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All Along the Watchtower

~ A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you … John 13:34

All Along the Watchtower

Tag Archives: Evangelism

“God talk”: an opportunity?

27 Saturday Jun 2020

Posted by John Charmley in Church/State, Faith, Politics

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Bishop Philip North, Covid19, Evangelism, Martyn Percy

North

Some have taken yesterday’s post to be hyper-critical of ++ Justin, a reminder that the post-modernists have a point when they say the author of a text has no control over how it is read. It seems to me that the Archbishop’s words have been taken out of context, but that even in context, they show a deafness of tone which is worrying.

The Very Reverend Professor Martyn Percy, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, commented some years ago that “one of the disappointing and alarming features of ++Justin’s primacy is his refusal to birth his proposed reforms in any good theology.” For Professor Percy, the heart of the problem is “++ Justin’s bewildering reluctance to talk about God.” That is not a problem confined to one Communion. The speed with which, mainly white Bishops moved to condemn the “systemic racism” of their own churches, has been contrasted by some with the want of serious theological talk about the pandemic and the place of Christianity at this time. Others think that unfair and point, rightly, to the good work done on parishes up and down the land.

One of the best analyses of how Christian churches should respond in the aftermath of Covid19 is that of the Bishop of Burnley, The Rt. Rev. Philip North in the Church Times, where he writes:

First, it is revealing something about our national life, and any attempt to rethink the ministry of the Church of England must begin with an attentive listening to the culture that it is our task to transform in Christ.

This is a brave and evangelical approach, but +Philip is clear:

We need priests — and bishops — who see themselves not as functionaries of an organisation, but as free-roaming evangelists in the style of Aidan or Cuthbert.

There is, of course, here the danger identified by Adrian Hilton (“Cranmer”) in his discussion with Professor Percy, that there is “no point teaching if no-one is listening.” But +Philip sees in the events of the past few months a period where, despite churches being closed, people have been listening, and may remain attentive – for a while:

we are seeing the unpicking of the lie that people today are not interested in the gospel. We have, instead, a nation relearning how to pray, looking to us for answers to the big questions, and accessing church life through online means in a way that we could not have imagined possible six months ago. Some studies reckon that one in three of the population have attended online worship since lockdown began. One Sunday, the Christians crashed Zoom.

At the same time, the economic and social consequences of the “lockdown” period are likely to be severe, and that part of parish ministry which has been quietly devoted to foodbanks and helping those bady hit, is only going to increase. As one whose family benefitted from such an initiative during industrial action in the mid-1960s, I can attest to the lasting effect of such a ministry; the Church was there for my family when no one else, including the Union which had called the strike, was.

Bishop Philip is right to say:

We now need to be ready to honour and acknowledge this new generation of lay leaders who have learnt how to use their gifts in Christ’s service, and who will not be happy to be mere consumers again.

To quote Professor Percy again (and yes, I know there may seem to be an irony in juxtaposing him with +Philip in view ofhis part in the former not becoming Bishop of Sheffield, but that just shows God’s providence, and maybe His sense of humour): “Theology and faith is always contextual, but that does not suggest an ultimate capitulation to relativism.” (Percy, Thirty-Nine New Articles, 2013, p. 19). A Church which, in times of crisis, adapts to bring the Word of God in action to those in need, has in the past, and can again, help transform the society within which it is set.

And this is where Professor Percy and +Philip are at one. If the Church is to meet the challenge set then it will need to be theologically-grounded as well as nimble. That would require it to move beyond the current “understanding of the diocese as an organisation, and its bishop and clergy as no more than “leaders”.

a diocese is not an organisation. It is a communion: a network of sacramental relationships flowing from the bishop, which together make up part of the body of Christ. Rather than draw everything into the centre, perhaps we need smaller, looser, central structures, which trust the local and encourage resourceful leadership; a bishop would offer oversight, but not control

In Professor Percy’s words, there needs to be more“God talk” and it needs to inform and drive how the Church reacts:

If A nation is, indeed, turning again to its Church, now is not the time to withdraw and manage decline. This crisis is showing us patterns of ministry which can enable us to reconnect to the culture and recapture imaginations with the gospel.

What +Philip writes, although addressed to a predominantly Anglican audience, is true for all Christian Churches.

