Dave Faulkner. Musings of an evangelical Methodist minister.
I hadn’t heard of the Presbyterian Global Fellowship until yesterday, when they contacted me and asked permission to reproduce my recent sermon on the Word made flesh. (I happily agreed, and they have posted it here, on their blog.) They look a fascinating group of people, promoting missional thinking and practice in American Presbyterian circles. Do have a look at how they are trying to do this in an historic ‘mainline’ denomination.
Technorati Tags: PresbyterianGlobalFellowship, missional
Introduction
My first Remembrance Sunday in the ministry fifteen years ago will stay in my
memory. Every year in the village, there was a united service at the parish
church. I found myself in a different world, where the elderly landowner whose
portfolio included many houses in the village had a separate entrance to the
church building.
Then there was the rector. He didn’t like women, at least
not in the ministry. During my time, he quit the Church of England over the
ordination of women, took his pay-off and retired. And he didn’t like preaching
on Remembrance Sunday. Which meant the Methodist minister always had to preach.
Step forward, me.
I was given this passage from Matthew, ‘The Beatitudes’.
Feeling I had to do justice to it, I went through all eight of the Beatitudes
that morning. It’s not something I’ve done since, and it’s not something I’ll
do today.
Instead, I want to pull out the one Beatitude that has the
most obvious relevance to Remembrance Sunday: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for
they will be called children of God’ (verse 9). What does being a peacemaker in
God’s kingdom include? The peace of God reverses all the effects of Adam’s fall
(whether you believe that story literally or figuratively). Making peace in
every aspect of life is the kingdom call to God’s children. What might it
involve?
1. Peace With God
‘Peace
With God’ was the title of perhaps Billy
Graham’s most famous
book. Peace with God is the most basic issue of life, according to the Gospel. Adam
and Eve are fundamentally alienated from God by listening to other voices than
his, and preferring their own way. When caught out, they shift the blame – Adam
to Eve and Eve to the serpent. They are driven out of Eden.
Christ wins peace with God at the Cross. He dies in our
place. He conquers sin and death in his own death and resurrection. He brings
forgiveness of sins and new life to all who make a u-turn of their lives from
the direction of selfishness to him and his kingdom, and who put their faith in
him, following him out of gratitude. This is at the heart of the Gospel. It is
the beginning of Gospel living – not the end, but the foundation upon which
Christian discipleship is built.
This peace with God stills the troubled mind. No more
anxiety about whether God loves me or accepts me – I see it is true at the
Cross, his promises are recorded in the Scriptures and the Holy Spirit brings
truth to life in my heart.
However, this peace has more than one dimension. Not only is
it the peace of sins forgiven and acceptance by God, which itself is pretty
major: imagine what that would do to so many troubled people in our society. It
is also the peace that comes from knowing that our lives are in his hands. When
a crisis comes, or when others let us down and we struggle to trust them, it is
still possible to trust the faithful God and know peace in the middle of the
storm, because he loves us and is in charge of our lives.
Only this week has this been important for me. I faced a
situation that I can’t name publicly, but I felt someone had let me down. I’m
sure it’s because they were under stress that they made a decision that made it
look like they were hiding something. Knowing the person, I can’t imagine they
intended that. But it made me feel like something was going on that wasn’t
transparent and was being hidden, or truncated for the sake of a quick
decision. I tried to find other ways around the impasse, to no avail. In the
end, all I could do was what I should have done from the outset – acknowledge
that the God of love was in control, and that he held me, the other person and
everyone else involved in the situation in his hands. That prevented a rise in
my blood pressure! All this arises from being at peace with the God who makes
peace with us in Christ.
2. Peace With People
Something goes badly wrong between Adam and Eve. Sin is not just a private
transaction with God, even if God is the primary party affected. We hurt
others. We end up with broken and distorted relationships. For Adam and Eve,
it’s seen in the pain of childbirth and the man ruling over the woman. Neither
of these were God’s best intentions for humanity. They symbolise the fracture
that has come into the human race through sin.
But the power of the Gospel of God’s kingdom is to heal
these severed relationships. Peace with God must lead to reconciliation with
others. It’s why we have ‘The Peace’ in the communion service. It’s a more
ancient version of the Book of Common Prayer tradition that called worshippers
to be in love and charity with their neighbour before taking the sacrament.
Therefore, peace is never a private matter. If we know God
has forgiven us, then we must share that with others, as Jesus taught in the
parable of the unforgiving servant. It’s why we have the difficult words in the
Lord’s Prayer, ‘Forgive us as our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.’
Today, as we remember the deaths of those who died in international conflicts,
we must also look at our smaller, closer-to-home conflicts, and bring them to
the Cross for reconciliation.
3. Peace With The
Earth
Just giving you a title like that for this point probably makes me sound like
an eco-warrior, or a flaky New Age type. And you’re thinking, ‘He doesn’t look
like one’ (I hope!).
I am not about to spout the nonsense of those who speak
about our planet as if it were a creature, or even the goddess Gaia, but in
Genesis 3 Adam’s tilling of the soil after the Fall leads to thorns and
thistles. The close and harmonious relationship with the earth is gone. Humans
who were meant to have dominion over the earth on behalf of God now find
themselves at odds with their physical environment.
Peacemakers in God’s kingdom, then, will be concerned about
climate change and especially its effects on the world’s poorest communities.
The restoration of all that is broken requires us to be peacemakers with
creation. It is not right to say – as some fundamentalists have said – that God
gave us the earth to do with as we pleased. He entrusted us to look after it
for him. If peace is about harmony and justice, then that involves our care of
creation. It is part of being a godly peacemaker.
It was a real attraction, then, to know that the new
(Christian) head teacher of our daughter’s primary school was committed to
green issues. In teaching the children these values, she is giving a lead in
one area of Christian peace making. What steps are we taking in our family
lives, at work, and in campaigning for companies and governments to set
ambitious goals?
4. Peace At Work
Adam’s problem with tilling the ground is a problem for his work. The ground
was cursed, and he would toil as a result. Does that sound familiar to people
in work, whether paid employment or otherwise? Does it not feel like toil? How
many of us work to live, rather than live to work? The nature of the job can be
frustrating, and as for the colleagues – well, it would be easier without them
sometimes, wouldn’t it?
