After being at Crosspoint last weekend I traveled back to London. I arrived ready to go to work and London already feels like home. I am at heart still a Brit. Texas has transformed the Meikle family and we are grateful particularly to Houston for accepting us and not allowing us to fail! Karen and I arrived with 8 pieces of luggage and a three month old baby. What a blessing Houston and Crosspoint have been to us and while I might be a closet Brit, Karen is like the bumper sticker, she was not born in Texas but she got there just as soon as she could.
The picture is the view from my window taken by my daughter Kate. Just looking at the picture London looks like a modern city but in reality it is dominated by buildings at least a hundred years old especially churches. Churches are everywhere reminding Londoners of their bygone faith. People think of the reformation happening in mainland Europe, but the reformation in some sense opened with Latimer in England and closed with the great social reforms in Scotland driven by Knox and his vision of a reformed nation understanding in its heart the word of God. All the way till the 19th century (that’s 400 years!) the Christian view of “the way things are” shaped how people thought and lived their lives in Britain. When I left the UK in 1991 this nationwide endorsement of the faith had been gone for 100 years and especially mainstream churches where struggling to find a faith worth believing in. Famously, the Anglican Bishop of Durham denied the reality of the resurrection and ascension. Looking back hope seemed lost - the Anglican communion was doomed.
But God of course is in the resurrection business and He must smile at the thought of the current Bishop of Durham, Tom Wright, giving to the church a simple reintroduction to its historic faith which is the best Christian book I have read in a decade. You can find it here 
“Simply Christian” has the ambition of being the “Mere Christianity” for the post modern age but it is a more profoundly Christian book than that. C.S. Lewis used basic philosophy to bring his readers into the Christian world of thought but Tom Wright’s book is grounded in the great sweep of the Bible’s story of our creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. Wright positions that story as an answer to the silent call of our heart for justice, peace, beauty, and order. In other words we know things are not right, what story explains why we feel that way, why we are here, and how we can make our situation better?
In this sense there is an ancientness about the book that is refreshing and new. At Crosspoint there is a tendency to focus on the practical and the everyday. We are tempted to conclude that what our people need is the means to Christianly deal with the problems they face in their daily life. There is nothing of that here because, for Tom Wright, our real problem is far deeper than that. The echo in our mind is not, “can I balance my check book” (that’s today’s urgent scream not eternity’s unanswered call) it is “how can I be right with God”. The weakness of our modern churches is that we listen to the urgent and pressing and decide this is our people’s problem and forget the insistent whisper that in our quiet times say “you are not right”. Wright remembers this and spends the bulk of his time showing in simple language that we can be right with God now and forever.
So there is hope for the Church of England and the Anglican communion. In London like so many cities and towns around the UK churches are closed and reopened as restaurants, bars, fitness clubs and turned into homes for the wealthy. Property developers resurrect these buildings to a new purpose. The Christian message is the same. Constantly put to one side as anachronistic and out of step with our age the heart of the gospel message is that we can be right with God and that message is constantly renewing itself. This message is as needed today as in any other age. That’s what our pastors seek to teach when they teach “The Core” and “Christology” classes. It is our modern answer to the ancient problem, “can I be right with God”.