Ignorance of the Christian faith plunges new depths – but perhaps I’ll laugh rather than cry:

BBC NEWS | Scotland | Highlands and Islands | Sisters lose second coming cover

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Methodist Conference begins today and runs for a week. One of the potentially most contentious debates will happen next Tuesday afternoon, the 27th, when the Pilgrimage Of Faith report on the question of civil partnerships and related matters will be considered. To the relief of my conscience last week’s Methodist Recorder reported that the recommendation will be that although anyone in the church may enter a civil partnership we should not agree to bless such relationships. We welcome all, but maintain ‘Resolution 4’ of the 1993 Derby Conference which affirmed our commitment to fidelity within marriage and celibacy outside. I had certainly feared the recommendation might be that ministers would be able to conduct such blessing and that those who had a conscience against it would have to refer enquirers to a colleague who would be happy to oblige. Of course we now have to see whether Conference will ratify the recommendation. I pray that it will. (The report can be downloaded in Word format here – it’s number 40 in the list.)

But those who hear me preach know I am loath for we Christians just to be known for what we are against. I would also like to write about something that has not worried me but excited me. Today’s Methodist Recorder publishes the text of the Pastoral Address being given today by the outgoing President of the Conference, Tom Stuckey. His inaugural address at the beginning of his year’s term was exciting and these closing words of his Presidential year are in my opinion no less exciting. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear to be online yet but keep an eye on the daily reports page – hopefully at least a summary will be up in the next twenty-four hours.

However the entire address bears reading and pondering. At heart Tom says God is calling us to ‘repent and believe’, and we have a short window – perhaps only five years – if we are to respond meaningfully. Firstly he talks about ‘Reading The Signs’ and secondly about ‘Reshaping The Church’.He concludes with ‘Necessary Changes’ and then a Postscript. What follows is a quick attempt to précis a dazzling address.

READING THE SIGNS
The destruction of the planet calls for a missionary response, since the covenant with Noah is ‘the foundational covenant of mission’.
The violent clash of cultures means ‘The Church has to jettison surplus baggage and recover essential Gospel values.’ There was violence before the Flood (Genesis 6:6); Christian and Islamic expansion could precipiate further violence; and in Alasdair MacIntyre’s words (in 1981!), ‘The barbarians … have already been governing us for some time.’
The shifting centre of Christianity Declining Western liberal Christianity has to come to terms with the fact that the majority of world Christianity is now southern and conservative. John Drane: ‘We seem to have become a secular Church in a spiritual society.’
The edge of Pentecost There is a ‘kairos moment of opportunity. Martin Luther: ‘God’s grace is like a passing storm which does not return where once it has been … it came to the Jews but passed over … Paul brought it to the Greeks but it passed over … the Romans and Latins had it. And you must not think that you have it forever.’ There are signs of personal response to the Spirit. We need what Orlando Costas calls ‘total growth’: i.e., numerical growth (numbers of Christians), organic growth (flexible structures), conceptual growth (theological development) and incarnational growth (prophetic identification with the marginalised).

THE CHURCH RESHAPED
John Hull: ‘Start with the Church and the mission will probably get lost. Start with mission and it is likely that the Church will be found.’ Pete Ward: modernity provided one ‘solid’ structure after another and our churches have modelled this. But technological innovation is liquefying all that. We need a ‘mixed economy Church’, says Stuckey. Some ‘Fresh Expressions‘ of church are genetically the same as modernity, substituting piano for organ and PowerPoint for hymn books. We need more theologically adventurous ’emerged churches’ which are not planted but spring from a need outside the church and who have a ‘theological consultant’ rather than a pioneer minister or leader. So there could be three types of church: traditional, fresh expressions and emerged churches.

NECESSARY CHANGES
Problems facing us include bureaucracy, resistance to change, ministers being bogged down in maintenance ministry and gifted laypeople who are frustrated in the exercise of their gifts. Action:
1. Encourage growing diversity and focus the national (‘connexional’) leadership more clearly.
2. Appoint bishops, but make them missionary bishops in the Celtic tradition.
3. Recruit younger presbyters and deacons for pioneer ministry.
4. Ordain 100 Local Preachers to a non-stipendiary ministry of word and sacrament.
5. Head-hunt ordained persons who truly could work with ’emerged churches’.
6. A structure of mutual accountability for those presbyters with evangelistic gifts.
7. Annual appraisal for ministers needs to become personal development: from initial ministerial training to ongoing.
8. Release some presbyters and deacons with evangelistic gifts from pastoral charge of churches.
9. Shift power from local churches to circuits and Districts so that resistant churches can’t dig in their heels against change.

POSTSCRIPT
As in John 21:6, we are being called to ‘cast [our] nets on the other side’. He then concludes with this amazing prayer of Brendan the Navigator.

Dave’s thoughts …
I think I just want to reiterate that the cat is out of the bag about the problems with our doctrine of ordination. Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch made the point in their book The Shaping Of Things To Come that the problem with ordaining people to a ministry of word, sacrament and pastoral charge (as denominations like Methodism do) limits the kind of people who offer and are accepted for ordination. Where, they ask, is the rich pattern of Ephesians 4 with apostles, prophets and evangelists as well as the pastors and teachers?

