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Thinking others' thoughts after them (originally posted June 2007)
Leafing through Malcolm Grundy's recent book What's New in Church Leadership? Creative Responses to the Changing Pattern of Church Life (The Canterbury Press 2007), I came across a reference to a book I hadn't consulted for very many years. John A.T.Robinson's On Being the Church in the World was published by SCM Press in 1960 and contains a chapter, 'The House Church and the Parish Church', based on an address Robinson originally gave to Wells Theological College as long ago as 1949. In it Robinson reflects on the references in St Paul's letters to 'the church in the house' of various named Christians. He argues for the need, in a changing society, for the church to rediscover, alongside the structures of diocese and parish, the necessity of the small 'cell group' level of church life, typically meeting in someone's home, though also recognizing that 'in these days when communities are often not geographical at all', the meeting place 'may be outside the parish structure altogether, for instance in an office or factory' (On Being the Church in the World, page 85). While it is obvious that this tells us that Fresh Expressions is not a new idea, I was particularly struck by what Robinson goes on to say about the distinctiveness of this 'way of being church', as we might put it today.
He makes three points. First, 'when there is no church to go to, one can only be the Church. At this level there is a new constraint both towards mission and towards deeprer involvement with one's neighbour in Christ. One cannot ignore either the house next door...or the Christian next to one (the parlour is very different from the pew)' (p.93). Allowing for the language of the time, and of Robinson's own background ('parlour'), this impressed on me how the best of the groups we form in parishes through a Local Ministry Scheme work to generate a fresh commitment to mission. In this way Local Ministry is not just a 'maintenance movement'. Robinson goes on to remark that in this small group environment, 'the challenge of disunity comes wth fresh force'. Working out their faith and discipleship in close proximity and in an informal setting, people have to work through their differences, and difference can become a positive benefit rather than a source of entrenchment and stalemate.
Second, he says that the 'house church' brings together the secular and the sacred and contributes to a more rounded understanding of Christian holiness. In the small group environment it becomes more natural to draw the links between worship and work, the spiritual and the practical, the world of 'religion' and everyday life ('from the sanctuary to the scullery', as he puts it, again in the quaint-sounding idiom of the day).
Third- and most interestingly- he argues that this dimension of church life 'shows a new type of ministry to be a necessary requirement of the normal (parochial) form of the Church's mission and not merely of evangelistic adventures that might (very wrongly) be dismissed as sidelines or stunts. It shows the real need to be not mere assistants at the parish church...but breakers of bread, priests, of indigenous churches' (pp.94-5). The jibe about 'evangelistic adventures' may seem unfair, but I think he has a point: we should not fall into the trap of seeing 'new ways of doing things' only as rather outlandish experiments out on the margins, that can therefore be safely ignored while the rest of us get on with doing things the traditional way! Fresh models of church life and patterns of ministry belong within the mainstream heart of the reality of the church.
And Robinson's vision should also be a salutary reminder to us all not to be wedded to novelty. Everything that Local Ministry is about, everything that Fresh Expressions is about, is not good because it is 'new'. Almost every profitable advance in mission and ministry is not novel at all, but a retrieval of lost or hidden truths about the Church, which past thinkers and writers have drawn to our attention. We should think more of the wisdom of the prophets and sages who have gone before us!
Leafing through Malcolm Grundy's recent book What's New in Church Leadership? Creative Responses to the Changing Pattern of Church Life (The Canterbury Press 2007), I came across a reference to a book I hadn't consulted for very many years. John A.T.Robinson's On Being the Church in the World was published by SCM Press in 1960 and contains a chapter, 'The House Church and the Parish Church', based on an address Robinson originally gave to Wells Theological College as long ago as 1949. In it Robinson reflects on the references in St Paul's letters to 'the church in the house' of various named Christians. He argues for the need, in a changing society, for the church to rediscover, alongside the structures of diocese and parish, the necessity of the small 'cell group' level of church life, typically meeting in someone's home, though also recognizing that 'in these days when communities are often not geographical at all', the meeting place 'may be outside the parish structure altogether, for instance in an office or factory' (On Being the Church in the World, page 85). While it is obvious that this tells us that Fresh Expressions is not a new idea, I was particularly struck by what Robinson goes on to say about the distinctiveness of this 'way of being church', as we might put it today.
