| Today our theme is 'No one alone ... in his or her ministry'. |
| We are reflecting on this in the light of the proposals in the Green Paper, 'Changing Lives, Changing Churches, Changing Communities'. In our time together I hope that we will 'think different' about what it means to be the people of God today; what it means to be the church; and what it means in ministry. |
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My two talks will hopefully provide something of a theological under girding to our concerns and questions about the report. You might say that I am coming at the subject obliquely. Perhaps I can remind you that 'obliquity is the idea that goals are often best achieved when pursued indirectly', and that 'obliquity is characteristic of systems that are complex, imperfectly understood, and change their nature as we engage with them'. [1]
I want to begin by addressing three questions:
- What kind of God do we worship?
- What kind of world do we live in?
- What kind of church is needed?
In addressing the third question, a further question presents itself:
- What models of ministry are required?
In this opening session we shall look at the first three questions, and the fourth in the second part of this morning.
What kind of God do we worship?
In Christian tradition the God we worship is known through creation, redemption and transformation. God is revealed as persons, Creator, Redeemer, Life Giver. God is both known and unknown; revealed and mystery, a constant source of wonder and worship. This community of persons we know as the Trinity, mutually interdependent, each with their vocation contributing to the whole.
As we look at the future of the church, the role model of the Trinity helps us. The Trinity reveals God in community. Individualism is sublimated to the total vocation of the Godhead, creating, redeeming, life giving. The idea of what we might term ‘mutual subordination’ in the Godhead to the vocation or ministry of the Other is essential in understanding new models of ministry in the church.
The vocation of the Trinity however, is not divided. There is no competition for ministry. Thus when Graham Kendrick observes ‘hands that flung stars into space, to cruel nails surrendered’, he is reflecting that though we see the role of God as Father, and Creator, the vocation for creating remains within the totality of the Godhead. The Redeemer is as much involved in creating as the Creator, because they are one and the same.
I am not a great one for statistics but a recent BBC survey concluded that 70% of the population believed in God (in 1968 it was 90%). In 1970 some 9.3 million people belonged to Trinitarian churches while in 1990 only 6.6 million declared that affiliation. At first sight this might not seem all that significant. However, I wonder whether or not the decline in Trinitarian religion is not in some way related to the rise of individualism in society and in religious expression. For too many the Godhead has been reduced to ‘Jesus’ and people’s personal relationship, or otherwise, with him.
The decline in our understanding of the Trinity, whereby we worship God as revealed persons, Creator, Redeemer, Life Giver is, I believe, in direct proportion to both the rise of individualism and our need to domesticate and to seek to control God. Worshipping God as Trinity allows God to be known and unknown, revealed and yet mystery, a continuing source of wonder and worship. The Trinity reveals God in community.
What kind of world do we live in?
Fear, injustice, xenophobia, war, violence, cruelty, hatred, betrayal, mistrust and much else besides mark the world we live in. It also bears witness from time to time to moments of great courage, faith, beauty and hope in the activity of individuals, the birth of movements and the revelation of goodness. It is this world for which Jesus both lived and died.
It is this world too, that we must seek to understand in order that we can bear witness to it. As Mother Mary Clare once observed, ‘We must accept the fact that this is an age in which the cloth is being unwoven. It is therefore no good trying to patch. We must rather, set up the loom on which coming generations may weave the new cloth according to the patterns God provides’.
It is this world to which Jesus came to found his kingdom. It is this world that he calls to repentance. During my Changing Lives tour I quoted from Rudy Wiebe’s interpretation of the ‘kingdom’ as the ‘Jesus society’. I concluded with this remark that ‘In the Jesus society you repent not by feeling bad, but by thinking different’.
There is an ancient proverb that says ‘If there are only two alternatives choose the third’. There is little doubt that the vocabulary of the Christian faith suffers from misunderstanding at almost every turn. But as Douglas John Hall has observed, ‘No one term is as badly understood in both church and society as the little word sin’. Conservatives tend to focus on personal morality, while being ambivalent about structural sin. To some extent this leads to such a faith prospering in a society that focuses upon the individualism of 21st century capitalism.
