One lesson I have learned is that, unless you are actually seen at work, people will assume you are doing nothing!

(Is this the origin of the common calumny that "Clergy and Ministers only work on Sundays"?)

The second is that your ordinary working man or woman mean by "work", what they do with their hands - be it driving heavy vehicles, heaving, pushing, pulling, sawing, drilling, painting, plumbing, working on the factory floor or at the farm, or whatever.

Consequently, the Vicar who pushes a barrow or constructs a garden is dubbed a "hard worker" and respected for it. As recently as 1985 I heard one of my neighbours tell a visitor that, "Our Rector is a real hard worker. I've seen him at it in his garden long before breakfast on many a day."

The majority of people in England are neither "middle class" nor educated past the statutory school leaving age; yet how many manual workers do we see inside our churches on Sundays? The C. of E. is almost entirely "middle class" and "white collared"; and whose fault is that?

If the average parson neglects his garden and never does any manual work on his car or in his church or hall, what point of contact can he possibly have with ordinary (so called) "working class" people?

But there is a deeper aspect to this too: Jesus, as I have already noted, worked with hand as well as brain for most of his life on earth, and all his teaching was illustrated from personal experiences of the daily life of very ordinary people.

I do not see the Church of England getting very far until its ministers and lay leaders find ways of keeping in much closer and understanding touch with the ordinary man and woman in the street.

Hopefully, the jobs mature students have had before training for the ministry will have helped them to understand the working and social background of so many of their parishioners.

Yet one must admit that nearly all this useful job experience has been of a "white collar" type.

How many manual workers does our church accept for training for ordination? And if it does accept any, does it not at once set out to make them more "academic" and "better educated"? Perhaps with the white neck-band of the uniform of a member of the clergy, we parsons cannot help being "white collar workers"! - but I do think we over-emphasise the importance of academic ability.

There were many "well educated people" in our Lord's day, but look what a mixed bag he chose for his twelve apostles! And who would you say was the most intelligent and best educated of the twelve? Could it have been the one called Judas Iscariot?

One of the most effective and influential ministers that the Christian Church has ever had was a non-stipendiary minister who earned his living by making tents. No doubt you know that he came from a town called Tarsus and that his name was Paul.

It seems highly likely he was speaking from experience when he wrote, "First that which is earthly, then that which is heavenly." In other words, the way to go about teaching the Faith is via the physical to the spiritual. It is even more clear to me that it was largely those years working with his hands that resulted in Jesus' ability to appeal to the ordinary "uneducated" people.

I am told that, in our Lord's day, the preachers used to illustrate their sermons or instructions by quotations from learned rabbis and by the written commentaries on the Jewish Scriptures. Jesus did not do this. He did sometimes quote directly from what you and I now call "The Old Testament", but he taught people by stories about the everyday life with which they were familiar. No wonder they listened so well! No wonder they commented, (as we read in John 7 v. 46) "we never heard it like that! "

An important principle underlies all this. We need to start where people are, and not where we ourselves are.

It is a way of helping people to learn which our school teachers have been taught for many years now. (They sometimes call it the "experiential" method).

If you want to teach young people about baptism, you start with their own experiences of water - like bathing and washing up - and then finally move on to baptism.

Or you can use "field work" and let them begin to learn about Christianity by a visit to the local church, or teach them about housing by a study of the buildings in a town they can visit. From such field work you can move out to topics of history, geography, mathematics and other subjects.

The ways of doing this are endless! Today, we Christian ministers (of all varieties and both sexes) need to learn afresh how to do this kind of thing in our own talks, sermons and other approaches to the ministry of teaching the faith.

And sometimes, it is just important to stop talking.

St. Paul will have been told about Jesus' method of teaching and noted how often he began by: "There was once a man or a woman who …"
Like Jesus, many of the apostles and Paul had all begun life by working with their hands.

As I intimated earlier, the way Paul mentions this principle of beginning with what people have already experienced in everyday life, and then moving on to teach about spiritual truths is summed up for us in a sentence he wrote to the Christians in Corinth; (I'll quote verse 46 in Chapter 15 of 1 Corinthians from the T.E.V. or Good News Translation - it sums up what I have been saying in this chapter.)

IT IS NOT THE SPIRITUAL WHICH COMES FIRST, BUT THE PHYSICAL, AND THEN THE SPIRITUAL.

End