Moderator's Address
A framework for an
encountering Church
[A summary of the address delivered by the Moderator on Saturday July
2nd. The full text can be found here.]
‘The Catch the Vision process is a
key moment in our life. It is a time to face words of judgement as well as
feed upon words of grace; an opportunity to become open to what God has for
us to do’.
So said incoming Moderator the Revd
Dr David Peel as he introduced the 2005 Moderator's Address to General
Assembly. Our task, he said, was to discern what was needed to become a
church whose local congregations make a difference to the lives of people,
societies and even the world and who encounter that world with a distinctive
message and way of life.
In seeking renewal, David Peel told
Assembly, we must avoid being driven either by a sense of failure over our
decline in recent years nor by an unthinking adaptation to the agenda of a
changed society. We had lost much of the sense of respect for the Church as
an institution and could no longer rely on the automatic acceptance of the
central placed of Christian faith. But people were still searching for
personal fulfilment in a 'spiritual' realm that they clearly believe lies
beyond all the seemingly unfulfilled hopes of their 'material' world. If
people saw in us new ways of being c+hurch which are both faithful to Jesus
and yet relevant to our age their interest would be rekindled. A key to the
future would be whether we could re-learn ‘the art and normality of swimming
against the tide’.
Open and inviting
What was needed was an ‘encountering
church’, one which discovered patterns of obedience which spoke to others.
It would be a church which was open to others, inviting them to participate
not in a closed group but in a fellowship which would empower and equip
young and old to live Christ-like lives in their ordinary encounters at
home, work and play.
The programme of such a church could
not be determined at the level of General Assembly, rather it must be
hammered out at the local level, adapted to local needs. Mission after the
example of Christ needed to be more 'bottom up' than 'top down', otherwise
it easily became manipulative and insensitive. Everything rested on the
ability of locally gathered saints to be signs and sacraments of God's
acceptance and generosity in their gloriously ordinary lives and
communities. The task of the national church was to provide a framework for
local mission and to suggest key areas which most needed our renewed
attention.
A new framework
The framework for the life and
witness of the local church, David Peel suggested, would need to contain at
least six strands.
Firstly it would need to be based on
an appropriate view of God. We needed to recapture the art of finding the
Transcendent within our daily activities, locating God's ways within the
midst of our worldly ways. But the God we found would not be a Christian
tribal deity, trimmed down to fit our narrow mentality. Rather it would be
the God of excitement, the One who not only said 'Yes' but sometimes 'No' to
our ideas and ways, the One who challenged us to do new things in obedience,
and the One who was forever surprising us with fresh possibilities.
Secondly we needed to rediscover a
positive attitude to chance. God had created an evolving cosmos within which
God's purposes were fleshed out. God might be unchanging but the way in
which God’s that love is expressed at different times and places changes to
be appropriate to those times and places. Change need not imply decay, it
could also involve improvement, new levels of complexity and greater value.
To believe that yesterday was better than today was as simplistic as
believing that the future will necessarily be better than the present. The
very least God's subjects ought to do was to engage positively with change,
conceiving fresh futures grounded in the belief that the world can be made a
better place. The future was bright because it belonged to God.
Thirdly we needed to distinguish
between ‘the living voice of tradition’ and ‘the dead hand of
traditionalism’. We witnessed to our faith with the saints; therefore we did
not have to make everything up as we go along. But it was never easy to
separate the ‘tradition’ of the saints from the 'traditionalist' practices
to which it has sometimes become wedded. The way some of our members
defended their traditionalism to the death was one of the more worrying
aspects of our life. But of equal concern was the reluctance within our
churches to plumb the depths of our ‘living tradition’ – a lack of urgency
about engaging with the Bible and with the major themes of Christian
theology.
Fourthly, we needed to find the
right balance between valuing right of individuals to autonomy and freedom
and our understanding that we become truly ourselves in relation to others.