He makes three points. First, 'when there is no church to go to, one can only be the Church. At this level there is a new constraint both towards mission and towards deeprer involvement with one's neighbour in Christ. One cannot ignore either the house next door...or the Christian next to one (the parlour is very different from the pew)' (p.93). Allowing for the language of the time, and of Robinson's own background ('parlour'), this impressed on me how the best of the groups we form in parishes through a Local Ministry Scheme work to generate a fresh commitment to mission. In this way Local Ministry is not just a 'maintenance movement'. Robinson goes on to remark that in this small group environment, 'the challenge of disunity comes wth fresh force'. Working out their faith and discipleship in close proximity and in an informal setting, people have to work through their differences, and difference can become a positive benefit rather than a source of entrenchment and stalemate.
Second, he says that the 'house church' brings together the secular and the sacred and contributes to a more rounded understanding of Christian holiness. In the small group environment it becomes more natural to draw the links between worship and work, the spiritual and the practical, the world of 'religion' and everyday life ('from the sanctuary to the scullery', as he puts it, again in the quaint-sounding idiom of the day).
Third- and most interestingly- he argues that this dimension of church life 'shows a new type of ministry to be a necessary requirement of the normal (parochial) form of the Church's mission and not merely of evangelistic adventures that might (very wrongly) be dismissed as sidelines or stunts. It shows the real need to be not mere assistants at the parish church...but breakers of bread, priests, of indigenous churches' (pp.94-5). The jibe about 'evangelistic adventures' may seem unfair, but I think he has a point: we should not fall into the trap of seeing 'new ways of doing things' only as rather outlandish experiments out on the margins, that can therefore be safely ignored while the rest of us get on with doing things the traditional way! Fresh models of church life and patterns of ministry belong within the mainstream heart of the reality of the church.
And Robinson's vision should also be a salutary reminder to us all not to be wedded to novelty. Everything that Local Ministry is about, everything that Fresh Expressions is about, is not good because it is 'new'. Almost every profitable advance in mission and ministry is not novel at all, but a retrieval of lost or hidden truths about the Church, which past thinkers and writers have drawn to our attention. We should think more of the wisdom of the prophets and sages who have gone before us!
Thinking about belief and dogma
Some time ago I attended a retreat for men. For most participants, there was a strong sense of relief at having the opportunity to meet within a context that opened up avenues for Christian believing and belonging they felt the institutional churches somehow did not offer them. For these men, a common feature was the quest to rediscover a faith that is personally authentic, but has somehow been hidden under dogma and tradition. For one person, ‘some explicitly Christian stuff creeping into the event’ was a cause of disappointment. He had moved to the fringes of the Christian tradition and no longer believed that organised Christianity in the West had any future. Another had sought inspiration from the Hindu Scriptures and prayers. Another had come to find that only the prayer of silent stillness had meaning, leaving a question mark over the concept of personal petitionary and intercessory prayer. There were clear signs of a weariness with formulaic and dogmatic religion and a longing for a form of faith that somehow ‘gets under the skin’ of formal ecclesiastical ways of talking about God. The conductor of the retreat offered a theology of the presence of God in everyone and everything, the belief in sacredness of the natural and the ordinary, the commitment to genuine incarnation, seeking divine action, presence and encounter through the human. Thus when we forgive someone, that is God’s forgiveness for that person; when we touch someone to comfort them, that is God’s healing touch; when we say to someone that we love them, that is a transmission to them of God’s love. It is all sacramental.
Some time ago I attended a retreat for men. For most participants, there was a strong sense of relief at having the opportunity to meet within a context that opened up avenues for Christian believing and belonging they felt the institutional churches somehow did not offer them. For these men, a common feature was the quest to rediscover a faith that is personally authentic, but has somehow been hidden under dogma and tradition. For one person, ‘some explicitly Christian stuff creeping into the event’ was a cause of disappointment. He had moved to the fringes of the Christian tradition and no longer believed that organised Christianity in the West had any future. Another had sought inspiration from the Hindu Scriptures and prayers. Another had come to find that only the prayer of silent stillness had meaning, leaving a question mark over the concept of personal petitionary and intercessory prayer. There were clear signs of a weariness with formulaic and dogmatic religion and a longing for a form of faith that somehow ‘gets under the skin’ of formal ecclesiastical ways of talking about God. The conductor of the retreat offered a theology of the presence of God in everyone and everything, the belief in sacredness of the natural and the ordinary, the commitment to genuine incarnation, seeking divine action, presence and encounter through the human. Thus when we forgive someone, that is God’s forgiveness for that person; when we touch someone to comfort them, that is God’s healing touch; when we say to someone that we love them, that is a transmission to them of God’s love. It is all sacramental.
