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.
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