andygoodliff

Will Willimon on starting ministry

HT to Jason

Pt4 One of the most important decisions that a new pastor can make is to obtain a good pastoral mentor. Ministry is a craft. I am unperturbed when new pastors sometimes say, “Seminary never really taught me actually how to do ministry.” I think seminary is best when it instills the classical theological disciplines and exposes to the classical theological resources of the church, not so good at teaching the everyday, practical, administrative and mundane tasks of the parish ministry. One learns a craft, not by reading books, but by looking over the shoulder of a master, watching the moves, learning by example, developing a critical approach that constantly evaluates and gains new skills.

Pt3 Be open to the possibility that the matters that were focused upon in the course of the seminary curriculum, the questions raised and the arguments engaged, might be a distraction from the true, historic mission and purpose of the church and its ministry. On the other hand, be open to the possibility that the church has a tendency to bed down with mediocrity, to accept the mere status quo as the norm, and to let itself off the theological hook too easily. One reason why the church needs theology explored and taught in its seminaries is that theology (at its best) keeps making Christian discipleship as hard as it ought to be. Theology keeps guard over the church’s peculiar speech and the church’s distinctive mission. Something there is within any accommodated, compromised church (and aren’t they all, in one way or another?) that needs to reassure itself, “All that academic, intellectual, theological stuff is bunk and is irrelevant to the way the church really is.” The way the church “really is” is faithless, mistaken, cowardly, and compromised. It’s sad that it is up to seminaries to offer some of the most trenchant and interesting critiques of the church. Criticism of the church ought to be part of the ongoing mission of a faithful church that takes Jesus more seriously and itself a little less so. I pray that your theological education rendered you permanently uneasy with the church. Promise me that you will, throughout your ministry, never be happy with the church.

Pt2 Devise ways to learn to speak their language. Laity sometimes complain that their young pastor, in sermons, uses “religious” words like “spiritual practice,” “liberation,” “empowerment,” “intentional community” (this is an actual list a layperson collected and sent to me) that no one understands and no one recalls having heard in Scripture. Such “preacher talk” makes the pastor seem detached, alien, and aloof from the people and hinders leadership. At the same time, prepare yourself to become a teacher of the church’s peculiar speech to a people who may have forgotten how to use it. This may seem contrary to my first suggestion. My friend, Stanley Hauerwas, says that the best preparation for being a pastor today is previously to have taught high school French. The skills required to drill French verbs into the heads of adolescents are the skills that pastors need to teach our people how to speak the gospel ... Keep telling yourself that the difference in thought between the laity in your first parish and that of your friends back in seminary is not so much the difference between ignorance and intelligence; it’s just different ways of thinking that arise out of life in different worlds ... It is my prejudice that, if you have difficulty making the transition from seminary to parish it is probably a criticism of the seminary. The Christian faith is to be studied and critically examined only for the purpose of its embodiment. Christians are those who are to become that which we profess. The purpose of theological discernment is not to devise something that is interesting to say to the modern world but rather to rock the modern world with the church’s demonstration that Jesus Christ is Lord and all other little lordlets are not.

Cherie Blair on Willow Creek as the future of Christianity

The final episode of Christianity: a history was presented by Cherie Blair.  She argued that the future of Christianity may lay in the kind of Christianity that is represented by Willow Creek. She interviewed Bill Hybels and showed clips from the service. I was amused by the words 'SERVICE STARTING IN THREE MINUTES' and 'YOU ARE LOVED' which appeared on the screen in the auditorium. Blair failed to understand the differences between Christianity in the States and in the UK and the rest of Europe. There are huge differences in why Europe has a falling church attendance ('Europe is the exceptional case' according to Grace Davie) and the States doesn't (yet?).  Where the United States was viewed as the future, Blair also failed to present the many hundreds and thousands of vibrant church projects in the UK which are making a more positive contribution to society. She focused entirely on the downward trend, specifically within the Roman Catholic church. The programme along with Ann Widdecombe's (another practicing Roman Catholic) on the Reformation failed to make any reference to non-conformist churches and the contribution they have made to the life and faith of Britain. Willow Creek will never be the future of the church in this country and I for one am thankful. Hybels in the interview suggested that with Willow Creek they had returned to a New Testament church (the claim that all new church movements, including Baptists in the 17th century claim) - although what you saw - a slick, business-model, entertainment-orientated style operation, didn't match my reading of the NT. The programme failed to level any critical comment on these megachurches. So all in all, a programme which generated a response, but a not very positive one from me. 

ministry after christendom

How seriously should we take the arguments of the 'after christendom' series?  The series' fourth book - Youth work after christendom was published earlier this year. At Regent's we spent Friday with Nigel Pimlott, co-author of Youth work after christendom, as part of a week looking at working with young people. What struck me was how Nigel's presentation was in many ways at odds to the approaches taken by other speakers (all good) from earlier in the week. I found myself asking are those training for baptist ministry being trained for a christendom church or for a church after christendom?

