar: a shrine dedicated “to an unknown god.”
Paul seizes the moment with what may be the most mischievous sermon ever delivered:
“What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.” — Acts of the Apostles 17
You can almost hear the theological grin.
The Athenians had built an altar just in case they had missed one of the gods. Paul gently suggests they have indeed missed one—but not in the way they think.
God is not missing.
God is simply unrecognised.
It’s the theology of the Hidden Presence
Put Jacob and Paul together and a curious pattern emerges.
The Bible seems remarkably relaxed about the idea that people often encounter God before they understand that they are doing so.
Jacob stumbles into holiness while running away from home. The Athenians worship a mystery they cannot quite name. Paul announces that the mystery already has a face.
In both stories the revelation is less about bringing God into the situation and more about noticing that God was already there.
The divine presence is not absent.
It is overlooked.
The Divine Sense of Humour
This raises a slightly unsettling possibility.
What if God is constantly showing up in places we have not yet labelled “religious”?
Not just in sanctuaries and cathedrals, but in bookshops, bus stops, university seminars, awkward dinner conversations, and the long quiet walk home after the argument.
Jacob thought he was sleeping in the middle of nowhere.
It turned out to be a sanctuary.
The Athenians thought they were hedging their bets with a spare altar.
It turned out to be a theological invitation.
The Church’s Slightly Awkward Role
Here is where the story becomes gently pertinent.
The role of faith may not always be to bring God to the world. Sometimes it is simply to whisper:
“Look again.”
That was Paul’s strategy in Athens. He did not begin by condemning the city’s religious confusion. He began by recognising the longing hidden inside it.
He noticed the altar.
He noticed the question.
Then he named the presence already haunting the place.
Bethel Is Everywhere
Jacob called the place Bethel—“house of God”—because he realised something shocking.
Sacred places are often ordinary places that have suddenly been recognised.
The rock becomes an altar. The wilderness becomes a sanctuary. The unknown god becomes known.
And the church, when it is at its best, does something wonderfully simple: it helps people notice the holy presence hiding in plain sight.
The Quiet Revelation
Perhaps that is why these two passages echo each other across the centuries.
Jacob wakes up in astonishment.
Paul walks through Athens with curiosity.
Both discover the same secret.
God is remarkably good at being present in places where nobody thinks to look.
And every now and then someone wakes up, rubs their eyes, and says—slightly sheepishly—
This is a cartoon that’s been making the rounds: God stands on a cloud, gazing down at the Earth. An angel stands beside him with a sort of polite, heavenly concern. God, beard flowing like a weather system, sighs and says: “I’m starting to prefer the ones who don’t believe in me.”
It’s funny because it feels slightly blasphemous. But it’s also funny because—if we’re honest—it feels slightly plausible. Because Jesus clearly said: “Why do you call Me ‘Lord, Lord,’ but not do what I say?” (Luke 6:46)
When Belief Becomes Performance
For centuries, believers have assumed that God’s main concern is belief itself: correct belief, fervent belief, loudly defended belief. The right doctrines recited in the right order by the right people. Somewhere along the way we quietly decided that God must be most pleased with those who say his name the most often, preferably with a microphone.
But the Bible has this awkward habit of complicating that theory.
The People Jesus Challenges
In the Gospels, the people who claim certainty about God are often the ones Jesus rolls his eyes at. The religious professionals, the title-holders, the ones with the correct vocabulary. Meanwhile, the unlikely characters—the outsiders, the doubters, the morally complicated—somehow keep stumbling into grace like tourists who took the wrong bus and ended up in the right city.
It’s almost as if God isn’t particularly impressed by people who talk about God all the time.
The Prophetic Pattern
There’s an old prophetic pattern here. People invoke God’s name loudly while simultaneously ignoring the things God apparently cares about: mercy, justice, humility, the poor, the stranger, the inconvenient neighbour. It’s the spiritual equivalent of wearing a football jersey but refusing to touch the ball.
The View From Heaven
So imagine, for a moment, the divine vantage point.
Down on Earth, people are arguing about who owns God. Entire industries of certainty are operating at full volume. Some insist that God exclusively endorses their politics, their tribe, their anxieties, their particular brand of outrage… their wars. God is invoked to justify everything from national pride to internet arguments.
The Quiet People Off to the Side
And then, quietly off to the side, there are people who aren’t sure what they believe about God at all—but they feed the hungry anyway. They protect the vulnerable. They refuse to hate their enemies. They show up for suffering without demanding a theological explanation first.
If you were God, you might find that contrast… interesting.
What “Belief” Might Actually Mean
It raises a mildly uncomfortable possibility: that belief, in the biblical sense, might not primarily mean intellectual agreement but trust expressed through love. Not saying “Lord, Lord,” but actually doing the strange things Jesus talked about—like forgiving people and welcoming strangers and refusing to build hierarchies out of religious titles.
The Joke That Lands Too Close to Home
Which might explain the cartoon’s punchline.
God looking down at a world full of confident believers who use his name like a branding strategy… and quietly noticing the skeptics who, without much fuss, are living as though love might actually be the point.
No wonder the angel looks a little nervous.
The Unsettling Question
Because if that cartoon is even slightly right, then the real question isn’t Do you believe in God?
The real question might be something much more unsettling:
Does your life resemble the kind of world God would believe in?
Hello! Val and I live in London, in the UK. We are teachers (http://kenandval.com), pastors of a local Nazarene church in Walthamstow and prayer activists working to develop new expressions of the kingdom of God.
Dr Ken Baker 