God made work to be good, but sin has ruined it. There is an
honourable calling in redeeming work. That may involve making the job or the
conditions better, if we have the power to do so. It may include working for
reconciliation and justice among the staff.
For me, that meant a surprise calling from God when I worked
at an office to become the office union secretary. It wasn’t all about conflict
with the management, although that happened occasionally. It was also about
caring for, and representing staff who were in difficulties.
Here is one story that became public knowledge. It involved
a young woman whose work was suffering. She asked to see me. What had affected
her work was this. She had been dating a young man from the office, and they
had gone on holiday to Majorca. While there, she discovered he was bisexual and
was seeing a man as well as her. When she confronted him with this, he beat her
senseless. She woke up in a local hospital where the staff knew little English,
and she knew hardly any Spanish. No wonder she couldn’t work well when she got
back to the office. The (now ex-) boyfriend was still there. It was my duty to
go with her to see a manager. Once they knew, they reduced their expectations
of her while she continued to recover.
There is far more to the Christian duty at work than to work
conscientiously and not steal the paper clips. We can be peacemakers, seeking
justice and reconciliation in what can be a stressful and even demoralising
atmosphere.
5. Peace In The World
If there is any allusion in Genesis 3 to the issues we commemorate on
Remembrance Sunday, it is when Adam and Eve are ejected from Eden by God. They become
refugees from one location to another. The arrival of refugees and the forced
displacement of peoples (or worse) are of course prime causes of wars. Movements
of peoples need not cause frictions, but such is human sin that they do. The Nazi
treatment of the Jews, and their invasion of Poland and other countries, is not
far from our minds today.
It is the Christian peacemaker’s calling to counter these
acts of hatred. But how we should do so is where we differ. There are many
shades of opinion about war and peace in the Christian community. (Moreover, it’s
what makes today so hard for those who lead worship: whatever convictions we
hold, there will be others who not only have come to different conclusions,
they are associated with painful real-life experience.)
You might hold that the words of Jesus expressly prohibit
all Christian involvement in war. You might not think they refer entirely to
that, but to personal relationships, and you might say that there is a case for
defending your nation against unjust attack. You might argue it is morally
acceptable to attack another nation or group in order to prevent them doing
evil. Most of those Christians who believe that war may sometimes be justified
generally agree that it must be a last resort, not a first resort, that the
response must be proportionate, and that care must be taken only to engage with
those genuinely involved in the war – not an easy matter.
There are other shades of opinion, too. And I confess I am
setting out some of the different ideas, because over the years my own views
have changed. At heart, I am probably a pacifist, although there is something
in my head that thinks a just war – such as the Second World War – may well be
acceptable biblically. Yet I can’t imagine myself killing an enemy combatant,
although I might feel differently if I thought my own family were threatened. And
that probably makes me a hypocrite: why defend my own family this way, but not
others? However, perhaps my struggles with this theme are echoed by some of
you.
However, I am convinced of this: we all who are followers of
Jesus need to acknowledge that it is central to our discipleship that our peace
making means we oppose injustice and violence, and that we are on the side of
the poor and oppressed. We may honestly disagree about strategies and tactics,
but we may not un-church each other on this issue. Our unity is in Christ, who
has reconciled us to God and each other through the Cross. It is that
reconciliation which leads us not only to campaign in the world; it is also a
reconciliation that we, the children of God – God’s family – need to model as
the community of his kingdom. Christian peace making is not merely something we
speak about: it is something we show by the way that we live. ‘They shall know
we are Christians by our love.’ ‘See how they love one another.’
Technorati Tags: RemembranceSunday, peace, Beatitudes, BillyGraham, reconciliation, justice, Gaia, climatechange, globalwarming, work, war, Nazis, Jews, Poland, pacifism, justwar
Here is a poem by Ruth Haley Barton, which uses the imagery both of Sabbath and Autumn to talk about how things once beautiful must die, because their season is past and a new one is here. Are we clinging to falling leaves in the church? Read, enjoy and be challenged.
Technorati Tags: RuthHaleyBarton, sabbath, fall, autumn, seasons, change
This morning, I preached for church anniversary back at the main church I served during my first appointment in the ministry. It’s frightening to think I began there fifteen years ago. I ought to know what I’m doing by now! But maybe it’s good to feel that you don’t know what you’re doing.
Preaching as a visitor is so different from regular preaching in the church(es) you are serving at present. My wife commented on the way home that my whole style and demeanour were different. Returning as a visitor, I enjoyed seeing old friends and was delighted to see several faces who were new to me.
But it was different when I was their minister for five years. Then, I had to participate in the struggles and battles of that church. My preaching in that atmosphere didn’t have the liberty it seemed to have today. This morning, I could return as an ‘outsider’ and say things I am saying regularly here, but without the ongoing work to transform thinking and attitudes that accompany it in leadership. When I was at that church, we had some terrible things to face. An awful problem with the children’s work consumed my first two years, and took a huge toll on me. Problems over the style of music soon followed. I stood up for what I believed, but ended up having six weeks off with stress, three years into the appointment.
Today, on the other hand, was full of laughter. There was a buzz about the place. Even the challenges ended up being set in a relaxed atmosphere as we grappled with two hymns the congregation didn’t know. Their ability to laugh together was beautiful.
It was a particular joy to see the number of children and teenagers present. That work had been decimated at the time when the crisis I mentioned two paragraphs ago really blew up. Looking at them today, it felt like all the pain of those five years was worth it. Seeds had been sown, and had grown.
Likewise, I was delighted to hear that some still remembered what I preached about five years ago, when I previously returned to take a church anniversary, and how some of that thinking has fed into their future plans.
Now I pray that the times of struggle that occur in the current appointment will one day also bear fruit.
Thank you to my old friends for a wonderful time sharing in worship, and for the lunch and all the conversations.
Tomorrow I have the privilege of taking church anniversary at the main church I served in my first appointment. Such invitations can be an opportunity to share some of the big thinking and passions that are now prominent in my ministry and spirituality. I have chosen to share my ‘conversion’ to missional thinking. Here goes:
Introduction
Happy Christmas! I just thought I’d get that in early. The shops are already
wishing ‘Happy Christmas’ to your credit cards, so why not?
