10 mins
Taking steps of faith
AFTER 45 minutes in the company of Michael Harvey, I find myself wishing that every member of the Church of Scotland could have the same experience - particularly anyone feeling discouraged or downhearted.
Because there is positive thinking, and then there is Michael Harvey. The chief executive of National Weekend of Invitation doesn’t just shrug off challenges and setbacks, he actively thrives on them.
“I learned in business - love it when it goes wrong,” he says, with absolute sincerity. “Love it when you get a ‘no’.”
Coming from anyone else this could sound like archetypal empty consultant-speak, but from Michael it comes across as a philosophy forged in a difficult early life and successful career, and grounded in a personal theology that sees the presence of God where things are going badly.
“I knew I was on to something immediately [with Back to Church Sunday] because when I went to my first clergy gathering they said ‘no’ to me,” he says. “That was just music to my ears. I’m generally speaking not that interested when things are going right, but I’m fascinated when it goes wrong.
“People might think I’m completely mad, but most of our Bible stories are based on things going wrong. It’s quite obvious to me that God intervenes in the difficult places - has always intervened in the difficult places.
“So when the clergy said ‘congregation members will never do anything like this’, it was like [he claps his hands] ‘fantastic, this is gold, real gold’. And that’s how Back to Church Sunday started.”
Back to Church Sunday, and its successor campaign Weekend of Invitation, have been the background to the third part of a life that could be the classic three-act play: the struggling adolescent who unexpectedly becomes a wealthy businessman, then just as unexpectedly gives it all up to devote his life full-time to Christian ministry.
Born, brought up and still living in Manchester (and peppering the conversation with ‘flippin’ ‘eck’s to prove it), Michael credits his mother with first inviting him to church at the age of eight, and the church youth leader, Frank, who became his mentor, for getting him more involved.
“I guess I saw something in Frank that I really liked - his Christian faith, his general belief in me before I started to believe in myself - and I didn’t know it at the time, but I really needed a male figure. I never grew up with a father.
“I think that’s the foundation piece of what keeps me going - that I was invited - and it’s totally transformed my life. And there’s another eight-year-old boy out there, or another adult son or daughter, just waiting for an invitation.”
Frank was also instrumental in changing the direction of Michael’s life at 19. “I had to stay on at school an extra year because I didn’t get enough O-levels to do A-levels. Then I left at 19, having failed my A-levels and failed to get into university.
“I was unemployed for six months, and I can remember going into the church where I was helping Frank with the youth at the time, prostrating myself on the floor and saying ‘well, Lord, I clearly can’t control my life, so you do something with it’.
“There was no flash of light or rumble of thunder or anything like that, but 24 hours later I’m round at Frank’s saying ‘have you got a book I can read?’, and him saying ‘what you, a book? You don’t read’.
“So he gave me The Lord of the Rings. I read it within three or four days and that started me on the path of two books a week for the next 20 years. I started with fiction, then I got into Christian books - I wasn’t that impressed - then I got into psychology, sociology, science, business, biography. I would just read and read and read.
“And all of a sudden I started seeing patterns, where you take one concept and put it with another concept, and then I started seeing those patterns in business.”
Initially applying his learning to the financial services and consumer electrical industries, he started a business ‘with someone else’s money’ which was later sold, and then set up as a consultant, working on the principle that growth is naturally there in business, but sometimes it is locked - partly because the good ideas are ‘at the sharp end’ but the decision makers are too far removed from there.
This act of his life lasted around twenty years, but by the time he was approaching his 40th birthday he says he felt ‘imprisoned within a business structure which was very constricting’. “Sometimes God has to do that to you, He has to make it so uncomfortable that you move - otherwise you find yourself in a rut that ends up in the grave.”
Still very much involved in the church, the conversation which changed the course of his life for the second time was over coffee with the communications director of the Bishop of Manchester. “I was always interested in how you unlock growth in the church. And in having this cup of coffee the communications director had the idea of this welcome Sunday, and she said ‘if I take the media side of this thing, would you look after the clergy?’ Little did I know, I got the rough end of the stick in that particular deal!”
Back to Church Sunday started in 2004, and in the first year 2000 people accepted an invitation to come to church. But analysis showed that, in churches taking part, one third of the normal congregation didn’t show up on that Sunday. And then half of the churches that took part didn’t do so again in the second year.
“I was panicking at this point,” says Michael, “But then I remembered: love it when it goes wrong. That’s where God is. We think He’s in the 2000, and He is, but if you look at the place where it’s not working and really peer into it, you suddenly find something amazing peering back at you.
Sometimes God has to do that to you, He has to make it so uncomfortable that you move - otherwise you find yourself in a rut that ends up in the grave.
