Ruth Clemence

It was an immense privilege to endorse John Hindley’s most recent book ‘Weakness Our Strength: Learning From Christ Crucified’. It was also a joy to be able to interview him as we discuss his journey to faith, becoming a pastor, church planter and an author, his brand new book, what weakness and strength look like biblically, societally and personally, plus so much more. His humility and deep love for Jesus are evident throughout. I hope that you will be greatly encouraged.

Tell us a little about you and your journey to becoming a Christian.

I grew up in a Christian home. We moved about a fair bit and my dad was a bank manager. We used to move with his job. My mum was a primary school teacher so she tended to find work wherever we were. That meant that we went to quite a variety of churches when I was growing up all around the country. My mum and dad had been taught that it was a good thing to support your local church, so we went to quite a variety of different churches across the theological spectrum. 

I certainly believed in my head the truths of the gospel. I was confirmed as a teenager in a Church of England confirmation, and I remember taking it quite seriously and thinking do I believe that Jesus is God? Do I believe that He did miracles? Do I believe that He rose from the dead? And I did. But it didn’t impact my life. I didn’t have a faith looking back. I had an intellectual ascent. 

I went to university in Exeter. I wanted to be a history teacher so I studied History and Politics. I met up with members of the Christian Union on my first day there. They helped me to move my bags into my halls. The next day they were doing a tour of the campus so I went on that. They did that on Sunday morning and one of them said they were going to church that evening and would I like to come so I went along. I was used to going to church and I stuck at the church for three years. 

During my third year, there at St. Leonard’s Church in Exeter, the pastor was preaching on the cross. The Holy Spirit convicted me that I was a sinner. It was the first time that I realised that Christ had died for me. I knew He died for sinners, I just didn’t think I was one! I was convicted and I knew what I needed to do. I knew that Jesus would forgive me if I asked. So I asked and He did and He saved me. That was my journey to becoming a Christian from the Lord’s grace and kindness. 

What made you decide to become a pastor? 

The evening the Lord saved me I thought, ‘I need to tell everybody about this’. I need to become a minister. The next day I made an appointment to meet up with the curate at St. Leonard’s and he said that might be a call of the Lord. He was very wise. He said it might be a call of the Lord or it might just be an enthusiasm. I saw it as a renewal of faith but looking back I think it was the Lord saving me. He said why not try and be a lay assistant (an intern or ministry trainee now) for a year or two and test out that calling. Then you can either go and be a history teacher and that time will stand you in good stead to serve in your church or maybe you’ll go into pastoral ministry. I thought that was good advice and I applied for various posts. 

Roger Salisbury who was the rector of team ministry in Cheshire in Buckinghamshire – they appointed me as their lay assistant. I spent two years there and while I was there, godly brothers and sisters who I respected said they felt that it would be good for me to go into pastoral ministry. I loved the work I was doing. I wasn’t totally sure about various things. I was never a very good public speaker so any gift I have in that, I was very aware was a supernatural gift and not something naturally I could do. 

I got a place at Cheltenham College to do a PGCE course as a secondary history teacher. They knew I was applying to be a pastor and they were fine with that. I went for an interview for the Church of England for their selection process for ministry. It was a three-day interview panel event. I stopped the car on the way down and said, “Lord, I don’t know what’s right, so if they say yes I will go off to theological college and study and become a minister. If they say no or wait, I will go off and be a teacher”. I want to do one or the other. If I was going to teach, I wanted to take that seriously. 

I said to the Lord, “It’s up to you. I’ll do whichever you choose.” They said ‘yes’ so I went to Oakhill Theological College for three years. I was ordained in the Church of England and served as an assistant pastor in Bolton in Lancashire for three years. 

Can you explain a bit about the church planting that you have been involved in?

The church planting was during that time. I got married to my wife Felicity. She was a student at Manchester University. We got married at the end of her first year as a student and my first year as a curate. We lived in Bolton and she commuted into university. We found that a lot of her friends were interested in Christ and one time she invited her friends around for dinner. She said to them “I’ll cook food and my fiance will tell you about Jesus.” I remember her kitchen was so packed that I had to stand on the table to share the gospel. 

We were chatting afterwards and the friends she had wanted to know about God, faith, and the Lord Jesus, but they wouldn’t come to church. She went to what we felt was a really accessible, welcoming, friendly church where there were quite a lot of students as well as people of all ages. We felt it would be a very easy place to come. I think people had never been to church, and it was quite a frightening prospect to them. It made us think, wouldn’t it be great if there was a church with the same theology but even more accessible and met in a pub or something. 

