‘Afflicting the comfortable’ could be taken as the keynote of this year’s Carey Conference held at the Hayes, Swanick, 6-8 January.
The main speaker was Professor Greg Beale of Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia. He is the author of a landmark and voluminous commentary on the Greek text of the book of Revelation and he treated the participants to a magisterial introduction to John’s apocalypse. The book is meant to be understood symbolically, according to its opening verse. The dramatic word pictures of the apostle will sedate the nominal Christian but shock God’s true people into action. There are seven churches addressed in the opening chapters of which only two are faithful. The others must change or be judged with the world. Hence John’s writing is addressed first to the whole professed church, but only the faithful remnant will ultimately benefit.
Faithful remnant
All this made for a very challenging set of talks. How many of those calling themselves evangelicals or Bible Christians in our country are genuine believers with a true love for Christ and real godliness? Greg Beale explained from Revelation 11 that God’s presence continues to protect God’s people and empower their witness. The two witnesses are the church. Revelation 18 teaches that the church is called to come out from the world spiritually. The world does its best to lower our defences against temptation, to blind us as to its insecurity and to numb people to the fear of coming judgment. Professor Beale quoted David Wells saying: ‘Worldliness is what any culture does to make sin seem normal and righteousness seem strange’. Many of those listening must have reflected on such things as the normalisation of abortion, euthanasia and the gay lifestyle. Christians must be different.
The theme of becoming too comfortable in this world was underlined by a number of other papers. Ray Trainer from the Wirral reminded us of the life of early Baptist Menno Simons, who spent most of his life on the run from persecution. John Hawley of the Open Air Mission challenged preachers not to simply preach from the pulpit, but to take on the harder task of preaching on the pavement to the 95% of people who never come to church.
There were also fine contributions from Bill James and Ed Collyer, and from Jane McNabb, who led the women’s sessions looking at the spirituality of Zechariah and Elizabeth from the early chapters of Luke.
