andygoodliff

Baptists and Pioneer Ministry

Ministry is going all pioneer these days. It could be argued that ministry has always been pioneering, but now we are naming it as such and training people for it. Following the Church of England, Baptist colleges are beginning to provide pioneer ministerial formation.

Regent's Park College are beginning a partnership with CMS - Emma Maggs, a ministerial student at Regent's is pioneering the way! (here and scroll down). Anthony Clarke, Tutor in Pastoral Studies says:

Within the Baptist Union it is possible to be ordained as a pastoral minister or as an evangelist - a more pioneering role. And it is possible to prepare for both of these at Regent's. They are not two distinct courses, but rather different emphases within one whole process of formation and training. It is vital that all those being formed for ministry are able to engage with contemporary culture in creative missional ways, and so this thread runs throughout the course. And those who are responding to a call to be evangelists and to work in pioneering ways will need to develop their pastoral understanding and skills. The heart of both emphases will be the integration of character, skills and understanding, but, in addition, to core shared teaching, there will be particular opportunities to develop in both of these ways. We have an exciting and growing partnership with the Pioneer Mission Leadership Training run by CMS (Church Mission Society) in Oxford and overseen by Jonny Baker. Students following the path to be ordained evangelists will join in some of this teaching, with a variety of other people also exploring pioneer ministry, instead of some of the sessions in College. In addition, placements
will be carefully planned to enable students to explore a variety of pioneering mission opportunities.
It is possible to follow a calling to be a pastoral ministry or a pioneer evangelist on both College-based and Congregation-based patterns, and also on either a full time or part-time basis.

The modules with CMS will involve:
Year 1 - Mission spirituality; Mission in Contemporary Society
Year 2 - Pioneer Ministry; Pioneer Ministry Skills
Year 3 - Missional entrepreneurship; Worship for a missional church

Sam Sharpe Projected Launched

The Sam Sharpe Project is launched this week. It has a great website and lots of events and resources planned. The project emerged following the 2007 apology the Baptist Union made for its involvement in the slave trade. A conference was held on Sam Sharpe at Regent's Park College in 2010 and the setting up of this project is the next stage. I hope it has a big impact on our Baptist life and beyond.

You can purchase (via here) 'Samuel Sharpe and the Meaning of Freedom' by the Jamaican Baptist Horace Russell, a new occasional paper from the Centre for Baptist History and Heritage.

A BUGB / BMS marriage?

So Tony Campolo says the division between BUGB and BMS is 'ridiculous' and so the call for BUGB and BMS to join together sounds again (as it has done a number of times recently) - I've heard this most often as BMS taking over BUGB. The view being that BMS are the cooler partner and more missional and BUGB is the outdated institution. Several points to this need to be made:

1. Tony Campolo is largely ignorant of British Baptist life and mission and he said as much in his address on the Saturday night.

2. There is a commitment from March BU Council to seriously explore possibilities, but will not be reporting anytime soon.

3. Let's not forget that BUGB is only England and a bit of Wales. BMS relate to both BUS and BUW.

4. My impression is I don't think BMS want to go there, or not quickly.

5. BMS are better at presenting themselves. The BUGB communications team are good, but the BMS are better. BMS video are always better. It was BMS that allowed people to give via mobile. The BMS presentation of accounts is just excellent. Unfortunately, overall BUGB just does not inspire in the ways BMS do. 

6. The partnership between BUGB and BMS is growing, and I think a lot of this is down to the BMS General Director (who, dare I say, inspires more warmth and more depth than a previous incumbant). I believe we will see more working together in the future. I think there is a shared commitment to that. But if there is to be any kind of marriage it will be a result of greater co-habitation.

7. BUGB is an ecclesial body, it may not always do this well, but it is a Union of churches, associations and colleges. BMS is a Baptist mission agency/organisation, and while it relates to churches, it does not have an ecclesiology. Their histories are very different. So a marriage is not immediately an easy thing to do, especially if theology and history matters.