We chatted to some friends and began to pray together. A few of us had the same idea and decided we would try this. We talked to the bishop of Manchester and there was a lot of conversation with the diocese. The bishop was personally supportive. Basically, they couldn’t find a structure to make it work. It was when the Church of England was talking about structure with church planting and they are called ‘Bishops’ Missions Orders’. 

In the end, we decided to go ahead even though they couldn’t find a structure. The bishop gave us his blessing and gave us permission to officiate, which is his official approval of your ministry. We started meeting as a church called ‘The Plant’ in 2004. It’s now called Grace Church Manchester. There were seven of us when we started and the Lord graciously grew that church. 

During that time, my wife’s family had moved to Norfolk. She has five sisters and they all ended up in Norfolk. Her mum and dad moved there shortly after we got married and we used to go on holidays and we loved it. Norfolk is a beautiful part of the world and we found the people really friendly. We also found there were a lack of gospel churches in rural Norfolk. They are there but there are not enough. 

We began to pray for the area and increasingly felt the Lord calling us to consider going. We talked with various pastors locally and our church family back in Manchester and my fellow elders there. They felt the church was sufficiently established. There were two of us who were co-pastors so we felt it would be possible for us to move. Everyone said yes there’s a need and you should come. 

We began to pray about that and then spoke to Tom Chapman who was the pastor of Surrey Chapel. He incredibly generously said they have a community group that meets in Coltishall and they had been praying for a church plant there for years. He said they had no money and no one to lead it, but he would encourage them to join us, if we wanted to come. We had been praying ‘Lord where would we find that initial core team?’, which is that initial group that would form the nucleus of the church family. That felt like a very clear answer to prayer. 

We met with the elders of Surrey Chapel which is now called CityGates Church, and they were really supportive and encouraging of this. These were godly, mature Christians and a wonderful group to start with. We moved down in 2009 and bought a house in Norfolk. The church plant began in May 2010 with 12 adults which felt like a good number. There have been lots of highs and lots of lows but consistent faithfulness from the Lord. 

You are an author as well, including the bestselling book ‘Serving Without Sinking’. Can you share how you stepped into writing books and your writing process? 

The first book I wrote was ‘Serving Without Sinking’ and it came out of seeing a weariness in serving Christ in myself and in others, particularly Christians who were quite committed and served hard in their churches on Sundays and throughout the week. The service of the Lord should be perfect freedom. We’ve got something wrong and it felt like quite a big problem. 

The answer that I came up with is we have forgotten that Jesus came to serve us (Mark 10:45). ‘For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and give His life as a ransom for many.’ Now Jesus is giving Himself as an example to the disciples there. We often latch onto that – service looks like giving yourself to serve others. It can only look like that if Jesus first serves us like that. I am a total older brother Pharisee and I keep having to repent in this area. But keep coming back to that truth that my relationship with Christ is defined by the cross, by His service of me not by my service of Him. That means he sees me as a friend, He takes me as part of his bride, He brings me before His Father to be adopted as a child. That’s who I am before I am a servant and the order has to be, I find, continually reestablished in my heart. 

A friend of mine who has done some writing, Professor Michael Reeves, and has been a friend for years, said that I should write a book on this. I wasn’t at all sure and I had not done much writing. He said, “I think people think too hard about writing. You think that preaching changes lives and the Lord uses preaching to save people and grow them into the likeness of Christ. Yet, some weeks you have had a heck of a week and you’ll give it two hours prep and you will stand up and you’ll trust the Holy Spirit and you’ll do the best you can. Why not just write in the same way? Just do the best you can, trust the Lord. It won’t be perfect but it might be useful.” That was very helpful.

I wrote a proposal and sent it to The Good Book Company. Carl Laferton (the editorial director now) read through the proposal and thought this could be useful to the church. I always feel Carl taught me to write. I would write a chapter and he would be able to see what was wrong, and help me to write it better without re-writing it. I love editors and feel it is a real gift. 

I am quite a quick writer, partly because life is quite busy. My writing process when I am writing a book is I’ll try to spend one day a fortnight writing. Typically I’ll go into Norwich on the bus, sit in the cathedral library which is beautiful, and I will write a chapter in the morning. In the afternoon, I will re-write the chapter the editor sent back to me. Then I will read through the chapter I wrote last time just to check through anything glaring and obvious. Then I’ll send that one to the editor and sit on the chapter I have just written for a fortnight. Two weeks later I’ll write a new chapter and review the one I wrote a fortnight ago. There is a lot of work at the end to work on the manuscript as a whole with the editor and there is often a bit of going backwards and forwards on things. 

