andygoodliff

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.
'

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.

Sean Winter on Gal 3.26-28

Sean has very kindly for a short time made available his bible study on Galatians 3.26-28 from this year's Baptist Assembly. Click here.  I loved the ending:

What would it mean for the inexorable logic of God's inclusive story to work itself out in us, among us and through us? In Christ, there is neither rich nor poor; neither single mother or the hard working family; neither big church nor small church. In Christ, there is neither north or south, european or african, muslim or hindu. In Christ there is neither gay or straight, neither young or old, pastor or people. In the words of Chris Ellis's hymn: 'here is a vision, new world begun, here is a family, made to be one.' Amen.

'education, discipleship and community formation'

Chapter 9 of Remembering Our Future is by Mark Wakelin. Wakelin, using Bonhoeffer's Life Together, discusses discipleship and community. One sentence really stuck out as I've read this chapter. It says 'it is about discovering community not creating it' (italics original, p.223).  Christian discipleship is about discovering the community that we name church. We don't create church, we don't engineer it, we discover it. There is so much emphasis on the word 'community' in the church today, but often it about how can we create more real community? How can we make community? The message of deep church, and here Bonhoeffer in particular, is that the call of God is to community. We discover community in response to God's call. This reminds me of one of my favourite Colin Gunton quotes: [The Spirit] liberates us, that is to say, by bringing us into community: by enabling us to be with and for the brothers and sisters whom we do not ourselves choose' (Theology Through the Theologians, 1996, 201).

Two other challenging quotes from Wakelin:
'First, it is important to keep it real. We are not to 'sell church' to people and allow Christian formation to become simply an aspect of Christian marketing. Our business is not to present the gospel in the most favourable light in case those we teach are put off' (p.221).

'Second, it is about including and not excluding. Christian formation is not a journey into a smaller and select group ofthe poure, doctrinally or morally ... Our including-in has to be grounded in the reality that Christ is in the other, not a process of pushing Christ at the other' (p.222)

'Deep calls to deep'

Chapter 5 of Remembering Our Future is by Ben Quash, Dean of Peterhouse College, Cambridge. (I'll come to back to chapters 3 and 4 another time). Quash's chapter is on reading scripture in a multi-faith world. He  has been part of the Cambridge group of scholars (with the likes of David Ford, Dan Hardy and Nicholas Adams), involved in 'scriptural reasoning' (SR), which is where Jewish, Muslim and Christian scholars come together to co-read their scriptures together. For more see the special Modern Theology edition on SR from last year. He argues that in church there is 'little if any communal enagagement with scripture' (p.108). (As an aside, interestingly during lent I ran a series called 'lent explorations' where we read lectionary readings for that day. A small group of us gathered together to read scripture together. It was amazing to here people engage with the texts and it felt regularly as if the texts came alive and God was speaking with us.) More communal engagement is sorely needed in our church life. Quash's argument is that SR may provide and be instructive to help Christians to read scripture in more 'deep' and 'thick' ways, which 'disrupt in a healthy way the habits of reading that Christian people can have allow themselves to get into' (p.111). In describing the practice of SR, Quash writes:

'these others [from different religious traditions] are invited to co-read, to ask questions and become contributers to the process of suggesting possible answers to the questions - and one of the common consequences of this is that the texts open up unexpected meanings for those who sacred texts they are, even at the same time as participants from the other Abrahamic traditions learn more about a text that is not theirs.' (p.114)

This communal reading overcomes our tendency to individual reading, which Quash argues often leads to stale readings - whether conservative or liberal. There is a richness to this chapter, which requires several re-readings. Quash says SR does not seek to produce agreement, but a deep engagement with the text that may bring disagreement. SR takes the image of the tent, which operates as a place of hospitality for all involved in reading, where everyone is both a host and a guest (pp.114-115). SR takes seriously the voice of others, it listens to the questions and the thoughts of others as the co-reading happens. A 'deep church' needs to listen to the voice of the other: the other from history (the names of those who have read these texts before us), the other from a different tradition (whether it a different denomination, or feminist readings, or even those from another religious tradition). And in this listening, those who have taken part in SR testify, to hearing the voice of God. Quash writes 'the text should be allowed to interrogate us, and not just we it. ' (p.121).

For those of you, who don't have a copy of the book, I have discovered you can read this chapter as a taster here.   

Baptist website relaunched (update)

Find the ctrl alt del forum here. You need to register and we're in the mission:envision section. I've put a welcome out. You can buy the ctrl alt del resource here.

The Baptist website for the BUGB has been relaunched today, just in time for this weekend's baptist assembly (the yearly gathering for baptists). It looks great and give a 21st feel to the baptist people. The communications department at baptist house, didcot (who have down all the hardwork) are hoping it will be a resource in itself and be a place of conversation, news, etc. I'm hoping that we will be able to forum or something like it for the ctrl alt del conversation.