8. A BUGB /BMS marriage does not solve issues of inclusivity - especially gender, race and age. In fact, despite what others are saying, this is something I believe BUGB has begun to make real progress on and must continue. My own fear is if power shifts to Associations, this will become less of a priority - note that the two most recent Association positions of Regional Minister Team Leader have been white males (why is this?)

9. As yet I have seen none of our best theological voices give it any real credence. I recognise that to a lot of people this doesn't mean anything and is probably just another reason why its a good idea. I would want to see any kind of marriage having a theological rationale and not just a percieved pragmatic one. This needs to go beyond 'we live in one world with one mission' ... on this basis we should become Roman Catholic.  

10. It is great to see BMS get more involved in mission within the UK. More of this is needed. I suggest we let the relationship grow without forcing an end-goal, in which married life may not be happy (I watch the film Blue Valentine tonight!)

11. I remain unconvinced this is prophetic answer many seem to think it is. In fact I would suggest that at this time this may well be a side-issue to more pressing questions.

Assembly Reflections

A list of reflections on Baptist Assembly for the time that I managed to be there.

1. Nigel Wright's George Beasley-Murray Memorial Lecture was good. It's main focus was the 1971/72 christological debacle - Nigel was pretty fair to Michael Taylor (although we still wait a telling of the whole affair from his side). I think the tension between faithfulness and freedom needs teasing out more, to give one example, around women in ministry. This was the last in the series - I hear the whole series will appear as a book. Hopefully a new lecture series will emerge to take its place. We sorely need this kind of intentional opportunity to reflect as Baptists. (The Whitley is our other opporunity. I think BHS annual lecture too often misses the chance to do something that brings our Baptist past into our present day conversations.)

2. The bookshop was appalling. Another year without any chance to buy anything by a British Baptist on Baptist history or theology. This is extremely disappointing as Assembly is one of the few chances to profile some of the excellent work being done.

3. Where was the Baptist Historical Society stand in exhibition? - I was told the Assembly organisers were charging ridicious rates. This is a sorry state of affairs. We must be able to promote the important work of the Society and many other Baptist groups that feed our life. No wonder people are unsure about Baptist identity, we do as much possible to keep them from engaging with it. The video which told our history was great, but there was little else that engaged with our story.

4. I only got to hear one address over the weekend - Tony Campolo. Engagement with biblical text: fail. A few good oneliners, but it all felt off the cuff, same old 'stump' speech. 

5. Aradhna leading worship was great, up there with the jazz communion last year. This is Assembly at its best - why not give these groups the whole weekend .. probably much cheaper than Noel Robinson!

6. I know why, but thirty minutes for the BU AGM! Basically that was summing up (and that was what it was - no chance for engagement) the work of Council that meets for around 5 days a year (plus all the work that goes on to support that). We must in the future make proper space to hold Council and other bits to account.

7. I think one day conferences were on the whole fairly good (better than possibly expected). I'm not just sure this is what Assembly is for and that is the big question which sorely needs to be answered.

8. Tweeting was the new thing this year - its great and fun for the very small number who tweet - but I remain unconvinced we should take it seriously as a means of listening and deliberation. I despair if this is the future. I'm not anti this kind of media (I blog, tweet, facebook) and I think it has a limited place, but if this is the future of the church, I fear we've lost our soul to the techno-monster. I do find it disturbing how many people are constantly on their phones all the time - often it just feels rude. 

9. Unfortunately looking after my daughter meant I wasn't there for the whole of the Futures discussion, but I'm not sure I missed much.

10. Did London work? I think over all no. Should we have gone to London? I do think yes, but that decision needed to be owned by more than the Assembly Planning Team.

Beyond 400: From 1 to 40

The beyond400 project posted its final voice today and marks the end of a 15-week journey from (January to May) of exploring what it might mean to be Baptist in the future. The conversation does not end here and the website remains open for comment, but there will be no more voices, at least for a little while.