Milbank takes a sideswipe at Fresh Expressions and Mission-Shaped Church

From 'Stale Expressions: the Management-Shaped Church', Studies in Christian Ethics, April 2008 by John Milbank. I think he partly has a point.

The projects known as ‘Fresh expressions’ and ‘mission-shaped church’ are, therefore, the outcome of this evangelical-liberal collusion. For all the protestations, they are a clear conspiracy against the parish. Perfectly viable parishes, especially in the countryside or the semi-countryside, are increasingly deprived of clergy who are seconded to dubious administrative tasks or else to various modes of ‘alternative ministry’ such as ‘ministry to
sportspeople’ or ‘ministry to youth’. In all this there lies no new expression of church, but rather its blasphemous denial. The church cannot be found amongst the merely like-minded, who associate in order to share a particular taste, hobby or perversion. It can only be found where many different peoples possessing many different gifts collaborate in order to produce a divine–human community in one specific location. St Paul wrote to Galatia and Corinth, not to regiments or to weaving-clubs for widows. He insisted on a unity that emerges from the harmonious blending of differences. Hence the idea that the church should ‘plant’ itself in various sordid and airless interstices of our contemporary world, instead of calling people to ‘come to church’, is wrongheaded, because the refusal to come out of oneself and go to church is simply the refusal of church per se. One can’t set up a church in a cafe amongst a gang of youths who like skateboarding because all this does is promote skateboarding and dysfunctional escapist maleness, along with that type of private but extra-ecclesial security that is offered by the notion of ‘being saved’.

Jim Gordon on Sacraments

Jim inspires me again.

As a Baptist I already worry about the downgrading of the Lord's Supper, so often appended to the service, at times stripped of liturgical depth, lacking spiritual beauty and omitting careful setting in the context of worship of the One whose real presence is an assumption of every community of believers gathered in Jesus name. Partly that's because there is a fear of sacramentalism, and a corresponding insistence on simplicity, insisting it is only bread and wine, and avoiding any suggestion that anything happens of a miraculous nature - they are mere symbols, memorial elements.

And yet. Broken bread and poured out wine were Jesus' own chosen vehicles to convey the truth and grace of who He is. Our fear of sacramentalism too easily becomes evasion of mystery, and reducing sacrament to mere symbolism empties the gifts of bread and wine of that rich evocative giftedness that transforms bread into nourishment and wine into healing and refreshment. Even our prayers of thanksgiving for the bread and wine, which at their best are a grateful remembering of Jesus' death, can become reduced to mere remembering of Jesus' death. That is, at the communion table, when we break bread and share it, pour wine and drink it together, we are not merely remembering, we are proclaiming - the death of Jesus Christ - but also the resurrection of Jesus, the life-giving gift of the Spirit to the community of Jesus Christ for the renewal of creation, the love of the Father and Creator revealed in created things, and the future hope 'till he come', and when God will be all in all. The Gospel is a richly textured, theologically overwhelming story, which in bread and wine, in the community of Jesus, is ineffable truth condensed through faith and love into an affirmation of the redeeming activity and presence of the Triune God.

Martyn Percy on Alpha

In a challenging essay 'Shopping for God: Production, Consumption and Globalization' (found in The Salt of the Earth, Sheffield Academic Press, 2001) Martyn Percy makes some serious criticisms of the Alpha course.

'My guess is that for all the hype, triumphalism and talk, this course is mainly about 'refreshing' charismatic-evangelical identity. It does not address the world in all its pain, ambiguity and profusion - so it will not actually change it, in spite of the claims' (p.184)

He argues that Alpha is flawed because:

1. the church is an after thought - 'people become Christians first,  then join think about joining a church'

2. 'in the relentless appeal to 'basics', the course obviates the implicit and explicit paradoxes in the gospel, as well as it breadth. It offers Christianity as a simple, uncontextual, boundless project that is 'learned' through a course offering certain types of knowledge and experience ... the authors do not apparently do not like the course being adapted or inculturated. This suggests that a 'package' of truth is being sold. (Yet Christianity is arguably not something we 'possess'; like God, it possesses us, but it is beyond us too.)' (p.180)

3. 'the focus on the Holy Spirit is both extensive and intensive. The Spirit on offer obviously arises from a personal, therapeutic, 'Home-Counties' context that is concerned with the individual.' (p.181)

4. Alpha is therefore somewhat prescriptive, a package rather than a pilgrimage. Participants are locked into a hermetically sealed hermeneutical circle, which keeps more issues out than it actually addresses' (p.181) - there is no mention of baptism, eucharist, doctrine of the Trinity, church.
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Visit to a gurdwara and a lesson in hospitality