Seriously, what did you think when you heard that the
opening verses of John’s Gospel were to be our text? Did you not think, ‘That’s
a Christmas reading’? We hear those words at carol services and on Christmas
morning. Of course, they are wonderful words for Christmas, and especially
verse 14, which is going to frame my thoughts today:
And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have
seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.
Christmas is about the Word made flesh. But we cannot
restrict these words to Christmas. They are a missionary text. ‘The Word became flesh and lived among us’
describes the missionary strategy of Jesus. And they are relevant to us,
because they are the model for the mission to which Jesus calls us.
How so? Skip from Christmas to Easter for a moment. Move
from John chapter 1 to John 20. It’s the evening of Easter Day. The disciples
are behind locked doors out of fear. The risen Jesus appears in their midst and
says (amongst other things), ‘As the Father has sent me, so I send you’ (John
20:21). We take our model for mission, then, from the way the Father sent
Jesus. And how did he send him? ‘The Word became flesh and lived among us.’
That was how the world saw the glory of Jesus, and that is how it will see his
glory through us today.
What do I mean? Jesus moves the traditional locations of
Christian practice into new places, and he calls us to follow him on the
journey:
1. From the Temple to
the Tent
There are some lovely alternative translations of our text. Eugene Peterson, in his
paraphrase of the Bible entitled ‘The
Message’, puts it this way:
The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the
neighbourhood.
More literally, you could render it,
The Word became flesh and ‘tabernacled’ among us.
The Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us.
Do you remember the tabernacle in the Old Testament? It was
the tent, which was the portable sign of God’s presence. We are more used to a
‘temple’ notion of God’s presence – a worthy place to which people travel in
order to find God. That is how we have tended to view church buildings. We have
talked about ‘going to church’.
And it is also how we have conceived of mission. We are
looking for people to come to us. We
put on certain events, and we work to make everything attractive and
hospitable.
But I suggest to you that this is radically different from
the way Jesus operated. Although he attended the synagogue, he never invited
anyone to go there. Although he said things like ‘Come to me’ and ‘Follow me’,
he did not do so from a distance. For Jesus, it was all about him going to
people rather than expecting them to come to him. Jesus pitched his tent in the
world, and moved it around, rather like the Bedouin people of the Middle East.
Jesus, who was the very presence of God – ‘we have seen his glory’ and ‘Whoever
has seen me has seen the Father’ (John 14:9) – tabernacled the presence of God in the world. People saw the glory of
God in Jesus, who based himself not in the religious building but in the world.
And how necessary such a strategy is for us today, too. Have
we not learned the painful lessons yet that people will not simply ‘come to
church’ any more? In generations when there was a common appreciation for
Christian values (even if they were sometimes honoured more in the breach), the
‘come to us’ or ‘temple’ approach to mission was understandable. But those days
are long gone.
I minister at a church where I inherited a building
refurbishment scheme when we arrived. The revitalised premises are lovely,
especially in the worship area. They are better than the previous tired design.
But on its own, it will not lead to fruitful Christian mission.
Similarly, we have been evolving a new approach to Sunday
morning. It now begins with breakfast. However, just putting on breakfast and
advertising it will not of itself attract new people. When we do make
missionary contact with people, it will be a helpful safe introduction to
Sunday worship. But it is not a missionary panacea on its own.
I’ve reached the conclusion that there has been an important
reason for this ‘come to us’ approach to mission. It means we do things on our
territory, in places where we feel comfortable. However, for most people in our
society today, church premises are not comfortable places, because they are
unfamiliar and strange. Jesus calls us instead to go to where the people we
want to reach are comfortable. To use the jargon, he wants to get us out of our
‘comfort zones’. After all, that’s what he did. He left the comfort zone of
Heaven for a stable.
For us, it means fewer obsessions with church meetings and
structures, and more commitment to involvement in the community. Debbie and I
are committed to setting up our tent in the vicinity where we live, being
involved in community organisations and events such as the pre-school or the
friends of the primary school, being known as Christians there, building
relationships with people, and socialising with them. We then want to see what
shape things take, rather than forcing people into a predetermined shape in an
existing church. The Australian church leader James
Thwaites says in his book ‘The
Church Beyond The Congregation’: if Christ is present throughout creation
and the Church is the Body of Christ, then the Church needs to be present
throughout creation.
That, essentially, is what the Fresh Expressions movement is
all about: meeting people on their own turf, and creating church around them in
their cultural environment. It’s pitching the tent, not journeying to the
Temple. It requires cutting church structures to a bare minimum: gathering for
worship and fellowship, plus no more business than is essential. It is more
honouring to Christ to do that than to wrap ourselves up in a holy huddle,
using the Church as a crutch for a social life.
2. From the Classroom
to the Street
One of the largest ‘mega-churches’ in the United States is based just outside
Chicago. It’s called Willow Creek.
Over the space of thirty years, they have pioneered ways of giving a high
priority to reaching people for Christ, based on high quality musical and
dramatic productions. With tens of thousands of people associated with their
church and its satellites, they have put in place a dazzling programme of
activities for those who become Christians. But recently,
they have made a startling
admission: their research shows that their programme and meeting-based
approach to discipling people in the ways of Christ hasn’t worked. Putting
people through church activities and programmes hasn’t made them more
Christ-like.
What they’ve done (with greater resources at their disposal
than the average church) is nevertheless similar to what the ‘ordinary’ church
says. In addition to a life of personal prayer and Bible study, join a
fellowship group, or attend a midweek meeting. And you know what? It no more
works for us than it does for Willow Creek.
Jesus, on the other hand, did his discipling, largely in the
world, where he – in the words of our text – ‘lived among us.’ He called
disciples from their professions, but not for them to become rabbis attached to
the synagogue. They learned from him rather like apprentices to a trade: they
watched him doing kingdom things; then they did some themselves under his eye;
finally, he let them loose. Most of Jesus’ teaching occurs not in the synagogue
but on the road. Many of his images are drawn from working life – hence the
preponderance of agricultural images in the parables. Jesus moved discipleship
from the classroom to the street.
I believe it means for us that all our approaches to
discipleship must have a practical edge. Learning something in our heads is not
of its own transformational; letting that knowledge travel from our heads to
our hands and our feet is.
