storylines: andrew philip

This month we talk to Andrew Philip

-       Anyone who’s spoken with you will realise you’re from South Africa. How long have you been in the UK now and what led to you coming here?

I’ve been here for 7 and a half years, since the turn of the millenium ... I might try another country next millenium, we’ll see how Gordon Brown works out! I’m still sometimes a bit surprised to find myself here, as for a while it was a bit of a cliche in South Africa to spend a year in London, which I resisted by going to Taiwan instead. After returning from there to South Africa in 1996, I continued working as a freelance music producer. This led to some opportunities opening up to work here in the UK. And following that there were a lot of situations and circumstances that seemed to be pointing very strongly toward my moving to the UK. I hadn’t really encountered such specific guidance before, so it was a really faith-stretching experience. But the sense of certainty that it built in me turned out to be really important during the first couple of years of being here - which were really difficult.

-       Tell us a bit about your life in South Africa and how you became a Christian…

I grew up in a great Christian family during some of South Africa’s hardest years. My parents are both Christians, and passed on their faith to us (I have 2 brothers and a sister), by words and example. As a family we were always involved in “bible-believing” churches, which many great qualities. Because of that I grew up very familiar with the Bible, and am aware today of how it’s kind of ‘embedded in my bones’ as a result. It wasn’t all straightforward of course, and there were parts of ‘church culture’ which I found a little confusing. But the truth is God has had a hold on me ever since I can remember, and my faith life has been about discovering more and more of what this means.

My childhood was in many ways quite idyllic - I had loads of time in the sun, freedom to explore, always enough to eat, a comfortable home, good schools, and safety. I would have said “a normal childhood”, but when you take away everything apart from “loads of time in the sun” from that list, you probably end up closer to what a “normal childhood” looked like for most South Africans at that time. One of the great tragedies of apartheid is that as white South Africans we did live apart, artificially protected by law and economics from the reality of the lives of most South Africans. There is nothing I remember from the preaching in 18 years of attending church that suggested that apartheid might have been wrong. It was just “the way things are”, and the whole social system was designed to make it easier to accept that than to try to discover any other version of the story. The churches I was a part of were pretty clear on the essential fact that Jesus is the only way to God, and had a pretty good handle on the need to “love the Lord your God with all your heart soul and mind”. We were very keen on evangelism (which meant getting people like us to be Christians) and missions (getting people not like us, mostly far away, to be Christians). But while I remember one or two people who were the exception, in general we weren’t nearly as strong on consistently unpacking what it might really mean to “love my neighbour as myself”, even though Jesus does a great job of explaining it right there in the story of the good Samaritan. I have come to realize that we’re all very good at finding ways to justify seeing others as not quite our equal, and once that’s done it’s easy to find reasons not to treat others as we would like to be treated. 

So I’m grateful for having grown up in South Africa, and learned a lot from having lived there. It has always been beautiful, but also was and is still a damaged place. In many ways it was like a heightened, sharply focussed version of how much of our world works, and has sensitized me to some things that are now an integral part of my faith. The relative wealth and prosperity of the West is not independent of the poverty and injustice in many other parts of the world, just as my situation as a white South African was not independent of the circumstances of most black South Africans. It remains hard to ask the difficult questions, easier to accept “the way things are” and assume that somehow we here have some kind of a right to a better life than somebody else somewhere else. 

