Monday 24 November 2014

I still have no idea how to follow anyone else on blogger. I have an idea that a little label saying "Follow" is supposed to appear on blogs, and that for some reason it just doesn't appear on my screen.

Thursday 20 February 2014

Despair—the great gift.

It's strange how comfortable this afterlife is that I now live. So comfortable, that it is easy to see it as the place to which God was bringing me all the time; and perhaps it really is.

All the best things I looked for from God are out of my reach, and I no longer reach for them, save one. I have given up on ministry, both in preaching and in music; I have given up seeking purpose or fulfilment; I have given up demanding that my life should have meaning; I have long given up seeking God's will for me, beyond that of loving him and loving my neighbour; I have given up looking for an explanation of the way my previous life ended.

Best of all, I have given up hope; and I am astonished beyond measure at how much peace and contentment this has brought me. Not the peace of God that passes understanding, and not the joy of the Lord that is the strength of so many of my brothers and sisters in Christ. But peace enough, and contentment enough. Hope was not for me the whisper of an angel, but the honey in the poison.

I have also given up church. After I left the last church where I had ministered on an occasional basis, I attended Mass sporadically at a local Catholic church, while carefully avoiding involving myself in its life, apart from the services. It is now nearly nine months since I last went. And abandoning church has left my sense of peace complete. Every time the scriptures or the homily or the hymns spoke of God leading us, I would walk home afterwards with a feeling of deep grief, especially if the parable of the talents had read or cited. This source of grief is now gone, and I can live in acceptance of the fact that, whatever gifts or abilities God gave me, the only thing he ever called me to was failure, simple and complete.

I still pray. Not as much as I once did, but probably more often—several times most days. Mainly I tell Jesus that I love him. Sometimes I pray for healing for someone, or for relief of some other unhappiness that is troubling them. And the one thing I still reach out for is to know God's love. Because, dispassionately, I no longer believe he loves me. I don't rule out the possibility that he actually does, but it does me no good. Love may be expressed without being spoken, but love that is not even expressed might just as well not be love. I am not a member of the body of Christ; and I am not God's child, or even his servant. I am God's subject, and have no more relationship with him than with Queen Elizabeth or John Key.

And, given that this afterlife is probably going to be only a third to a half the length of the life before, and only an infinitesimal part of the eternity to follow, one question keeps coming back to me about the parable of the talents. It's the final fate of the servant Jesus never mentioned—the one who took the talents given him, and used them as best he knew how, only to have all his investments fall through, and the original talents buried by his master.

Wednesday 10 April 2013

Letter of resignation from membership in North East Valley Baptist Church, written (I think) February 2012


Dear brothers and sisters of North East Valley Baptist Church—

This is to notify you that I am resigning my membership in the church. In doing so, I am simply formalising my position as it has been now for 18 months or more, as I have only attended one service there in that time.

I owe it to the church, I think, to explain my reasons for withdrawing from fellowship at Valley Baptist, and to assure you all that I have not been motivated by anger or resentment towards the church or anyone in it. I accepted the decision not to employ me as pastor as the decree of God, and this is still how I see it. But when, after many years of following a course of life governed by a conviction that God had called me to full-time ministry, I finally failed to be taken on by the small church which was my spiritual home, where I had ministered frequently over several years, and where my gifts and abilities (and shortcomings) were well known, I was forced to acknowledge that my conviction of a calling was mistaken, and even delusional. At 59 years old, as I was then, it was time to let the delusion go.

This is why I can no longer be involved in ministry of any sort, at any level. And had I continued attending Valley Baptist, people would have made real efforts to keep me involved, which would have been very difficult to refuse. As it is, I have carried on with the small weekly Bible study I had been doing with half a dozen members of the church. In continuing this involvement, however, I have felt that I was putting myself in a false position simply because I could not bear to disappoint them. I cannot see it as truly consistent with my obedience to God, even though for much of the last year the group has been my only church. After ceasing to attend Sunday services at Valley Baptist, I attended Holy Name intermittently until shortly before last Easter, but I did not attend church again till December, when I started attending Mass at St Bernadette’s on Forbury Rd. I expect to continue there, at least on an occasional basis, now that we are living in the south-west of the city.

