From the ages of 3-13 I was sent to Sunday School by my parents so that they could have Sunday afternoon to themselves. The walk from Council house to Gospel Hall would have been a good mile which included crossing a main arterial road. The Gospel Hall was in no way evangelical. Its superindendent was a caricature of a Church of England Sunday School superintendent: benevolent, elderly, white-haired and kindly Mr Fryor. His 2IC was a large rotund man who fittingly arrived in a Humber. We called him Jumbo. Both men in their ways were well-intentioned comfortable middle class administrants to the children, some of whom came from the wrong side of the arterial road.
For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. If anyone should believe in Me he shall have eternal Life.
I learned two things from this benevolent Sunday education, despite my rebellion. I came to know the Bible stories inside out and probably still remember them. And I learned that Christian life was all about the New Testament. The stories of the New Testament are completely different in tone from those in the Old.
The Old Testament stories formed an historical context only to the coming of the Son of God in the New Testament. The values of the New Testament given through Jesus Christ were an advance and improvement on the values of the Old Testament. A studious Christian can live without reference to the Old Testament but of course cannot do so without the New.
So when I hear high profile Christian leaders emphasising God and the Old Testament in the content of their sermons I believe that I am listening to someone who should belong to another religion. Literature of the 19th century, especially Dickens, is littered with cold and loveless individuals who in the name of God insist they are Christians performing some form of necessary tyranny against others. If they are not self-professed Christians they are rank materialists who believe in the over-riding power of mechanical science and industry. The segue between the two is minimal.
So long as Bishop Tamaki of Destiny Church spouts the Old Testament he can justify his tyranny and his materialistic success. He can think he deserves to become comfortable after all his industry. But he has to steer clear of the Spiritual Being Who after His hard work was very uncomfortably nailed to a Cross for His pains.
In the Gospel Jesus Christ comes incognito, isolated and homeless into Galilee and begins gathering His disciples. I can assure Bishop Tamaki that if He came today He would not arrive on a Harley Davidson taken from the garage of His material mansion. The unpretentious education of the Gospel Hall fifty years ago allows me to guess that the man Jesus would come from the nondescript people, and that his non-violent radicalism would be too much for the Tamakis and politicians of this world. He would be seen as a troublemaker, a dangerous loner gathering together a dangerous group, leading to only one inevitable outcome.
I thank the humble Gospel Hall for helping me to see clearly without effort the false prophets of our times, whether they come from within the Christian establishment, or from some supposed alternative, or from political circles. What allows Blair of the maniac glare to consciously carry out a crusade and criminally invade other countries belongs to the medieval Catholic Church just as much as to any petty Tamaki tyrant. And they all belong to the ethos of the Old Testament.
It is when I see odd individuals - and some of them may be odd - carrying out loving actions without beating any drum that I feel myself in the presence of the New Testament, in the presence of a true Christian.