5 highlights for me have been:

Sian Murray-Williams - That's My Church

Julie Alyward - Better Together

Ian Randall - Five Things from Early Baptist Life

Glen Marshall - A theological, religious, sectarian, worldly, modest, bold and nuanced future

Stuart Murray-Williams - In Search of our Values

But many of the posts have stimulated conversation in different directions and enabled a good number of Baptists to think and question and comment on this way of being church we name Baptist.

A copy of the book with all 40 voices and selected comments will be available at the Baptist Assembly and hopefully elsewhere.

The website, in terms of new content, will take a break post-Assembly, but we are looking to see if it might continue in some way, with the aim of being a space to explore Baptist life and mission in the UK.

Happy Birthday Paul Fiddes (from Ed Kaneen)

My experience of Prof Paul S. Fiddes is primarily as Principal of Regent's Park College during my ministerial training. Although there was, rightly, immense pride in the College for all Paul's theological achievements, what has always struck me has been his humanity - his kindness, his compassion, and his grace. In his dealings with us as students, he managed to communicate an enthusiasm for theology and ministry. Or to put it another way, an inspiring enthusiasm for God and his people. The book which combines these for me is Participating in God: A Pastoral Doctrine of the Trinity (DLT, 2000) which seeks to answer so many of the questions which most of us, as ministers, shy away from, but which truly get to the heart of the relationship between God, his people, and his world. One quotation is never enough, but the following seems to me characteristic of Paul as pastor, preacher, reader, and creative theologian, who, out of the reality of life, still finds God through faith.

But I must end with the same word of caution with which I began this chapter. There can be no complete theodicy. There can be no completely rational defence of God in a world of pain. If there could be, it would justify suffering on the one hand, and destroy faith on the other. In argument we may talk of the risk that God took in creation, and the way God shares that risk in suffering. Rational theodicy is thus not divorced from practical theodicy: they are both connected with a suffering that 'befalls' God or 'happens' to God. But it still remains open to decide whether God's creative decision that set all this off is worth the cost.

In Dostoyevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov, one of the characters (Ivan) ask the question: 'Is the whole universe worth the tears of one tortured child?' He has in mind the story of a rich landowner who threw a peasant child to his hunting dogs to be torn apart because the child had thrown a stone and broken a dog's leg. Is it all worth the tears of one child, let alone the millions in Auschwitz? Even if God suffers, is it worth it? Ivan thinks not, and says that he is 'returning his entrance ticket to God with the polite observation that the price was too steep'.

The belief that God suffers with us may help us to say that the making of persons is worth all the tears. But only faith can answer the question, 'is it worth it?' after all reasonable arguments have fallen silent. (pp.186-7)

Ed Kaneen is a Baptist minister, who is currently completing a PhD in New Testament at Durham University, and will become the Tutor in the Biblical Studies at South Wales Baptist College in September 2012.

Baptist Bloggers say Happy Birthday Prof Fiddes

Bloggers from the Baptist community have joined together in bringing birthday greetings to Paul Fiddes.

Steve Holmes

Sean Winter

Steven Harmon

Simon Woodman

Andy Goodliff

Rowena Wilding

Glen Marshall

Catriona Gorton

Ed Kaneen

Louise Polhill

Neil Brighton

 

Happy Birthday Paul Fiddes! 65 today

When it comes to Paul Fiddes this facebook conversation from December 2011 is probably spot on:

The problem with studying at Regent's Park is the repeated realisation "anything you can do, Fiddes has done better"!

(Student Baptist minister)

'That's my whole career in eight words.'

(British Baptist theologian)

'Too true. I've likened it to hacking through the jungle, every so often you reach a clearing and think to yourself that you have made a contribution. Then, just as you are ready to move on you spot an empty wine bottle with a note in the top. You open the note to discover it reads "visited here in 1995 - regards Paul".'

