Adrian Plass & Steve Bell on tour

An evening with Adrian Plass (right) is a little like playing dodgeball--just when you think you’ve escaped the ball, it whizzes up and smacks you right between the eyes.

Plass is also in demand as a speaker, and recently kicked off his Canadian tour Oct 12 in Toronto, raising laugh meters across the country until he closed Nov 5 in Abbotsford.  Sidelining him were his wife, Bridget, and Canadian musician Steve Bell.

Plass gets away with swiping at preciously held Christian (self)righteousness, by pillorying himself first.  He recounts speaking to a group of Australian Pentecostals, after which a woman comes to the podium and tells him: “You’re not very good looking are you.”  As Plass nurses his hurt pride and tries to think up a response, the woman adds: “If you were good looking, then I wouldn’t be able to think about what you were saying.”  He tells about being at a conference where everyone else shares their food, but he finds it impossible to surrender his coveted cheese and pickle.  “Christ said share your cheese and pickle, but it’s so hard to be obedient. ”

It’s these grace notes of human vulnerability that distinguish Plass. Laugh at yourself and the whole world laughs with you, and hopefully recognizes its own silly pride and deceit.  But the other lesson embedded in his stories is this: “Unless you know you’re loved, it’s very hard to be good.”  As he explained in an interview given to The Door magazine: Most of us know we’re a bunch of old rubbish…we don’t match up to what’s expected.  When you read that someone says, for instance, “I tried to move a paper clip by faith,” maybe you haven’t done exactly that, but you’ve probably done something like that.  And you felt a complete idiot.  And to read that someone else does it... just breathed a sigh of relief and thought, “It’s all right. I’m all right. I can be me! I don’t have to worry about being a wonderful, wonderful Christian.”  I think God says, “That’s good, let’s just

relax a bit; take it easy.”

In spite of ourselves, the Church is doing “amazing things.” He told of two women--one Christian, one Muslim--who hold a day school for children in the slums of Dhaka, Bangladesh, giving them clean clothes and baths so they can begin to feel good about themselves and loved, so they won’t choose a life of prostitution at the age of 10.  He tells the story of Lackson and Philemon, two African orphans who at 11 and 13 care for themselves, ending by saying “Jesus is indignant because children are not being taken care of.”  One senses it is also Plass who is indignant.

Which is why he’s thrown his weight behind World Vision, an organisation that acts on Christian charity without looking to make notches on their conversion belt.  “The fact that they don’t evangelize,” he says, “has a sort of purity about it, because they never ask for anything back. They don’t say, ‘Here’s some food; make a commitment’ or ‘Here’s some education; now you become Christians.’ That’s very Jesus-like, I think.”

It would be a huge oversight to review the evening without any mention of Steve Bell (left). Demonstrating his considerable musical talents with the opening song, “Starfields,” Bell proceeded to draw enough laughs of his own with nicely timed stories, sprinkled with more musical offerings.  He grew up an “extroverted Baptist, the worst kind to be,” and was raised on quartets and hymns in his church-going family.  Then he discovered Bruce Cockburn, and realized what North American Christianity was missing.  “We have censored the lament songs, and we need to hear them.  Celebration is great, and there’s a time for joy but there’s also loss, confusion, and we can take all to God.  It’s not friendship if we can’t share all with him.”