Moderator's Address Part IV
Part I - A Key Moment
Part II - Contemporary Mission
Part III - The Local Church
Part IV - A New Framework
Part V - Key Areas
A Framework for the Life and Witness of a Local
Church
Six interlocking themes to aid the missionary planning
of the local church.
I'm presenting this framework for wider discussion
within the Catch the Vision process in the conviction that before we get
immersed in all the structural and practical proposals starting to flow from
our review it will be prudent if we attend to primary issues concerning what
the church is called to become if we are to be faithful participants in
God's mission. My first theme fundamentally underpins all the others; there
is no significance in the order of priority of the rest.
1. An Appropriate View of God
The God on display in many churches is not the lively
God of the Christian tradition.
We need to recapture the art of finding the
Transcendent within our daily activities, locating God's ways within the
midst of our worldly ways, reading 'the signs of the times' to re-engage
with the One who always is doing new things.[2]
What we say and do as Christians should re-present to others not only God's
invitation to enjoy the divine generosity of being the chosen, accepted and
forgiven sons and daughters of God and but also God's challenge to take up
the responsibilities towards others that are placed upon us. The vision of
the kingdom God has set before us in the Christ event thus presents us with
the model God expects us to adopt in all our personal and corporate affairs.
Blaise Pascal once remarked that the God of Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob is not the God of the philosophers and scholars. Some
'philosophers and scholars', of course, have come closer to the biblical
picture of God than those Pascal had in mind, while the church has often
been at its most obscurantist when reacting to scientific and technological
developments. Be that as it may, adapting Pascal's claim a little, there is
a strong case for suggesting that God, the One who is with all beings and
things as Creator, became incarnate in the Redeemer and gives life to all
through the Spirit, is a far cry from the 'God' being exhibited in the life
and witness of many contemporary Christian churches. How easily we have
transformed the grandeur of God into the narrow-mindedness of a tribal
Deity. We have reduced a cosmic Deity to a Christian god – as if the mission
of God in Jesus concerned only Christians rather than the whole world. How
common it has also been for us to exchange the incarnate Deity who became
'down-to-earth' in Jesus for an altogether more distant God, who, aloof from
our everyday material world, conveniently never engages with either our
personal or political affairs. Our Nonconformist forebears would be turning
in their graves! Frightened by the vitality and diversity of God, we even
end up pretending that God creates everything the same in all the ways we
just happen to find comfortable. We trim 'God' down to fit our narrow
mentality when what we ought to be doing is respond to the excitement of
God, the One who not only says 'Yes' but sometimes 'No' to our ideas and
ways, the One
who challenges us to do new things in obedience, and
the One who is forever surprising us with fresh possibilities.
The second theme of my framework follows from this
need to display in our church life an altogether more lively understanding
of God, one which is based upon a renewed experience of God in the midst of
life:
2. A Positive Attitude to Change
'The times, they are a changing' - they always have.
Rejoice, for in the changes we find God!
God has created an evolving cosmos within which God's
purposes are fleshed out. The Deity is endlessly finding new ways in which
to relate to the world. God's love is unchanging, but the way in which that
love is expressed at different times and places is relative to what is
appropriate to those times and places. As Heraclitus is recorded as saying:
'Nothing is permanent but change', and, in certain ways, this insight
applies even to God. Nevertheless, there exists within the Western psyche a
long-standing prejudice against change. This goes right back to the Ancient
Greeks who viewed perfection in terms of what is static and supposedly
complete. This prejudice seeped into Christian piety, as the following lines
from a well-known hymn testify:
Swift to its close ebbs out life's little day; earth's
joys grow dim, its glories pass away; change and decay in all around I see;
0 Thou who changest not, abide with me.[3]
Note how Lyte links 'change' with 'decay', thereby
viewing 'change' totally negatively. Also observe how his understanding of
God is not centred upon God's infinite ability to respond appropriately to
evolving situations, and hence God's capacity in certain respects to change,
but simply upon God's changelessness in the eternal aspect of the divine
life.
Unlike the Greeks, however, we know that everything
which exists is in a state of flux and hence changing – whether we think of
the smallest building blocks of matter, persons, cultures or the whole
cosmos. In terms of what we know, the static is a mere abstraction from
reality, not perfection as the Greeks believed. Nor need change imply decay;
it can also involve improvement, new levels of complexity and greater value.