Because of this, I have become a fan of the ‘cell church movement’. The small groups –
‘cells’ – are as much church as the Sunday gathering. However, they are also
much more than the average Bible study group. When they study Scripture, it is
with a view to asking, ‘What should be our active response to this?’ When they
pray, it is for missionary things – friends who don’t know Christ,
opportunities to demonstrate the love of God to the needy. They are not the
sort of groups who get obsessed with the maps on the inside covers of their
Bibles. They are groups that are passionately committed to working out their
faith with concrete action.
Likewise, I’ve become impressed with the way some ancient
spiritual disciplines of the Church are making a comeback. One in particular connects
growth in discipleship to our daily living. It’s called the ‘examen’. A few
brief words can only provide an over-simplified summary of it, but it boils
down to this. Twice a day, at lunchtime and before bed, you review your day,
prayerfully asking the Holy Spirit to show you where God has been at work, and the
parts of your day from which you could learn. The learning is connected to your
experience.
When Jesus moves our discipleship from the classroom from
the street, he does so, knowing we can expect to meet him by his Spirit in the
world. As the author of the Willow Creek report put it,
Our dream is really to discover what God is doing and how
he’s asking us to transform this planet.
3. From Reformation
to Revolution
If Jesus calls us to move from the temple to the tent and from the classroom to
the street, he is asking for a massive change in our thinking and practice. How
might we approach such a revolution? I recently read some background on Vaclav Havel, the playwright and first President
of the post-communist Czechoslovakia and then Czech Republic.
Havel was a dissident playwright under the communist rule,
and under that régime he was jailed. During the 70s and 80s it seemed to them
that the system would never change. It seemed literally immutable, an iron
curtain, a system that dominated every aspect of people’s lives. It wasn’t just
“out there”, it was also “within”, within their heads, within their hearts,
within their spirits. He describes the system as founded on a simple lie:
“You’ll be happy if you have enough things.”
Havel and other dissidents began to ask, “How can we live the
truth in a culture based on a fundamental lie, especially since the lie is in
our heads? How can we begin to live the truth? We desire so much more than just
things. We want something to hope in, a reason to believe.” Mary Jo Leddy of Romero House writes,
“In his country as in
other iron-curtain countries people began to set up what he called “parallel
cultures.” They had underground study groups. They studied Plato. They had
drama. They had music groups. They wrote novels and poetry, and published them
underground. He called this a “parallel culture.” It was not a counter-culture
because, he said, it was impossible for us to live totally outside the system. You
cannot live outside a culture. But you can create within it zones and spaces,
where you can become who you really are. It is in such places that one can
speak the truth, where one can gather with others who share that truth.
This went on for
years, not without difficulties, but for years. Over time, the truth became
stronger and stronger, and at a certain point people began to walk in the
streets and to say to the system, “We don’t believe you anymore.” And the
system fell. It fell, not because of the power of Western nuclear equipment,
but because the people said within the system, “We don’t believe you anymore.”
It was a vision that had been nourished within those parallel cultures.”[1]
Moving from the Temple to the Tent – from ‘come to us’
mission to ‘going and being’ mission – requires a parallel culture. So does
moving our discipleship from the classroom to the street, from theory to the
whole of life. The forces of ‘Temple’ and ‘Classroom’ are powerful in the
Church. They have held minds captive for centuries. But today they are not
working, yet they are still being repeated. Such failure in our day reminds me
of Einstein’s definition of insanity: ‘To keep doing the same thing while
expecting a different result.’
I suspect that rather than reforming our ‘Temple’ and ‘Classroom’
approaches, we need to start new parallel cultures of ‘Tent’ and ‘Street’
instead. And not only because of the pervasive power of the old ways in our
churches: we also need to do this, because of the power of the society we live
in. Vaclav Havel may have grown up under communism, but we who have grown up
under capitalism have also experienced a culture that says, “You’ll be happy if
you have enough things.” In fact, our economy would collapse without it!
No, if Jesus calls us from Temple to Tent and from Classroom
to Street, then he is calling us not simply to reformation. He is calling us to
subvert the old structures with parallel cultures. He is calling us to prepare
for revolution, in creating a new society under the reign of God, a society that
will say to the existing ways, “We don’t believe you anymore”, and demonstrate
life as word made flesh.
[1] Len Hjalmarson, ‘Afterword’, in Wikiklesia:
Volume One: Voices of the Virtual World: Participative Technology and the
Ecclesial Revolution, edited by Len Hjalmarson and John La Grou, Wikiklesia Press 2007, pp 342f
(printed edition).
Technorati Tags: missional, incarnation, EugenePeterson, JamesThwaites, FreshExpressions, WillowCreek, discipleship, cellchurch, examen, VaclavHavel, MaryJoLeddy, RomeroHouse, Einstein, LenHjalmarson, Wikiklesia, JohnLaGrou
Tomorrow I have the privilege of taking church anniversary at the main church I served in my first appointment. Such invitations can be an opportunity to share some of the big thinking and passions that are now prominent in my ministry and spirituality. I have chosen to share my ‘conversion’ to missional thinking. Here goes:
Introduction
Happy Christmas! I just thought I’d get that in early. The shops are already
wishing ‘Happy Christmas’ to your credit cards, so why not?
Seriously, what did you think when you heard that the
opening verses of John’s Gospel were to be our text? Did you not think, ‘That’s
a Christmas reading’? We hear those words at carol services and on Christmas
morning. Of course, they are wonderful words for Christmas, and especially
verse 14, which is going to frame my thoughts today:
And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have
seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.
Christmas is about the Word made flesh. But we cannot
restrict these words to Christmas. They are a missionary text. ‘The Word became flesh and lived among us’
describes the missionary strategy of Jesus. And they are relevant to us,
because they are the model for the mission to which Jesus calls us.
How so? Skip from Christmas to Easter for a moment. Move
from John chapter 1 to John 20. It’s the evening of Easter Day. The disciples
are behind locked doors out of fear. The risen Jesus appears in their midst and
says (amongst other things), ‘As the Father has sent me, so I send you’ (John
20:21). We take our model for mission, then, from the way the Father sent
Jesus. And how did he send him? ‘The Word became flesh and lived among us.’
That was how the world saw the glory of Jesus, and that is how it will see his
glory through us today.
