The coincidental conscience?

Imagine that you have a green card and a red card in your hands.  As I say the following raise the imaginary red card if you wouldn't and the green card if you would.  Ready...

1. eat meat
2. drink alcohol
3. drive over 70 on the motorway
4. take your child out of school for a holiday during term time
5. shop on a Sunday
6. go to a concert with explicit/sexual lyrical content
7. pick an apple from a neighbours tree and eat

Got your answers?  So having gotten you two do that let me be honest, I'm not really bothered by your answers.  The bigger question is why did you give those answers.  We all have a conscience, an awareness or sense of what is right or wrong and that will have informed the answers above.  Our conscience is the result of a wide range of influences throughout our lives.  The challenge for us as christians is to train and calibrate our conscience in light of God's word.  To hear what God says and train our conscience accordingly.  As well as to identify and erase those influences which numb our consciences, sear our consciences or just put them out of step with God's word.

But here's where it gets more complex both in church and in mission.  Different people are at different stages in terms of training and recalibrating their conscience.  And some of the calibration of our consciences is constantly being carried out by our society without our realising it via the media, arts, legal system, education, peer pressure and so on.  And some of that instinctive awareness of right and wrong varies from country to country, culture to culture, region to region and from class to class.  The church as a cross cultural and cross class community is therefore going to have lots of people with varying, and at time diverging, consciences all together.  That is why we need to exercise love in our dealings with one another in church.  It is also why we need to listen to others and not judge and why we need to be constantly examining ourselves searching for the planks that are wrongly informing our conscience.

The added difficulty is that so many of these things we are just unaware of, they operate at the level of assumptions and therefore remain unchallenged until we rub up against someone who thinks differently to us, whose conscience is more or less tender on that issue, or who doesn't even see it as an issue at all.  And the challenge then is to meet such differences with grace and humility as we look to help one another reform our consciences in light of grace.

Come the New Year we're going to take some time at Grace to think about The Christian and Conscience.  What it is, what the Bible has to say about it, how it is trained, how we retrain it in light of scripture and how as community of grace we engage with one another where our consciences differ.