There is a hunger for something beyond the material rewards offered by the consumerism that has been dominant in the West for so long. The question is whether the Churches are led by those who can seize the opportunity identified by Bishop Philip North.

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Material world

09 Thursday Jun 2016

Posted by Geoffrey RS Sales in Faith

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Catholicism, Christianity, Evangelism, Jesus, Materialism

IMG_0214

I was talking to a chap the other day after our usual Saturday morning preaching session in the local town. He wanted to know why we were bothering, science, he said, explained everything, so why did we need Jesus – all there was, he said, was what we saw. So, I asked him. did he think there were no radio waves? when had he last seen one – and yet his radio worked. How did he feel about electricity, where, again, he could see the results but not the thing itself. We live in a world where there are all sorts of things which we can’t see, but we can see evidence suggesting things we can’t see exist and matter – so why be so in denial about the spiritual?

We ended up having a coffee, as he seemed to want to talk further. It turned out he was in town buying a wedding present for his daughter who is getting married at the end of the month. As I’ve two daughters, we ended up chatting about modern youth – the way you do. His lass had just taken out a mortgage on a house with her future husband. There you go, I said, proof positive that there is more to this world than things we can measure and weigh. After all, I pointed out, his daughter was just making a huge and life-transforming decision on the basis of what – a feeling? She loved her fiance, and he loved her –  but what proof did they have of that – except their committing their lives to each other? What sort of scientific decision was that? Could they weigh and measure love? I assumed that her future husband thought his future wife was a beautiful  but again, where was the proof she really was? Had she been weighed, measured and compared against what society considers ‘beautiful’? Was there even a scientific consensus on what beauty was? Rubens, after all, liked his women to have plenty of curves, whilst modern fashion designers like the opposite. Yet, again, people make life-changing decisions without what scientists would call ‘evidence’. So why, when we allow so much leeway for non-scientific ‘evidence’ do we insist on it in the realm of the spiritual?

Our western society is in denial about the one thing to which all humans are heir – death. Where, for our ancestors, even for my parents generation, and certainly for their parents, death in the midst of life was common enough to have acquired whole sets of rituals – laying out in the parlour comes to my mind, and the wearing of black by widows – we are in denial. Funerals ‘celebrate’ the ‘life’, because so many believe that after that there is nothing. Life exists because it exists, we die, perhaps procreate, we consume, and we die. There is no ‘purpose’. Yet few people act as though that is the case, we act as though it matters what we do with our life, because we have an inbuilt sense that it does matter. But the moral codes which underpin our lives here in the West rest on Christian foundations of what is good and bad, and as we distance ourselves from that, it is by no means clear that the moral codes will survive.

Already we actually have discussions about at what stage it is right to kill and infant in the womb, not because its survival might threaten the life and health of the mother in a physical way, but because the woman has the ‘right to choose’. To a consumerist society that sound seductive. But we all ignore the fact that rights are not absolutes – we all have to negotiate with others about which ‘rights’ matter and where my rights end and their rights begin – how do we coexist? For this we have relied on shared values. But I am not sure that we any longer share as many as we imagine. If her right to choose means her partner or her baby in the womb have no rights, then that’s not an assertion of any moral principe, it is an exercise in power dynamics.

If we see no wider purpose in life except consuming and materialism, then it makes sense to concentrate on our own selfish needs. Babies cost money, children cost much more, why bother? Use your money on yourself. No doubt some way will be found to provide the next generation of workers to pay for your pension and to look after you in your care home.

The evidence is, it seems to me, that materialism produces an impoverished existence for most folk. It suits a society based on knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. At any rate, it was good to see the chap at our meeting on Sunday, and I hope he’ll come back. There’s more to life than we can see – as we can see by looking at it.

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A new life in Christ?

03 Friday Jun 2016

Posted by JessicaHoff in Bible, Faith, Reading the BIble

≈ 32 Comments

Tags

Christianity, controversy, Evangelism, Faith, God, Grace, Jesus, love

woman taken

Jesus’ injunctions to us are predicated on our new life in him, as St Paul makes clear. The Law cannot save us. We can keep every jot and tittle of it, but that does not save us. We cannot be saved unto eternal life through being a ‘good person’ – if all our efforts are thus directed we gain not life, but death. If we have new life in Christ, then being in the love of God, if we are rude to someone, we will feel bad about it; our new life in Jesus does not make us perfect, but it does infuse us with God’s love; we do not act differently – we are different. Jesus did not judge the woman taken in adultery, he called her to new life by turning from her sins to him; he did not condemn the woman at the well for having had five husbands, he called her to redemption through the living water of his love.