What do I mean? Jesus moves the traditional locations of
Christian practice into new places, and he calls us to follow him on the
journey:
1. From the Temple to
the Tent
There are some lovely alternative translations of our text. Eugene Peterson, in his
paraphrase of the Bible entitled ‘The
Message’, puts it this way:
The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the
neighbourhood.
More literally, you could render it,
The Word became flesh and ‘tabernacled’ among us.
The Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us.
Do you remember the tabernacle in the Old Testament? It was
the tent, which was the portable sign of God’s presence. We are more used to a
‘temple’ notion of God’s presence – a worthy place to which people travel in
order to find God. That is how we have tended to view church buildings. We have
talked about ‘going to church’.
And it is also how we have conceived of mission. We are
looking for people to come to us. We
put on certain events, and we work to make everything attractive and
hospitable.
But I suggest to you that this is radically different from
the way Jesus operated. Although he attended the synagogue, he never invited
anyone to go there. Although he said things like ‘Come to me’ and ‘Follow me’,
he did not do so from a distance. For Jesus, it was all about him going to
people rather than expecting them to come to him. Jesus pitched his tent in the
world, and moved it around, rather like the Bedouin people of the Middle East.
Jesus, who was the very presence of God – ‘we have seen his glory’ and ‘Whoever
has seen me has seen the Father’ (John 14:9) – tabernacled the presence of God in the world. People saw the glory of
God in Jesus, who based himself not in the religious building but in the world.
And how necessary such a strategy is for us today, too. Have
we not learned the painful lessons yet that people will not simply ‘come to
church’ any more? In generations when there was a common appreciation for
Christian values (even if they were sometimes honoured more in the breach), the
‘come to us’ or ‘temple’ approach to mission was understandable. But those days
are long gone.
I minister at a church where I inherited a building
refurbishment scheme when we arrived. The revitalised premises are lovely,
especially in the worship area. They are better than the previous tired design.
But on its own, it will not lead to fruitful Christian mission.
Similarly, we have been evolving a new approach to Sunday
morning. It now begins with breakfast. However, just putting on breakfast and
advertising it will not of itself attract new people. When we do make
missionary contact with people, it will be a helpful safe introduction to
Sunday worship. But it is not a missionary panacea on its own.
I’ve reached the conclusion that there has been an important
reason for this ‘come to us’ approach to mission. It means we do things on our
territory, in places where we feel comfortable. However, for most people in our
society today, church premises are not comfortable places, because they are
unfamiliar and strange. Jesus calls us instead to go to where the people we
want to reach are comfortable. To use the jargon, he wants to get us out of our
‘comfort zones’. After all, that’s what he did. He left the comfort zone of
Heaven for a stable.
For us, it means fewer obsessions with church meetings and
structures, and more commitment to involvement in the community. Debbie and I
are committed to setting up our tent in the vicinity where we live, being
involved in community organisations and events such as the pre-school or the
friends of the primary school, being known as Christians there, building
relationships with people, and socialising with them. We then want to see what
shape things take, rather than forcing people into a predetermined shape in an
existing church. The Australian church leader James
Thwaites says in his book ‘The
Church Beyond The Congregation’: if Christ is present throughout creation
and the Church is the Body of Christ, then the Church needs to be present
throughout creation.
That, essentially, is what the Fresh Expressions movement is
all about: meeting people on their own turf, and creating church around them in
their cultural environment. It’s pitching the tent, not journeying to the
Temple. It requires cutting church structures to a bare minimum: gathering for
worship and fellowship, plus no more business than is essential. It is more
honouring to Christ to do that than to wrap ourselves up in a holy huddle,
using the Church as a crutch for a social life.
2. From the Classroom
to the Street
One of the largest ‘mega-churches’ in the United States is based just outside
Chicago. It’s called Willow Creek.
Over the space of thirty years, they have pioneered ways of giving a high
priority to reaching people for Christ, based on high quality musical and
dramatic productions. With tens of thousands of people associated with their
church and its satellites, they have put in place a dazzling programme of
activities for those who become Christians. But recently,
they have made a startling
admission: their research shows that their programme and meeting-based
approach to discipling people in the ways of Christ hasn’t worked. Putting
people through church activities and programmes hasn’t made them more
Christ-like.
What they’ve done (with greater resources at their disposal
than the average church) is nevertheless similar to what the ‘ordinary’ church
says. In addition to a life of personal prayer and Bible study, join a
fellowship group, or attend a midweek meeting. And you know what? It no more
works for us than it does for Willow Creek.
Jesus, on the other hand, did his discipling, largely in the
world, where he – in the words of our text – ‘lived among us.’ He called
disciples from their professions, but not for them to become rabbis attached to
the synagogue. They learned from him rather like apprentices to a trade: they
watched him doing kingdom things; then they did some themselves under his eye;
finally, he let them loose. Most of Jesus’ teaching occurs not in the synagogue
but on the road. Many of his images are drawn from working life – hence the
preponderance of agricultural images in the parables. Jesus moved discipleship
from the classroom to the street.
I believe it means for us that all our approaches to
discipleship must have a practical edge. Learning something in our heads is not
of its own transformational; letting that knowledge travel from our heads to
our hands and our feet is.
Because of this, I have become a fan of the ‘cell church movement’. The small groups –
‘cells’ – are as much church as the Sunday gathering. However, they are also
much more than the average Bible study group. When they study Scripture, it is
with a view to asking, ‘What should be our active response to this?’ When they
pray, it is for missionary things – friends who don’t know Christ,
opportunities to demonstrate the love of God to the needy. They are not the
sort of groups who get obsessed with the maps on the inside covers of their
Bibles. They are groups that are passionately committed to working out their
faith with concrete action.
Likewise, I’ve become impressed with the way some ancient
spiritual disciplines of the Church are making a comeback. One in particular connects
growth in discipleship to our daily living. It’s called the ‘examen’. A few
brief words can only provide an over-simplified summary of it, but it boils
down to this. Twice a day, at lunchtime and before bed, you review your day,
prayerfully asking the Holy Spirit to show you where God has been at work, and the
parts of your day from which you could learn. The learning is connected to your
experience.
When Jesus moves our discipleship from the classroom from
the street, he does so, knowing we can expect to meet him by his Spirit in the
world. As the author of the Willow Creek report put it,
Our dream is really to discover what God is doing and how
he’s asking us to transform this planet.
