Thy Kingdom Come

31st May 2020 Jonnyfun.ELeave a comment

Today is Pentecost Sunday

The last of the questions I’m thinking about is:

How do we allow God’s kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven – in this place?

I’m coming to the end of the book ‘Church After Christendom,’ and I’ll just have a few thoughts here.

De-emphasise worship, and make Mission and Community Building just as central

Reduce the number of church focused commitments to allow congregation members to be involved in other activities and mission opportunities outside church.

Cultivate simplicity – which does not necessarily mean blandness or lacking in creativity.

Take a long look at ourselves, using tools that are there to help us identify areas of strength and weakness – especially in areas of conflict within the church. Use resources such as Appreciative Inquiry, The Healthy Churches Audit, Bridgebuilders.

Promote lay participation and become less ‘leader centric.’ Encourage multi voiced worship.

Refocused commitment – we live in an age when it is often said that people do not want commitment – yet movements like extinction rebellion show that where people see something worth struggling for, they will do it.

I love this prayer, with four words that are used to describe the way we are called to be … full of generosity, joy, imagination and courage

Living God, draw us deeper into your love;

Jesus our Lord, send us to care and serve;

Holy Spirit, make us heralds of good news.

Stir us, strengthen us, teach and inspire us,

to live your love with generosity and joy,

imagination and courage;

for the sake of your world,

and in the name of Jesus, Amen.

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What could we hold onto ?

27th May 2020 Jonnyfun.ELeave a comment

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.

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What is Church?

22nd May 202014th Aug 2020 Jonnyfun.ELeave a comment

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.