-       You have a great story about waking up the day after the first multi-racial elections in 1994 in South Africa…

Many of us who live in the more ordered parts of the world have this illusion that “it could never happen here” - an expectation that things will continue much as they always have. For so many people in the world this is not the case, and life is not stable and predictable. We experience this on a personal level, through disappointment, sickness or bereavement, but for so many people it has happened on a grander scale - a tsunami, an earthquake, a terrorist attack, or a war. Before the elections in South Africa, there were many who doubted that we would make it. There were threats of terrorism by both the hard-line apartheid supporters and the more extreme black liberation groups - and consequently there were people digging caves and stockpiling water and tinned goods. I had just carried on as usual, fairly relaxed about it, pretty sure I had nothing to worry about. I woke early on the morning of the elections to the sound of automatic gunfire - and this was in a nice quiet suburb. I couldn’t see the road from my window, but a while later I heard heavy vehicles going past, sounding like the armoured cars we would see on the news patrolling the townships. I remember thinking “this is it, it’s actually happened just like those lunatics said it would” and began trying to make some kind of plan which at one point involved going to a cave I knew of in a valley nearby. After a while, not hearing any more noises, I ventured out, into a completely normal looking day. The first person I saw was an old lady walking a small dog. I never did find out what it was I had heard earlier, but as you probably know the peacefulness of the elections confounded the international community, which had expected chaos and bloodshed. What I have come to realize is that there are many millions of people who have had their lives radically changed in just such an instant. My being relaxed about it wasn’t because of my deep faith, or access to better information, but was actually just naivety. This is true any time we think that who we are, and where we live, somehow immunizes us from pain or disaster. Just turn on the TV news. That house bombed to rubble could have been my house. That woman crying could be my mother. God’s heart grieves for their loss as He would for mine.

-       Tell us a bit about what you do in life now…

I’m trying to find a coherent way to answer that question. I have spent the last few years with my days disappearing into a Bermuda Triangle of music, video and photography. All of these have the two elements of “capture” and then “organise”, and a little more capture means a lot more organising. So right now I am organising! I also travel and play keyboards with Matt Redman, which has been quite a busy schedule at times, plus of course I’m quite involved with the church here. And I try to take my niece to see Shrek (and other movies) regularly!

-       You were very involved in The Point right from the beginning – in fact being one of the little team that had the initial vision to plant the church. Did you always have a sense you might be involved in something like this? 

Yes and no. Church had been a huge part of my life growing up, and there had been a few experiences which had made me quite cynical about it - especially the sense of disconnect in applying what I really believe to be the truth of the Bible in the South African context. I believed it was true, but it just didn’t seem relevant or applied very well in certain areas in some of the churches I had been a part of. I had a season of thinking I didn’t need the church, that I was ok with it just being “me and God”, but that didn’t work out so well! Then I had a time of seeing church as something necessary but peripheral, a place to get spiritually fed and meet people, but separate to the main focus of my life. So for a long while the last thing I wanted to do was be involved in a church to any large extent. But then at some point I really got the fact that God loves the church, and that it was His idea, and that I had no right to give up on it just because it hadn’t met my expectations.

Today I see it as this precious thing that needs to be tended, a fragile collection of fallible people that has somehow hung together and grown ridiculously for 2000 years and that God is constantly shaping into a community that can demonstrate His love to people, and bring glory to Jesus and healing to a broken world. I believe that a local church is not primarily an organisation for gathering people, but rather a gathering of people who have seen Jesus and need to share what they are discovering. This journey towards Jesus leads us towards one another, and then overflows back out into our communities. We need lots of different kinds of churches because our communities are diverse, and although there is a lot of important teaching in the Bible about what the church should be, we’re given a lot of freedom too. So for quite a few years before The Point began I did have a sense that I would be involved in something like it - not necessarily a picture of any particular structure, but wanting to be part of that dynamic of God creating something new. 

-       Looking back now, how do you feel about all that’s happened with The Point – and seeing the church grow from being a few adults in a front room, to the place we’re at now?

