Distinctly Welcoming

Pioneer Ordination: not nearly so radical or institutional enough

I've had a short article posted on the Fresh Expressions "Share the Guide" blog where I share some thoughts on Pioneer ordination. It comes at a time when various folk are reviewing and assessing the direction of Pioneer and, for my money, falling into the trap of defaulting to "more of the same" or "institutions always suck". Let me know what you think, anyway.

Yesterday, I had a letter published in the Guardian after they'd done a bit of a hatchet job on the Church of England over the weekend in the midst of controversies to do with sexuality and women bishops. There's a lot to be embarrassed about in this church many of us are part of, but i do wish there were more insightful analyses of our predicament.

As a bit of a final flourish, let me add my voice congratulating the Church on opening the door, and not leaving it slightly ajar, to women bishops.

Pioneer Ordination: more tea, vicar?

I'm about to go on ordination retreat. So, yes, this Sunday I will be ordained into the Church of England as a Pioneer curate. According to your point of view, I will be either:

1. showing my age and finally succumbing to the genteel temptations of establishment, compromising my principles along the way

2. courageously serving this wonderful institution as it fulfils its vocation to the entire nation

...I'd like to think there are alternative conclusions but the impression is sometimes that these are the two responses one gets. I've been intrigued by the discussion on the institution between Jonny Baker and Kester Brewin and I may chip in at some point. However, in the meantime, here's a little piece that I'll be taking with me this weekend, given me by Ray Gaston:

"We are not ordaining you to ministry; that happened at your baptism. We are not ordaining you to serve the Church in committees, activities, organisation; that is already implied in your membership. We are not ordaining you to become involved in social issues, in ecology, race, politics, and the search for justice and peace; for that is laid on every Christian.

We are ordaining you to something smaller and less spectacular; to read and interpret those sacred stories of our community, so that they speak a word to people today; to remember and practice those rituals of meaning that address people at the level where change takes place; to foster in community, through word and sacrament, that encounter with truth which will set people free to minister as the Body of Christ.

We are ordaining you to the ministry of the word and sacraments and pastoral care.

God grant you grace not to betray but uphold it, not to deny but to affirm it, through Jesus Christ our Lord."

Amen....

UK Under Attack Again: really?

I was sent a link recently to a broadcast from the States lamenting that "Christian Britain" was "under attack again". It's a polemical report scattered with stories about the persecution of Christians in the workplace and the inevitable and inexorable erosion of Christian values in the nation. I'm reminded of a great story that the artist David Hockney tells. His mum is visiting his villa in the hills overlooking LA, all the way from industrial Yorkshire. As she looks out over the vista of swimming pools glinting in the sun below them she remarks to David (cue broad Yorkshire accent): "It's disgraceful! All this sunshine and no one has got their washing out."

Well the supposed decline of Christian Britain really depends on how you're looking at things and where you're standing. Admittedly, many of our inherited denominations are struggling with numbers and finances, but look across at the growth of black-led churches. What of persecution then? I don't want to be complacent, and there are real issues for many converts from other faiths seeking to become Christians in Britain, but is our country really a harder place to be a disciple than even 20 years ago? Look at the profile of religious issues in the news and documentaries. We have to thank our Muslim neighbours for some of this, but I believe that we are in a far healthier state than we have been for the significance of religion in the public square.

The broadcast I linked to began by referencing Winston Churchill's Christian battle against the forces of Nazism...(These days, anything that defaults to using Churchill as an emotive way in to making a point deserves deep suspicion!) I think what we are seeing is a genuine distinctiveness in the church from society, and that is something to be welcomed. It is not as simple as separation of church and state; the American model which originates the broadcast gives the lie to that pretence. Rather, it is about the genuine reality of diversity and the church being a voice of pastoral and prophetic concern. It will at times agree and affirm, and at others at will contradict. But being a critical friend means that, as Christians, we have to make sense of our beliefs to others, communicate why they are "good for all" and expect that they will not be the aspiration of many.

