andygoodliff

40 Days of Baptism (1-40)

Last year I blogged each day through Lent with something on baptism. I plan to blog again this year, but this time 40 days of Eucharist.

Here are links to 40 Days from last year:

1 St Andrew's Street Baptist Church

2 St. Paul’s Baptist Church

3 Lauren Winner

4 Stanley Hauerwas

5 Ralph Wood

6 Robert Jenson and Poppi Gold

7 Vincent Donovan

8 Martin Luther

9 Nadi Bolz-Weber

10 Chris Ellis

11 Barbara Brown Taylor

12 Will Campbell

13 John Colwell

14 Chris Russell

15 Rowan Williams

16 Walter Brueggemmann

17 Sara Miles

18 Melanie Ross

19 J. Kameron Carter

20 Anne Lamott

21 Paul Fiddes

22 Malcolm Guite

23 Andrew Kleissner

24 O Brother Where Art Thou?

25 Laurence Hull Stookey

26 Rodney Wallace Kennedy

27 Michael Jinkins

28 David Ford

29 Robert Webber

30 Marilynne Robinson

31 Dietrich Bonhoeffer

32 Flannery O’Connor

33 Will Willimon

34 3 baptism paintings

35 Kim Fabricius

36 Andy Goodliff

37 Eugene Rogers

38 Craig Hovey

39 Stanley Hauerwas

40: James McClendon

New Book: Shaped for Service

Shaped for Service: Ministerial Formation and Virtue Ethics is a new book from Paul Goodliff (full disclosure he's my dad). It seeks to explore what is going on when we are preparing ministers for Christian ministry in the church. Where Anglicans churns half a dozen books on ministry out a year, Baptists have been reluctant or indifferent to a proper exploration of what we think ministry is and what we are doing in the period of formation/training. Building on his doctoral research published as Ministry, Sacrament and Representation, Goodliff argues that character formation is at the heart of all ministerial formation and the practices of ministry are linked to the person, spirituality and wisdom of the practitioner.

Part 1 Formation and Virtue Ethics                               

1. Formation for Ministry
2. History and Landscape
3. Virtue Ethics and Practitioners
4. Creation, Eschaton and the Formation and the Practice of Ministry

Part 2 Models of Ministerial Formation

5. Formation and Wisdom
6. Focused Discipleship.
7. Ministerial Formation as Apprenticeship

Part 3 Forming the Person

8. Intellectual Formation
9. Spiritual Formation
10. Character Formation

Part 4 Forming the Practices of Ministry

11. Formation of the Practitioner
12. Forming the Liturgist
13. The Formation of Pastoral Integrity
14. Ministry as Guidance
15. Ministry as Mission
16. Forming the Preacher
17. Forming the Administrator
18. Forming the Leader

HeartEdge

I spent Wednesday this week at the launch of HeartEdge. This is a new initiative coming from St. Martin-in-the-Fields, which is seeking to set up a network of churches to see if the combination of congregation + commerce + culture + compassion that marks the life of the church there, can be something which can help other churches in terms of mission and sustainability.

Sam Wells argues that the old benefactor (which historically resourced the Church of England) and stewardship (which remains the classic Baptist congregational mode of resource) models are no longer working. This was the story at St Martin's in 1987 and the response was to grow a commercial wing, initially to resource, but which increasingly began to shape the life of the church that historically was (and is) marked by ministries of compassion. This new model Wells calls the kingdom model. The classic view is that the world needs the church, Wells argues that now (perhaps always) the church needs the world. 

Those who gathered on Wednesday were overwhelming Anglican, so it will be interesting to see how Baptists might fit in where they decide to join the network. It will also be interesting to see what kind of commerce (outside of room hiring) churches outside of city-centre locations might be possible to develop. 

The day included stories from other churches, although none seem to have full grasped the 4 Cs mentioned above, at least in a strategic sense. They were good stories doing interesting things, but St. Martin's seems to be flourishing because it has found a way to integrate congregation, commerce, culture and compassion increasingly together, in some part probably because of theological wisdom that Sam Wells has to tell a story and offer a vision that the church has embraced.

It is called HeartEdge because it is for churches 'working at the heart of culture, community and commerce, with those at the margins and on the edge.'

You can find them on twitter @heartedge and Sam Wells has given a few relevant talks here and here and here. 

A few sentences from Hauerwas

Here's just a few sentences from Hauerwas from his conversations with Brian Brock in Beginning: Interrogating Hauerwas.

... one of the lessons you learn from the gospel is to not let the gospel be judged by our own lives, because the lives we're given through the gospel are greater than our subjectivities allow (2)

... one of the things in ethics we need is compelling characterisations of good people (6)

'Barth was doing a biography' 'Why do you think he ran aground on that? 'I don't know, but my hunch is that Barth just found God so more interesting than Barth' (16)

I regard one of the great moral witnesses of the last centuries as refusal of Jewish people to let Christian persecution stop them from having children. Th they would have children in the face of Christian hatred was an extraordinary faith in God ... (49)

Apocalyptic is not "We must change the world the way Jesus wanted us to do." Apocalyptic is "Jesus changed the world, now let's learn to live in the light of that change (77)

I say the worst phrase in the world is "I never want to be a burden." I mean, you should want to be a burden! That's exactly who we are. We are burdens for one another (99)

