Tag: Church

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Who not How ?

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I was in a conversation yesterday about what the church might look like after lockdown.  There was a bit of a presentation, and then some questions.  Most of the questions seemed to be asking ‘how’ and ‘what’ questions.
How will be be able to worship with social distancing ?
How can we use what we have learned in lockdown ?
What new expressions of church might there be in the light of church on zoom, facebook and Youtube etc?
I remember a few years ago, preparing to lead some sessions on working with difference and conflict in our church.
We had some questions to think about.  When would be the best time to do the sessions ?  Where would we hold them – in our own church, or at a neutral venue ? How many sessions would we run ?  How would we decide which of the material to use ?
All necessary questions relating to the practical delivery of the material.
However …. before we considered any of those questions, it would be more important to ask – Who would we like to be there ?
Since we had a maximum number of 24 places so that we could do some group work, we decided that rather than open it up to anyone, we would focus on who we really wanted to be there.    Having key leaders there meant that we would stand a better chance of the learning being spread through the congregation, so we invited the church council to be there, as well as leaders in different areas of church life.  This would just about fill our 24 places.  We made sure that personal invitations were sent, and on the day we had pretty much all the people we had hoped for.
So I am trying to transfer that thinking to aspects of ‘Church after Lockdown.’  One thought is to try and find out how lockdown has affected not only the church community, but our parish generally.  So forgetting the ‘what,’ and the ‘how,’ and the ‘when,’ for a moment, I started thinking about the ‘who.’
The outcome of this might be to invite a cross section of key people in our community.  Not too many to make a conversation difficult, and bearing in mind the precautions that would be necessary. So for example, a doctor, a nurse, a leader from another faith, a city councillor, another church leader from a different denomination, a business owner, a teacher, a supermarket worker, etc etc, as well as from our own community a church council member, a member of the congregation ….
I just get the sense that this exercise in focused listening would stand a chance of helping us understand our community better, and how as a Christian community we can serve our neighbourhood.
Grace and peace to all of you who are doing exactly that.
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That reminds me

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… Of the blog by Jonny Baker, which I haven’t looked at for ages.


In his blog post on flipped church, he refers back to some questions he was asking himself nearly 15 years ago …

can we imagine…
church beyond gathering?
church beyond once a week?
church as always on connectivity to christ and one another?
church where community is the content?
theology and resources of church being open source?
church valuing the wisdom of the crowd rather than the knowledge of the expert?
our church/spirituality being easily found by seekers because we tag it that way?
an ethos of low control and collaboration?
an economy of gift?
church as spaces for creative production and self publishing?
church as providers of resources for spiritual seekers and tourists?

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What are the temptations we need to avoid – as a church ?

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There might be many temptations to avoid, so I’ll focus on the one that comes to mind, the one closest to my heart.  My fear is that as lockdown eases, we will all breathe a sigh of relief and go back to the way we were.

Here’s a quote from Bishop Nick Baines blog, posted recently:

“Christian faith does not assume a life (or world)of continuous security and familiarity. It is fed by scriptures that speak of transience, mortality, provisionality, interruption and leavings. But, they also whisper that the endings are always beginnings – the leavings open a door to arrivals that could not have been experienced otherwise. In other words, the loss can be seen as a gift – what Walter Brueggemann calls ‘newness after loss’.

The temptation at the moment is to want to move on too quickly from our experience of loss, and so lose things of immense value that we can learn.

Back to Nick Baines again, who has a useful tool for helping us examine ourselves at this time:

He has suggested to clergy in the Diocese of Leeds, that it might be helpful to ask these four questions:

(a) what have I/we lost that we need to regain in the weeks and months ahead? 
(b) what have we lost that needs to remain lost – left behind in another country? 
(c) what have I/we gained that we need to retain in the future? 
(d) what have we gained recently that was useful for this season but needs to be lost if we are to move forward?”
My last post was Song of the Day #4, home, by Foo Fighters.  I chose it before I decided what to write here, but it does seem appropriate.  What we all want is ‘to be home.’  To have a sense that we are exactly where we belong.  To be in a place – maybe, but not necessarily geographically – where we can grow.

But to find the road home we will have experiences of what the Bible calls exile.  Where we are far from home in order to learn what is really important.

This prayer, attributed to Sir Francis Drake, is one of my favourites.

DISTURB US, LORD,
When we are too well pleased with ourselves,
When our dreams have come true
Because we have dreamed too little,
When we arrived safely
Because we sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, Lord, when
With the abundance of things we possess
We have lost our thirst
For the waters of life;
Having fallen in love with life,
We have ceased to dream of eternity
And in our efforts to build a new earth,
We have allowed our vision
Of the new Heaven to dim.

Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly,
To venture on wider seas
Where storms will show your mastery;
Where losing sight of land,
We shall find the stars.

We ask You to push back
The horizons of our hopes;
And to push into the future
In strength, courage, hope, and love.

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How is God asking us to reach out ?