3. From Reformation
to Revolution
If Jesus calls us to move from the temple to the tent and from the classroom to
the street, he is asking for a massive change in our thinking and practice. How
might we approach such a revolution? I recently read some background on Vaclav Havel, the playwright and first President
of the post-communist Czechoslovakia and then Czech Republic.
Havel was a dissident playwright under the communist rule,
and under that régime he was jailed. During the 70s and 80s it seemed to them
that the system would never change. It seemed literally immutable, an iron
curtain, a system that dominated every aspect of people’s lives. It wasn’t just
“out there”, it was also “within”, within their heads, within their hearts,
within their spirits. He describes the system as founded on a simple lie:
“You’ll be happy if you have enough things.”
Havel and other dissidents began to ask, “How can we live the
truth in a culture based on a fundamental lie, especially since the lie is in
our heads? How can we begin to live the truth? We desire so much more than just
things. We want something to hope in, a reason to believe.” Mary Jo Leddy of Romero House writes,
“In his country as in
other iron-curtain countries people began to set up what he called “parallel
cultures.” They had underground study groups. They studied Plato. They had
drama. They had music groups. They wrote novels and poetry, and published them
underground. He called this a “parallel culture.” It was not a counter-culture
because, he said, it was impossible for us to live totally outside the system. You
cannot live outside a culture. But you can create within it zones and spaces,
where you can become who you really are. It is in such places that one can
speak the truth, where one can gather with others who share that truth.
This went on for
years, not without difficulties, but for years. Over time, the truth became
stronger and stronger, and at a certain point people began to walk in the
streets and to say to the system, “We don’t believe you anymore.” And the
system fell. It fell, not because of the power of Western nuclear equipment,
but because the people said within the system, “We don’t believe you anymore.”
It was a vision that had been nourished within those parallel cultures.”[1]
Moving from the Temple to the Tent – from ‘come to us’
mission to ‘going and being’ mission – requires a parallel culture. So does
moving our discipleship from the classroom to the street, from theory to the
whole of life. The forces of ‘Temple’ and ‘Classroom’ are powerful in the
Church. They have held minds captive for centuries. But today they are not
working, yet they are still being repeated. Such failure in our day reminds me
of Einstein’s definition of insanity: ‘To keep doing the same thing while
expecting a different result.’
I suspect that rather than reforming our ‘Temple’ and ‘Classroom’
approaches, we need to start new parallel cultures of ‘Tent’ and ‘Street’
instead. And not only because of the pervasive power of the old ways in our
churches: we also need to do this, because of the power of the society we live
in. Vaclav Havel may have grown up under communism, but we who have grown up
under capitalism have also experienced a culture that says, “You’ll be happy if
you have enough things.” In fact, our economy would collapse without it!
No, if Jesus calls us from Temple to Tent and from Classroom
to Street, then he is calling us not simply to reformation. He is calling us to
subvert the old structures with parallel cultures. He is calling us to prepare
for revolution, in creating a new society under the reign of God, a society that
will say to the existing ways, “We don’t believe you anymore”, and demonstrate
life as word made flesh.
[1] Len Hjalmarson, ‘Afterword’, in Wikiklesia:
Volume One: Voices of the Virtual World: Participative Technology and the
Ecclesial Revolution, edited by Len Hjalmarson and John La Grou, Wikiklesia Press 2007, pp 342f
(printed edition).
Technorati Tags: missional, incarnation, EugenePeterson, JamesThwaites, FreshExpressions, WillowCreek, discipleship, cellchurch, examen, VaclavHavel, MaryJoLeddy, RomeroHouse, Einstein, LenHjalmarson, Wikiklesia, JohnLaGrou
Tomorrow I have the privilege of taking church anniversary at the main church I served in my first appointment. Such invitations can be an opportunity to share some of the big thinking and passions that are now prominent in my ministry and spirituality. I have chosen to share my ‘conversion’ to missional thinking. Here goes:
Introduction
Happy Christmas! I just thought I’d get that in early. The shops are already
wishing ‘Happy Christmas’ to your credit cards, so why not?
Seriously, what did you think when you heard that the
opening verses of John’s Gospel were to be our text? Did you not think, ‘That’s
a Christmas reading’? We hear those words at carol services and on Christmas
morning. Of course, they are wonderful words for Christmas, and especially
verse 14, which is going to frame my thoughts today:
And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have
seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.
Christmas is about the Word made flesh. But we cannot
restrict these words to Christmas. They are a missionary text. ‘The Word became flesh and lived among us’
describes the missionary strategy of Jesus. And they are relevant to us,
because they are the model for the mission to which Jesus calls us.
How so? Skip from Christmas to Easter for a moment. Move
from John chapter 1 to John 20. It’s the evening of Easter Day. The disciples
are behind locked doors out of fear. The risen Jesus appears in their midst and
says (amongst other things), ‘As the Father has sent me, so I send you’ (John
20:21). We take our model for mission, then, from the way the Father sent
Jesus. And how did he send him? ‘The Word became flesh and lived among us.’
That was how the world saw the glory of Jesus, and that is how it will see his
glory through us today.
What do I mean? Jesus moves the traditional locations of
Christian practice into new places, and he calls us to follow him on the
journey:
1. From the Temple to
the Tent
There are some lovely alternative translations of our text. Eugene Peterson, in his
paraphrase of the Bible entitled ‘The
Message’, puts it this way:
The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the
neighbourhood.
More literally, you could render it,
The Word became flesh and ‘tabernacled’ among us.
The Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us.
Do you remember the tabernacle in the Old Testament? It was
the tent, which was the portable sign of God’s presence. We are more used to a
‘temple’ notion of God’s presence – a worthy place to which people travel in
order to find God. That is how we have tended to view church buildings. We have
talked about ‘going to church’.
And it is also how we have conceived of mission. We are
looking for people to come to us. We
put on certain events, and we work to make everything attractive and
hospitable.
But I suggest to you that this is radically different from
the way Jesus operated. Although he attended the synagogue, he never invited
anyone to go there. Although he said things like ‘Come to me’ and ‘Follow me’,
he did not do so from a distance. For Jesus, it was all about him going to
people rather than expecting them to come to him. Jesus pitched his tent in the
world, and moved it around, rather like the Bedouin people of the Middle East.
