Murder outside church points to fresh hope for London community

A fatal stabbing took place just outside a north London church only days before I spoke there about Pentecost last Saturday.

The young man’s family had left a floral tribute beside the pavement and were being comforted by passers-by as we came out of church. Barış Küçük had been taken to hospital after an attack in the early hours of 1 June, but had simply lost too much blood. A man has been charged with his murder.

As in the Days of Noah

The harrowing scene was a stark reminder of the suffering Jesus went through in order to bring us life. And our prayer was that life and peace would emerge from the ashes of this terrible tragedy, the latest in a string of such incidents across the capital where knife crime has reached epidemic proportions.

Political activists were quick to blame cuts to policing, but this is a shallow analysis of the situation. We are living in times of violence compared to the days of Noah, which Jesus indicated would be a sign of coming judgment and of his imminent return (Luke 17:26-30).

There are all kinds of reasons for the murderous mayhem we are witnessing, but chief among them is a turning away from God’s laws, which successive governments have encouraged.

Is it surprising that knives are used freely on the streets when doctors and nurses, charged with our care, are engaged in the legal butchering of unborn babies every single day! We are reaping what we have sown. We have also too often allowed the guilty to go free, with murderers serving ridiculously short sentences before returning to our communities to wreak further havoc.

There are all kinds of reasons for the murderous mayhem we are witnessing, but chief among them is a turning away from God’s laws.

Scene of Reconciliation

This latest outrage occurred just a ten-minute walk from the former Haringey Stadium¹ which, in 1954, witnessed the only significant post-war turnaround in the fortunes of the UK Church. Tens of thousands had their lives transformed by the message of American evangelist Billy Graham, including a young Jewish lady, Helen McIntosh, who later guided me through my early Christian discipleship.

Crowds gather for a vigil to mark the untimely death of Barış Küçük, the latest victim of London's knife crime epidemic. Photo: Charles Mugenyi.It was appropriate too, therefore, that the church I visited stands on the edge of Stamford Hill, home to many Jewish people, some of whom came to hear my talk on Shavuot (Pentecost), a thoroughly Jewish feast which empowered the first disciples of Jesus to ‘turn the world upside down’ (Acts 17:6) with God’s commandments written on their hearts and not just on tablets of stone (2 Cor 3:3).

Pentecost is still available to turn this tense and troubled community around, and I pray that my friends at the church will help to bring the resurrection life of Jesus to the streets of Tottenham and Haringey.

It would certainly be the perfect place to witness the reconciliation between Jew and Gentile the Apostle Paul talks about in his letter to the Ephesians (2:14).

In writing to the Romans, he says both groups are steeped in sin and, in quoting the Old Testament, writes: “There is no-one righteous…no-one who seeks God…their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and misery mark their ways, and the way of peace they do not know. There is no fear of God before their eyes” (Rom 3:9-18).

A return of the fear of God that people felt at those Billy Graham meetings would bring new hope; I am told they used to arrive on train platforms singing hymns. So what is the remedy? How can such reverential fear be restored to communities that have forsaken God?

75 years ago a vicious enemy threatened our freedoms, but while our soldiers fought on the beaches of Normandy, much of the country fought on their knees as they responded to the King’s call to prayer. We must turn to God once more.

How can a reverential fear of God be restored to communities that have forsaken him?

True Freedom, New Life

Jesus, God’s Son, lived a perfect life on earth and was unjustly crucified. He became a substitute for us – for we have all sinned – and by trusting in his sacrificial blood, we are raised to new life and hope (Rom 3:23f).

Just as 33-year-old Barış bled to death through the cruel hands of his assailant, so Jesus bled, for us – and he was exactly the same age! In doing so, Jesus became the ultimate Passover Lamb, fulfilling the picture of how the enslaved Jews were freed from captivity in Egypt by daubing a lamb’s blood on the doorposts of their homes (as a result of which the angel of death ‘passed over’ them while striking the first-born of the host country who had stubbornly refused to let them go).

Whether you are a Jew or a Gentile, freedom from sin and darkness comes by marking your heart, figuratively speaking, with the blood of Jesus – which shows that you are placing all your trust for escaping God’s judgment and inheriting new life in what Jesus has done for you.

It will surely open up the ‘Red Sea’ and lead you into the Promised Land of peace and purpose. Not just for this life, but forever more.

Perfect Peace

As well as Pentecost, I also led a session on Job who, in spite of terrible trials, refused to relinquish his integrity and trust in God. One dear woman in the audience confirmed the reality of Job’s experience in her own life. Tragically, she had lost three sons – all in their twenties – and yet, through her faith in Jesus, she had managed to maintain perfect peace through all her troubles!

The Prophet Isaiah wrote: “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on Thee: because he trusts in Thee” (Isa 26:3 KJV).

Notes

1 Now a shopping centre, accommodating the new religion.

Mental illness is becoming the go-to explanation in the press for the recent spate of terror attacks. But this approach is not without problems.

Have you noticed that media coverage of the recent terror attacks across Europe has been littered with references to the mental health of the perpetrators? Without necessarily denying links to Islamic extremism, reports also keenly stress the role of psychological instability.