(British Baptist minister)

Paul Fiddes is perhaps what many of us think a theologian should look like. Paul has the same look that Colin Gunton had (beard, no moustache), which perhaps should become the non-conformist theological trademark (come on Steve Holmes, I dare you!). Paul also shares the commitment Colin had to the local church and their wider bodies (Baptist and URC respectively). I note their similarities (although their theologies were quite different) because for us nonconformists we don't have many of the like of Fiddes and Gunton.

It doesn't happen often, not even in every generation, but sometimes the church is gifted by God with someone with immense theological wisdom and ability to grasp the historical tradition of the church, and in Paul's case, the skill to relate and connect it all to the issues of and questions of contemporary culture. For us Baptists, at least in the UK, Paul Fiddes is the theological voice, at whose feet we listen.

Today is Professor Paul Fiddes' sixty-fifth birthday. Here's a quote from an essay on Baptist identity:

I have stood with fellow Baptists at a service in Sam Sharpe Square in Montego Bay, Jamaica, a place named in memory of the Baptist deacon and slave who was executed for his protest against the British slave system. I have prayed with fellow Baptists by the side of the Han river in Seoul, Korea, and witnessed several thousand young people being baptized - not in a media spectacle, but each one greeted personally by his or her pastor. I have lectured with fellow Baptists in the University of Timisoare, Romania, near the square where more than fifty young people were killed in the revolution of 1989 as they demonstrated for freedom, shouting 'God exists'. I have talked with Portuguese Baptists in Lisbon, where the great earthquake of 1755 is still remembered as the event which shook people's faith in a good creator, and destroyed a whole system of natural theology. I have shared in a Sunday morning service in the black township of Tembisa near Johannesburg where the previous night Zulu Inkata terrorists had massacred nearly a hundred people, and I have experienced Zulu and Chosa Baptists worshipping together in acceptance of each other. I have sat with Baptists in Cuba, listening to the way that they understand mission in their neighbourhood, led by a pastor who was serving as a Deputy in the government of Fidel Castro, and suffering rejection by fellow Christians because of this involvement in politics. I have received hospitality from Baptists in Myanmar, and admired the way that their ethnic groups express their faith, and their hopes for a common society, through their different styles of song and dance. Through these experiences, my thinking has been shaped in a way that would not have been possible without a shared identity as Baptists.

Identity, I suggest, is more about identification than about being identical. It is an identification which is not a mere human effort, but is enabled by that identification of God with humanity that we call incarnation ... I want to make clear that my appeal to the act of identifying does not conform the church to the secular model of a voluntary society, though there will always be something intentional about it; nor am I ignoring the truth that we share a common identity as members of the body of Christ through baptism. However, a theology of identification will be bound to envisage visible unity as covenantal at heart, rather than (say) a recovery of any particular structure of episcopal oversight which has precedent in history ... It is not that we share an already-existing identity through establishing a common list of agreed items, but we willingly identify ourselves with others who want to make or keep covenant with us because they catch an echo of their story in us.

('The Question of Identity' in Tracks and Traces: Baptist Identity in Church and Theology, Paternoster, 2003, pp15-16)

Beyond 400: 'A Mixed Economy' and the future of the church

My final suggestion in my contribution to the beyond400 conversation asked

What if Beyond400 we understood that the most pioneering work might be to hold on to established ways of being church, that what we need is not necessarily all new, ‘fresh’, novel, but old practices (revived) to ‘sustain Christian community in an unstable age’ (this phrase comes from Gerald W. Schlabach, Unlearning Protestantism, Brazos, 2010).  This is potentially more risky in a climate when the clarion call is we must change, change, change.

In response to one comment I offered this

The concluding comment (or final point) is deliberately provocative and is a challenge that it might be pioneering to not do new, alternative, fresh, novel, but to recover and renew the old ... I'm all for 'mixed economy', I've argued its the future elsewhere ... I guess when all the criticism goes at the old forms of church, I want to push, in a friendly way, some in the other direction too ... It obviously needs expanding and developing and nuancing.