If we look at the attitude evinced by Jesus to the hot ethical issues of his day, we do not find him making the sort of judgments the Pharisees made. On divorce, where there were discussions within Judaism on the proper grounds for it, and for deciding whether a marriage had even existed, Jesus did not say that the Jewish equivalent of what Christians call Canon law should be followed – he cut through our human reasoning – that has not stopped mankind trying to find ways of avoiding what he said by finding ways of saying a marriage never existed. When Pharisees tried to involve him in political arguments about what sort of duty the Jews owed to the civil government, again, he cut through their sophistry. On the rules covering adultery, Jesus simply, again, refused to be drawn into condemning the woman, even though the Law was utterly clear on what should be done. Neither was he over-exercised about what the Law said could and could not be done on the Sabbath. It is easy to see why the religious leaders of his own community came to hate him and wanted him killed. Time after time Jesus confronts these leaders with a message which amounts to ‘who are you to judge?’

Pope Francis seems to arouse the same sort of hatred from the same type of person who hated Jesus. He, like Christ, talks a lot about love and mercy and living a new life, and he spends little time condemning others; those who find in their religion an excuse to condemn those sinners over there, naturally find this abhorrent – it vitiates the whole purpose of their religion. Do these people do what Jesus would have done and what Francis tries to do? Do they take in refugees? Do they welcome the prostitutes, the modern equivalent of the tax collectors, do they embrace without judging the marginalised in our society. Or are they, like the Pharisees, on high alert to see if someone disobeys a rubric or breaches canon law, and to point out when they do not come up to the level of behaviour their church demands. Where does Jesus say that he will only love the repentant prostitute, tax collector or sinner? where does he say that only when they have purged their behaviour will he love them? He proceeds, as God, knowing that love will redeem them – love them, make them a new creation in Him, and that will begin to affect all aspects of their lives.

Too often our churches put the cart before the horse. We would like the sinners to repent before we love them, so we imagine that is what Jesus must have meant really. No, his message is far more radical than that, and very discomforting for those who see in Christianity a moral code akin to the Torah. If we find these considerations are top of our list, then we might ask why? There is nothing wrong in wanting people to behave better and in wanting people to know who the real Jesus is, but of this is where we find our religious action, we might ask why we are finding it necessary to hide from the radicalism of the way Jesus shows us?

Quiavideruntoculi, as ever, exemplifies this way of thinking, as this comment on my post yesterday shows:

The Church only refuses communion to those in public sin. Being fat is not, by itself, proof that someone is an unrepentant glutton, or that he ever was a glutton (though I accept that almost everyone commits the venial sin of gluttony). Being in a homosexual “marriage” IS proof that one is an unrepentant sodomite. Sodomy is a mortal sin.

There were have it, let us split sins into two, let us decide to condemn a sin which afflicts the few, and excuse one which afflicts the many, and let us judge as though we were God Himself. In none of his (more than 3000 C tells me) comments is there the slightest trace of any notion that as a forgiven sinner himself, he might begin by embracing and loving his fellow sinners. Perhaps he feels that by behaving well he is no longer a sinner. It is not the Law that saves. As we judge, by that measure shall we be judged. Are we without sin that we condemn another? Are we God that we can judge what is in their hearts? Or, having eaten of the fruit of the tree of Good and Evil, are we presuming to do what God alone can do – and following through on the consequences of the sin which led to the Fall of mankind?

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Choose your sin?