Having a Christian core to the constitution from our history gives us a duty that cuts both ways: to be faithful to pointing out the one hope of all humanity but to be humble about where the church has failed. Invoking the ghosts of Churchill et al means we need to tell the story of colonialism, patriarchy and the class system. Loving our country and witnessing to Jesus seems to me to be less about bemoaning how far we have sold off the crown jewels of our Christian inheritance and more about pointing forward to the new humanity that Jesus has inaugurated.

A Christian Engagement with Other Faiths: Two Resources

Rev Ray Gaston has just published his book, A Heart Broken Open. I can highly recommend it as a story of one person's journey into deep and powerfully transformative relations with Muslims. Ray documents the changes he experienced opening himself up to the hospitality of Muslims from a radicalised commitment to the ant-war movement around the Iraq invasion. It's edgy, political, deeply spiritual and infused with repeated grapplings with scripture and Christian prayer as he recounts his journey. You can access a flyer for the book here.

Share the Guide is a site from Fresh Expressions resourcing new models of church in contemporary culture and I've written a short piece helping to provide some tools for thinking about church and other faiths here.

Zizek and the Revolution/Insurrection: recommending suspicion

Some time ago I wrote a piece about "piracy" which caused a bit of a stir and much against my original intentions I want to follow that up. Pete Rollins and Kester Brewin (who inspired the earlier discussion) have been reading a lot of the Slovenian philosopher Zizek's work and, in the absence of any other dissenting voices, I'd like to weigh in with my reasons for being suspicious. I do this hesitantly because a big drawback to the original debate was its exclusivity: there are some powerful and complex ideas swirling around and a language that is quite intimidating. One one level, this is what is urging me to write because there is a danger that one-sided complexity gives the aura of unchallenged authority...So that's by way of excuse/apology.

To give a brief intro to Zizek: first of all, he is wonderfully entertaining and fascinating. An appearance on last week's BBC Culture Show was brilliant and engaging. He's a man immersed in Hegal and Lacan but equally conversant in Star Wars and Kung-Fu Panda. One anecdote which epitomises him is that, growing up in communist Slovenia, his favourite film was The Sound of Music. The excised and edited version of the film that they were permitted to watch omitted the scene where Maria is encouraged to leave the convent by the sisters because she is clearly in love. For communist Slovenia, that demonstrated the life-affirming nature of the Catholic Church: and that was an unacceptable truth. In a post-Berlin wall world, Marx has lost his sheen and totems that reroot the world order and invert the status quo are being searched for. So far, so good. In Zizek's mischievous perversity, Jesus is the answer, Paul a radical revolutionary. If the twentieth century's moral scandal was Auschwitz, this century's symbol of crisis is Guantanemo Bay: the place that admits that the law fails... and thus the language of law, the cross, kenosis comes into play with post-Marxist cultural criticism.

It's all great stuff to engage with: big questions, wonderful shared allusions to the Christian story and faith. It's philosophy wrestling with theology...but it's still philosophy in dominance. What i mean by that is that it is a philosophy devoid of God because in this reading kenosis is not any more special when exhibited by Jesus than when it is demanded of a Western capitalist (this piece by Kester is indicative of the casual relativising of kenosis. This by pete argues that it is the laying down of distinctions that is paramount: so Jesus' distinction from us as Son of God is less important to us than his going to the cross. Thus, any number of self-sacrificing "martyrs" are redemptive for creation!). It's a reading of the Christian faith that writes out the redemptive purposes of the creator. If there is a revolution "out there", an insurrection only made possible when we give up the pretensions of our belief systems, authorities, churches, legal systems...we are actually colluding in armchair practice. It's great philosophy: but it's not the revolution of the people of God.

Here's what Rowan Williams says:

"definition matters, ultimately, so that resistance is possible to the idolatrous claims of total power that may be made from time to time in the world. Definition matters so that the Christian is free to say with conviction that the truth of the world and of humanity is not at the disposal of this or that system of political management."

