Proclaimer Blog
Duplicity (1)
I spent some of the weekend reading a book that made be sad. It was Tyler Hamilton's The Secret Race helpfully dispatched by amazon on publication day. It tells the story of professional cycling and doping – or more precisely, the story about Lance Armstrong (who won the Tour de France an amazing seven times in a row) and doping. It's not pleasant reading – not only because it blows apart sporting achievements that I loved watching as a spectator, but because Armstrong himself comes across (and this may be skewed by the book, of course) as a self-absorbed, self-deceiving, arrogant idiot. I'm pretty sure that the excesses of then are not being repeated now – the cyclists of the early nineties climbed the major hills loads quicker than they do today – and there are not many sports where performance goes backwards. I'm not so naive as to think that people don't push the boundaries of what they can get away with, but it does seem that is a different attitude now than there was then.
However, this is not a blog about professional cycling. It's a blog about preaching. So here's the thing. As I read, what saddened me most was the duplicity with which most of these riders conducted themselves. Hamilton himself said that if the whole team had taken lie detector tests, they would have passed, because they convinced themselves they weren't cheating. As I thought about this and then thought about my own heart, I reflected on the capacity for self-deception. How easy it is to convince others, and in doing so convince myself, that everything is OK, or better, everything is glorious. I think preachers are particularly good at doing this. They know that to stand in the pulpit and say "I've had a rubbish week/month/year. I'm struggling to pray. I've lost my love for Christ" is the kiss of death for ministry. So, we say nothing. We convince others and we often convince ourselves.
I want to blog about this a little this week. Because this duplicity is deadly to faith and deadly to ministry. Part (2) tomorrow when we'll get into specifics.