02 Thursday Jun 2016

Posted by JessicaHoff in Anglicanism, Bible, Faith

≈ 54 Comments

Tags

Christianity, controversy, Evangelism, Faith, love

gluttony-is-a-sin

The Bible has a great deal to say about one of the sins which our secular society would describe as a problem – and no, that’s not homosexuality or adultery – gluttony. Sirach 23:6 brackets it with lust as a ‘shameless passion’, whilst there are plenty of other passages which see it as a form of idolatry – worshipping the belly. Some 60% of Americans are overweight – a far greater number than are homosexual or who have abortions, so one might expect the churches to make great play of such a prevalent sin. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard people complain about preachers/priests not preaching on ‘sin’, by which they usually mean sex or abortion, but I have never once heard anyone ask why no one preaches about gluttony? It is the most prevalent of sins in our Western society if by prevalent one means common – and yet I can’t recall a Papal encyclical mentioning it, or an Anglican Conference pronouncing on it – can you? Does your Church mention it much – despite it being one of the seven deadly sins?

Apart from the nanny-State health professionals, no one goes around judging the overweight – and again, those people apart, we tend to acknowledge that eating disorders are quite a complex phenomenon, and that quick-fix diets and other miracle cures are not the solution. If there is a solution, it is a long-term one involving education, self-discipline and motivation. We don’t argue that overweight people should not be made welcome in church because of the obvious outward sign of their sin – and if anyone did suggest such a thing, most of us would think it outrageous – and not a few priests and pastors might find themselves with a problem there too. As a (fortunately) naturally skinny woman (whose main problem with food is remembering to eat it regularly) I could choose to be very judgmental of fat people, refusing to accept their excuses that it is a complex problem, because for me it isn’t. If I were, I think, and rightly, that I’d get short shrift. Now, if in this paragraph thus far, I replaced the words ‘fat’ and ‘overweight’ with the words ‘lesbian’ and ‘homosexual’, I wonder how many would be inclined to accept so easily the conclusion that one should not be judgmental about accepting such people in church – that despite the fact that lesbianism gets about one mention and male homosexuality no more than gluttony?

Where, with the sin of overeating, we’d all be inclined to acknowledge that we’d need to understand the glutton and not discriminate against her (or him), but how many conservative Christians would accept the same is true of gay people? Yet, there are fewer gay people than fat people, and it would be hard to construct an argument to say that gay people cost, say, the National Health Service in the UK as much as fat people, or, from a Christian perspective, that Scripture is harder on gayness than it is on obesity – but I have yet to hear a conservative Christian saying obesity is a sin that cries to heaven for vengeance, or that fat people are bound for hell unless they amend their ways; have you? No, me neither.

Gay people are an easy target. Gay activists make a lot of noise, and a lot of the noise they make annoys conservatives, and moreover, there are not a lot of them in churches – compared, that is, to fat people. Imagine if we were to say that fat people were not welcome in church until they had repented of their sin of gluttony and shown true amendment of life? Apart from anything else, you’d see a pretty dramatic decline in the collection plate and in tithing; so it is safe to say these things about homosexuals – but not fat people.

Is there not something just a wee bit hypocritical going on here? I wonder, turning it round, how it would seem to the wider society, if we treated gay Christians the way we treated gluttonous ones? More love, less judgment, anyone?

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Falling short of the love of God?

30 Monday May 2016

Posted by JessicaHoff in Anglicanism, Bible, Faith

≈ 25 Comments

Tags

Christianity, Church & State, controversy, Evangelism, Jesus, love

warrior_bride of Jesus Christ

Latterly, whenever I have written about ‘love’ here it has caused controversy. God showed the extent of his love for us by gaining for us the rewards of salvation by his sacrifice at Calvary. Jesus prayed that the Church would reflect that love. Yet it is clear, except to those with their fingers in their ears and eyes fixed on their own navels, that the world does not see the Church as a society which manifests a radical, self-sacrificing love, either to its own members, or to those without it. We can, of course, choose to tell the world it does not understand these things, but we might do better to reflect on how and why it has this impression, and to wonder how far we are responsible for this sorry state of affairs.

Looking from the outside, or even the inside, or even at this blog, the world might get the impression that Christians are preoccupied with somewhat arcane theological disputes, inter-denominational quarrels, and doctrinal disputes in which we evince nothing that looks in the slightest bit like Christ’s love on Calvary. We are known in the world not for our love and our radical embrace of the outsider and the outcast, but rather for our propensity to judge. If, as Our Lord prayed, the world would know Him through our witness of love, perhaps the real reason for the growth of atheism and agnosticism is that our witness has been so poor?