Regular readers of my blog may remember that I asked a few weeks ago whether people thought it was ok for christian youth groups to visit other different religious places of worship. The reason behind the question was we were planning a visit to a local gurdwara and it had caused some discussion within my church. Tonight we took our young people to visit and we had a fantastic time. Having taught little bits about Sikhism over the last three years in RE lessons, it was great to hear and see what it means to be Sikh from a Sikh. We entered the main worship hall and were given a short talk on the basics tenets of Sikhism before a question and answer time. Our young people asked some great questions and their was a good atmosphere. We then through into the langar, where we served food and drink. The hospitality was amazing. The generosity was humbling. The langar is open 24/7 to serve the community. You can get a meal at any time. The guardwara exists for the community, to enable it to learn (the meaning of the word 'sikh' is 'learner'), to worship and to serve it. Is this not the calling of the church? I was left asking how do we serve the community and enable it to learn and worship? What would it take to have our church open as a place of hospitality to the stranger? This is something that monastries do, but most of our churches only serve the community when it suits us. It seems to me that where other religions - Sikhism, Islam and Buddhism - have better resisted the assualts of Western culture, especially its consumerism, Christianity has, in the main, crumbled and become in many places and in many ways in distinguishable from the world. The church must be open to learn from other religious faiths and how they witness to the world. The question of religions and the Christian emphasis on the particularity of Jesus Christ still taxes me. My experience this year of Buddhism and Sikhism, makes me wonder at the words of Jesus when he says 'the Spirit blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes' (John 3.8).

de-coding the new 'church' language

emerging church - a loose term that reflects christians who are experimenting and trying to discover church in a postmodern world. those who identify with the term 'emerging church' resist trying to define and label it. there is a difference in how the word is used in the uk and usa, because of the different contexts. for more see eddie gibbs and ryan bolger's Emerging Churches (2006, spck). in the uk, see emergingchurch.info and the blogs of andrew jones, jonny baker, jason clark and kester brewin (this is just some of the major players).

inherited church - this term is used to described the existing church, which still is the vast majority, from which those involved in these other types of church listed here are moving beyond. some are very critical of inherited church, others are more kind! evangelicalism does come in for a lot of criticism.

liquid church - first coined by pete ward (lecturer in youth ministry and theological education, kcl) in his 2002 book of the same name. He borrowed the word 'liquid' from zygmunt bauman's book Liquid Modernity (2000, poliity press). Liquid church is church that moves beyond the one-size fits all (solid church) into a more dynamic notion of church which is focused on networks, relationships and communications.

deep church- first coined by cs lewis, but used more recently by andrew walker (professor of theology and education, kcl)  and others to describe church that seeks to reconnect with the common historical Christian tradition and go beyond denominational divides. See Andrew Walker's essay 'Recovering Deep Church' in Remembering our Future (2007, paternoster).

mcdonaldized church - first coined by john drane in his book the McDonaldization of the Church, which adapts the theory of george ritzer to the church. It is church that is pre-packaged and takes on the characteristics of McDonalds.

post-christendom - the understanding that in recent years there has been a shift from christendom to post-christendom. in christendom, the christian story was known and accepted and society was christenized in many ways. after christendom, the christian story is much less known and the chrisitans find themselves on the margins of society and competing for the public square. see the work of stuart murray, especially his two books Post-Christendom (2004, paternoster) and Church After Christendom (2005, paternoster).

mission-shaped church - a 2004 church of england report which got the anglicans moving into exploring and financing different kinds of church. operates under the name fresh expressions.

alternative worship - worship that emerged out of the likes of the nine o'clock service in sheffield in the mid-1990s. it can be described as creative (embraces the arts), post-charismatic  (tends not to do singing) and post-evangelical, visual, kinasethetic, post-modern, contemplative, retriving and rewriting liturgy, rediscovering theology (especially doctines of incarnation, creation and trinity), having a positive of view of contemporary culture. see jonny baker and doug gay's book Alternative Worship (2004, spck) and steve collin's alternative worship website.

post-evangelical - first coined by dave tomlinson's in his 1995 book of the same name. casued something of a debate. a term that describes those wanting to move beyond evangelical church and theology. 

churchless faith -  first coined by alan jamiseon in his 2002 book of the same name. the word refers to those who still express or identify with the christian faith but have beyond the church. these people are evangelical/charismatic/pentecostal church leavers (and jamieson's research showed often church leaders as well).

'baptism and catechesis'

Chapter 8 of Remembering our Future is Alan Kreider's essay on baptism and catechesis as spiritual formation.  He argues that 'the approaches to baptism and catechesis of Christians in the West have often been "shallow church"' and that instead we need a "deep church" approach that discovers way of practicing baptism and catechesis like the Christians of early centuries (p.171). Within the New Testament Kreider recognises two voices, which he names the sacramental and the anabaptist. The sacramental which sees baptism as a powerful act of God and the anabaptist which sees the baptism as more of an ethical act (dying to self and living to God). (For more on this I recommend reading the relevant chapters in Living the Christian Story and also Promise and Presence both by John Colwell). Both these voices on baptism reocgnise the importance of catechesis (which we've often truncated to four or five baptismal or confirmation preparation classes).