Rowan's words are very similar to Zizek's. The difference (and this is my challenge to Pete and Kester) is in the very political and spiritual import of our definition: our story and the absolute and unequivocal place of Christ as the decisive point of history that frames our story. This loss of definition merely fuels armchair radicalism and iconoclism.

When in Rome.....

 
  
It's a real treat to be doing my research at a Catholic institution, learning from the huge wealth of theological tradition and spirituality from this sister church. There is so much I admire in the weight of history that has deepened my own desire to draw from resources beyond my own evangelicalism. The latest developments with regard to invites from Rome to Anglicans unhappy with the prospect of women bishops seems very perplexing though. Maggi Dawn gives a useful summary of the situation here. I couldn't help chuckling when i was told by a Catholic woman recently, full of anxiety and exasperation, "The last thing our church needs is a bunch of reactionary misogynists."

The trouble is, I think our churches have gone about this the wrong way round. I was reading some Thomas Merton today and this is what he was saying in the midst of Vatican II reforms in the 1960's: "conservatives and progressives in the Church are so concerned with total victory over each other that they are more and more closed to each other." For Merton, there was a clear sense that when the church lost sight of its love and compassion for the stranger it would lose love and compassion for herself. He goes on to say, "If we cannot see [God] in the stranger and the alien, we will not understand him even in the Church. We must find him in our enemy, or we may lose him even in our friend...How can we reveal to others what we cannot discover in them ourselves?" I think of controversies over Islam, homosexuality, women bishops and wherever we place ourselves in these arguments, I suspect that we will find faultlines in the church at the points where we have been unable to see the grace of God beyond the place we stand in.

On a more positive note of mission and evangelism with grace and humility, Steve Taylor has written a brief reflection on my earlier post of the "Ten Commandments of Mission" published by the Christian-Muslim Forum. For me, these exemplify something of the ability to be confidently oneself in the very process of giving the other genuine space.

Pioneer Ministry - a few years down the line

A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the CofE book "Mission-Shaped Church" was published....Well, it was 2004 and peaking into the next decade, it seems worthwhile to take stock and review where mission and church planting is at, particularly for the Church of England. Ben Edson, who has been one of the key leaders of Sanctus 1, a church community sponsored by the Diocese of Manchester, is moving on to new things and is helpfully posting some important reflections on what he has learned. Ben, for me, is a significant voice in connecting inherited church with radical forms of mission and community, and consistently brings critical reflection both ways so these reflections are invaluable. This specific milestone of reflection is mirrored by a number of "Pioneer" initiatives I know around the country, many because of the time-limits on funding. 18 months ago, the first wave of formal Pioneer ministers was ordained. Fresh Expressions, as a hub of resourcing and encouragement, has been collating stories and endorsing new engagements for some years now. Here area  number of questions that seem to me to be worth considering at this important juncture:

1. are Pioneer ministers being appropriately trained for the mission they are encountering and engaging with or are they essentially still being equipped for inherited church ministry with a certain degree of freedom that "traditional" ministers do not have? If it is the latter, how does the church endorse and affirm the pioneering (with a small "p") outside current structures?

2. to what extent has the setting up of a Pioneer stream created a gap between them and mainstream clergy so that the latter are deemed not to have a responsibility for mission?

3. there have been some legitimate critiques of Mission-Shaped Church that have highlighted the emphasis on church rescue as opposed to genuine mission into our unchurched cultures; to what extent is the Pioneer and Fresh Expressions movement focussing on "church" as opposed to kingdom?

4. what commitment is there to long term sustainability of pioneering church plants or is there a simple formula being applied that drops financial support after several years?

5. Mission-shaped Church and Fresh Expressions are releasing great permission to innovation and creativity...some of these things are not necessarily "new" but we have to rejoice in the opening up of boundaries that have often been so prohibitive...But is there a clear sense of the relative gulfs between church and various communities in contemporary culture and respective missional engagements? Or are people content to see anything "new" (cafe church, prayer on the streets etc etc) as sufficient to the demands of contextualisation today?