“Because when you think about it, who in our Bible stories immediately jumps into action when God asks them to do something? There’s not a lot. Most of the time it’s ‘oh flippin’ ‘eck, don’t pick me’. It’s ‘Right, Jonah, let’s go to Nineveh’ - and he dashes off in the opposite direction. The Bible informs us how we are likely to react today.”
Of course, for most of the twentieth century churchgoing was ingrained in British culture, so Christians didn’t feel they had to invite others in. “It’s like having a muscle that you want to strengthen,” says Michael. “We know the capability is there, but if you’ve not used it for such a long time it’s very, very painful when you use it the first time. And the great difficulty here is that we are a whole generation, two or three generations, that have never really had to do this.
“And you can tell we’ve never had to do this because the major word outside most churches is ‘welcome’, which is basically suggestive of the fact that actually we’re expecting people to get themselves across the threshold.”
So how do we move on from this, I ask. “First of all, you have to help people see exactly where they are. It’s almost as if we’re frozen in time at the moment. The best Bible story I’ve got about where I think the church is at the moment is David and Goliath - you’ve got King Saul’s army, which is God’s army, paralysed in fear, and a boy with a little bit of faith comes along and defeats the giant. And many of Saul’s paralysed army become David’s mighty men - and that’s the hope for the church.
“We have brilliant, brilliant people sat in the pews - the issue is that we’ve got to unlock faith. We have to teach the principles of faith again - that faith is not just a noun, it’s a verb. You take a step of faith where there’s fear, and that’s always been the case.
So through exercises such as getting congregations to ask God if there’s somebody He is nudging them to invite, and getting them to write the name down on a post-it note and then bringing forward that post-it note and placing it on the cross so everybody can see they’re being called by God.
Also by providing supportive structures that care for the inviter, so they’re not doing this on their own. We do this together, we support one another, we pray for one another. We need to be as interested in the inviter as we are in the invited person.”
Back to Church Sunday morphed into the Weekend of Invitation in 2017, recognising that the majority of people in the UK now have no experience of church to come back to. And into the mix of welcome and invitation, Michael has now thrown another element - healing.
At a lecture in Edinburgh in November shortly after this interview, and in a short book (available through The Guild of Health and St Raphael) he argued that Christian healing is at the heart of mission - that in choosing people who are, on the face of it, unsuitable, God is healing them as well as the people they are leading.
Coming back to his talent for finding connections in disparate subjects, the theory is based partly on scientific findings which show that a ‘challenge response’, where you face the thing you’re afraid of, aids healing - so that in facing your fear of mission you will be helped to overcome whatever wounds or trauma you are carrying. “You know, God knows all our biology and psychology, so wouldn’t there be biology going on as we’re taking steps of faith? So I’m going to suggest churches have the potential of becoming healthy, healing hubs - places of healing.”
Healing is all over mission. Mission is an invitation to heal: both the person who God is calling to go on mission and the person who’s receiving that mission.
And of course he has a Bible story to back this up: “When Moses says to God, ‘I am slow of speech and tongue’, at that point God should have said, ‘oh yes, actually, wrong person, I’m looking for somebody who’s competent, well-trained and has been through theological college’. Unfortunately that’s not the way that God works - he takes somebody who disqualifies themselves, and that disqualification is what God is going to use. “In the Moses story, how does it end? You’d never believe that Moses ends up speaking to a nation, this man who’s ‘slow of speech and tongue’. Moses’ mission is healing for Moses, and because Moses is being healed so are the people he’s leading.
Michael and Eike Harvey
“Healing is all over mission. Mission is an invitation to heal: both the person who God is calling to go on mission and the person who’s receiving that mission.
“So how that plays out in the Church of Scotland for example, is people telling me why they shouldn’t do this, why they can’t do it. ‘They might ask me a question I don’t have the answer to’, ‘what if the person says no’, or ‘I couldn’t possibly invite them to what it is that we’ve got’. All of that sounds perfectly reasonable, and we might think ‘we have got to do something about all of those reasons’.
“I’m not saying we don’t need to look at how we do church, but that should not stop us answering the call of God - the disqualification is the qualification.”
This third act of his life has taken Michael to 18 countries as an itinerant speaker and author. “I live by faith, I trot around the world going where people invite me to go,” he says.
In the early stages it was hard financially, and cost Michael and his wife Eike all of their savings. “My wife is just an incredible supportive Christian woman, a brilliant woman of God, and she always backed what I was doing. She wasn’t wholly convinced in Back to Church Sunday but she thought something else would emerge - and it is so annoying when your wife is right!
“When the savings went it was like ‘oh no, we have to depend on God’. I have to take the same steps of faith as everyone else. I have to grow. If this messaging is to get out there, I have to face exactly the same things as everybody else has to face. Taking steps of faith.”
This article appears in the March 2020 Issue of Life and Work
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