Process does not guarantee progress, but it sometimes does lead to it. To
believe that yesterday was better than today is as simplistic as believing
that the future will necessarily be better than the present. But the future
can only be made better if we accept change as normative rather than resist
it in principle.
Part of the genius of God lies in the way God works.
The Creator has produced an evolving universe which is largely
self-determining, yet through patient initiatives the divine Will is
exercised as the created order responds to divine prompting. The very least
God's subjects ought to do is to engage positively with change, conceiving
fresh futures grounded in the belief that the world can be made a better
place. There is much to be learned from the notion that to live is to
change, and to live well is to have changed often. It is striking how the
world's best minds undergo not only developments in their ideas but
sometimes have dramatic sea-changes of view. This is particularly true of
Christian theologians.
The future is bright – not because it's Orange but
because it belongs to God. And God, because God is God, can cope with
whatever the future brings! Only a positive attitude to change can provide
us with a hope for the future to underpin our commitment to the present.
When "change" is believed necessarily to involve "decay" we cannot have any
realistic hope this side of eternity; but when "change" is viewed more
positively in terms of the myriad of possibilities for new life that it
opens up we can possess hope in a future before as well as in Eternity. Our
grounds for saying this lies in a healthy view of history, one which feeds
upon the fact that, since God did not give up on folk in the past, we can be
confident that God will be with us 'through all the changing scenes of
life'. This takes us to our third theme in my framework:
3. A Critical Approach to Tradition Beware of
'traditionalism'; embrace 'tradition'
The Christian tradition contains a fair amount of
dross surrounding the vitally precious nuggets that give us continuity with
the great stream of witness which began with the earliest confessors of
Christ as Saviour and Lord. Our task is to remove the dross so that the
nuggets can once again shine in their full glory. My way of describing this
perennial task is to speak of discerning the difference between "the living
voice of tradition" and "the dead hand of traditionalism". We witness to our
faith with the saints; therefore we do not have to make everything up as we
go along. But it is never easy to separate the "tradition" of the saints
from the "traditionalist" practices to which it has sometimes become wedded.
I'm certain that Catch the Vision is essentially about
looking backwards in search of "living tradition"; but I'm equally clear
that it involves setting to one side a whole host of things that are now
surplus to our needs. Many of the so-called traditions of our congregations
are recent accretions to their church life when viewed from the perspective
of two thousand years of church history. They also can seem somewhat
parochial when placed in a wider ecumenical context. The way some of our
members defend their traditionalism to the death, though, is one of the more
worrying aspects of our life. But of equal concern is the reluctance within
our churches to plumb the depths of our "living tradition". There is a lack
of urgency about engaging with the Bible and with the major themes of
Christian theology. Fred Pratt Green has his finger on the pulse of a
healthy attitude to tradition when he reminds us that:
We need not now take refuge in tradition
like those prepared to make a final stand,
but use it as a springboard of decision,
to follow him whose kingdom is at hand.[4]
Tradition will only become "a springboard of decision"
when we receive it anew through renewed acquaintance with it. To further
that end we need theological leadership from our ministers and an ongoing
commitment from the church to invest in theological education across the
churches. Fundamental to our current task is re-appropriating faith for our
age.
4. A Relational View of Society
'The Word 'I' remains the shibboleth of humanity'.[5]
Ever since Margaret Thatcher announced that there is
no such thing as society, and thereby gave the Prime Ministerial blessing to
the culture of individualism, Christian commentators have come forward with
persuasive critiques of our supposedly 'me myself and I' world. The more
perceptive of them have noted the positive features of the society in which
we now live. They highlight the way in which increasing human autonomy has
made it possible for whole sections of humankind to experience once undreamt
of freedoms, for example, women becoming liberated from the shackles of male
domination and members of the two thirds world being set free from colonial
bondage. Being truly an individual is a phenomenon many only recently have
come near to acquiring, even though countless others have yet to experience
it. But, as the better critiques argue, true individuality can only be fully
attained in relationship with other individuals whose uniqueness in the
sight of God is valued and affirmed.
So, in Christian teaching, the path to becoming fully
human is 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.[6] This is 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.