The level of ministry I have had in the past, at Dunedin City Apostolic, at Valley Baptist, at St David’s Presbyterian and at the Owaka Presbyterian Church, while I have appreciated it deeply, has not been sufficient to justify the commitment of time and money it has cost me over some 30 years, a commitment that has been financially damaging to my family and, in the end, emotionally and spiritually destructive to myself. As a result, I am resolved not to minister again. In the position I find myself in, I cannot urge others to seek God’s will for their lives, and I cannot proclaim the faithfulness of God, as I cannot reconcile it with my own experience. In my pursuit of ministry, I have left myself unfit for any other employment, or at any rate unfit for consideration by any employer for gainful work.

There is nothing I regret more than my decision to offer up myself and my abilities to God in his service.

I had already gone through virtually all of the soul-searching and heartache that this has entailed in the years before God’s final blow fell. Indeed, it had started long before we first came to Valley Baptist in late 2001. The blow itself was not unexpected, and now that it has fallen, I am no longer looking for answers or solutions. For many years—too many—I followed the philosophy that if I did nothing, nothing would happen, and that the only way to find my place in the service of God was to go on seeking opportunities, to keep as active as I could in ministry, and keep my options open with university study. I kept on doing this, even when things had been looking hopeless for years, in part because nothing else was open to me—I was too old for most employers to consider taking me on, and I thought it at least possible that God still had his good purposes for me in closing all other doors. But even as long ago as early 2004, when I was at a low point spiritually, I wrote the following words as a verse of a song:

I won’t look for leading, sweet voice of the Spirit,
I won’t chase the will of God up a blind alleyway.
I’ll still watch the sunset, I’ll still love my neighbour,
I’ll still play my music, and be grateful while I may.

It took me more than six years after I wrote this to start living by my own advice.

As I said, I am not looking for answers or solutions. There are none, and God keeps his own counsel. I take what enjoyment I can from my family, my friendships and my music, and I no longer insist that my life should have meaning. I go to Mass and participate in the worship, and I greet the people around me in the pews during the exchanging of the Peace, but this is the limit of my involvement. As a non-Catholic, of course, I cannot take the Eucharist. I still seek to live by Christ’s teaching in my dealings with others, and still call myself Christian. And I pray sometimes—especially if someone needs healing or some other intervention from God. But I do not seek God’s guidance, and I have had to close my heart and mind to Christ’s Parable of the Talents.

The truly sad thing to me is that no preacher can even use my life as a sermon illustration. Obviously it can’t be used for encouragement—“Things looked bad, but he persevered, and after five heart-breaking years, suddenly God made it all right, and even the tough stuff finally made sense.” But I can’t be used as an awful warning either. What pastor is ever going to tell his or her congregation that seeking to serve God can seriously stuff up your life? Or even, “Be careful about dedicating your life to the service of God, because if you get it wrong, even seriously wrong, he won’t necessarily let you know.”

So, this is where my life in God finds its conclusion. I hope this clarifies for you why I can no longer be involved in ministry, and my need to be in a place where no-one has any expectation of ministry from me. I pray that God will bless you all, bless Valley Baptist, and bring you anointed ministry in the power of his Holy Spirit.

Much love, always.

Neil Copeland

Thursday 4 April 2013

I still think of myself as Christian.  I no longer consider myself a member of the body of Christ, or a child of God - certainly not a servant of God. This is why I now attend Mass at St Bernadette's. I won’t take communion, though it represents the body and blood of Christ, because it is an expression of our part in his body. In another church, if I were asked why I do not take communion, I would have to explain this. If I am ever asked by a Catholic, it is enough to say, I am not Catholic.

Tuesday 31 January 2012

I forget that I have this. I suppose I should use it for stuff that I want people to read, but don't find Facebook ideal for.

Sunday 29 May 2011

God is my enemy.
I love my enemy more than life itself.
That makes me a Christian.