Jesus, who was the very presence of God – ‘we have seen his glory’ and ‘Whoever
has seen me has seen the Father’ (John 14:9) – tabernacled the presence of God in the world. People saw the glory of
God in Jesus, who based himself not in the religious building but in the world.
And how necessary such a strategy is for us today, too. Have
we not learned the painful lessons yet that people will not simply ‘come to
church’ any more? In generations when there was a common appreciation for
Christian values (even if they were sometimes honoured more in the breach), the
‘come to us’ or ‘temple’ approach to mission was understandable. But those days
are long gone.
I minister at a church where I inherited a building
refurbishment scheme when we arrived. The revitalised premises are lovely,
especially in the worship area. They are better than the previous tired design.
But on its own, it will not lead to fruitful Christian mission.
Similarly, we have been evolving a new approach to Sunday
morning. It now begins with breakfast. However, just putting on breakfast and
advertising it will not of itself attract new people. When we do make
missionary contact with people, it will be a helpful safe introduction to
Sunday worship. But it is not a missionary panacea on its own.
I’ve reached the conclusion that there has been an important
reason for this ‘come to us’ approach to mission. It means we do things on our
territory, in places where we feel comfortable. However, for most people in our
society today, church premises are not comfortable places, because they are
unfamiliar and strange. Jesus calls us instead to go to where the people we
want to reach are comfortable. To use the jargon, he wants to get us out of our
‘comfort zones’. After all, that’s what he did. He left the comfort zone of
Heaven for a stable.
For us, it means fewer obsessions with church meetings and
structures, and more commitment to involvement in the community. Debbie and I
are committed to setting up our tent in the vicinity where we live, being
involved in community organisations and events such as the pre-school or the
friends of the primary school, being known as Christians there, building
relationships with people, and socialising with them. We then want to see what
shape things take, rather than forcing people into a predetermined shape in an
existing church. The Australian church leader James
Thwaites says in his book ‘The
Church Beyond The Congregation’: if Christ is present throughout creation
and the Church is the Body of Christ, then the Church needs to be present
throughout creation.
That, essentially, is what the Fresh Expressions movement is
all about: meeting people on their own turf, and creating church around them in
their cultural environment. It’s pitching the tent, not journeying to the
Temple. It requires cutting church structures to a bare minimum: gathering for
worship and fellowship, plus no more business than is essential. It is more
honouring to Christ to do that than to wrap ourselves up in a holy huddle,
using the Church as a crutch for a social life.
2. From the Classroom
to the Street
One of the largest ‘mega-churches’ in the United States is based just outside
Chicago. It’s called Willow Creek.
Over the space of thirty years, they have pioneered ways of giving a high
priority to reaching people for Christ, based on high quality musical and
dramatic productions. With tens of thousands of people associated with their
church and its satellites, they have put in place a dazzling programme of
activities for those who become Christians. But recently,
they have made a startling
admission: their research shows that their programme and meeting-based
approach to discipling people in the ways of Christ hasn’t worked. Putting
people through church activities and programmes hasn’t made them more
Christ-like.
What they’ve done (with greater resources at their disposal
than the average church) is nevertheless similar to what the ‘ordinary’ church
says. In addition to a life of personal prayer and Bible study, join a
fellowship group, or attend a midweek meeting. And you know what? It no more
works for us than it does for Willow Creek.
Jesus, on the other hand, did his discipling, largely in the
world, where he – in the words of our text – ‘lived among us.’ He called
disciples from their professions, but not for them to become rabbis attached to
the synagogue. They learned from him rather like apprentices to a trade: they
watched him doing kingdom things; then they did some themselves under his eye;
finally, he let them loose. Most of Jesus’ teaching occurs not in the synagogue
but on the road. Many of his images are drawn from working life – hence the
preponderance of agricultural images in the parables. Jesus moved discipleship
from the classroom to the street.
I believe it means for us that all our approaches to
discipleship must have a practical edge. Learning something in our heads is not
of its own transformational; letting that knowledge travel from our heads to
our hands and our feet is.
Because of this, I have become a fan of the ‘cell church movement’. The small groups –
‘cells’ – are as much church as the Sunday gathering. However, they are also
much more than the average Bible study group. When they study Scripture, it is
with a view to asking, ‘What should be our active response to this?’ When they
pray, it is for missionary things – friends who don’t know Christ,
opportunities to demonstrate the love of God to the needy. They are not the
sort of groups who get obsessed with the maps on the inside covers of their
Bibles. They are groups that are passionately committed to working out their
faith with concrete action.
Likewise, I’ve become impressed with the way some ancient
spiritual disciplines of the Church are making a comeback. One in particular connects
growth in discipleship to our daily living. It’s called the ‘examen’. A few
brief words can only provide an over-simplified summary of it, but it boils
down to this. Twice a day, at lunchtime and before bed, you review your day,
prayerfully asking the Holy Spirit to show you where God has been at work, and the
parts of your day from which you could learn. The learning is connected to your
experience.
When Jesus moves our discipleship from the classroom from
the street, he does so, knowing we can expect to meet him by his Spirit in the
world. As the author of the Willow Creek report put it,
Our dream is really to discover what God is doing and how
he’s asking us to transform this planet.
3. From Reformation
to Revolution
If Jesus calls us to move from the temple to the tent and from the classroom to
the street, he is asking for a massive change in our thinking and practice. How
might we approach such a revolution? I recently read some background on Vaclav Havel, the playwright and first President
of the post-communist Czechoslovakia and then Czech Republic.
Havel was a dissident playwright under the communist rule,
and under that régime he was jailed. During the 70s and 80s it seemed to them
that the system would never change. It seemed literally immutable, an iron
curtain, a system that dominated every aspect of people’s lives. It wasn’t just
“out there”, it was also “within”, within their heads, within their hearts,
within their spirits. He describes the system as founded on a simple lie:
“You’ll be happy if you have enough things.”