I find the process really interesting. Sometimes you accidentally stray into an area of theological controversy and I need to clarify my position or actually I don’t want to engage in that controversy. It’s not what I am writing about. If I just change this sentence, I can step back into clearly accepted truth and it not be a distraction. Sometimes it matters and this text is important and I need to spend a bit longer on my exegesis and defend it if people disagree. 

That’s the process and then you get to do interviews with people and talk about the book. People read it and like it and the Lord uses it. I get emails from people about books I wrote years ago, and I think wow, this is being used by the Lord to help someone. What an amazing blessing. I get to go and meet other churches and it does feel like a massive blessing getting to write and be part of serving the church that way. 

Your most recent book is ‘Weakness Our Strength: Learning From Christ Crucified’. Could you explain a little about the book – there is so much in that title alone! 

Thinking about the Bible’s view of weakness and strength, and the view of the society we live in, I think we live in a world that values strength. What I mean by strength is quite a broad category – basically self-sufficient and having your stuff together. It looks slightly different in different places. In one place it might be having lots of followers on Instagram or Facebook, and you have a certain degree of popularity and influence. It might be physical strength – you can lift a lot of weight or you can run very fast. It might be financial strength – you’re well off. It might be power – either authority held in being a manager or business or a position of authority like a teacher. 

Around us in a rural culture, I think people really value the sense of being a reliable, dependable person. Being self-sufficient and the sort of person people come to, to borrow a tool or to ask for help. Of course we want to be people who are gifted, skillful and can help others. These aren’t necessarily bad things, but I think where it becomes bad is that it becomes who we are. And it’s not true. We are weak. 

We are weak in all sorts of ways. For some people the weakness is very obvious. They suffer with chronic ill health. It might be physical, mental or emotional. Some people are financially weak. They don’t have qualifications that enable them to get a well paid job. They have been really hit by the cost of living crisis, it’s crippling and they are really struggling. Other people might be weak intellectually – they are not bright or able to be quick thinkers. Other people might be weak in getting older. Other people are weak with family life which is just exhausting. How do I parent a tantruming toddler or a teenager struggling with their self-image? 

There is an incredible weight and difficulty that we are weak. Our temptation is often to deny it, hide it and put our best face on. Everyone is fine on a Sunday at church. We think we ought to have everything sorted. I was struck by the fact that God doesn’t see like that. Paul writes about the cross in the beginning of 1 Corinthians: 

‘For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God’ and ‘For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.’

God is strong in weakness. It got me to think about how does the Bible view weakness and strength? As I thought about that, I thought we are deliberately created weak. We need sleep. We have physical limitations. We are fallen and sinful, but even aside from that, God created us not to be strong in ourselves. I think He created us to be strong together. The weakness in ourselves is meant to drive us to dependence on Him and mutual dependance. I think that is how the trinity functions. 

I was thinking about that picture in John 19 as Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea are taking Christ’s body down from the cross and at that point Jesus is dead. He is obviously incapable of getting Himself into His tomb. You don’t get weaker. His body is broken. He is a corpse being carried by two friends and laid in a borrowed tomb. His last possessions were gambled away a few hours previously. In every sense He is utterly weak. And yet, He has authority from the Father to take back His life and He knows that His Father will raise Him from the dead. In His dependence on His Father, He is strong because the resurrection is guaranteed by the gift of His Father to Him. 

You see it in His ministry. Christ does everything in obedience to the Father by the power of the Holy Spirit. He never operates independently. The only moment He is independent is when the Father turns His face away from Him and pours out on Christ the judgement and the anger we deserve for our sin as He dies on the cross. But even then He depends on His Father when He cries out “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”). He wants His Father and He knows that the Father will vindicate Him in the resurrection. 

That is why it is ‘Weakness Our Strength’ because what I would love people to take away is my weakness is not something to be embarrassed by or to hide or to pretend doesn’t exist or to excuse. My weakness is part of God’s gift in who I am, in His image, so that together we might admit our weakness and rely on one another, and rely on the Holy Spirit, on our Father, on Christ. Then together as the body of Christ we are strong. But we will only know that strength if we are very happy to be weak in ourselves.

You honestly, yet humbly share your own weakness in the book. Can you talk a little of what weakness looks like in your life?

I do particularly notice it in family life. I think that is often because my temptation is to act strong and to do things out of my own strength. That’s pretty exhausting. We have four children and they are spread from ages 12 to 3,  so it’s pretty busy. We have lots of people in and out of the home which we enjoy. If I try to do it all in my own strength, I find that I am increasingly exhausted and angry as the day goes on. I notice it physically if I do it for too long. My shoulder gets tense, my side starts to ache, my teeth ache. I notice it in my behaviour and it can come out as unkindness and coldness toward my wife or towards our children. 

