I went to the lectures given by Alister McGrath at St Paul’s Anglican church in Paget over the weekend. He was up on top of a stage and behind a lectern in the church’s fellowship hall. He had a cold, and he had several bottles of water to help him out, but he did say that at times it felt like he was losing his voice. I’m sure he felt uncomfortable, and the room was rather warm, but he sounded just fine to me. He sounded like the erudite scholar that he is — a thinking Christian.

An introduction to a Wikipedia article about him says that “Alister Edgar McGrath (born 23 January 1953) is a British Irish theologian, priest, intellectual historian and Christian apologist, currently Professor of Theology, Ministry, and Education at Kings College London and Head of the Centre for Theology, Religion and Culture. He was previously Professor of Historical Theology at the University of Oxford, and was principal of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, until 2005. He has also taught at Cambridge University and is a Teaching Fellow at Regent College. McGrath holds two doctorates from the University of Oxford, a DPhil in Molecular Biophysics and a Doctor of Divinity in Theology. He is an Anglican and is ordained within the Church of England. McGrath is noted for his work in historical theology, systematic theology, and the relationship between science and religion, as well as his writings on apologetics. He is also known for his opposition to New Atheism and anti-religionism and his advocacy of critical realism. Among his best-known books are The Twilight of Atheism, The Dawkins Delusion, Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life, and A Scientific Theology. He is also the author of a number of popular textbooks on theology.”

I wanted to listen to him, because I have read his material for some time. When I was on the multiple staff of a large church in Sacramento, California I engaged in a brief correspondence with him. I’ve read his material on science and Christianity, as that goes back quite a ways, and being a psychologist (the science of psychology), I was interested in his work.

It is not that I heard anything earth shatteringly new. It is that I heard the man. I perceived the person. He is careful and deliberate in his word choice, and he is so precise that I found myself wondering if he had given this lecture ten million times or he has developed the style from years of lecturing at world class universities. Then again, sometimes God makes a person such as this; it’s a matter of gifting.

I am not like that. Sometimes I think I am so “laid back” as to be sloppy. Let’s face it, maybe I am untidy. I do not attempt to attend to all the various details of in my life. For instance, recently I have been discussing the potential teaching and training programme for a major gestalt institute in a major city, and I realised that in contrast with someone who preferred taking small steps and attending to the details encountered one bit at a time, I preferred a larger vision and an existential faith that allowed me to, in essence, reach for the stars. You cannot reach for the stars and also wipe down the countertops at the same time. Either you put your eyeballs on all the little tasks that need to be taken care of or you look up and out into the vastness of what might still yet be.

Big vision people are usually not tidy people, because they are not detail oriented. They realise that the details need to be accomplished, but they believe they will be, and they keep their eyes on matters they believe are more important.

This is what happened in the early church. There came a time at which the church was growing rapidly, adding new people, and the details of attending to the tables and taking care of feeding the widows, etc, were beginning to crowd out the ministry of preaching the gospel. So, the apostles, all commissioned by Jesus to attend to the big vision, decided to create another level of leadership in the young church. They called the big vision people elders, and they called the detail people deacons. The deacons were commissioned to take care of the tables, feed the widows, and so forth. In today’s world, these people would take care of the church grounds, take up the collection, help bus folks to the church, and so forth. The elders maintained their big vision perspective. They devoted themselves to the preaching and teaching of what had been given to them by Jesus, and because of that, we have something today called The New Testament. The New Testament is a compilation of what big vision people in the early church were doing and saying.

Now, the trick is not to say we should all be big vision people or that we should all be detail-oriented. If someone gave me a detail responsibility, I would spend more energy trying to do that than if someone offered me a big vision opportunity. That is the way it works, and the trick is to be free enough to know oneself and to operate within an area of strength. This, by the way is also a recognised principle in strengths-based clinical work and positive psychology. People do best when they are set free to work within an area of strength and out of the base of who they actually are as persons. Whether we are talking at home, at work, at school, or in the church, it does not make sense to insist that everyone be the same and work in the same ways toward the same goals.

When Alister McGrath started off in his university studies he was an atheist trying to become a chemist. Compared to where he has ended up, that was a small vision characterised by small thinking. The freedom he found in Christ opened up new vistas and enlarged his vision. Today he is an apologist for Christ in the spirit of CS Lewis. And how apt that he would have produced a new biography of THAT visionary thinker.