Havel and other dissidents began to ask, “How can we live the
truth in a culture based on a fundamental lie, especially since the lie is in
our heads? How can we begin to live the truth? We desire so much more than just
things. We want something to hope in, a reason to believe.” Mary Jo Leddy of Romero House writes,
“In his country as in
other iron-curtain countries people began to set up what he called “parallel
cultures.” They had underground study groups. They studied Plato. They had
drama. They had music groups. They wrote novels and poetry, and published them
underground. He called this a “parallel culture.” It was not a counter-culture
because, he said, it was impossible for us to live totally outside the system. You
cannot live outside a culture. But you can create within it zones and spaces,
where you can become who you really are. It is in such places that one can
speak the truth, where one can gather with others who share that truth.
This went on for
years, not without difficulties, but for years. Over time, the truth became
stronger and stronger, and at a certain point people began to walk in the
streets and to say to the system, “We don’t believe you anymore.” And the
system fell. It fell, not because of the power of Western nuclear equipment,
but because the people said within the system, “We don’t believe you anymore.”
It was a vision that had been nourished within those parallel cultures.”[1]
Moving from the Temple to the Tent – from ‘come to us’
mission to ‘going and being’ mission – requires a parallel culture. So does
moving our discipleship from the classroom to the street, from theory to the
whole of life. The forces of ‘Temple’ and ‘Classroom’ are powerful in the
Church. They have held minds captive for centuries. But today they are not
working, yet they are still being repeated. Such failure in our day reminds me
of Einstein’s definition of insanity: ‘To keep doing the same thing while
expecting a different result.’
I suspect that rather than reforming our ‘Temple’ and ‘Classroom’
approaches, we need to start new parallel cultures of ‘Tent’ and ‘Street’
instead. And not only because of the pervasive power of the old ways in our
churches: we also need to do this, because of the power of the society we live
in. Vaclav Havel may have grown up under communism, but we who have grown up
under capitalism have also experienced a culture that says, “You’ll be happy if
you have enough things.” In fact, our economy would collapse without it!
No, if Jesus calls us from Temple to Tent and from Classroom
to Street, then he is calling us not simply to reformation. He is calling us to
subvert the old structures with parallel cultures. He is calling us to prepare
for revolution, in creating a new society under the reign of God, a society that
will say to the existing ways, “We don’t believe you anymore”, and demonstrate
life as word made flesh.
[1] Len Hjalmarson, ‘Afterword’, in Wikiklesia:
Volume One: Voices of the Virtual World: Participative Technology and the
Ecclesial Revolution, edited by Len Hjalmarson and John La Grou, Wikiklesia Press 2007, pp 342f
(printed edition).
Technorati Tags: missional, incarnation, EugenePeterson, JamesThwaites, FreshExpressions, WillowCreek, discipleship, cellchurch, examen, VaclavHavel, MaryJoLeddy, RomeroHouse, Einstein, LenHjalmarson, Wikiklesia, JohnLaGrou
Leith Anderson on using technology with different generations: he sees PowerPoint as a Baby Boomer tool, but finds it less useful with younger generations who crave an authenticity in preaching that is difficult to hold to when everything is tightly scripted to connect with the screen. So he invites people to text questions on the sermon (which will appear on screen). He believes this participatory use of technology is perceived as more authentic.
Technorati Tags: LeithAnderson, technology, worship, PowerPoint, babyboomers, texting
connexions » Blog Archive » Martyn Percy on Methodism and Charismatic Christianity
Fascinating partial book review from Richard Hall. As I comment on his post, this is a book I have shortlisted for reading during a sabbatical. Here is Richard’s summary of Martyn Percy on Methodism:
Connoisseurs of Connexions will be particularly challenged by
Percy’s nine-page case study of Methodism, which, beginning as a
radical intra-church movement combining missionary zeal with passionate
social concern, has become “mired within the process of
bureaucratization and routinization” (p. 128). “If any evidence of this
were needed,” Percy continues, “one need only turn to the Millennium
edition of The Constitution, Practice and Discipline of the Methodist Church. As Angela Shier-Jones notes:‘Pythagoras’ theorem cane be stated in 24 words. The Lord’s Prayer
in traditional English form has only 70 words… the Ten Commandments can
be listed using 179 words… [but] The Constitution, Practice and Discipline of the Methodist Church requires no less than 225,966 words – to tell us what?’”Observing that “Methodism has experienced a relatively recent
collapse in its theological confidence” (p. 130) – a crisis he relates,
in part, to the “mixed fortune” of contemporary hymnody and the decline
of “the Methodist monopoly of ’singing theology’” (p. 130) – Percy
suggests that, returning to its roots, it may be as “a movement rather than a church” that “the spirit of Methodism” (p. 131) might best be conveyed in the future.
Some of this is precisely the kind of point I have been trying to make lately. Methodism did begin as ‘an intra-church movement’. We never have built a proper ecclesiology (exactly one of Percy’s later criticisms of charismatic Christianity). We have translated an intra-church movement into a church, and got ourselves roundly confused. So often I hear it from Christians outside Methodism that they find our ecclesiological approach baffling, isn’t it time we listened?
Having said that, can Percy be serious if he associates Methodism’s loss of theological confidence with the use of contemporary hymnody? He is right about Methodists singing their theology, but how many who do so are devoted in mind and soul to the theology Wesley wrote? It had long become a cultural thing – an association with styles of poetry and music. Contemporary hymnody (and yes, much of it is theologically superficial) rode in on the back of that, often appealing to those who were culturally alienated by the dense lyricism of Wesley and the nineteenth-century hymns with SATB music in an age of solo vocals.
The bureaucratisation is bang on, though. Ordained friends from other denominations who have worked ecumenically with Methodists all attest to the fact that we are the most bureaucratic denomination (he says, in the middle of the annual October count). We suffer death by a thousand cuts of Standing Orders. About fifteen years ago, when Ronald Hoar was President of the Conference, he called for a simplification of our structures. Some of that has happened, but nothing like enough. I know I shall sit with my copy of CPD before me at a Church Council tomorrow night. It takes on more importance than Scripture. No wonder I – like thousands of others – have been attracted to the cell church movement, which has certain similarities with the Wesleyan version of the Evangelical Revival.
Yes, the cell church movement has recaptured something of the spirit of what Percy calls the Methodist movement. Might we be more profitable seeking a revival of the movement more than of the denomination?
Technorati Tags: Methodism, RichardHall, MartynPercy, CPD, cellchurch, RonaldHoar, hymnody
Big Circumstance 