When I know that I am weak, I just don’t approach the day like that. I pray and seek the Lord to help. I talk with brothers and sisters – I get to see Christians most days because I work full-time for a church, so I can admit that I am struggling and ask them to pray for me. As I share my uncertainties, there is grace and strength from the Lord.  

There’s a lovely quote that Charles Haddon Spurgeon wrote in one of his lectures to his students when he was talking about his battle with depression and his suffering. He was addressing trainee pastors at his college and said God afflicts us so that we can be ‘fitting shepherds of an ailing flock’. I love that idea that ministers who were not weak could not minister to weak sheep. I think that’s true of all Christians. We are weak. We need each other. If we weren’t weak, we would be incapable of having compassion and serving and loving our brothers and sisters. Christ entered our weakness to better serve us. 

What would you say to someone who is walking through weakness at the moment without Jesus?

To be struggling with weakness is to know that you are a creature. You are created by God to be weak, to be needy. God wants to welcome you into His family and to give you His love, to forgive you your sins, and to help you, to give you hope and peace and comfort and joy in His weakness. That is the experience of Christians and that is the truth. I think that resonates more truly that we are made to be weak and to need each other and need God because the world around us says ‘if you try hard enough, you can achieve anything’. 

I often think of the paralympic games where we have these amazing men and women who have overcome incredible suffering to compete at the highest level in their sport. Rightly they are applauded for doing so and that is good. But I often think about the person who is watching that at home, having lost their leg in a traffic accident or through illness, suffering with chronic depression as a result, full of anxiety, barely able to leave the house, maybe not able to leave the house. It feels that our world just puts another burden on that says ‘you shouldn’t be on the sofa, you should be on the podium’. All it says is ‘you don’t measure up’.

I think that there are so many people that are crushed by the gospel of this age which is ‘if you look down deep inside you’ll find the strength to be anything’. I found that if I look down deep inside I find fear, depression, weakness, sorrow, hurt and that’s about it. If I look out to Jesus, I find One who loves me, and who came for me, who died for me. And He gives me hope, joy, and peace. And I think if you are feeling weak, that is because you are seeing reality. You are seeing through the lies that we use to support ourselves in this age. We need God. We need Jesus.

If that’s you, I would really encourage you to take your weakness and find Christians. Go to a church. You’ll find people who are struggling, you’ll find sinners, you’ll find hypocrites. That’s who we are. We are not perfect by any means. We are broken and weak and we know we need help. Go and find a church and say ‘I’m weak and I’m struggling. I understand your God is not a God who despises the weak, but a God who loves the weak. A God who became weak. A God who made us to need Him and need each other. Could you tell me more about Him and help me?’ I would really encourage you to do that. 

As Christians, how can we make church a place where people feel that they are accepted? 

God takes us as we are. He takes us in our suffering, our sin, our mess, our brokenness and meanness and welcomes us and He forgives us. But He also knows that a selfish life is a miserable life, and He loves us enough to help us to change. To be a Christian is to be a mess and to have God working in us and with us, to help us know more joy and goodness. I long to be a person of integrity, and yet lying is very attractive. Sin is attractive. Lying can get me out of all sorts of awkward situations without social embarrassment. But I want to be a truthful person and God helps me in that. God helps us to enjoy the deeper desires of our hearts, to be kind, to be generous, to be truthful, to be patient. I would love to be a more patient dad, husband and friend. 

I think the mistake we can make in churches is to forget that God welcomes us as we are and helps us change, and just focus on the change process. If we don’t always keep reminding ourselves that God loves us as we are – the change process is part of His love for us, not something that we have to achieve for Him to love us – we can get that out of kilter. 

We can talk too much about growing in Christ and changing and not enough about our need to continually come back to the cross, and remember that we are loved and forgiven and He died for us. I think if we do that as Christians and we seek to say a lot to each other – I’m broken, I’m weak, I’m a sinner – the more open and honest we can be, the easier it is for others to be open and honest, the easier it is to forgive each other, to show grace, to speak the love of the Lord into each other’s lives. That creates a culture where when someone walks in the door of church, our community group or we are just hanging out with our neighbours, then what people see is a community where it’s ok to be broken and it’s ok to be bad, and to be forgiven and welcomed in. If our churches are places where it’s ok to be sorted, but not ok to be broken, then they are not Christ’s church at that point. We have to keep working on this because we fall for the same lie that we should be sorted. 

Are there any particular Bible passages that have encouraged you in your own life when you have felt weak? 