Paul told the Galatians that all that matters when we are in Christ is faith working through love. We are called not to be ‘religious’ or ‘pious’ – these things are a by-product, or rather the result of the new life we have in Christ – we are called to witness to that new life and to the love of Christ which has transformed us. Christ loved us when we were far off, and though we are sinners, and he laid his life down for us because His love saw we were worth saving; do we do that? Are the Churches noted in the world for doing this? We are told to love God and our neighbour as ourself – and we’re not allowed the option of loving only those neighbours who are like us – everything else, the whole of the Law and the Old Testament witness hangs on obeying this commandment. John tells us we are liars if we say we love God but hate our brothers and sisters, and in the light of what Jesus says, it is wrong to read this last as somehow John saying we should love only our fellow Christians – those who argue thus seem frightened of the implications of the radical love of Christ which transforms us. If we do not love, we do not know God.

We can, and we often do, choose to assess ourselves and others by how far they conquer a particular sin, how often they go to church, and how ‘religious’ they seem, and this is fair enough, but how often do we judge them – and ourselves – by the extent to which we manifest that love of God for others – all others, even the outcasts, the strangers within our gate, and those who seem most unloveable? All we do is in Christ, and if we love, as we know we are loved by God, then we pass on that knowledge to others. We are told that if we abide in love, we abide in God, and that is not theoretical, it isn’t about defining the various types of love which we see in Scripture, it is about expressing that love of God which led the Word to sacrifice Himself for us because He saw in us the image of God. Do we do that? Or do we parse words and shimmy away from the radical conclusion that it is our failure to witness to this love of God which is at the root of the growth of secularism?

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The Wedding at Cana

29 Sunday May 2016

Posted by JessicaHoff in Bible, Faith, St John

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Christianity, Evangelism, Jesus, love

497292288_d79ca4355f_o

The second of the mysteries of light when praying the Rosary is the wedding of Cana. I want to share some thoughts which have come to me over the years as I meditate on what St John tells us.

St John is as much poet as evangelist – or perhaps I should say that for me, the best way of understanding Scripture is often through poetry. Sometimes we read texts as though they were simply words on paper, not always taking in the notion that even what seem to be mere ‘facts’ are also ripe with interpretative material; like all the Evangelists, St John is a theologian – he asks the question, what is it that the facts signify? Jesus had taught in parables, and when the Spirit came on the Apostles, they understood that the sort of symbolism Jesus had used was a good way of getting the message to their listeners – and of course, most of those who received the Gospel did so by that means.

So, we could read the story of the wedding at Cana as simply a magic trick – Jesus changed water into win – hey presto! But note, St John calls it a ‘sign’ – and a sign points to something else, not itself. Not all the ‘signs’ Jesus gave are recorded in the Gospels, but the ones that are are all pointing us towards the truth of who He is and the invitation He extends to each of us to discover that reality in our own lives and to follow Him. (John 20: 30-31).

It is not accidental that St John begins this episode with the words ‘on the third day’ – those familiar with the resurrection as told by Paul (1 Cor 15:3-4) or by Luke (Acts 10:40) would get the resonance with the resurrection – this particular sign is indeed an occasion of ‘light’ – it is the beginning of a new age. The final Passover meal begins with a reference to the ‘hour’ and ends with the prayer ‘Father, the hour has come: glorify your Son.’ (17:1). The words ‘glory’ and ‘glorify’ appear, from chapter 12 on, alongside the word ‘hour’. Jesus prays to be saved from this ‘hour’ in the Garden, but in the Passion we see that it is during it that his ‘glory’ is to be seen. We see here the link between Cana – the first of the signs which would reveal his glory – and the revelation of Calvary. Cana is an epiphany – the first occasion in his adult life when the world gets a glimpse of His glory.

In Jesus, the finest wine has arrived, and it has come in abundance – all at the wedding can drink this new wine. We might note that the six water pots which are standing by (six, one short of seven, which was the usual measure of perfection) are there for the ritual of cleansing – for the guests to make themselves ritually clean. But we see here that it is not the water, not the ritual, but Jesus who saves us. He transforms the water of the old covenant into the wine of the new one. In this new dispensation, love is more important than ritual. As happens so often with religion, ritual had become more important than it should, and Law was more important than Love, with Love being transmogrified into something acceptable to the Law; but the Law is transformed by Love into the best wine of all.