Fresh Expressions of Church :: Fresh Expressions of Believing?
originally posted September 2007
Today's question for pondering: will Fresh Expressions of Church necessitate Fresh Expressions of Belief as well? Much of the literature on the subject supposes not: church can be comprehensively overhauled while what is believed by church people can remain reassuringly orthodox. I have long wondered whether this line can be held.
As a starter, I reproduce here some unpublished reflections I put on paper a few years ago- and now I feel more than ever it is time to come back to this question.
This essay asks how the Christian faith might come alive again for people today in the post-Christendom, post-modern West. It is a plea for a different kind of church, a more open theology, and a fresh approach to evangelism. I long to see a church that is able to combine the warm-heartedness and passionate commitment long associated with the evangelical tradition with the generous openness of mind and the critical questioning characteristic of the best academic theology. I would delight in a church confident enough in the dynamic mystery of God in everyday experience to be less defensive about the details of dogma. I yearn for a church ready to take the risk of embracing the mess and the muddle of contemporary spiritual longings, rather than being eager to confront these with ‘the truth’ and put people straight. I want a church that gladly extends the extravagant hospitality of God to all-comers and is less preoccupied with the rational management of its own institutional arrangements. And I have a vision of local church communities where people celebrate the joy of the voyage of discovery that is the Christian life, instead of being the object of fears that too much questioning will upset or undermine their faith.
All these longings contribute to the groundwork of an approach to evangelism, an outreach to contemporary society with the substance and heart and guts of Christian faith, different from that which currently prevails. In these pages I will argue that the present strategies of the churches are short-sighted and overly narrow in focus. They rely upon a recipe of ‘ecclesial reconstruction’ plus ‘doctrinal conservation’ which is superficially attractive. By ‘ecclesial reconstruction’ I mean such things as changing patterns of ministry, new models of church life and ‘ways of being church’, experimental liturgies and imaginative methods of mission and outreach. By ‘doctrinal conservation’ I mean the assumption that all these initiatives can be undergirded by a more or less unquestioning acceptance of the orthodox content of the Christian faith. This approach may well be fruitful to an extent in making churches more welcoming and culturally accessible places, and in producing some genuine and lasting conversions to Christian faith. But in the longer run it will only serve to bolster the rather sectarian and voluntaristic understanding of the church and of active Christianity that is already widespread, namely that Christian believing and belonging are a somewhat esoteric minority option for those who are into that kind of thing.
So there it is. I'll add more as I ponder it further...
originally posted September 2007
Today's question for pondering: will Fresh Expressions of Church necessitate Fresh Expressions of Belief as well? Much of the literature on the subject supposes not: church can be comprehensively overhauled while what is believed by church people can remain reassuringly orthodox. I have long wondered whether this line can be held.
As a starter, I reproduce here some unpublished reflections I put on paper a few years ago- and now I feel more than ever it is time to come back to this question.
This essay asks how the Christian faith might come alive again for people today in the post-Christendom, post-modern West. It is a plea for a different kind of church, a more open theology, and a fresh approach to evangelism. I long to see a church that is able to combine the warm-heartedness and passionate commitment long associated with the evangelical tradition with the generous openness of mind and the critical questioning characteristic of the best academic theology. I would delight in a church confident enough in the dynamic mystery of God in everyday experience to be less defensive about the details of dogma. I yearn for a church ready to take the risk of embracing the mess and the muddle of contemporary spiritual longings, rather than being eager to confront these with ‘the truth’ and put people straight. I want a church that gladly extends the extravagant hospitality of God to all-comers and is less preoccupied with the rational management of its own institutional arrangements. And I have a vision of local church communities where people celebrate the joy of the voyage of discovery that is the Christian life, instead of being the object of fears that too much questioning will upset or undermine their faith.