In Luke 15 Jesus tells three parables: the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the father with the two sons (the prodigal son). That series of parables, particularly the third one, because there are two lost sons. One is lost in obvious blatant hatred for his father and rebellion. The other is lost in equally hating his father but doing all the right stuff so that he can earn what he wants which is just cash. You have these two quite different characters who are basically committing the same sin, which is they don’t care about anyone apart from themselves. They just want money and just go about it in different ways. The father welcomes them both, goes out to them both, draws them both to himself, in lovely, warm forgiveness. That helps me to remember that I’m a sinner and that God is kind to sinners. 

I also often go to the Song of Songs which is a series of love songs between Solomon and his bride but are about Jesus and His love for His bride, the church. Chapter four in the Song of Songs is a groom’s wedding speech to his bride, so it is Jesus speaking to us and saying how much He loves us. Our love for Him is better than wine, more precious than gold. Jesus really cares about me loving Him. But I only love Him because He first loved me (1 John 4:19). 

The other place I go is Revelation 21 where it says one day Jesus will return and He will wipe away every tear. That sense that now we will weep but one day His nail-scarred hands will wipe away our last tears, I really love. There’s a song by Sandra McCracken called ‘We Will Feast in the House of Zion’ and I love it and often sing or listen to it. ‘We will feast in the house of Zion, we will feast and weep no more’ and that idea that one day we will be together with Jesus enjoying His feast. The suffering, pain and sin will have gone. I find that really hopeful. 

It’s just looking at Jesus – that’s the thing. Anywhere in the Bible does that. It’s about Him. It’s taking my eyes off myself and onto Him. 

How can a Christian remain anchored to Jesus through the storms of life when they may feel at their weakest? 

I think what the Puritans used to call the ‘means of grace’; the ways God gives us to show Himself to us: the Bible, prayer, creation are probably the primary ones. I find creation really helpful. I live in a rural village in Norfolk so I’ll often go for a walk or a run and try and get out every day. I find just seeing God sustaining the trees and the crops in the fields and thinking if God cares for that tree enough to help it to flourish over decades, how much more does He care for me? 

Receiving things with gratitude I find good because we have a tendency when we’re struggling to grasp at comforts. But to sit down and go ‘Lord, thank you that I can now watch three episodes of a Netflix show as a gift from you because your plan to redeem a people for your Son does not depend on me working this evening.’ This isn’t a stolen pleasure from a mean God. He wants to see us smile. He wants to see us at peace. Gratitude I find hugely helpful in staying close to Christ. 

Martin Luther, the German reformer, when he was depressed he used to seek out Christians and music. I think that is a good way to go. Being with other Christians, it’s very easy to see Jesus. I find as a pastor in the church when people are suffering they always run to Jesus and His people or they run away from Jesus and His people. People will always go one way or the other. Those who run to Jesus and His people get far more help. Those who run away, we run after them. That is what the church is for. Either way you get Christians. We are meant to do this together and that is the biggest thing. 

How could someone who does not know Christ come to know Him?

I think if you are not a Christian and you’re struggling, seek Christians. Generally Christians like to help and there aren’t strings attached. We have received freely given love from Jesus and from others, and we enjoy freely sharing His love. We are not trying to convert you as if we have got some brainwashing programme. We would love for you to come to know Jesus because we found Him kind. To have a kind God who made you establishes who you are and it’s who we are made to be. We feel you probably can’t know the deepest joy and peace in your life without knowing Jesus. Of course we want you to come to know Him but not because we can gain anything. We want to welcome you, we want to get to know you, we want to share our lives because we enjoy that. We value everyone made in God’s image. 

We often get it wrong and are often hypocritical. We are sinful and we mess it up. We can be brash. We can be judgmental. Of course we can and that’s horrid and we shouldn’t be like that. You won’t experience that from Jesus. 

Find Christians. Get to know them. Ask them about how they tick. They won’t have all the answers but they’ll do their best. They don’t mind sharing. They don’t mind your questions. They don’t mind if you don’t agree with them and you push back. Not all the time, but generally! 

---

John Hindley grew up in a Christian home, and was saved by Christ as a university student. Since then, the Lord has given him a godly wife, Felicity, and delightful children. The Lord has also given him a lovely church family in Broadgrace Church where he serves as an elder. As a church they live in the villages of Norfolk and meet on Sundays in Coltishall. John enjoys reading as well as writing and unhurried time with family and friends, ideally with a cold drink on a summer’s evening.

You can pre-order ‘Weakness Our Strength‘ (Union Publishing) from your local Christian bookshop or online. Available on the 7th August 2023.