A WAITING PEOPLE?

'One good answer to the question "What sort of church are you? Who are you?" is to say, "We are a community of men and women who are waiting for Jesus to return". Not waiting passively, as if we just wait and never do anything; no, that would be nonsense! But waiting actively - working at our daily work, loving God, loving people, giving our lives for Jesus and his gospel, and all the time praying, "Your Kingdom come, Lord Jesus!" As we do so, we will never be satisfied by what this world offers, never too disappointed when we do not experience healing or reconciliation or happiness in this life, always keeping our hopes set on that great future day.'

Christopher Ash, Repeat the Sounding Joy: A daily Advent devotional on Luke 1-2, p.345. 

TRUE CHURCH UNITY

'It is often suggested that because doctrine divides, the best way to unite a church (or churches) is to dumb down and de-emphasize doctrine, because doctrinal distinctives will exclude some who cannot subscribe to them. This is true when the doctrinal distinction is secondary. It is untrue when the doctrine is justification by grace alone. Other distinctives create privileged or exclusive ghetto religion. But grace alone fashions a community which has no pride in its history, its privileges, its morality, its Bible knowledge, or anything that comes from within itself. It is therefore, a community that can live together in harmony and reach out with the barrier-breaking message of grace to a needy world.' 

Christopher Ash, Teaching Romans: Volume 1, p.177. 

WHY THE CHURCH NEEDS HUMILITY

'Every human society or community is by nature both introspective and unstable. It is introspective, because it is always more comfortable to be a club to which only "people like us" belong. And it is unstable because I in my pride will always want to be narrowing the definition of people "people like us" so that it becomes "people like me." Human pride leads to human strife which divides a society from within; and human pride leads to dividing walls of hostility which cut us off from the world outside. The gospel therefore needs to counteract both internal instability and external defensiveness. And it does both in exactly the same way, by humbling human pride.' 

Christopher Ash, Teaching Romans (Volume 1), p.35. 

CHRISTIANS WHO BULLY

'...just as the insecure child becomes the playground bully, so the insecure Christian causes problems in the church, because he or she always has something to prove, is always seeking affirmation. By contrast, the Christian who grasps security in grace will build others up.' 

Christopher Ash, Teaching Romans (Volume 1), p.215. 

AUTHENTICATING FAITH

'Until we suffer, we are untested. Only suffering can stamp us with the hallmark of authentic faith...' 

Christopher Ash, Teaching Romans (Volume 1), p.197. 

THE CROSS

'We need not, and cannot, add to what Jesus has done. We do not need, and are not able, to do anything more to have a cleansed consience. Imagine going in to a famous art gallery wth a child's paintbrush and paints in your coat pocket. You stand before some great work of art by Rubens or Michaelangelo, quietly get out your paintbrush and - when the attendants are not watching - start adding your own touches of paint. When challenged, you say, "Well, it's a lovely painting. But I thought it had a few parts missing. So I was touching it up. I hope that's OK." No, it is not OK. You are ruining it! In the same way, I cannot add anything to Jesus' completed work of redemption on the cross, without taking away from its value.'

Christopher Ash, Pure Joy, p.139.  

MINISTRY

'The great task of awakening people's conscience is a mark of authentic Christian ministry. When pastors and ministers teach and preach without awakening the conscience of their hearers, there is something badly wrong.'

Christopher Ash, Pure Joy, p.91.

SIN

'Suppose I hold a glass of water and I jog it. Water spills out, and you ask me, "Why did water spill out?" The instinctive answer is to say, "Water came out because you jogged it." But there is another correct answer, which is to say, "Water came out because water was what was inside the glass. If there hadn't been water in the glass in the first place, no water would ever have come out of the glass." Sure, it came out because it was jogged. But water came out because water was inside.'

Christopher Ash, Pure Joy, p.86.

CONSCIENCE

'An awakened conscience does much more than show me that a particular action was (or would be) wrong; it shows me that I myself, as a whole person, am under the just judgment of God.'

Christopher Ash, Pure Joy: Rediscover Your Conscience, p.82.

PREACHING

'When we do topical preaching we (as it were) hold the microphone in front of God and ask him the questions of our choice. We hold the microphone there just long enough to hear his answers, and then we take it away. We do not want to take the risk of letting him have the microphone; after all, he may want to tell us all sorts of things we may not want to hear. To do consecutive expository preaching gives God the mircophone. We hand it over to him and we listen while God tells us what he wants ust to hear. He sets the agenda for our teaching and our learning. Let us give God the microphone.'

Christopher Ash, The Priority of Preaching, p.111.

THE CHURCH

'Our challenge is not simply to understand the word we hear preached but to do it. Our business is not Biblical interpreation but Biblical performance. We need to be a community who interpret the word; but the kind of interpretation we are to aim at is much more than agreeing what it means. We are to interpret the word in the sense of becoming a living visible interpretation of the word, a community in which the word of Christ is lived out and made concrete. We will only do this if we understand that our gatherings as whole local churches under the preached word are the defining context for church.'

Christopher Ash, The Priority of Preaching, p.101.

THE CHURCH & PREACHING

'...the weekly gatherings of the local church to hear the preached word should be understood as the primary dynamic and driving force of church life, alongside the gatherings for corporate prayer. All the other contexts in which Bibles are opened, read or discussed, have supportive rather than a normative role in church life. Or, to put it bluntly, a church will be a church as long as it gathers to hear the word, even if non of its members meets in small groups or even reads the Bible on their own! And conversely, if they willfully neglect the gathering of the church under the preached word they are not properly a church, even if they do all these other things. The writer to the Hebrws does not tell them, "Don't neglect your Quiet Time"; he says, "Let us not give up meeting together" (Heb.10:25), because that's where they sit together under the preached word of God.'