All these longings contribute to the groundwork of an approach to evangelism, an outreach to contemporary society with the substance and heart and guts of Christian faith, different from that which currently prevails. In these pages I will argue that the present strategies of the churches are short-sighted and overly narrow in focus. They rely upon a recipe of ‘ecclesial reconstruction’ plus ‘doctrinal conservation’ which is superficially attractive. By ‘ecclesial reconstruction’ I mean such things as changing patterns of ministry, new models of church life and ‘ways of being church’, experimental liturgies and imaginative methods of mission and outreach. By ‘doctrinal conservation’ I mean the assumption that all these initiatives can be undergirded by a more or less unquestioning acceptance of the orthodox content of the Christian faith. This approach may well be fruitful to an extent in making churches more welcoming and culturally accessible places, and in producing some genuine and lasting conversions to Christian faith. But in the longer run it will only serve to bolster the rather sectarian and voluntaristic understanding of the church and of active Christianity that is already widespread, namely that Christian believing and belonging are a somewhat esoteric minority option for those who are into that kind of thing.
So there it is. I'll add more as I ponder it further...
Originally posted November 2007
Leadership is a subject that refuses to go away. Some time ago I listened to a broadcast on Radio 4 in the In Business series introduced by Peter Day. I was interested to hear the observations of several business leaders on how models of leadership are changing in their secular field. Below are three examples.
If we got rid of hierarchy...I put that to a group of curates on a training course recently, just as a topic to ponder. Is hierarchy inevitable? Are there other ways of structuring leadership in the church so that Fairclough's everyone is potentially a leader is realised?
Senge and Semmler both refer to control. Hierarchies are a deceptively orderly way of handling leadership: they create the illusion of a system under control. Indeed for the Church, control of boundaries- of right belief and practice in line with inherited tradition- has often been thought to be of the essence of the leadership role. Bur Semmler says of being in control, we never were. Because the Church is a communion of persons in a particular context, leadership is always going to be about the handling of complexity: the complexities of different personalities, expectations, assumptions and attitudes; the complexities of changing environments, constraints and influences. And so there is this illusion of control. Semmler's insight seems very apt here: if we are (or imagine we are) in control, we can't respond to the demands of change. And we can't tap the intelligence and creativity and imagination and persistence and commitment of people...
Isn't 'not being in control' something to do with the Spirit who blows where s/he wills, and leadership something to do with enabling discernment, right judgment and appropriate vision, in line with what the Spirit is saying to the churches? And for leadership to do this requires sustained engagement with the complexity of persons and contexts.
Leadership is a subject that refuses to go away. Some time ago I listened to a broadcast on Radio 4 in the In Business series introduced by Peter Day. I was interested to hear the observations of several business leaders on how models of leadership are changing in their secular field. Below are three examples.
If we got rid of hierarchy...I put that to a group of curates on a training course recently, just as a topic to ponder. Is hierarchy inevitable? Are there other ways of structuring leadership in the church so that Fairclough's everyone is potentially a leader is realised?
Senge and Semmler both refer to control. Hierarchies are a deceptively orderly way of handling leadership: they create the illusion of a system under control. Indeed for the Church, control of boundaries- of right belief and practice in line with inherited tradition- has often been thought to be of the essence of the leadership role. Bur Semmler says of being in control, we never were. Because the Church is a communion of persons in a particular context, leadership is always going to be about the handling of complexity: the complexities of different personalities, expectations, assumptions and attitudes; the complexities of changing environments, constraints and influences. And so there is this illusion of control. Semmler's insight seems very apt here: if we are (or imagine we are) in control, we can't respond to the demands of change. And we can't tap the intelligence and creativity and imagination and persistence and commitment of people...
Isn't 'not being in control' something to do with the Spirit who blows where s/he wills, and leadership something to do with enabling discernment, right judgment and appropriate vision, in line with what the Spirit is saying to the churches? And for leadership to do this requires sustained engagement with the complexity of persons and contexts.