If you think marriage is an institution in Christianity that has a unitary and sacramental end, I cannot also see how it doesn't have the procreative end. It doesn't mean that every marriage has to be procreative. But marriage as an institution does. (189)

I think marriage has become such a damned necessity for many people because they intuit that it's their only hedge against loneliness, particularly as they grow older (190)

My way of saying it is, "Don't talk about disability. Talk about Adam." So the name makes all the difference (201)

I tell students to read Barth like a symphony. You start with the major theme: Jesus is lord. Then you run it through twenty-five different variations. Then you end with: Jesus is Lord. But it is enriching what you say when you say Jesus is Lord (241)

I believe where Christians, even in deep unfaithfulness, say they are worshipping God, God shows up. That should scare the hell out of us (248)

Sermons should be teaching the basic grammar of what it is to say we are Christians (256)

I went over and I watched an episode of Friends, and of course I was stunned. When it was over I said, "Who would want to be friends with any of those people?" End of conversation (278)

I thought I would be afraid of death, and I may be, but I haven't experienced it that way yet. Probably because I still don't know I'm going to die. I think, one, I have had such a wonderful life, and two, whatever heaven may be, it will be joy (286)

Oliver [O'Donovan] was very sympathetic with what I had done. He said, "Well, he's doing the best he can in a church in freefall self-destruction." (288f)

The refusal to let the old world overwhelm the world that we have been given is the great adventure (290)

Beginnings: Interrogating Hauerwas

Brian Brock and Stanley Hauerwas, Beginnings: Interrogating Hauerwas, edited by Kevin Harden (Bloomsbury, 2017), 348pp.

This book is the transcript of eight lengthy conversations between two theologians, one of whom is Stanley Hauerwas. The book, as the title suggests, is an interrogation of Hauerwas and his work. Brian Brock who is the other theologian, does not let Hauerwas get away with his stock answers, which you might expect from someone who has had a forty-year career and is now in their 70s. (Brock himself was the subject of a set of conversations in Captive to Christ, Open to the World). This is what makes the book both interesting and not just another book from Hauerwas. That is, this is not a one-sided listening to Hauerwas. This is not a set of interviews, but conversations, in which Brock does as much, if not more, of the work in reflecting on the broad areas of Hauerwas' work. Brock is certainly someone who knows Hauerwas' body of work in detail and these are not off-the cuff conversations, but ones in which Brock has prepared. I enjoyed - the right word, I think - overhearing the process of starting from Hauerwas' work and then taking it further, questioning and challenging it. In so doing Brock's own theological work is touched on.

Eight conversations are turned into eight chapters. Chapter one reflects on biography and in particular the act of Hauerwas writing his memoir Hannah's Child. Chapter two engages with the areas of contingency, virtue and holiness. Chapter three looks at questions of temperament, habit and ends with an unplanned discussion of the work of Paul Holmer (one of Hauerwas' teachers at Yale) and its impact on Hauerwas. Chapter four turns to ecclesial politics, peacemaking and the eschatology of worship. Chapter five is centred on casuistry, natural law and virtue again. Chapter six has it focus on just war, pacifism, gender, and includes an exchange on Yoder's abusive actions towards women. Chapter seven (probably the best chapter in the whole book) opens up a conversation about disability, medical ethics and the cross. And chapter eight picks up Hauerwas' more recent emphasis on preaching, praying and Christian language.

Particular highlights for me in the book are a discussion about dying, ageing, in which Hauerwas talks about churches having a columbarium (I had to google it); a conversation about the strengths and weaknesses of the Blackwell Companion of Christian Ethics that Hauerwas co-edited with Sam Wells; and the whole chapter on disability. The chapter on disability is interesting because it develops an argument for the centrality of Hauerwas' work on disability to understanding his work as a whole. Where Hauerwas is usually first and foremost seen as a pacifist, partly by himself, Brock develops an argument (building from essays by Jonathan Tran and Peter Dula) that we should see disability as the 'hermeneutic key' to Hauerwas' theology:

... your constant engagement with disability as the central internal bulwark in your work resisting all attempts to turn it into a theologia gloriae, a triumphant theology ...'

To which Hauerwas responds, 'the gospel is not a successful story. Or is it a story of success. It's a story of redemption.'

Within the chapter come also very helpful reflections on disability by both Hauerwas and Brock, helpful to any pastor and/or church wanting to understand something of what it is to have a 'disability' or a child with a 'disability.' 

Like any book that involves Hauerwas, Beginnings: Interrogating Hauerwas will repay revisiting. The model of two theologians engaged in conversation which are then published is also one I hope others undertake. Some theologians never make themselves present in their work, at least obviously. Hauerwas, from the 1980s onwards, has increasingly made himself present in his work. In a recent essay Sam Wells says that Hauerwas shows (amongst other things) that 'it is not possible to separate Jesus from the narrative of his life' and 'it is not possible to separate Jesus' person from his work'. It seems to me this is equally true of Hauerwas himself. Not many theologians would enter the exercise of this book (probably also, not many would be in the position too). This is not acceptable to some views of doing theology. Hauerwas always shows that theology is a struggle (to quote his friend Jim McClendon) and in these conversations, Hauerwas and Brock demonstrate that struggle, but also discovery and joy of reflecting theologically on what it means to be Christian. Hauerwas is a one of a kind theologian and Brock draws that out in these conversations for our enjoyment and edification.