Liberals tend to be embarrassed by the language of sin, although the optimistic secular myth of Progress has long since been discredited. Some, on the margins, such as Christian realists, liberationists, or adherents of the social gospel, have tried to re-assert the public and political character of sin. They have largely failed, not least because conservatives and liberals within a mainstream church prefer to stay on the side of the prevailing political, social and economic culture, because that enables the best of both worlds.
Western Christians have all the consumables that the rest of the world has; they place their trust in the same weapons and economic systems; and have many of the same phobias and prejudices. But the cherry on the cake that makes it alright is Jesus, though he rarely, if ever, is allowed to challenge a way of life that is out of control. We like the rest of our addicted world, are captive to illusions, excesses and appetites – and we can no longer imagine the world differently.
So, ‘if there are only two alternatives’, how do we choose the third? When we return to the person of Jesus of Nazareth we find him not exhorting people to become better people, but rather, ‘To change historical direction’ as Ched Myers has put it.[2] ‘The synoptic gospels portray Jesus of Nazareth as taking up this very message after the authorities had silenced the Baptist (Mark 1.14f)’.
At the heart of Jesus’ discourse on repentance lies the call for a radical discontinuity with the social, economic and political order – ‘the way things are’. Jesus by focussing his healing and exorcising mission on the ‘not entitled’, the ‘not needed’, within the system, exposed the reliance of the religious and political leaders of his time upon the status quo. Simply put ensuring continuity for the haves by reliance on the system that keeps it that way.
In Michael Moore’s Farenheit 9-11 there is a scene where George Bush is making an after dinner speech. He begins, ‘In my world there are two sorts of people: the haves, and the have mores. Some people call you the elite’, he says looking over his wealthy and influential guests; and concludes, ‘but I call you my base’. From Caesar Augustus, or Herod the Great to George Bush – it was ever thus – the wealthy and influential have been the base of the powerful.
Jesus’ view of repentance was discontinuity with the status quo. The power of nineteenth century evangelicalism lay in the belief of a radical conversion that changed not only individuals, but structures, powers and principalities. Conversion today has largely been spiritualised by evangelicals and wholly ignored by liberals. If we are to have anything to be or say to our times, it must be to find the ‘third’ alternative.
It all depends on how we look on sin. Traditionally sin is described as ‘stain’ or ‘crime’. These descriptions may have their place, but possibly there are others that open up the possibility of understanding our life and times differently. I have already hinted that most of us Western Christians are part of an addicted society. One writer, Gerald May – Addiction and Grace – sees addiction as ‘universal in the human experience and thus as a primary metaphor for sin and alienation’.
Whatever Romans 1 says about sexual immorality or not, Paul’s admonition to Jews who suspect him of being too friendly with the Gentiles; and then to Gentiles who need to be told they are not superior to Jews; is summed up telling them all that they are in the same need of Christ’s redemption because they are all capable, indeed are, victims of distorted desire, and are in no position to judge others. Yet judging others is the besetting sin of contemporary Christianity and distracts us from our primary vocation.
By seeing sin as ‘addiction’ or ‘disease’ we can begin to think differently about the world in which we live, and the plight of those who dwell in it. By seeing sin as a dysfunctional way of life, rather than simply a behavioural aberration we can begin to understand that the wages of addiction is death: addiction not only to those repetitive patterns that are own ‘original sin’; but addiction to the ‘way of life’ that depends for its existence on enslavement to social, economic and political order that seeks continuity for the ‘entitled’ rather than justice for all God’s people.
‘Just as those addicted to food or drink learn that they will never be totally converted from their addiction and must, therefore, “Take one day at a time”, so Jesus in Matthew urges the same on the anxious disciples. The God who gives daily bread will meet all basic needs if people are faithful and just.[3]
The addict who relies upon drink, gambling or drugs is writ large in a society that is addicted to consumerism, militarism and classism in the political world, and sexism and clericalism in our churches. At the heart of both personal and societal recovery lie three elements of spirituality: conversion, contemplation and community.
What kind of church is needed?
Jesus came to found a kingdom not to build a church. He gathered a community to model the kingdom. Whatever the church is to be, it is not a waiting room waiting for the kingdom to come, but a building site for building it and watching it grow.[4] We have to re-imagine Sunday services not as a venue for religious performances, in which most attendees are essentially spectators, but as a committed community of recovering addicts in which each member is what Augusto Boal calls a “spectator” struggling for sobriety.