There is so much else here that could be said, but for this, the first of five Sunday reflections on St John’s Gospel, I shall stop there. Let me know what you think.

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Disappearing Christianity?

28 Saturday May 2016

Posted by JessicaHoff in Anglicanism, Faith

≈ 33 Comments

Tags

Catholic Church, Christianity, Church & State, controversy, Evangelism, God

 

brideatwar

Friday’s Guardian headlined with the figures showing that Christianity in the UK is in what looks like terminal decline. My own church is losing ten people for every one convert, and those for the RCC would be even worse were it not for the effects of immigration

It is only the smallest and most self-consciously sectarian forms of Christianity that manage to retain believers, in part no doubt because they feel cut off from the society around them.

Archbishop William Temple once said that the Church was the only organisation which existed to benefit those who were not its members; we seem to have forgotten that. If we retreat to the margins and our own comfort zones and take refuge in the thought we are members of a purer ‘remnant’ safe in our ancient traditions, we betray the longest tradition of all – the Great Commission. Jesus did not say the his disciples, ‘hang round in upper rooms in Jerusalem and they will come to you’.

The Guardian makes an interesting point here:

The people in the pews have always been heretics with only the vaguest notion of what official doctrines are, and still less of an allegiance to them. The difference is now that they are outside the pews, even if they still hold the same vague convictions about a life spirit or a benevolent purpose to the universe

That is, in part, what prompted my short series this week on evangelism and the hot button issues and the question of how we minister to those people who still ‘believe’ but do not see the churches as part of their lives or as a way to become connected with that ‘benevolent purpose’. It is, I suppose, ironic, that a set of our commentators here, who have gone from church to church, and in some cases belief system to belief system, should have decided that someone who has remained in the same church all her life, is the one person out of line; but I take comfort from the fact that those here involved in active evangelism ‘get it’ and know that in asking questions about what we do about this situation, I am prescribing no one remedy.

If there is a call for the Latin Mass, fine, let those who want it have it, but let others have what they find works for them. The Church cannot be Henry Ford – ‘any colour as long as it is black’. Sometimes we ask how it is that there can be so many churches, with the implication that there should be only one. But what if there is only one – the One Gospel – but put across in many forms because that is how we have traditionally reached people? I have no idea whether this idea is true, but it is a reality all the same.

I was interested to read in the Catholic Herald that the American RCC is doing well, especially in the south in bringing in the unchurched. The tremendous Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith (why isn’t he a bishop?) outlines the characteristics he finds work in a church with a successful mission:

• It is Marian.
• It is Christocentric.
• It is Eucharistic.
• It is not clericalist: all the parishioners are called to be involved.
• It emphasises prayer, education, fellowship and works – in that order.

He refers, rightly, to ‘inculturation’, and this in the context of speaking to Spanish speakers in their language. But what about the culture we are in here? My series here this week was an appeal to a different from of inculturation.

This is what the Guardian had to say about the relationship between our faith and our culture:

Over the last 50 years “religion” has come to stand for the opposite of freedom and fairness. This is partly an outcome of the sexual revolution and of the long and ultimately futile resistance to it mounted by mainstream denominations. “The religious” now appear to young people as obscurantist bigots whose main purpose is to police sexuality, especially female sexuality, in the service of incomprehensible doctrines. Institutional resistance to the rights of women and of gay people was an exceptionally stupid strategy for institutions that depends on the labour of both

Is that hard? Is it untrue to those of us in the Church? In both cases the answer is ‘yes’, but if that is what people outside the churches think, then there is no use our playing the victim and saying how awfully unfair that is. Young (and not so young) people did not get that impression by accident – and if, as one departed commentator tried to, you say there never was any misogyny in the church, you simply lose any credibility. I’ve never understood why so many in a religion founded on the idea of repentance, find it so difficult to admit fault. Of course all the churches have been misogynist – they have also been women-friendly in some ways too – so let us first face up to why people think this about us – and then do something other than quote obscure texts no one has ever heard of to pretend the elephant in the room is not there.