Tom’s section ‘Necessary Changes’ above recognises the problem but doesn’t radically reshape our doctrine of ordination. Many of us in circuit ministry know how the problem rears its head: we may feel the connection between the call to ministry and leading the church, but when it comes each quarter to making the Circuit Plan (the document that shows which minister and which Local Preacher is taking which service at which church) we have to fill in who is conducting the specifically sacramental services of baptism and Holy Communion. We become, in my rather cynical phrase, ‘travelling sacrament machines’ rather than people deployed to lead the church.

Compound this with the problem that proportionately the number of churches has not declined as much as the number of ministers and the ordained staff are looking after more congregations. This means a further dispersal of our energies from focussed efforts.

Tom, I’m very excited by your courage and vision. Now let’s be much more radical than even you are daring to suggest!

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Not that I can either, off the top of my head. Whatever did happen to memorisation as a spiritual discipline? A field day for the secularly minded here. Was the Congressman genuinely unprepared or was he a hypocrite? I don’t knw. Over to our American friends for that one.

Boing Boing: Ten Commandments Congressman can’t name the Ten Commandments

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See this news report from the BBC:

BBC NEWS | Education | Churches push for school worship

Some church leaders want the Government to enforce the legal requirement in the UK for acts of collective worship in schools of a ‘broadly Christian character’. I am disturbed by their major claim for worship. Apparently it

“helps to equip young people to understand more about
themselves, foster a sense of the aesthetic and to cope with
life-changing moments.”

Since when was that Christian worship? This is such an anthropocentric (human-centred) definition. It is consumerist: what’s in it for me? There is nothing theocentric (God-centred) in these words at all.

Ironically the British Humanist Association said,

“A whole school can do many things together but, lacking
a shared religion, it is incoherent to believe that they can ‘worship’
together.”

They are onto the fact that there is something requiring coherence in true worship. As a Christian I would argue that it is found in the Trinity. But no, once more, those who speak on behalf of the Christian Church seem to have gone more for the ‘sales pitch’ than core truth.

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Here is what the hamlet of Hell, Michigan, sixty miles west of Detroit is planning for tomorrow.

And here are some mischievous thoughts from Kim Fabricius.

‘Greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world.’

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You may laugh, you may wince:

Boing Boing: Praying woman struck by lightning

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Driving yesterday I heard this horrendous interview on the radio with Gary Glitter (Paul Gadd) about his appeal against conviction for sleeping with underage girls in Vietnam:

BBC NEWS | World | Asia-Pacific | Gary Glitter denies abusing girls

The line that stuck out in the vile conversation was where he said “I’m not a paedophile” – this from a man who was convicted in the UK in 1999 of having four thousand photos of children being abused on his home computer. Does he not understand definitions of paedophilia?

Of course he does. He is simply manifesting the appalling levels of deceit and self-deceit common in paedophiles. (We’ll say nothing about his apparent assumption in the interview that a man in his sixties having sex with teenage girls is OK if they are over the age of consent. And I won’t even get on to my traditional Christian views about sex and marriage.)

It is due to these levels of deceit that my denomination will not allow anyone who has been convicted or cautioned for offences against children ever take responsible posts in the church – and not just jobs working with young people. Some object to this, saying that the transforming power of the Gospel must mean hope even for paedophiles to change. It looks bad when the Christian Church doesn’t seem to believe that people can change through Christ’s forgiveness and the work of the Holy Spirit. And of course I believe that people can be wonderfully renewed by God.

Nevertheless I willingly hold the party line on this one. Sometimes the Christian ethic is not about claiming my rights, it’s about not claiming them, for the good of others. For example, the apostle Paul did not claim payment and support from the churches he served, even though he believed that those who preached the Gospel should live by it. He refused to claim his right in that respect, because he believed it would be a hindrance. In the same way it would be a terrible hindrance if we freely allowed paedophiles to hold church office. So we ask them not to claim their ‘rights’. (And there is a whole Christian problem with the language of rights anyway, as the late Lesslie Newbigin pointed out twenty years ago in his book ‘Foolishness To The Greeks’: rights are the language of the Enlightenment, of human autonomy, with nobody, certainly not God, to answer to.)

But the sting in the tail for me is this: it is easy to spot deceit and self-deceit in a criminal such as paedophile. It is fairly simple to spot it in others. But perhaps the Gary Glitter interview should be the terrible warning to us all about how easy we find it to deceive others and ourselves. Most of us, I guess, engage in our little deceits. If we are not careful, where might they lead? I, for one, am all too good at justifying myself when I feel unfairly attacked and go on the defensive. The risk is that I exaggerate and so deceive myself, let alone whoever is attacking me.

So despite feeling revulsion listening to Gary Glitter yesterday I come with a sense of ‘There but for the grace of God go I’ – not into paedophilia, I pray; but I pray more for the grace of God to enable me to live more truthfully.

Technorati Tags: Gary Glitter, Paul Gadd, Vietnam, paedophile, Methodist Church, deceit, grace