I say "often" since I do not want to get into the bad
Christian habit of so emphasising what is wrong with the world that we fail
to acknowledge its more wholesome aspects. If the overwhelming public
response to the Boxing Day tsunami is anything to go by we might do well for
once orientating our presentation of the gospel towards what is best in
people rather than what is worst. Before we rabbit on about the evils of our
fragmented world we ought to note that the public generosity following the
tsunami was in fact, as The Observer stated, 'a mark of the connectedness of
the world in which we live, whose far reaches are more familiar to us than
to any other generation' .[7]
Increasingly, people are realising that, in a post
9/11 world, the most fundamental question facing humankind is that of global
solidarity and togetherness. Not only is it clearly absurd to claim there is
no such thing as society, it is profoundly dangerous to view the world in
such a way that fear or even hatred becomes the barrier to achieving the
degree of "connectedness" which alone can guarantee world peace. Central to
Christianity is the challenge to remove ourselves from the centre of our
worlds and instead put God and others central. But the ideology of
individualism also runs counter to the philosophy of the most significant
Jewish thinker of the twentieth century. Martin Buber recognised that living
in relationships with others is part of the very essence of our being fully
human: 'All actual life is encounter', he proclaimed, thereby underscoring
the view that the fully autonomous self is deficient.[8]
Part of Buber's complex thought is echoed in some
memorable words from a former Bishop of Durham: 'I cannot be fully me until
you are fully you, and that means that you must be you in such a way that it
enables me to be me; and similarly I must be me in such a way that it
enables you to be you'.[9] I find it
increasingly challenging to realise that not only my thinking but my whole
person is deficient and lacking unless I'm part of a fully reciprocal
relationship with others who are different to me. It is through "the other"
that I find myself. In relation with others I discover and develop; on my
own I can only stagnate. I need the other's perspective: the perspective of
women, children, blacks, gays and so on, since from my place in the world my
understanding is partial. So if I wish to further my grasp of reality I need
to learn from those who 'live' in different places and therefore perceive
different things. This requires what Gordon Kaufman calls 'free-flowing,
open, and unfettered conversation'.[10]
We need to cultivate ways of sharing and living faith with others that open
up the possibilities of learning faith from them – both inside and outside
the Christian community.
5. A Realistic Understanding of the Church
But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may
be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come
from us.[11]
I have a love-hate relationship with the church. It
has been my life in so many ways and helped shape who I am, but equally it
has provided me with many bad nightmares – so much so that what often has
kept me going has been the witness of the Seer of Patmos in the Book of
Revelation that in the Eternal City there will be no Temple, because at the
End there will be no need for religion.[12]
When church debate has been at its most quarrelsome, and our faithlessness
has been most apparent, I have found it important to remember that the
church is but the means to the End and not the End itself. We signify . . .
we express ... we anticipate, but this side of Eternity we never are the
Kingdom. Let us never forget that the earthly church is a temporal means to
an eternal End. Being temporal means that it is subject to all the forces of
change as well as the final reality of death. Churches rise up and they pass
away, as is the case with all temporal entities. We need to bear this 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.
The church is an all too human institution which is
always in need of critical examination and reconstruction as it attempts to
remain faithful to the Mystery it seeks to exhibit. In certain periods, it
has expressed itself through solid, confident statements: magnificent
buildings and articulate statements of faith. At other points in history,
though, it has taken on an altogether more humble disposition, being more a
pilgrim people than an institutional presence. We are now at the end of an
ecclesiastical era, a period in which the institutional presence of the
church at the heart of local communities was assured, with young and old
being attracted into church life through any number of activities. That way
of being church, with which we have become familiar, and due to which most
of us are here at this Assembly, is no longer relevant to many of today's
spiritual searchers. Just as our forebears found ways of being church which
enabled the folk of their time to respond to the gospel, so we are called to
a comparable task.
This will inevitably mean recognizing that today
'people want to "live" experientially rather than "die" institutionally'.[13]
They want "religion" or "spirituality", but they have little time for all
the institutional trappings within which we currently present it. Sometimes,
we fail to meet their needs because often we lack "imagination";[14]
at other times, we simply refuse to adopt strategies of presenting the
gospel which do not fit our styles or temperaments. 'Over my dead body', we
hear it said. Well, given the age of most of our congregations we will not
have to wait long!