As we approach the end of this first session, and begin to contemplate coffee, and possibly the second question for our reflection: What models of ministry are required? – let us ask ourselves: to what are we addicted as ministers in the church? How are we addicted to the models that have shaped us? How is that addiction disabling the building of God’s kingdom?
At the heart of any recovery programme is the principle of conversion; the removal from one form of control or authority to another. Conversion only becomes possible when people see more value in that to which they are invited, than that they already possess. Only then, to use Jesus’ language in the parable of the pearl, will they sell in order to buy. The rich man did not perceive what Jesus offered as being better. He would have had to come under a power or influence greater than that to which he was given over.
In any programme to overcome addiction, there is the need for contemplation. This is a recognition of our own experience of pain, oppression, culpability and responsibility. Addicts by and large choose the path to change. It is the point where they refuse to accept powerlessness as the only option, and choose to believe that by a day by day, one step at a time process they can respond to that inner voice that bids them change.
For we Christians only prayerful contemplation of our powerlessness, and our decision under God to both change and be changed, bearing the fruits of God’s saving justice, can we ‘move mountains’. Matthew bid his household churches to ‘Hunger and thirst for God’s order in their lives’ (5.6.) and to seek the experience of God’s reign and order in their lives.(6.32) Then their faith would be deepened. Contemplation begins with seeking the reality of God’s reign and God’s order in one’s life. It is expressed in resting that reign alone’.(11.25-30)[5]
And so we return to where we began: ‘No one alone’ – or community. We who are called to priesthood do not have a vocation significantly different from that given to all who are baptised. The vocation of the baptised is to discover how to be fully human. It is the discovery that we are made for immortality, and it is discerning how to live with that profound truth.
Our vocation in ordination is being set apart to serve. It is to be placed under a discipline of daily living with the service of others at its heart. It is a ministry of enabling: enabling people to become fully human, fully alive; enabling people to recognise the immortality of all, and thus their value and worth to God and to one another. This enabling takes place not in some neat and tidy ghetto of like minded, but among the dispossessed, the not needed, the off scourings of humanity, from whom our eyes turn in horror when we see them naked, hungry, addicted, imprisoned, dehumanised by what the systems of the world can do. The ministry of enabling, empowers through the Word and sacrament appropriately shared in liturgies and forms that connect with the liteourgia – the work of the people.
St Paul spoke of priesthood as ‘offering the Gentiles to God as an acceptable sacrifice consecrated by the Holy Spirit’. (Romans 15.16) to the Jewish Christians such a vocation bordered on the impossible. Who are we being asked to bring? To answer that is the task of each community represented here. What is certain is that no one is excluded and we cannot act alone. Our vocation is to serve the community of the baptised, by leading them to their full potential. We do this knowing that we have not achieved our own, and that like them we too are on a journey. We need them as much as they need us.
Twenty years ago Jim Wallis wrote: ‘The greatest need of our time is not simply for the preaching of the gospel, nor for service on the part of justice, nor for the experience of the Spirit’s gifts, nor even prophecy the challenging of the king. The greatest need of our time is koinonia, the call simply to be the church – to love one another for the sake of the world. The creation of living, breathing, loving communities of faith at the local church level is the foundation of all answers’. It is that vision that has inspired me, one that reveals a God who reproduces a people who have been called out of the world, called into relationship with each other, and then sent back into the world. For us to survive as a church we need to create a base that is strong enough for us to survive as Christians and to empower us to be actively engaged in the world. Only as we do this, will we find resources to deal with our addictions, and to allow ourselves to be open to the liberating power of God’s Spirit.
Bishop Peter
Wells - September 2004
FOOTNOTES
[1] FT Magazine January 17 2004 ‘Obliquity’ John Kay
[2] Ched Myers 'Repentance as Recovery –What the church can learn from the Twelve Steps' Living Pulpit July –September 2004 pp28-31.
[3] Michael J.Crosby House of Disciples Orbis 1988.
[4] This is a quote from Ched Myers article, and from a conversation we held on 22 August 2004. I am grateful for Ched’s help and input into my thinking.
[5] Crosby op cit pp256-259 |