I do not believe that leadership comes only from the top. It comes from everywhere, potentially, and it’s hierarchy that stops it coming from everywhere. If we got rid of hierarchy, we would not get rid of leadership. Everyone is potentially a leader- people do rise to the occasion. They do produce solutions to problems, they produce new ideas, and they persuade others to follow.
Gerard Fairclough, former Chief Executive of Shell, author of ‘Three Ways of Getting Things Done’.
Gerard Fairclough, former Chief Executive of Shell, author of ‘Three Ways of Getting Things Done’.
The fundamental rule of all major institutions through the industrial era has been to control, not to enable. I mean at some level it seems rather stupidly obvious, if you don’t tap the intelligence and creativity and imagination and persistence and commitment of your people, how can you possible be imagining that your organisation is functioning anywhere above 10-20% of its capability?’
Peter Senge, U.S. management guru and author of ‘The Fifth Discipline: the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization’.
Peter Senge, U.S. management guru and author of ‘The Fifth Discipline: the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization’.
Let’s set up an organization that will survive because people will find their own solutions, whatever they are- and that’s very scary for people in general, because everyone wants to feel that they’re in control, and we never were. But you’re not able to define your mission, your values, your credo, your basic core business, because if you do that, you’re in control, and if you’re in control, you don’t change as fast as you need to.
Ricardo Semmler, Brazilian founder of Semko engineering group, who abolished the ‘command and control hierarchy’ in his firm in the 1990s.
Ricardo Semmler, Brazilian founder of Semko engineering group, who abolished the ‘command and control hierarchy’ in his firm in the 1990s.
First posted in JANUARY 2008
Learning and Growing in the Church: a reflection
Some time ago in my capacity as diocesan officer responsible for Lay Education and Training I put on a new five-session course entitled Believing Behaving Belonging. The course offered some fresh avenues of approach to the familiar contents of Christian faith: believing in God, the historical Jesus, the authority of the Bible, Christian lifestyle, the nature of the Church. People were fairly gently challenged to ‘think outside the box’: to try to get under the skin of all-too-familiar Christian beliefs from the point of view of how they might look to people who do not come to them with all the baggage of an inherited church background. At the end of the course, I was surprised to discover that the evaluation sheets returned by the participants (a group of twenty or so people from several church congregations, mostly from large rural / suburban villages) showed an unusual spread of responses. The form invites people to respond along a six-point scale from ‘poor’ to ‘excellent’. In this case, every single response was at either point 3 (fair) or point 6 (excellent). I had never before had such a polarised feedback. Fifty per cent of participants found the course liberating and refreshing, speaking to their condition and their questioning. The other half felt uncomfortable; this course was not what they had expected, they feared that being encouraged to question cherished and long-held positions was dangerous. And these two positions were held with equal passion. Christian Education in the churches today must facilitate understanding; we need to hear each other and acknowledge why we feel as we do.
Within the educational dimension of the church’s life, the expectation of deference to experts on the part of the untutored has been traditionally as strong as anywhere. To this day, despite the widespread presence of house groups and the popularity of study courses in Christian basics such as Alpha and Emmaus (which of course themselves employ contrasting educational models), it is still not uncommon to find two things. In some parishes, people continue to say ‘we do not like “groups” - we don’t want to have to say anything - we’d rather come to a service or meeting and just listen’. In others, groups do exist but on closer examination turn out to consist mainly of a monologue of input from a group leader who possesses ‘the knowledge’. In this way the inherited model of the educative dimension of church life has profoundly shaped people’s expectations and fears in this area.
The small group as the prime locus of adult Christian education in the local church is now more or less universally affirmed. The effectiveness of this activity for developing mature faith and discipleship, however, depends on the recognition of a number of key principles:
· spiritual and Christian growth and development is a matter of life-long learning
· such learning is not individualistic but takes place within the corporate exchanges of church life as fellowship and relationships are built up and the work of discipleship is shared
· the learning process is not one of the top-down delivery of information but consists of reflection upon experience in the light of the shared story (tradition), and vice versa
· the concept of truth modelled by such an educational process is neither hierarchical nor already fully known, but democratic and eschatological: that is, fresh learning wells up from God’s people rather than only cascading down from the expert, and the full disclosure of God’s truth always lies ahead of us, with the promised coming of the Kingdom.
