My main church in my new appointment was in the midst of a building refurbishment when I arrived. I have just written the following for our February newsletter, Topic. I am seeking to address in brief form the problem of becoming building-centric.

 

Dear Friends

 

It was an unexpected early Christmas present. There we were, holding our communion service on Christmas Eve in the refurbished worship area. I had not expected to be in there until Christmas Day. So much hard work by church members, friends and contractors, and there we were. Phew!

 

OK, so there are some furnishings still to come and a bit more fundraising to do, but it’s tempting to breathe a huge sigh of relief that the project has basically been concluded.

 

You’ll notice I used the word ‘tempting’. That was a deliberate choice of word. We would fall into temptation if we think the project has finished. It would be the same error that an engaged couple would make if they planned only for their wedding day and not for their marriage. We have not reached the end, only the end of the beginning.

 

As David Hodgkinson rightly reminds us elsewhere in this issue of Topic, our purposes were not only to have premises fit for the twenty-first century; they were also to be for the sake of fulfilling ‘Our Calling’ in Broomfield.

 

In other words, if we think the refurbishment has been for ourselves (rather like a redecoration of our own homes) we are off target. Archbishop William Temple once said that the church was the only organisation that existed for the benefit of those who did not belong to it. And Emil Brunner wrote, “The church exists by mission as fire exists by burning.”

 

So our focus has to shift to mission: to sharing Jesus Christ in word and deed. Our much-improved premises will be a resource for that, and they will also be a base from which we go out into the community.

 

Exactly how? I have to be honest and say I don’t know. And that’s good. Because it means that our call now is a call to prayer. We don’t know, but Someone does.

 

And it is not the only sign that we are being called to prayer. Those who came to the open Church Council meeting about children’s ministry in December heard calls for a new dependence upon prayer.

 

Which makes it a twin focus, then: mission and prayer. And the two go together.

 

One of my Christmas presents was the book ‘Red Moon Rising’, the story of the 24-7 Prayer Movement. The leaders of 24-7 practise this twin focus: they call it intimacy and involvement. Intimacy with God (prayer) and involvement with his world (mission).

 

Who will answer the call? Will we? Will you? Will I?

Last night I was preparing my order of service for this Sunday’s Covenant Service. At the end I put down ‘Blessing, Dismissal’. It’s what I’ve written for years. This morning it doesn’t look too good in black and white. ‘Blessing’ – I have no problem with that. It’s that word ‘dismissal’. It makes it sound like church is over for another week, and that’s where I think I’ve slipped into heresy.

 

The trouble is, that is how we have conceived of church for far too long. It’s a certain wooden take on the Greek word that the New Testament translates as ‘church’, ekklesia. Ekklesia was the word used for the assembly. So the notion goes that church exists when we assemble together.

 

But I can’t see church that way any more. It has to be more. More literally ekklesia refers to those who have been ‘called out’ – it denotes the holy calling of God’s people. This calling doesn’t just exist for an hour or two on Sunday morning. It exists all the time. I rather like the notion of the Australian church leader James Thwaites in his book The Church Beyond The Congregation that Scripture has in view both the ‘church gathered’ and the ‘church dispersed’. When I say, ‘Go in peace to love and serve the Lord’ and the congregation replies, ‘In the name of Christ. Amen’, I am not dismissing church, I am commissioning church.

 

In the early nineties one of my ecumenical colleagues was a URC minister called Jeanne Ennals. I once took a service at ‘her’ church. She gave me a draft order of service. I remember she never called it the ‘dismissal’: It was a ‘word of mission’.

 

The challenge comes, then, in so reorientating our thinking as church leaders and the congregations we service to embrace church dispersed as well as church gathered, to move from dismissal to commission and mission. This little episode has been an uncomfortable reminder of how far my practice has to catch up with my theory.