6. what is the normative profile of the Pioneer minister's context and Fresh Expressions initiative? Is there sufficient attention to the inner cities, other faiths, rural poverty, young adults....or is this another exercise in retrieving the lost middle classes to the church?

7. In the permission for pioneers, what is the inherited church and its leadership learning from them or is there a two-tier ecclesiology being birthed?

8. for Pioneer church plants with a very specific demographic, to what extent are principles of broad church being applied so that relationships are being forged across the spectrum of the Christian family?

I could probably add to these questions, and I betray some of my own agendas with these prods. But i do believe these are important questions to be asked about a process that i see as generally liberative and vital. What do you think?

Pioneer Ministry - a few years down the line

A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the CofE book "Mission-Shaped Church" was published....Well, it was 2004 and peaking into the next decade, it seems worthwhile to take stock and review where mission and church planting is at, particularly for the Church of England. Ben Edson, who has been one of the key leaders of Sanctus 1, a church community sponsored by the Diocese of Manchester, is moving on to new things and is helpfully posting some important reflections on what he has learned. Ben, for me, is a significant voice in connecting inherited church with radical forms of mission and community, and consistently brings critical reflection both ways so these reflections are invaluable. This specific milestone of reflection is mirrored by a number of "Pioneer" initiatives I know around the country, many because of the time-limits on funding. 18 months ago, the first wave of formal Pioneer ministers was ordained. Fresh Expressions, as a hub of resourcing and encouragement, has been collating stories and endorsing new engagements for some years now. Here area  number of questions that seem to me to be worth considering at this important juncture:

1. are Pioneer ministers being appropriately trained for the mission they are encountering and engaging with or are they essentially still being equipped for inherited church ministry with a certain degree of freedom that "traditional" ministers do not have? If it is the latter, how does the church endorse and affirm the pioneering (with a small "p") outside current structures?

2. to what extent has the setting up of a Pioneer stream created a gap between them and mainstream clergy so that the latter are deemed not to have a responsibility for mission?

3. there have been some legitimate critiques of Mission-Shaped Church that have highlighted the emphasis on church rescue as opposed to genuine mission into our unchurched cultures; to what extent is the Pioneer and Fresh Expressions movement focussing on "church" as opposed to kingdom?

4. what commitment is there to long term sustainability of pioneering church plants or is there a simple formula being applied that drops financial support after several years?

5. Mission-shaped Church and Fresh Expressions are releasing great permission to innovation and creativity...some of these things are not necessarily "new" but we have to rejoice in the opening up of boundaries that have often been so prohibitive...But is there a clear sense of the relative gulfs between church and various communities in contemporary culture and respective missional engagements? Or are people content to see anything "new" (cafe church, prayer on the streets etc etc) as sufficient to the demands of contextualisation today?

6. what is the normative profile of the Pioneer minister's context and Fresh Expressions initiative? Is there sufficient attention to the inner cities, other faiths, rural poverty, young adults....or is this another exercise in retrieving the lost middle classes to the church?

7. In the permission for pioneers, what is the inherited church and its leadership learning from them or is there a two-tier ecclesiology being birthed?

8. for Pioneer church plants with a very specific demographic, to what extent are principles of broad church being applied so that relationships are being forged across the spectrum of the Christian family?

I could probably add to these questions, and I betray some of my own agendas with these prods. But i do believe these are important questions to be asked about a process that i see as generally liberative and vital. What do you think?

'BNP Has Nothing to Do with Christianity'

I was trying to work out an appropriate image to head this posting and settled on the union jack...and then was troubled! Does it make my blog look jingoistic and right wing?! Oh dear...I've gone along with the image basically to make a point about our confusion and doubts over loyalties to the state and national pride. It's a confusion and doubt for good reason because our (for British readers!) national story is a mixed tale (as I guess everyone's is). As Christians, more particularly, our loyalties should be quite split (well, not even split: our ultimate loyalty is to another country entirely). So, there is the union jack in all its glory/shame. Oh, and if we needed reminding at the moment, the Houses of Parliament, seat of our very human and fallen government. But God uses and works with and in nations and government. Our task as Christians is not withdrawal, not to rubbish all this, though we should hold some critical distance.

