Episode Details

It’s an ad that Aussies of my generation grew up with. Jack Thompson, in his ruggedly good-looking larrikin phase, says to the barman, “Claytons thanks, Brian”.

A dumbfounded onlooker responds, “On the wagon, Jack?”

“Nah” drawls Jack. “When I don’t feel like alcohol, I have Claytons.”

(Voice-over): “Claytons: the drink you have when you’re not having a drink”.

And so an expression entered Australian vernacular. When you can’t have the real thing, but you have to make do with a less than adequate substitute, it’s a Claytons. This is often derogatory, of course (in typical Aussie fashion). You really don’t want to end up with a Claytons car or work for a Claytons boss or (worst of all) be described as a Claytons husband.

But it doesn’t have to be negative. Sometimes, because of the situation you find yourself in, you just have to say, “I’ll have Claytons, thanks”.

I think that’s where many of us are at with church, in this surreal coronavirus moment.

We’re genuinely thankful for the technology that allows us to connect with our church communities online in the various kinds of simulated Sunday things that many churches are doing. And yet we also can’t help feeling the Claytons nature of it all—in the lack of physical presence with one another, the diminished communicative power of the preaching, the absence of communal singing and the Lord’s Supper, and so much more.

We miss the real thing, but we’re grateful in the meantime for the ‘church you have when you’re not having church’.

I think both of these impulses are healthy—the sadness at no longer having the real thing, and the gratitude for the Claytons substitute. In fact, I think embracing both of these attitudes will be important over the coming difficult months.

On one hand, the benefits of gratitude are obvious, and I won’t dwell too long on them. Thanksgiving in all circumstances is one of the basic characteristics of the redeemed life. And now, in these particularly difficult circumstances, there is much that we should thank God for—for the opportunities some of us have to spend more time with our families; for the undoubted gospel opportunities that are opening up as we interact with friends and neighbours whose secure worlds have been rattled; and for our pastors, who are all working long hours under stress, scrambling to minister to the flock when most of their normal tools for doing so have been suddenly withdrawn. Let’s be thankful and positive about the extraordinary technology that is allowing us to stay in touch online, to hear each other’s voices and to see each other’s faces, even if in a mirror darkly (when the webcam is positioned facing the window).

On the other hand, it will also do us good to openly embrace the fact that what we’re doing online is not the real thing—that it’s Claytons church—for at least two reasons.

Firstly, I think it’s spiritually healthy for us grieve the loss of our local church gatherings. It’s good to miss meeting together as a congregation, to long for its return, and to realise (perhaps for the first time for some of us) just how precious, unique and important the weekly gathering of a local congregation is. I wonder if this will be a Hebrews 12 moment for us, in which God disciplines us as his children to appreciate afresh something that we frequently take for granted. (And I don’t think we want to convey the opposite theological lesson over the next several months—namely, that church-without-actually-gathering is still pretty much church, so long as you catch up with an online sermon and sing along with some Christian music in your lounge room.)

Secondly, if we embrace the Claytons nature of what we’re doing online on Sundays, it may actually help us do a better job. I don’t just mean that it will motivate us to lean harder on the ‘one-another’ aspect of ministry during the week (as I

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