It is clear from all this that in any course, the vicar- or indeed anyone else- ‘retaining control and leading all the sessions’ will militate against much growth occurring.
Learning and Growing in the Church: a reflection
Some time ago in my capacity as diocesan officer responsible for Lay Education and Training I put on a new five-session course entitled Believing Behaving Belonging. The course offered some fresh avenues of approach to the familiar contents of Christian faith: believing in God, the historical Jesus, the authority of the Bible, Christian lifestyle, the nature of the Church. People were fairly gently challenged to ‘think outside the box’: to try to get under the skin of all-too-familiar Christian beliefs from the point of view of how they might look to people who do not come to them with all the baggage of an inherited church background. At the end of the course, I was surprised to discover that the evaluation sheets returned by the participants (a group of twenty or so people from several church congregations, mostly from large rural / suburban villages) showed an unusual spread of responses. The form invites people to respond along a six-point scale from ‘poor’ to ‘excellent’. In this case, every single response was at either point 3 (fair) or point 6 (excellent). I had never before had such a polarised feedback. Fifty per cent of participants found the course liberating and refreshing, speaking to their condition and their questioning. The other half felt uncomfortable; this course was not what they had expected, they feared that being encouraged to question cherished and long-held positions was dangerous. And these two positions were held with equal passion. Christian Education in the churches today must facilitate understanding; we need to hear each other and acknowledge why we feel as we do.
Within the educational dimension of the church’s life, the expectation of deference to experts on the part of the untutored has been traditionally as strong as anywhere. To this day, despite the widespread presence of house groups and the popularity of study courses in Christian basics such as Alpha and Emmaus (which of course themselves employ contrasting educational models), it is still not uncommon to find two things. In some parishes, people continue to say ‘we do not like “groups” - we don’t want to have to say anything - we’d rather come to a service or meeting and just listen’. In others, groups do exist but on closer examination turn out to consist mainly of a monologue of input from a group leader who possesses ‘the knowledge’. In this way the inherited model of the educative dimension of church life has profoundly shaped people’s expectations and fears in this area.
The small group as the prime locus of adult Christian education in the local church is now more or less universally affirmed. The effectiveness of this activity for developing mature faith and discipleship, however, depends on the recognition of a number of key principles:
· spiritual and Christian growth and development is a matter of life-long learning
· such learning is not individualistic but takes place within the corporate exchanges of church life as fellowship and relationships are built up and the work of discipleship is shared
· the learning process is not one of the top-down delivery of information but consists of reflection upon experience in the light of the shared story (tradition), and vice versa
· the concept of truth modelled by such an educational process is neither hierarchical nor already fully known, but democratic and eschatological: that is, fresh learning wells up from God’s people rather than only cascading down from the expert, and the full disclosure of God’s truth always lies ahead of us, with the promised coming of the Kingdom.
It is clear from all this that in any course, the vicar- or indeed anyone else- ‘retaining control and leading all the sessions’ will militate against much growth occurring.
Thoughts in Holy Week 2008
I was looking at a DVD that arrived from the Fresh Expressions stable offering a taster of some of the innovative church projects springing up around the country, and I was struck by how relentlessly upbeat it all was. At one all-age worship event a young father said that he would not normally have gone to church, but having come along to this he really enjoyed it because it was fun: and he added that 'it's got to be fun, otherwise people won't come'. Of course I understand what he meant: too much that passes for worship is deadly dull or overly formal or fussy. But the notion that 'it's got to be fun' sat oddly with the readings and themes of Holy Week in my daily prayers. The Psalms- 'My heart is smitten down and withered like grass' (102:5), 'Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul?' (42:6, 13; 43:5), 'I have grown weary with crying' (69:3), and much more besides. The Lamentations ascribed to Jeremiah the Prophet: 'Is any suffering like my suffering?' (1:12), 'My eyes fail from weeping, I am in torment within' (2:11), 'I am the man who has seen affliction' (3:1)- these few words give only the merest hint of the searing quality of the poetry here. And of course, Jesus himself: 'he began to be deeply distressed and troubled. "My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death" he said to them' (Mark 14:33-4); 'Now my heart is troubled, and what shall I say? "Father, save me from this hour? No, it was for this very reason i came to this hour' (John 12:27).
