Matthew 9: Jesus has not come to call the righteous but sinners
Tom: 'I didn't have any formal education, I couldn't even spell GCSE... I just wanted to make a difference.'
9:11 'why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?' ie why does he spend time with people who are not important?
- story of mixing at a politicians house/party and realising 'we're just token chavs.'
In the UK, 98% of the church could be described as middle class.
How do we reach men, working class men in particular?
Jesus was a builder, he was a normal fella and he trusted people like him with the gospel message. He didn't go to the politicians or the kings, the shakers and movers.
Give men, man sized challenges to go for. Don't talk about things that they think they can go for or achieve in their own energy.
As it stands in the UK 2.4 million women cannot marry a Christian man. They have to decide if they're going to stay single and childless or marry a non-Christian man.
Generally speaking, working class people are overlooked for leadership in the church. As a working class man he said that when he hears someone speak or talks posher than him, that they know more than he does, just because he's working class. At our peril we overlook people from working class backgrounds.
In 2009 St Helen's Bishsopsgate put on a conference entitled reaching the unreached, targeted specifically at reaching working class people.
Working class people are brutally honest with the way they speak, they haven't got a middle class filter of politeness in place. The middle class will call them rude but the working class think the middle class are two-faced and rude.
God loves common people so much that when he sent his Son to the world he became an apprentice labourer.
There is more of a receptivity to the supernatural among the working class.
Becoming a Christian isn't like joining the library, where you just get a card and that's that. Don't look at where people are at now, look at the direction of travel. What's the direction of travel?