What was behind this final suggestion?

Stanley Hauerwas' argument to the anabaptists (which I think extends wider to all free churches) that

'too often voluntary church membership is translated into the right to make up one's own mind. Accordingly, the church as a disciplined body becomes a community of like-minded individuals who share the conviction that they should respect each other's right to make up his or her own mind' (p.71)

and

'"voluntary church membership" was a prophetic challenge against mainstream Christianity, but once Christendom is gone the call for voluntary commitment cannot help but appear as a legitimation of the secular commitment to autonomy. In a Christendom world it took conviction to be a pagan or an Anabaptist, but given the world in which we are now living it is hard to distinguish pagans from Anabaptists ...

The habits of Christendom churches may now become a resource for their members and for Anabaptists to resist letting their church become just another community in a world desperate for community' (p.73)

(Stanley Hauerwas, 'Whose Church? Which Future? Whither the Anabaptist Vision?' in In Good Company: The Church as Polis (Notre Dame, 1995), pp.65-78)

In agreement with Hauerwas, Gerald Schlabach argues that free churches need to become more catholic and that it is time to unlearn some of our Protestantism. In where we find ourselves, our catholicity matters more than ever. By our catholicity I mean our connectedness with one and with our tradition which for us is Baptist. This will need to challenge some of the ways our tradition has developed or been understood - so Paul Fiddes' work on covenant theology. Rather than 'liquid church', which just adapts and accomodates wherever it is, we need, says Schlabach, stability in the face of the constant flux.  We acknowledge that Christ is not immediate to us, but always mediated through scripture and tradition (John Colwell, Promise and Presence). With Mark Medley (see his chapter in Tradition and the Baptist Academy), I think we need to faithfully interrogate and be inventive with the Baptist tradition, alongside being stewards. Here perhaps the jazz anaology is helpful. I guess the point being made here is new is not necessarily better than old, and much that claims newness is just old in a different key. There is also something about Sam Wells comments on where we are in God's story - i.e., post-Jesus ... Jesus is God's newness, and so our task as the church is to be saints not heroes (Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics, 2004).

In an ecclesiological 'mixed economy', we don't prize the newer ways of being church as being 'better' and vice versa we don't dismiss the new as lacking substance; we don't see 'older' churches as something tolerated because they provide finance and funding and vice versa we don't see the existence of newer churches as our excuse for not engaging in mission; and we don't see structures and instituion as not worth anything and as church gone wrong and vice versa we don't think if we can just get the strucutures and insitution right everything else will follow.  

To go back to comment above, it is perhaps more 'pioneering' to trust in a way of being Baptist that values what we've been given in our buildings, our worship, our accredited ministry, our Union and Associations, rather than just abandon them because they don't quite cut it in a new age. Somewhere beneath all our Baptist pragmatism - which has led us to succumb too easily to the ways of the world, is a rich theological tradition that we need to discover and allow to speak to us once again. Both the newer churches and the older ones are both failing to rediscover a way of being church that can nourish and sustain the church as a covenanted group of disciples. The current situation does not value a 'mixed economy', with suspicion and partial truth on both sides: from the new to the old there is suspicion that the 'old' has moved too far from the missionary movement of the early church (they are too inward looking and not far from death); and from the old to the new, there is suspicion at whether the developing ecclesiogies will or can survive beyond a few years (they are too outward looking and will not live long enough to see another generation).

A mixed economy demands that what we need is a rigorous and honest converastion between those wanting us to engage a postmodern culture and those wanting us to cling on to a tradition so we don't lose our soul and this takes back again to Glen Marshall's description of a church that is theological, religious, sectarian, worldly, modest, bold and nuanced.  