Christopher Ash, The Priority of Preaching, p.99.

THE CHURCH

'...only a church where grace is preached repeatedly and forcefully wil be preserved from degenerating into a club. Just as a variegated shrub can revert into one with a single colour of leaf, so a church can so easily revert to being mono-cultural. We must be realistic about this. We must not beat ourselves up because our churches are not wonderfully and ideally multi-cultural. We live in a broken world, and therefore Jesus starts church-building using broken materials. Our churches are bound to refleect in some way the divisions within our society, if only at the lowest level the social differences in different localities. The wonder is not that our churches are not perfect. The wonder is that they are beginning to bring together unlikely people, that they are pulling against the culture that keeps one race together or one class together or one type of person together.

This movement from homogeneity to heterogeneity cannot be engineered by positive discrimination (the token different person) or by hectoring or lecturing ("You rotten old middle-class Christians ought to be more multicultural"). It will only be created supernaturally by the preached word of grace in Jesus Christ.

The word of sovereign grace, preached and preached and preached again, is the necessary condition for a shaping of a people of garce, who alone can reassemble a broken world. All churches tend to revert from grace to being a homogeneous club. Grace is fragile, because grace humbles human pride. A church without the public preaching of garce at its heart will always slip away from grace. A church with grace as its theme tune in preaching will be held to grace.' 

Christopher Ash, The Priority of Preaching, p.98.  

PREACHING

'When you or I stand to preach in a local church, we see before us the seeds of reassembly for a broken world. And we have in our mouths the DNA of those seeds. As we preach to them week by week, those seeds grow and are shaped by grace. And we and they together form the societies that alone can build a broken world by grace. As Peter puts it (1 Pet.1:22-25), new birth comes by an imperisable seed and that seed is the preached word...'

Christopher Ash, The Priority of Preaching, p.78.

PREACHING VS. TEACHING

'If teaching is like the signpost which explains clearly to us where we ought to go and how to go there, preaching is like the friendly but firm shove from behind to get us started on actually going there and to keep us moving. We must teach: exhortation without teaching is like someone giving me a shove without explaining why. It is an act verbal aggression, an invasion of my personal space, a ranting and a raving without explaining to me why I need to do what the soap box warrior shouts that I must do. We must teach. If we do not teach with patience and clarity, there is no point preaching. But we must not stop with teaching. It is a fine thing patiently explaining to me so that I will understand. But if you love me you will press home to me with all the force you can my need to act on what I now understand, and to act on it today.'

Christopher Ash, The Priority of Preaching, p.65.

PREACHING

'We need repeated preaching, because by nature we wil never repent and believe. We will "move on" from the simple gospel of daily repentence, daily taking up the cross, daily faith, to a supposed higher life, a more sophisticated life, some kind of super-spiritual life in which repentance and faith are too ordinary and simple to be practiced. This is what will happen unless we sit under faithful preaching. We need the urgency of a city watchman to cry out, "Listen to the sound of the trumpet!" (Jer.6:17).'

Christopher Ash, The Priority of Preaching, p.61.

PREACHING VS. TEACHING

'For some time we have emphasises the centrality of "teaching the Bible" in pastoral ministry. That was good because it stopped us being side-tracked onto teaching our systematic theology or our experience, or just setting out strategic thinking or baptising the wisdom of the world with a religious veneer. We were reminded that we were leading our churches by teaching the Bible. But I fear that we have so emphasised "teaching the Bible" that we rest happy with "teaching the Bible". But preaching the Bible is more important than teaching the Bible, let alone simply explaining the Bible. Many of us have been introduced as a visiting speaker with the words, "Now so and so will explain the Bible/ teach the Bible." When that happens to me I want to interrupt and say, "Yes, I hope to explain and teach it. But I hope also to preach it, and that is not the same."'

Christopher Ash, The Priority of Preaching, p.48.

PREACHING

'...no preacher who wants to be in the pulpit ought to be in the pulpit. Nobody who likes the limelight ought to be a preacher. We do not want in our pulpits men like Diotrephes who loved to have the pre-eminence, who couldn't wait to be given the microphone (3 John 9).'

Christopher Ash, The Priority of Preaching, p.42.

CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP

'...the biggest problem faced by every church leader, the physical absence of Jesus Christ.'

Christopher Ash, The Priority of Preaching, p.32.

PREACHING VS. BIBLE STUDY

'...preaching in its essence is an authorized human being speaking the words of God to listening human beings; and every culture understands that.

An interactive Bible study is not culturally-neutral. To sit around drinking coffee with a book open, reading and talking about that book in a way that forces me to keep looking at that book and finding my place and showing a high level of mental agility, functional literacy, spoken coherence and fluency, that is something that only some of the human race are comfortable doing. Not everyone feels comfortable when the bright spark in the corner pipes up, "Ah, yes, but I was wondering about the significance of the word "However" in verse 3b. What do you think about that?" Some of us love that kind of seminar interaction, but many do not. For those who can do it, it may way be profitable; but many people can't, and just feel daunted or excluded by the exercise.

In some churches we have slipped into assuming that personal Bible reading and one-to-one Bible studies and Bible study groups are the normative way for Christian people to hear the Word of God. This, we say, is what a healthy Christian life looks like. But in redefining the Christian life like that we may unwittingly have alienated the illiterate, the functionally illiterate, the less-educated, those less confident in studying a text. I wonder if, quite unintentionally, we may have contributed to making some of our churches more monocultural than they might otherwise be. Paradoxically it is not that preaching is culturally outmoded, but rather that the study of written Biblical texts is culturally narrow.'

Christopher Ash, The Priority of Preaching, p.28.