One of our commentators told me yesterday:

Your Jesus is as about as historical as Bosco’s.
God doesn’t change. So what you worship is not God.

We change, society changes, and if this has no impact on how we perceive the Eternal Message of God, and we refuse to change, not the Gospel, but the way we work in a changing culture, then we become exactly what the Guardian is talking about.

If we are frightened of a culture, we cannot do inculturation. Too often our attitude to the culture in which we exist here is akin to that of an English speaker in Latino communities who insists in speaking in English because it is his language and the one he is comfortable with. No doubt some, especially if they perceive some benefit in knowing English, will come, but you cut yourself off from everyone else – you effectively say you are not interested.

We risk, as the Guardian points out, losing much if we slip away altogether from the public square:

A post-Christian Europe will of course have a morality but it won’t be Christian morality. It will likely be less universalist. The idea that people have some rights just because they are human, and entirely irrespective of merit, certainly isn’t derived from observation of the world. It arose out of Christianity, no matter how much Christians have in practice resisted it.

As Tim Stanley points out in the Telegraph we have seen peaks and troughs many time in the history of Christianity, and effective evangelism has usually come out of our wrestling with what the Spirit is trying to tell us to do.  Inculturation has worked in every age of the church. If we have become too conservative, too fearful, too attached to our own comfort zones to do what the Apostles did, well then, it will be left to other Christians made bold by the Spirit, to go where we will not. But as I have tried to suggest this week, the oldest method of all – inculturation – that is walking with people where they are and preaching to them in language they understand – can still work. The question is will we be bold as our forefathers were, or are we to retreat to our safe spaces? My answer is clear – if God is with us, all things are possible – even talking to people about what matters to them, rather than our own internal churchy concerns.

 

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To Relate

23 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by Neo in Faith, Saints

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

England, Evangelism, history, Moral relativism, St. George

always-love-and-respectIn reading our discussions lately, it  has struck me that sometimes we conflate words to get to places we didn’t really mean to go.

We have discussed much how the church relates to the congregant. Webster’s defines relate this way.

: to show or make a connection between (two or more things)

: to understand and like or have sympathy for someone or something

: to tell (something, such as a story)

For our purposes though, I think the definition from the medical dictionary is perhaps more useful:

: to have meaningful social relationships : interact realistically <an inability to relate emotionally to others—Willow Lawson>

In many ways, when we look for a church, that’s what we are looking for, isn’t it? A place that will try to understand “where we are coming from”. And not this: if we are coming from, it’s likely that we are not satisfied with where we are, so we’re unlikely to be looking simply for validation that we’ve been perfect, are we?

So we’re not merely looking for validation that we’re doing everything right, we’re most likely looking for something better. Perhaps an example, perhaps someone to follow.

People are unchurched for many reasons, some have never been told anything about Christianity, some have come away from a lukewarm experience that left them unsatisfied, there are as many reasons as there are the unchurched.

It is our mission to listen to them, to help them to understand the Good News and help them make the journey to Christ. Note that i am not saying (nor have I ever) that we should compromise our beliefs (or our churches’) but we should, nay we must, listen to them carefully to understand what is troubling them.

No doubt if we are active in this, we will hear all manner of folly, and things that we know are nonsense. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that they learn that we care about them and will listen to them. If we don’t have that relationship, and that trust, we will be ineffective, not least because we will never understand why they are looking for something,.

But once they have learned that we can be trusted, and trusted not to denigrate them for what they say, we can begin to lead them to the Cross. Without that, we will simply drive them away, at least in my experience, from both sides.

Earlier, I said I think we sometimes conflate words. The phrase I had in mind is moral relativism. The Basics of Philosophy tells us:

Moral Relativism (or Ethical Relativism) is the position that moral or ethical propositions do not reflect objective and/oruniversal moral truths, but instead make claims relative to social, cultural, historical or personal circumstances. It does notdeny outright the truth-value or justification of moral statements (as some forms of Moral Anti-Realism do), but affirms relative forms of them. It may be described by the common aphorism: “When in Rome, do as the Romans do”.

