An Emerged Community

Questions of relevance are always critical for the church. How can we effect - for good and for God - those whom we encounter? There is an increasing awareness around of the importance of giving 'community' its desired and necessary precedence. These days there are many ways in which churches seek to be appropriate and these seem to work best with this emphasis on community. I was interested in some comments on these ideas by Duncan MacLaren (in "Mission Implausible") - “In recent years .. there has been much talk of ‘emerging church’. The term is in danger of becoming meaningless if it becomes entrenched (a church cannot ‘emerge’ for ever), but for the moment it seems to be a good way both to capture the sense that established patterns of being church are increasingly moribund, and to give space for experimental patterns of church life to emerge unhindered by premature definitions. ‘Networks’, ‘Cell Church’, ‘Liquid Church’, ‘Transforming Communities’ and ‘Small Christian Communities’ are all ways of articulating what is emerging. .... What all of them seem to agree on .. is that community must take priority over congregation if the church in Britain is to have a future. In one way, this sounds radical; in another, it seems obvious .... ” I hope we can do the obvious so far as being church in an effective - and community-minded - way.

Love Changes Everything

I want to put two things together. The first is that God is love. There are many ways in which we can describe God, many things that we can say about God but, arguably, the most profound is that statement, drawn most obviously from the first letter of John, that God is love. The second thing is that the church is, or should be, about change. That change may come in all sorts of ways and at all sorts of levels, but the church should be bringing God's transforming power to bear on the world. Having made those two points, I want to put them together and use Michael Ball's song "Love Changes Everything" as a commentary on the resultant mix. "Love, love changes everything Hands and faces, earth and sky Love, love changes everything How you live and how you die Love, can make the summer fly Or a night seem like a lifetime Yes love, love changes everything Now I tremble at your name Nothing in the world will ever be the same Love, love changes everything Days are longer, words mean more Love, love changes everything Pain is deeper than before Love will turn your world around And that world will last forever Yes love, love changes everything Brings you glory, brings you shame Nothing in the world will ever be the same Off into the world we go Planning futures, shaping years Love (comes in) and suddenly all our wisdom disappears Love makes fools of everyone All the rules we made are broken Yes love, love changes everyone Live or perish in its flame Love will never never let you be the same Love will never never let you be the same" If you look in detail at some of the things the song says, and apply them to church, I think you will find a very useful challenge emerging.

Putting Peace Around

The Church needs to do all sorts of things. That is clearly so, and any church will engage in a range of activity. However, one thing that we all ought to engage with is the promotion of peace as a way of operating. We live in a world where conflict is often the name of the game - and part of the church's task is to offer the peace alternative. I love the way Fred Kaan sums it up in his hymn "Put peace into each other's hands", especially the third verse: "Put peace into each other's hands like bread we break for sharing; look people warmly in the eye: our life is meant for caring." If we can "look people warmly in the eye", then we are doing something right. If we can't, .......

Stand Tall

At last weekend's General Assembly of the United Reformed Church in Edinburgh the new General Secretary of the URC (Revd. Roberta Rominger) urged the church to take seriously its potential, saying: "if we can get the glue right between us, we have the capacity for a perfect combination: support and mutual accountability and support on the one hand, freedom for local imagination and initiative on the other". Roberta urged us to get on with the task to which God has called us saying that knowing that God's backing is there should enable us to "stand tall". Too often we lack confidence and fail to reach the prominence we ought. There is nothing to be gained from being a "well kept secret". The church is called by God to be the church. We ought to take that calling, that role and all the possibilities it offers seriously - instead of worrying about what we can't do!

Mission Implausible

In many ways the task before the church seems an impossible one. How on earth can we engagingly relate with a fast-changing world? What are we to do to demonstrate that the church is a point of resolution for society's struggles? Duncan MacLaren, in "Mission Implausible" (Paternoster, 2004) certainly recognises the problem - p. 22/3 - “Against the gleaming backdrop of cutting-edge technology, Christian faith looks a little tired. Its homely doctrine of providence – God is working his purpose out as year succeeds year – cannot compete with the adrenaline-rush injected by scientific and technological progress. Nor can its story compete with technology’s underlying evolutionary narrative. More than that, whereas progress exalts the idea of the ‘new’, Christianity trades on the value of the ‘old’, the traditional and the authoritative. In a world bewitched by progress, Christianity suffers cognitive dissonance; it tries to tell the old, old story, but people think they have heard it before. Who wants to hear the obsolete, obsolete story? In the modern world, then, while science, ‘is a culturally successful – or rather, perhaps better, confident – form of practice, in the West the church is not’.” So what are we to do to make this implausible mission plausible and effective in the communities in which we are set?

Bus Timetables and Beatitudes

One challenge for today's church is to deal both with the hugely practical and very specific whilst at the same time engaging with the spiritual and those things that drive us from inside. Today's society knows all about practical issues and wants them addressed, often in a public way, but we tend to keep those things that drive us from inside private and to ourselves. Duncan MacLaren summarises this - "Although the majority of people in Britain continue to believe in God, what they think they know of God they do not feel permission to treat as real knowledge. In the modern world, the bus timetable counts as real knowledge: the Beatitudes do not. Christian beliefs constitute a second-rate, privatized form of knowing.” ("Mission Implausible", Paternoster, 2004, p. 19) Faith and church ought not to be privatised as they should belong to everyone - to the community, but too often, I fear, they are. The church needs to engage with the issues that matter whilst, at the same time, helping people to find that spirituality which brings meaning to life and being.

On the Way

I returned yesterday from a long weekend in Edinburgh at the United Reformed Church's General Assembly. The Moderator, Revd. John Marsh, took 'pilgrimage' as his theme. Amongst many good things in his moderatorial address he commented: "We're to sustain this pilgrimage journey, walking together through thick and thin, continuing a pilgrimage of faith, during which we share gifts from each other's experience, consider wounds whether suffered or inflicted, and allow visions and nightmares to be expressed and understood. On this pilgrimage there'll be serious giving and receiving; mutual accepting and challenging - to an unsettling degree. And it's a process, a journey. Today's pilgrims are not where they were yesterday - and tomorrow they'll be somewhere else." I like - and support - this idea of not being static. We do need to be on the move, whatever that may mean. I also like the recognition that it's not all good, but a mix. The dream of the moment may be a vision, but it may, also and alternatively, be a nightmare. That is actually worth recognising.