‘People often say to me, ‘J.John, what do you do?’
It’s difficult to know what to say. Because if I say to you that I’m a Reverend, which I am, that conjures up certain images in people’s minds as to what I might be. I like to be a bit creative in telling people what I do.
I sat next to this lady on an aeroplane at Heathrow airport and I said, ‘Hello’, and she said, ‘Hello’. Then I said to her, ‘Where are you going?’ and she said, ‘I’m going to Singapore’. And she said to me, ‘Where are you going?’ and I said, ‘I’m going to Australia’.
I said, ‘What do you do?’ and she told me; then she said to me, ‘What do you do?’ and I said, ‘Well….’
‘… I work for a global enterprise.’
She said, ‘Do you?’
I said, ‘Yes I do.’ I said, ‘We’ve got outlets in nearly every country of the world.’
She said, ‘Have you?’
I said, ‘Yes we have.’ I said, ‘We’ve got hospitals and hospices and homeless shelters,’ I said, ‘We do marriage work, we’ve got orphanages, we’ve got feeding programmes, educational programmes.’ I said, ‘We do all sorts of justice and reconciliation things’. I said, ‘Basically, we look after people from birth to death, and we deal in the area of behavioural alteration.’
She went, ‘Wow!’ And it was so loud, her ‘Wow!’, loads of people turned round and looked at us.
She said, ‘What’s it called?’
I said, ‘It’s called the church … have you not heard of it?’
And that’s it, really, isn’t it – if we are a follower of Jesus then we are part of a global enterprise. But not only is it global, it’s intergalactic, because it includes everyone that’s gone before us.’
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