I don’t know a whole lot about gardening, but I’m trying to grow a few herbs indoors, and they are not looking good ... I forget to water them, or put them in the wrong place so that they wilt. But in South Africa, during the summer, it was completely different. It was all we could do to keep a clear path to the door. The rain fell, the sun shone, and the garden did what it was supposed to – it grew. I used to mow the lawn, and every week it would just be this mass of grass again. That is pretty much it. God does the growing. We try to landscape a little. We’ve tried to make sure that we keep our attention on the basics, and then to let the structure take shape to address needs as they’ve arisen. So we started off with a few families with young children, and tried to do something that valued and included the children, and God brought us more families with children. For a long while there were not many teens, but we had a few “seeds” which, at a certain point started to grow, and we then added structures to support that life. We had some great advice at the start from some wise friends who said “when you think you’re going slowly, go slower”. It hasn’t always felt like we were going slowly, but we tried not to set any new structure in place until there was an obvious need and a hunger for something, not just because we were used to church looking a certain way. So in the last while we’ve started the teaching venue, “Venue 2”, and the new worship gathering, “Devotion”. It wasn’t that we just suddenly realized we’d forgotten something - worship and the Word have been in our DNA from the start - but the structure follows the life, and that life had been finding expression less obviously in other places in our community before that. So I’m really excited to see what has happened in the past three years. It feels like a great start, and that God is beginning to grow us in some new areas. It feels like a new season, and we know that it is only God who makes all things new.

-       As a member of the leadership team, if you were to commend the church to someone now, what qualities of The Point would you want to highlight?

I like what I heard Rich Nathan say about the church he leads in Columbus, Ohio, and want to adopt it for us too. We don’t want to be known just as “the kids church” or “the worship church” or “the social action church” or the “evangelism church” or even “the family Bible church” although all of those are good things to be. We want to be a church that lives out the whole gospel, a church that worships and prays and serves all the parts of our community that we are able to reach, locally and globally, a church that wants to know God’s heart. I think that a few simple things lead us in this direction, and I see them present in our leadership, and in our DNA as a church: a desire to worship the Father, through Jesus, and be led in all we do by the Holy Spirit. That is the only thing that really seems worth commending. We deeply desire to reflect the heart of God. If you’re someone looking in and you see even a little of that, and it stirs something in you, then we’d love you to join us and add your life to our pursuit.

-       You were keen right from the beginning to make sure ‘a heart for the poor’ was always on the agendas at The Point. Are you encouraged to see that taking place?

Yes. At the start of our life there were many things that we thought might not find full expression in The Point immediately, but that we knew needed to be present at the start if they were to be part of our DNA as we grew. For example, we wanted to be rooted in prayer, worshipping together, and studying the Bible, which leads us right to having a heart for the poor. One in every sixteen verses in the New Testament deals with poverty - one in every ten verses if we consider only the Gospels. So it’s very clear that poverty is an issue Jesus cares very much about - something which is very much on God’s heart. We felt it was important to consider the poor wherever they are to be found, whether the streets of Brighton, the slums of Mumbai or the townships of Cape Town. We had a bit of a kick-start in this area through a very early connection with Off The Fence in Brighton. They serve people who are living on the streets as well as others who are at risk in various ways. Consistently from then there have been teams from The Point who volunteer weekly to help the homeless in practical ways. Also there have been a number of people from the church who have been able to go to Africa, India and elsewhere to help and to learn from people who live in very poverty-ridden conditions. It is so important that as a church we don’t become all about “just us and God, here and now”, so I’m excited about these bridges. I am sure we’ll be more stretched in this area in the future, but it seems like the seed is well rooted, and growing healthily.

-       Lastly, you’ve just got back from a trip to Asia with Matt Redman, and have been  leading worship out there in Seoul, Hong Kong, Manila and Tokyo. How did the trip go? Is it exciting to get a little of what God is doing around the globe?

It’s a really special thing to be able to meet and learn from Christians in different cultures, to have our sense of “normal” re-calibrated and to be reminded that God’s home language is not English! Often we’re not in one place for very long, but I love that sense of being able to walk into a place where perhaps we don’t even understand the language, and yet we can recognize that God is not only present but has been there long before us. And that He knows each of these people and this church as well as He knows us. God is at work everywhere, whether we know it or not, and sometimes we are invited to share in that work, which is an amazing privilege. 

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