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This is the seventh question to think about as our church is called to think and pray about the future.
I’m reading a book by Stuart Murray – Church After Christendom.
It has some really helpful things to say about what healthy churches might look like in a Post Christendom world.
The thing that struck me in relation to the above question is a passage from Paul’s letter to the early church in Ephesus.
Ephesians 4:11&12.

“So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers,  to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up ….. “

The passage does not mention leaders, but gifts.  it is clear that these are ‘leadership’ gifts, but we have identified gifts almost exclusively with officially recognised and often paid leadership roles in the church, requiring years of training.  In my context, it is clear that the vicar/minister is the main pastor.  A Lay Reader would usually be one of the main teachers.  I’m not sure where the other three gifts mentioned here appear. 

There are several passages in the New Testament that talk about the gifts that are needed for a healthy church.   In Christendom, the gifts that were prominent were Pastors and Teachers.  In Post Christendom, we can no longer rely on people being familiar in any way with the Christian story. Gifts that take the faith beyond the bounds of the Christian community become vital.  That means that our very structures need to change to allow this to happen.

“Ephesians 4 focuses not on church leaders, but on a harmonious church.It is the empowered community that engages in works of service.Its multidimensional activities result in the church functioning properly and becoming mature. It is a long way from this to the clerical (i.e. top down – my addition) models in which the laity support gifted clergy who perfom the worls of service. These models exalt or exhaust those designated as leaders and disempower community” Murray p. 189.

When thinking about the ‘How’ questions, like the one I’m thinking about today, it might be easy to draw up a list of actions a local church might take to reach out to their community.  That’s fine, but there might be other ‘how’ questions that precede these very practical ideas – questions that are more fundamental to enabling long term change.

For example:

How can the church be less hierarchical, and promote and encourage a much wider participation, as envisioned by Ephesians 4.

How can churches be better at exploring difference, and resolving conflict, and so be the kind of communities that people want to join ?

How can funds be redistributed so that reaching out becomes a major item of expenditure in a church’s budget ?

…. perhaps you might make up a question …





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What could we hold onto ?

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This question is posed to us – a church community in the middle of the coronovirus lockdown.

What might we hold onto from the experience of the last 9 weeks or so ?

I think that is such a big question.  For me the bigger question that it leads to is
How can we learn from both the inherited church, and the emerging ‘new ways of being church’ to enable us to be a church fit for a post Christendom world ?
But for now, I’ll focus on what have I learned from lockdown, especially with regard to worship.
So – for the last two weeks, our ‘zoom church’ has been like this:
Short ‘hellos’ and a prayer
* Brief reading of and introduction to one of the Bible passages for the day. (Usually, but not always the Gospel).
This has been done in a way that is accessible to all ages from pre-schoolers up.  E.G Godly Play.
* Some open questions to think about what might emerge from the introduction.
* Break out groups of 4/5 people.  This for me has been great, because I have ‘met’ people who I have known a little bit before, but got to know them much better through these small zoom groups.
* Come back together for some prayers.
* Close and further chat over coffee etc.
I would like to hold on to this much simpler approach to worship.  I like the way it has given us something to reflect on, rather than a sermon with a possibly complicated train of thought.
It’s very ‘word light’ in the sense that we don’t have a lot of the quite wordy prayers and responses typical of Anglican worship.  This is good for inclusivity.  Some prayers that we all can learn off by heart would be good to give structure and stability.  (But not too many, or prayers that are too long)
I like the way that it invites everyone to contribute.  This makes it more empowering and engaging.

Maybe there are some principles to draw that can be adapted back in a church setting.  In fact this is something we were beginning to experiment with before lockdown, with the time to break up in the middle of the service to respond to the opening introduction in a variety of ways. 
The drawback is that it’s harder to be a bystander, which can be quite threatening/challenging, so there should always be the option of using this time for personal reflection.
Church

Work Of Love And Grace

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Today’s question  – What could be different about church ?
I came across a verse today in psalm 68 – I’m reading the New Revised Standard Version
verse 9:
Rain in abundance, O God, you showered abroad;
you restored your heritage when it languished;
I’m taking God’s heritage here as the Church of God.  And in this country and in so many secular, Post Christendon societies, the Church of God has lost its edge. 
So the hope held out here is that God will restore the Church.
Rain in abundance: this reminds us that this restoration will be a work of God.  We do not send the rain, this is not something that we can control.
You showered abroad: I realise that translations vary enormously, but the word that came to me today through this phrase was another hope – that God’s renewal would be widespread.
In the latter half of the 20th century, there was a widespread renewal in worship, with greater openness to the work of the Holy Spirit.
What I am praying for is a greater openness now to the Holy Spirit breaking down the walls of the church to spread God’s goodness and grace.
There’s a story in the Gospel about the woman who brought a jar of precious perfume to Jesus – she broke it open and poured it over Jesus’ feet and wiped his feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.
What I pray for is for the world to filled with the gracious works of the Holy Spirit through God’s church.  Of course those works of love and grace are not absent now, but we long for more. 
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What is Church?