To take a few recent examples, according to the BBC, Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, the man responsible for the Nice lorry attack, reportedly "had a history of violence and mental instability".¹ Omar Mateen, the 29-year old responsible for the Orlando nightclub attack in June, "was violent and mentally unstable".²

The Ansbach suicide bomber (27-year old Syrian refugee Mohammad Daleel) was reported as having previously received psychiatric care following two suicide attempts, and Adel Kermiche, who murdered French priest Jacques Hamel in the Rouen attack, had apparently received treatment for mental disorders as a teenager.³

London Stabbings

Most recently, this week's stabbing in London led the Met Police very quickly to point to "mental health issues" as a possible explanation, whilst repeatedly emphasising that terrorism is just one of many possible lines of enquiry and that so far there is "no evidence of radicalisation".⁴

Of course, not all recent attacks have been described in this manner. Nevertheless, a cross-media narrative is certainly emerging which holds 'mental health issues' as the go-to explanation for the recent spate of terror attacks in Europe. Only in the last few days have others begun to point out the problems with this approach.⁵

A cross-media narrative is emerging which holds 'mental health issues' as the go-to explanation for the recent spate of terror attacks in Europe.

Complex Concept – Not Catch-All Explanation

The highly complex relationship between mental health and violent behaviour is not well understood. Individuals driven to such terrible actions as we have witnessed in recent weeks must themselves be severely disturbed – mentally deluded, corrupted or oppressed. To deny the presence of psychological problems in this context could be dangerous.

For Christians, belief in the existence of a spiritual realm necessarily provokes questions about the influence of demonic spirits. But the secular press ignores such things and rushes to explain away what is going on purely by a catch-all reference to mental health problems, which though convenient, can be severely misleading.

Will Gore of The Independent has argued that "The media glosses over the specifics in favour of creating a kind of homogenised bogeyman figure: a religious fundamentalist afflicted by mental illness and immune to rationality".⁶ His argument is that the media's first response to any attack is to suspect jihadism, the second response is to expect mental health issues, and the third response is to conflate the two, oversimplifying and demonising them both.

This is visible in the term 'Islamopsychosis', which is gaining traction online, and also in yesterday's Daily Express, which claimed that ISIS might be deliberately targeting mentally unstable people to encourage them to carry out attacks.⁷

The complex relationship between mental health and violent behaviour is not well understood, but the secular press ignores such things.

Explanation or Distraction?

So, whilst our security services are working around the clock to try to understand the complex processes behind radicalisation, the general public are being sold a different and much simpler narrative – these attackers are just crazy religious people!

This sits neatly with the 'Islam is a religion of peace' doctrine; any Muslim who turns to terror is not practising a true form of their faith – they are simply mentally unstable. So the public is deceived and deluded about the incursion of jihad (radical Islam) into Europe. The secular humanist values of multi-faith 'tolerance' remain intact.

But if we ignore the links of attackers to radical Islam, we close down proper debate and divert attention away from the real reasons behind the attacks. We end up blaming mental health for the things we do not understand and dismissing anything beyond our comprehension or in discord with our own worldview.

Mark Brown of The Independent commented yesterday:

When such events break the reasoned quiet and order of our lives, we look for ways to make ourselves safe, ways to fit the shock of such attacks into our existing ways of thinking and understanding of the world. We want an explanation for what feels beyond comprehension...⁸

The 'mental health' narrative is fast becoming the pacifying response that somehow makes us feel more comfortable and in control of a threatening and unpredictable situation. But this leaves us deceived about the full truth and irrationally prejudiced about both Muslims and those suffering from mental health problems.

The 'mental health' narrative is fast becoming the pacifying response that somehow makes us feel more in control of a threatening situation.

Danger for Christians

The great danger of all this cover-up for Christians will be the next stage in the deception. As the secular media begin dismissing all terrorism as the action of crazy religious fundamentalists, this will only be a stepping stone to saying that all religious people are mentally deluded – especially those who can be labelled 'fundamentalist'. This is the final goal of our secular humanist society.

Paul warned about the coming of a great delusion in the last days. In the first chapter of Romans, he spoke of people suppressing the truth about God and creation, leading God to give them over to a depraved mind and them becoming filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed, depravity and violence.

When writing to the Thessalonians, in reference to the 'man of lawlessness' being let loose into the world, Paul said that people perish because they refuse to love the truth and so be saved. He said "For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness" (2 Thess 2:11).

As terrorism is increasingly dismissed as the action of crazy religious fundamentalists, it will then be easy to assert that all religious people are mentally deluded.

Shine Like Stars

Only a lost and broken world would try to explain away one terrifying problem it doesn't understand with another it understands even less – shifting fear from one base to another.

For Christians, it is important that we guard our hearts, so we do not allow ourselves to be drawn under the powerful, delusional influence of fear currently shrouding Europe. It is also important that we brace ourselves and learn the full truth about Islam – because we're not going to get it from the BBC.

In an increasingly panic-stricken time we are given the opportunity to shine like stars in the universe (Phil 2:15), holding out the beautiful gifts for which the entire world is searching: TRUTH, HOPE and PEACE. It is time for the Church to stop hiding its light under a bowl – the world needs it now.

References

1 Attack on Nice: Who was Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel? BBC News, 18 July 2016.

2 Orlando nightclub shooting: How the attack unfolded. BBC News, 15 June 2016.

3 Knife attack raises fears of Isis targeting people with mental health problems. The Express, 4 August 2016.

4 Russell Square stabbings: Man arrested on suspicion of murder. BBC News, 4 August 2016.

5 E.g. Brown, M. Mentally ill people are the collateral damage of news reports about the Russell Square stabbings. The Independent, 4 August 2016.

6 Gore, W. Mental illness has become a convenient scapegoat for terrorism – but the causes of terror are rarely so simple. The Independent, 25 July 2016.

7 See note 3.

8 See note 5.