Kreider then makes a set of observations about baptism over the last two thousand years:

1. Baptism plays a central role in the Christian church when it is under pressure
2. Baptism whithers when Christianity is socially acceptable and comfortable
3. When baptism becomes culturally routine it whithers ritually
4. Under these circumstances, preparations for baptism become truncated
5. Baptismal renewal is taking place today (because of our post-Christendom situation) and by this he means a more 'deep church' vision of baptism, which takes catechesis more seriously.

Kreider's main argument is to baptism as an journey and not as an event and therefore catechesis is extremely important. He outlines twelve steps of baptismal preperation.

1. Experiences of God - the candidate must encounter God however and wherever that happens
2. The Story of God - the candidate have to 'switch stories' - to re-orientate their lives around the biblical narrative
3. Missional issues in the congregation - the candidates are prepared for local mission
4. Classic issues of addiction - face and explore issues of addiction (idoltary, greed, violence, etc)
5. Personal problem areas - to face the question of who am I? and how am I a blessing to others?
6. Christian culture critique - what does it mean to be 'resident alien' in our culture
7. Prayer - the candidate will learn to pray
8. Basic Bible passages - memorise scripture because 'bible passages ... are deep wells from which Christians can drink from when under pressure' (p.185)
9. Fundamental beliefs  - the candidate will learn to think like Christians
10. Christian articulacy - how is the candidate going to share and demonstrate their Christian faith
11. Personal questions - explore the candidate specific questions about christianity
12. The church's practices - learn what the church does what it does and why it does it

For Kreider these steps (of which there could be others) have the aim to help the baptismal candidate confess 'with gratitude growing out of a deep awareness that"Jesus Christ is Lord"' (p.187). He sees this period of catechesis not as a matter of weeks, but as a matters of months, possible even years. In the early church of the first centuries catechesis would sometimes last up to three years.

This is a powerful, exciting and challenging essay (there are also sections on methods of catechesis and possible objections - dealing with infant baptism, the NT practice on baptism immediately on conversion and is it possible in our times). I am unconvinced that pre-baptism this kind of catechesis is needed, but post-baptism I want to find ways to see it happen. The kind of commitment to following Jesus that Kreider outlines is hard to find in today's churches. I found much that I want to include as I think about preparing people for baptism and for helping churches follow Jesus.

(For more on these issues see Kreider's other published works: The Origins of Christendom in the West (ed., 2001, T & T Clark),  The Change of Conversion and the origin of Christendom (1997, Trinity Press)

'Mundane Holiness'

Luke Bretherton in chapter 10 of Remembering Our Future argues for a 'mundane holiness: the theology and spirituality of everyday life.' He claims that too much Christian spirituality is divorced from Christian theology and that Christian spirituality is offered as a consumer option or technique to be learned and also one that is about transcending the everyday (pp.228-229). The main sections of the chapter discuss how 'spirituality is true materiality', so Bretherton says "Paul's advocacy of the spiritual life points to neither an ethereal, otherworldly life nor an interior realm of consciousness, but to a whole pattern of life which is truly material, truly itself, human life as part of creation healed and fulfilled' (p.234). He points to the church year and says there are times of fasting and lament, as well as times of feasting and joy, but the clearest indicator of how a mundane holiness is true description of Christian spirituality is the existence of ordinary time: 'it is ordinary time that is the focus of a mundane holiness and it is ordinary time that is, perhaps, the major key or predominant mode of the Christian life ... to refuse to live faithfully  in ordinary time and constantly seek times of ecstasy or insist that all life is a fast is to refuse ... a definitive part of Christian discipleship' (pp.236-237).

Bretherton concludes with five marks that should be present in Christian spirituality: 1) it should be about relationship with the Father, through Christ, in the Spirit and not about focusing on exercises, experiences or techniques (p.245); 2) it should have a community dimension and focus because 'a Christian spirituality can be either individualistic or simply therapeutic' (p.245); 3) it should not see time and place as enemies to be overcome (p.246); 4) it must show concern for ecological, political, economic and social justice, without these it 'can hardly be said to be Christian' (p.246); and 5) it should be eschatological, that has a right understanding of the 'now and not yet' (pp.246-247).

I welcome this description of Christian spirituality, that seeks to recognise the Spirit in the everyday Christian life and not only in visits to Spring Harvest, Soul Survivor or the such like. I think finding appropriate habits and practices (is that different from exercises and techniques?) are necessary in order to encourage a Christian spirituality of mundane holiness.