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Yesterday was Ascension Day in the Christian calendar.  It’s the day when the church remembers Jesus’ return to the Father – 40 days after the resurrection.  Jesus left his follwers with a command to pray as they waited for the promised coming of the Holy Spirit.  That would happen on the day of Pentecost, 10 days later.

In recent years, many Christians have used these 10 days between Ascension and Pentecost to pray ‘Thy Kingdom Come.’  This is a prayer that we offer continually, but we are called to pray this prayer especially at this time.

In our congregation in Gloucester, we are praying that we will learn new lessons about what it means to be church at this time of crisis.

We are considering some questions to help us with this prayer:

  • what is church to you?  
  • what is the spiritual bread you need each day?
  • why St Paul and St Stephen’s?  why do you come to church here?
  • what is it that you cherish about our community?
  • what could be different in the days ahead?
  • what could we hold onto?
  • how is God asking us to reach out to others?
  • what are the temptations we need to avoid – as a church?
  • how do we allow God’s kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven in this place?

I’m thinking about the first question today.

One model of church (Purpose driven church) has these five priorities: Worship, Evangelism, Discipleship, Fellowship, Ministry.

(I won’t unpack any of those words here)

Others will have other models to describe church … One that I have found helpful is found in a book by Eugene Peterson: Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work.

He has five – Prayer Directing, Discipleship Making, Community Building, Pain Sharing and Injustice Resisting. (I’m actually paraphrasing his categories, which he describes slightly differently)

Notice the absence of Worship and Mission ….

I think that’s because Worship and Mission are not things that we do but more about who we are. Worship is at the heart of all of the five categories above.  As is Mission.  To share the pain of another in works of service and compassion is a missional activity.  To resist injustice is a mission activity.

So I would argue that one of the ways we need to see church is with Mission at its heart, not simply a set of activities.  The famous analogy of fire works well – As a fire only exists through burning, so the Church only exists in mission.

For many churches, this is about changing a mindset.  Having a complete revolution in the way we think, so that we see everything in our lives through a lens of mission.

And at the heart, this mission is not ours to contain and own, but it is the mission of God, expressed most completely in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. And God invites us to be a part of his saving mission to the world, bringing reconciliation through forgiveness and peace through justice.

It’s good to remember another recent well used phrase – It is not that the church of God has a mission, but that the God of mission has a church.

It is only when we are people defined by mission as much as worship that we will see the world blessed by the church. Otherwise, we remain behind the doors of our churches, in a different kind of lockdown, unable to be the agents of blessing to the world.










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The Moviegoer

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I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the longterm effects of Lockdown.  Some of course are bad news – for families suffering bereavement, for those whose businesses will not survive, for those whose education has been affected.

There will be some good news as well.  But I think we will have to be attentive to what that might be, otherwise we will slip back into old ways.

We have on our shelves a book by Walker Percy – The Moviegoer.  I can’t actually remember if I have read it.  I bought it on a recommendation years ago, and I’ll have to revisit it.

I was reminded of the book today when I picked a random page (page 73) from ‘The Ragamuffin Gospel’ by Brennan Manning. He is writing about a moment in the book that helped me make some connections with where we are in Lockdown.

The Moviegoer tells the story of a commuter who has a pretty good life in many ways, but in spite of that feels bad all the time. Every day as he rides the train he is gripped by a nameless despair.

Then, one day, while on the train, he has a heart attack, and is taken from the train to hospital.  he wakes up in a strange place, surrounded by faces he doesn’t recognise.  He see a hand on his bedsheet, and not realising it is his own hand, he marvels at the way it can move and open and close.

Percy describes what happens to the man as an awakening, as bit by bit, he encounters himself and his life in ways that he hadn’t done for years.  The ordeal restored him to himself.  What he chooses to do now will be the whole burden of his existence …

His heart attack has liberated him from a meaningless life and set him on a path to a new existence.

Manning writes – “Percy plunges his heroes into disaster and ordeal, only to speak out of the whirlwind about the worst of times being the best of times … through the catastrophe they discover the freedom to act and to be”

It’s as if we have all had that ‘heart attack moment’ when we suddenly went into lockdown.  For Christians, and those of other faiths, that meant we could no longer meet together.  Our buildings were closed.

For Muslims, this has been a Ramadan like no other.  On a typical night in Ramadan, mosques would be full with hundreds of people, many of them praying all night.  How terrible to not be able to meet together in this way.  Yet out of this catastrophe there may have been new opportunities, new discoveries, new experiences.

Christians too have had to cope with online virtual services, and all that lockdown has meant.

But could this time signal a reawakening ?  As we ask questions about our faith, and the meaning of church, might this lead us as churches to discover a new freedom to act and to be.

More to come, as I ponder on all of this.

Peace be with you.

Some phrases above are quotes from ‘The Ragamuffin Gospel’