In Christian teaching, the path to becoming fully human was marked out by
the twin demands of entering into loving relationships with not only God but
also all those who place a claim upon our lives as neighbours. This was a
far cry from those forms of the contemporary quest for human autonomy which
only give rise to an interest in the self and often precious little
attention to the existence, let alone the needs, of others. As a former
Bishop of Durham had said : 'I cannot be fully me until you are fully you.’
We needed to cultivate ways of sharing and living faith with others that
opened up the possibilities of learning faith from them – both inside and
outside the Christian community.
Fifthly, we needed a realistic view
of the Church. It was important to remember that the Church was not the end
in itself but a means to an end. Churches rise up and they pass away, as is
the case with all temporal entities. We needed to bear that in mind as we
humbly set about the task of responding to the challenge of re-constituting
ourselves afresh in ways appropriate to the gospel and relevant to our age.
We were now at the end of an ecclesiastical era, a period in which
the institutional presence of the church at the
heart of local communities had been assured, with young and old being
attracted into church life through any number of activities. That way of
being church was no longer relevant to many of today's spiritual searchers.
To reach them we must recognize that today people wanted ‘religion’ or
‘spirituality’, but they had little time for all the institutional trappings
within which we currently present it. We came from a ‘temple’ culture when
what we now perhaps needed is a ‘tent’ tradition which would bring us
mobility and flexibility in a rapidly changing world: taking the church to
where people now were rather than expecting them to come to us, expressing
the gospel in response to people's current hopes and fears, and creating
worship which addressed today's concerns and issues.
Sixthly, when at its best the church
had interpreted its mission both ‘materially’ and ‘spiritually’, recognizing
that ‘abundant life’ referred to this present life as well as to an
existence beyond the present life. Christianity had affirmed the importance
of current social and political realities alongside the promise of the life
hereafter but many had been the time when we have torn apart what really
belongs together, with one wing of the church claiming that the gospel
centres upon people getting right with God while the other insists that the
gospel is all about Kingdom building in the here and now. In fact we needed
to be both 'evangelical' and 'liberal' if we were to present the gospel
fully. A holistic mission in contemporary society would attend not only to
proclaiming the way in which God in Jesus has accepted sinners and liberated
them to be open to the call placed upon their lives by others; it would also
find us, for example, passionately campaigning on environmental issues,
being committed to Making Poverty History and promoting peace-making
practices. Out of a genuine appreciation of what was involved in Christian
fellowship, we ought to rise above the practice of un-churching those whose
emphasis fell in a different direction to the one we find congenial and
affirming. We needed one another to display a full exhibition of the gospel.
An honest review
A church which intended to encounter
others with the gospel would need to operate with something like this
six-fold framework it wanted to connect with contemporary men and women and
be faithful to the agenda of Jesus. What was needed was needed in every
local church was a radical commitment and honest attempt to review church
life in the kind of spirit which would be generated if serious attention
were given to this framework.
Particular attention might be given
to one specific early example of church life: 'They devoted themselves to
the apostles teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the
prayers'. The early Jerusalem church was recorded as paying particular
attention to teaching, fellowship and worship. That in turn became the
driving force behind its proclamation of the gospel to others. Nothing could
be more basic or vital: teaching - people becoming steeped in the doctrines
and traditions of the lifetime of Christianity; fellowship - people
experiencing the richness of a Spirit-filled community which is inclusive
and committed to the welfare of those for whom Christ died; worship - the
offering in words and song, reflection and silence, of all that is of our
best to God; and thus proclamation - both inside and outside the church
giving of an account of the hope that is within us.
There was not much future, David
Peel suggested, for churches with dispirited outlooks who were held captive
to traditionalist attitudes. Their useful life was over, unless they
re-discovered a new vision for a fresh age. But there were enough quality
people in our churches to lead the search within each local church for what
God has for it to do today. If we made teaching, fellowship and worship our
key areas for consideration and came at them on the basis of the kind of
framework suggested, we should be prepared for God to do exciting things
with us!
The full text of the address can be found
here |