Beyond 400: Baptist Catechesis Required

In a conversation on a recent blog, I wrote the following comment:

most of us resist the idea that we need formation, that we need to unlearn and relearn … and subsequently I would claim or tentatively suggest (depending on mood) that our churches are now not places now for formation, but consumption … here I think Hauerwas' complaint that the free church understanding of church has ceased to be distinctive and offer opportunities to create disciplined communities … instead they mirror society in practising church as autonomous individual persons who resist any notion of authority or obedience in the name of a skewed understanding of rights and freedom.

I believe that somehow we need to rediscover church as a community of character, where we are formed and schooled in living the Christian story. This requires that we rediscover ways of discipling, of catechesis, where the implications of our baptism are repeatedly being explored and lived out. The challenge is one that is perhaps near impossible because we have so throughly formed by the world (see Michael Budde's powerful claims in 'Collecting Praise' in Hauerwas and Wells (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, 2004 and James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 2009, ch.3).

Walter Brueggemann puts the challenge this way:

Discipleship is not just a nice notion of church membership or church education, but it entails a resituating of our lives. The disciples of Jesus are the ones who follow their master and who are able to follow their master because they have been instructed in his way of life, both his aim and his practice of embodying that aim. Note well that the disciple is one who is in sync with the master-teacher, a profoundly undemocratic notion, for the relation consists in yielding, submitting, relinquishing to the will and purpose of another.

Discipleship fundamentally entails a set of disciplines, habits and practices that are undertaken as regular, concrete, daily practices. Such daily  disciplines are not very exciting or immediately productive, but like the acquiring of any new competence, require such regimen, not unlike the learning of a new language by practicing the paradigm of verbs, not unlike the learning of piano by practicing the scales, not unlike the maintenance of good health by tenacity in jogging, not unlike every intentional habit that makes new dimensions of life possible. The church is a community engaged in disciplines that make following the master-teacher possible and sustainable' (Brueggemann, The Word that Redescribes the World, 2011, p.107)

Brueggemann offers this as a possible set of disciplines: teaching (catechesis), fellowship, eating together, prayer, fasting, recovery of Sabbath. He goes on to say that first, 'it is clear that these disciplines, if taken seriously, are immensely inconvenient ... The disciplines function to inconvenience us enough that we become conscious, self-conscious, and intentionally aware of who we are and what we doing with our lives' (p.109). And second, 'even in a consumer society discipline is not unknown' - think about the discipline of buying the same brand, of shopping at the same shop, or our commitment to never miss Eastenders, Mad Men or Match of the Day - these don't seem demanding disciplines, and 'on the contrary, it is the disciplines of counterculture that seem to us demanding, because they break deliberately with the seeming givens of dominant faith' (pp.109-110).

None of this is new to those that have read the work of Stanley Hauerwas, Dorothy Bass, Richard Foster, or the new monastics to name a few (and their work is only a recovery of the historic traditions of the church, including Baptist). It is not even new to those that haven't read the above, as I have discovered in the local church in which I serve in recently acquainting myself with the list of responsibilities for church members'. The issue we don't know how to translate this into practice, or we are afraid to demand it in the face of an understanding of belonging to church which is voluntary, consumerist, autonomous and therapeutic.

One response might be to say is that in the church's history not everyone has been called to take up holy orders. For many in the past their Christian life was a commitment to worship God on a Sunday, tithe, work hard, raise a family and pray before bedtime (can we say this is still true of many in the pews today?). Others - those called into ministry or to the monastic life - sought to practice their faith in more disciplined ways. What this is suggesting is that a more disciplined Christian life may be something that some within our churches commit themselves to, and their a wider group whose faith is practiced in more simple ways. I recognise that this suggestion may be seen as creating a two-tier Christianity.

Beyond 400 we require a new Baptist catechesis and the courage and faith to practice it. Only out of a church engaged in serious discipleship will emerge a commitment to mission and evangelism, for mission and evangelism are the overflow of lives ordered by the gospel.