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![[Image showing part of an application form:
'PERSONAL DETAILS (Include hobbies or other interests):
Church?']](application_form.jpg)
The above question is something I was faced with answering a few days ago. I was filling one of those massive application forms for a big, grown-up job, and the space for your personal details bit was still a yawning gap, and so I looked over the guidance notes, and it said, “include hobbies and other interests”. Having reeled off a few standard answers (beer, rugby, more beer) and either included or missed them out; then I thought, “Should I include all the stuff I’ve been doing with MethAng (Christian Focus’ predecessor) and with church?” Then this thought was overtaken in my mental processes by the question I began this article with.
Had this been merely a mental sidetrack to get out of filling endless forms, I doubt this would be worthy of a Christis article. However, this has set in motion a train of random thoughts over the past days, and this, coupled with the Beanbag’s pleading for articles, led me to commit a few of these thoughts to paper.
The main problem I had with this chain of thought was: Is faith a hobby, or not? I had trouble with this, as my faith is something I am (or at times am not), not something I do. According to my housemate Phil’s dictionary, a hobby is “[a] thing done often for pleasure in one’s spare time”, which again did not square with some thing that, to a greater or lesser degree, influences everything I do. In theory at least, everything I do should be influenced by the teaching and example of Jesus, not something to squeeze in when I have a few moments. (Obviously, it’s hard to do trigonometry in a particularly Christian way, but I hope you take the general point.) Furthermore not all bits of Christianity are enjoyable. Helping in a homeless shelter on Christmas Day, when you really want to be tucking it to your third portion of trifle is not ‘enjoyable’ as such. Rewarding, yes, enjoyable, not really. Put against this was the feeling that, if my faith were that important to me, then to omit it would be being dishonest.
Then, after much pondering I came across that which I had been struggling for, namely a definition of Christianity, to use in conjunction with the meaning of hobby. However, I needed one that rang true to my experience of faith, one which I could actually use, rather than just look at, and hence deal with a real thing, not some set of abstract concepts. It comes from Kenneth Kirk’s Vision of God, and reads thus: “Christianity … has come into the world with a double purpose, to offer men the vision of God, and to call them to the pursuit of that vision.” There are obviously problems with this, as it has no mention of any interaction with God and only an implicit sense of salvation, but I feel that the central idea behind it is both true and very useful — faith is about seeing the kingdom, and working towards making it a reality.
So perhaps the answer to the question that I started with and have referred to at various points (mainly to stop me waffling) is: it depends what you want to do with your faith. Is it something that you use to give yourself a nice feeling of being close to God and to reassure yourself that you’ll be ‘saved’ at The Big End? Or is it something you use as a means to look at the world and to change it, whether through prayer, or more direct means, working towards making the Kingdom that we have been promised?
Let us know your opinions on whether Christianity is a hobby. Send letters to editor@christis.org.uk
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Last modified: 25th November 2005