The truth is that millions of people can identify with all this. Life is often precarious. Things do not work out as we should wish. Burdens and sorrows, doubts and fears and miseries, some rational and entirely understandable, others welling up as dark unnameable threats from some subterranean region of the psyche, are not an aberration from the serene human norm but part of the warp and weft of daily experience. The genius and glory of the Christian faith is that it addresses, engages with and enters profoundly into precisely these dimensions of life. In the interests of coaxing people into the church by making sure it is 'fun' we risk losing touch with exactly what Christianity uniquely has to offer, and which is starkly and movingly in the frame during Holy Week and Passiontide. That is, that life is unpredictable, that terrible things happen to people regardless of calculations about what we 'deserve', that we are not in control and things are not going to be neatly, rationally, sweetly sorted to our advantage; that there will be trials and tears, but nevertheless in the midst and at the depth of all that, there is God, holding, enduring, bearing with, agonising- transforming from within.
The mood of upbeatness and its demand for good news stories can contribute to the marginalizing of the dark events of Holy Week and Good Friday that scour the soul and confront us with the realities of pain, failure and emptiness: and yet only in making this terrifying journey do we grasp a genuine and lasting hope. It is not 'fun' and never could be, however much the pill be sweetened by Good Friday activity events and hot cross bun parties. Christianity cannot expel the Cross from the centre of its self-definition as a revelation of God: an inconvenient truth that remains to this day, as St Paul knew long ago, a stumbling block to some and an offence to others.
I was looking at a DVD that arrived from the Fresh Expressions stable offering a taster of some of the innovative church projects springing up around the country, and I was struck by how relentlessly upbeat it all was. At one all-age worship event a young father said that he would not normally have gone to church, but having come along to this he really enjoyed it because it was fun: and he added that 'it's got to be fun, otherwise people won't come'. Of course I understand what he meant: too much that passes for worship is deadly dull or overly formal or fussy. But the notion that 'it's got to be fun' sat oddly with the readings and themes of Holy Week in my daily prayers. The Psalms- 'My heart is smitten down and withered like grass' (102:5), 'Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul?' (42:6, 13; 43:5), 'I have grown weary with crying' (69:3), and much more besides. The Lamentations ascribed to Jeremiah the Prophet: 'Is any suffering like my suffering?' (1:12), 'My eyes fail from weeping, I am in torment within' (2:11), 'I am the man who has seen affliction' (3:1)- these few words give only the merest hint of the searing quality of the poetry here. And of course, Jesus himself: 'he began to be deeply distressed and troubled. "My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death" he said to them' (Mark 14:33-4); 'Now my heart is troubled, and what shall I say? "Father, save me from this hour? No, it was for this very reason i came to this hour' (John 12:27).
The truth is that millions of people can identify with all this. Life is often precarious. Things do not work out as we should wish. Burdens and sorrows, doubts and fears and miseries, some rational and entirely understandable, others welling up as dark unnameable threats from some subterranean region of the psyche, are not an aberration from the serene human norm but part of the warp and weft of daily experience. The genius and glory of the Christian faith is that it addresses, engages with and enters profoundly into precisely these dimensions of life. In the interests of coaxing people into the church by making sure it is 'fun' we risk losing touch with exactly what Christianity uniquely has to offer, and which is starkly and movingly in the frame during Holy Week and Passiontide. That is, that life is unpredictable, that terrible things happen to people regardless of calculations about what we 'deserve', that we are not in control and things are not going to be neatly, rationally, sweetly sorted to our advantage; that there will be trials and tears, but nevertheless in the midst and at the depth of all that, there is God, holding, enduring, bearing with, agonising- transforming from within.
The mood of upbeatness and its demand for good news stories can contribute to the marginalizing of the dark events of Holy Week and Good Friday that scour the soul and confront us with the realities of pain, failure and emptiness: and yet only in making this terrifying journey do we grasp a genuine and lasting hope. It is not 'fun' and never could be, however much the pill be sweetened by Good Friday activity events and hot cross bun parties. Christianity cannot expel the Cross from the centre of its self-definition as a revelation of God: an inconvenient truth that remains to this day, as St Paul knew long ago, a stumbling block to some and an offence to others.