Moral Relativists point out that humans are not omniscient, and history is replete with examples of individuals and societies acting in the name of an infallible truth later demonstrated to be more than fallible, so we should be very wary of basing important ethical decisions on a supposed absolute claim. Absolutes also tend to inhibit experimentation and foreclose possible fields of inquiry which might lead to progress in many fields, as well as stifling the human spirit and quest for meaning. In addition, the short term proves itself vastly superior in the ethical decision-making process than the relatively unknown long-term.

Relativistic positions may specifically see moral values as applicable only within certain cultural boundaries (Cultural Relativism) or in the context of individual preferences (Ethical Subjectivism). A related but slightly different concept is that ofMoral Pluralism (or Value Pluralism), the idea that there are several values which may be equally correct and fundamental, and yet in conflict with each other (e.g. the moral life of a nun is incompatible with that of a mother, yet there is no purely rationalmeasure of which is preferable).

An extreme relativist position might suggest that judging the moral or ethical judgments or acts of another person or group has no meaning at all, though most relativists propound a more limited version of the theory. Some philosophers maintain that Moral Relativism dissolves into Emotivism (the non-cognitivist theory espoused by many Logical Positivists, which holds that ethical sentences serve merely to express emotions and personal attitudes) or Moral Nihilism (the theory that, although ethical sentences do represent objective values, they are in fact false).

Moral Relativism generally stands in contrast to Moral Absolutism, Moral Universalism and to all types of Moral Realism, which maintain the existence of invariant moral facts that can be known and judged, whether through some process of verification or through intuition.

There’s quite a lot more, as I’m sure you are aware, and it’s interesting, especially the history. But since we are Christians, we can’t really go there, in my opinion, without abrogating our faith. Christ taught us that there is objectively right, and wrong, in all times and all places.

Yes, things change. Christ was not pressing for the abolition of human slavery, but Christianity was the driving force in its abolition in the west. Nor did He agitate for the equality of women but we have come to see that as a Christian value.

In other words he taught us the basics, and we have taken the ball and advanced it, with due regard for tradition, we have come to see that the dignity of the individual human being is paramount, and that human rights (as we perceive them) are an objectively good (and ethical) thing.

But to come back to where we began, it is not our role to judge others, God will take care of that in His own good time. And in truth, as I get older, I have less and less desire to judge others. More and more I realize that everybody’s experience is different and I’m simply not qualified.

What our mission is once we have a person’s trust is to teach him what God says and does, and give him the tools to judge himself. This is the role of confession. And then God will participate with forgiveness and mercy.

A reminder for all of us though, although our churches don’t seem to stress it as much as they used to, Christ ended almost all of his lessons with this, in one form or another:

Go and sin no more

That’s key!


 

st-georgeAnd since today is 23 April, I thought I would add a reminder that it is the Feast Day of St. George. He’s a busy guy, he’s the patron saint of Bulgaria, Ethiopia, Georgia, Greece, Portugal and Russia, but above all in our minds: England.

Sir Winston Churchill said:

There is a forgotten -nay almost forbidden word,
. . . . a word which means more to me than any other. . . .
That word is
“ENGLAND”

Seems to me he’s wasn’t far wrong. We hear much of Great Britain, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, and even of the former Empires: America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Singapore, and even India, but we hear little of the source of the glory: England. For without the driving force of English ideas, our world would simply not exist.

The Late Rt Hon Enoch Powell MBE, once said at a St. George’s Day speech.

There was a saying, not heard today so often as formerly . .

“What do they know of England who only England know?”

It is a saying which dates. It has a period aroma, like Kipling’s “Recessional” or the state rooms at Osborne. That phase is ended, so plainly ended, that even the generation born at its zenith, for whom the realisation is the hardest, no longer deceive themselves as to the fact. That power and that glory have vanished, as surely, if not as tracelessly, as the imperial fleet from the waters of Spithead.

And yet England is not as Nineveh and Tyre, nor as Rome, nor as Spain. Herodotus relates how the Athenians, returning to their city after it had been sacked and burnt by Xerxes and the Persian army, were astonished to find, alive and flourishing in the blackened ruins, the sacred olive tree, the native symbol of their country.

So we today, at the heart of a vanished empire, amid the fragments of demolished glory, seem to find, like one of her own oak trees, standing and growing, the sap still rising from her ancient roots to meet the spring, England herself.

Happy St. George’s Day to the cousins!

 

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