I say all this because I think we live in a quite precarious time as regards nationalist tendencies. My own city's church leaders have just written a public condemnation of the British National Party ("BNP"); a statement that can be read here and that I would echo. It's an important marker in the sand; a public statement that demonstrates an involvement and posits a real critical distance. I'm concerned in the area of my interfaith work because the BNP, and other extremist groups, are mobilising religious language, and seeking to jump on a bandwagon of Christian heritage as counter to the "foreign" threat that is Islam. We have a responsibility to present the counter truth; and part of that truth is making clear the "foreign threat" that is the Christian faith, hospitable to all, regardless of race and colour! It's worth drawing attention to Paul's sermon in Athens in Acts 17: Paul acknowledges the God-given diversity of the city and nations and affirms the gospel, with its higher loyalties, within all the cultural mix of an Athens or a Birmingham.

As regards the leader of the BNP, Nick Griffin, appearing on BBC's Question Time: I hope you'll join me in expressing dismay that a programme dedicated to honourable  and reasonable debate across difference is in danger of providing a veneer of honour and reasonableness to policies that are far from so. So, when we reflect on some of the crises of our age, the lack of "moral compass" and the like, recalling our Christian tradition, let's own what was good, be utterly repentant about what was bad (lest you need reminding...tawdriness of colonialism, sexism, pillage of the earth's resources to name a few things done in the name of British Christianity), and engage the good news of Jesus with the Britain we live in today, in all its richness.

What price labels?

Jonny Baker made a point some weeks ago about his discomfort with church labels: evangelical, liberal, catholic etc. I understand completely where he is coming from. For many Christians now, we are recognising the gift and complexity of our various traditions and drawing lessons and insights across a wide range of spiritualities and theologies that would have been unthinkable even 20 years ago. I talk to liberals urging their churches to get serious about mission and be more passionate about their engagement with scripture. Evangelicals are asking searching questions of textual criticism and reading the Bible with a political lens. Catholics are promoting ecumenism and fostering the charismatic. Does this mean all these labels and descriptions are now history?

"Labelling" already suggests a bias to the question because the problem of any category of identity is its inadequacy. No one wants to be defined in advance; for their life to be reduced and preempted. If you are from an evangelical tradition, you've got the added problem that such a closure assumes ignorance, reactionary attitudes and fundamentalism. Media coverage of "evangelicals", especially under the previous President of the USA seemed to make evangelicalism into a swear word. So is it time to move on? Is Jonny right to stick with "Christian" as the baseline?

I'd want to say yes and no, I think. I'm not sure any of us should be hiding under labels; and there is a great temptation to do so out of fear: to seek the comfort blanket of the group mentality. But there is something about owning what is still a real part of my history. In interfaith circles and Church of England stuff, I get to mix with a broad range of folk. Doing PhD studies at a Jesuit college has given me a turbo-charged experience of the breadth of church tradition, too. My evangelical roots have given me an inescapable love for scripture and an unavoidable appreciation of the personal claims of Jesus. Now you don't have to be evangelical to have these, and my understanding of scripture and the nature of Jesus' claims have changed over the years. But they are part and parcel of my evangelical heritage. I actually find that in ecumenical groups, that heritage is being looked for (yes, Roman Catholics and liberationists to name two examples). Should i disown not just the gift of the other to me, but withhold the gift of myself to the other?

So can evangelicalism be redeemed? I'm not sure; and I'm with Jonny in not being overly concerned by the word itself as a rallying point. But, for the time-being, if someone wants to label me "evangelical"; I'll run with it as part of the richness of the church i'm pleased to contribute towards. Just expect me to confound any preconceptions.