It will take a greater awareness of the temporal
nature of the church for us to become open to whatever radical changes are
now being called from our faithfulness. Many of our churches reflect the
success and confidence of Nonconformity during the Victorian and Edwardian
eras. We come from a "temple" culture when what we now perhaps need is a
"tent" tradition which will bring us mobility and flexibility in a rapidly
changing world: taking the church to where people now are rather than
expecting them to come to us, expressing the gospel in response to people's
current hopes and fears, and creating worship which addresses today's
concerns and issues.
6. A Commitment to Life.
'I came that they may have life, and have it
abundantly'.[15]
When at its best the church has interpreted its
mission both "materially" and "spiritually", recognizing that "abundant
life" refers to this present life as well as to an existence beyond the
present life. Christianity thereby has affirmed the importance of current
social and political realities alongside the promise of the life hereafter
in its understanding of what constitutes being fully human. But many has
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. We have sometimes given the impression that
the United Reformed Church is better at the Kingdom building part of the
gospel agenda. Fortunately, and increasingly, all but extreme "evangelicals"
and "liberals" are seeing truths in their one-time opponents' positions.
In a very significant way, we need to be both
"evangelical" and "liberal" if we are to present the gospel fully. John de
Gruchy argues correctly that 'we have to find a way whereby appreciation for
the mystery ... of faith is kept in creative tension with our concern for
social reality and concreteness'.[16]
Indeed, if the United Reformed church were fully self-critical we would
recognize a weakness on both sides: a lack of depth, the spirituality which
comes from patiently waiting for God's voice as we attend to scripture,
tradition and the words of one another, as well as a far from total
commitment to "the impossible possibility" (Reinhold Niebuhr) of creating
the Kingdom of God. Meanwhile, one clear feature of our age concerns the way
in which past opposites and hierarchies such as 'reason and revelation',
'faith and science', 'clerics and laity', etc, as well as once unbridgeable
divides of religious identity and commitment, are breaking down. Theorists
now talk in terms of 'new syntheses of "hybridity", "collage", "solidarity"
and so on'.[17] Things once held in total
opposition now are seen as mutually enriching polar opposites. The context
of theological debate is not what it used to be, a fact that destabilizes
those who hitherto have comfortably resided in either the "evangelical" and
"liberal" camps.
A holistic mission in contemporary society will 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 will 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 is involved in Christian
fellowship, we ought to rise above the practice of un-churching those whose
emphasis falls in a different direction to the one we find congenial and
affirming. We need one another to display a full exhibition of the gospel!
[2]
Isaiah 43:16-2U Matthew 16:1-4. (All
scripture references are taken from the New Revised Standard Version
1989, copyright of the Division of Christian Education of the
National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of
America.)
[3]
From Henry F. Lyte's hymn `Abide with me",
found in Rejoice and Sing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
number 336.
[4]
From Fred Pratt Green's hymn 'Sing, one and
all, a song of celebration", found in Rejoice and Sing. number 581
[5]
Martin Buber, I and Thou 3rd edn.
(Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1970) pp.115. 119.
[7]
The Observer, 2 January 2005
[8] Buber,
I and Thou, p.62.
[9] David
E. Jenkins, God, Jesus and Life in the Spirit (London: SCM Press,
1988), p.71.
[10]
Gordon D. Kaufman, In Face of Mystery: A
Constructive Theology (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard
University Press, 1993), p.66. See also L. Swidler. J.B. Cobb Jr..
P. F. Knitter and M. K. Hellwig, Death or Dialogue? From the Age of
Monologue to the Age of Dialogue (London: SCM Press and
Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1990), pp.56-77.
[12]
See Revelation 21:22
[13]
Julius Lipner. "Religion and Religious
Thinking in
the New Millennium" in P. L. Wickeri" J. K. Wickeri and D.M.A. Niles
eds., Plurality, Power and Mission: Intercontextual Theological
Explorations on the Role of Religion in the New Millennium (London:
The Council for World Mission, 2000), pp.88-89
[14]
Lipner, "Religion and Religious Thinking in
the New Millennium", p.89.
[16]
John W. de Gruchy, "Religion in the
Millennium: A Christian Perspective" in P. L. Wickeri, J. K. Wickeri
and D.M.A. Niles eds., Plurality, Power and Mission: Intercontextual
Theological Explorations on the Role of Religion in the New
Millennium, p.107
[17]
Lipner, "Religion and Religious Thinking in
the New Millennium", p.87.
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