Unity does not mean uniformity; diversity does not mean division.

It seems to me that one of the main challenges the churches and denominations face, perhaps moreso in this time than any other, is to work with greater integrity and grace with one another. As the Christian faith suffers at the hands of an increasingly secularised society (and, indeed, an increasingly more apathetic society – perhaps the greater danger), the public perception of division and disagreement within the Church (upper-case ‘C’, no one denomination) can only hasten its marginalisation.

The answer, of course, does not lie in creating uniformity and stifling diversity. I can’t think of anything more dire than an army of Christian clones who all act the same and think the same. And indeed, does creation itself not argue against such an approach? How easy would it have been for God to create each person in His own likeness, in exactly the same way, over and over again? Yet that is not what we have. Instead, there is an enormous variety of gifts and talents, of creativity and uniqueness.

Our trip included a visit to the World Council of Churches and it was fascinating getting a first-hand account of what their aims were and the challenges they face. Here, perhaps more than anywhere, the reality of unity without uniformity and diversity without division ought to have been clearly seen. And yet, we still heard stories of disagreements, but also some interesting little hints of change, of long-standing barriers gradually being broken down and challenged.

Of course such changes take time and there will always be voices who oppose such cross-denomination activities. But we were reminded one evening that the Reformed church’s cry of ‘semper reformanda’ is so often mistranslated as ‘always reforming’. Rather its more correct understanding of ‘always in need of reform’ seems to be something that we need to grab hold of as relationships with others develops. It says that we don’t have all the answers or the correct way of doing things. And this, of course, is another cause of Christian ‘clones’ – a sense of having the correct answers and the right way of ‘doing’ church means that one never questions, but simply adopts.

Isaiah 53:6 tells us that we have all wandered off the path, like sheep. We may well all behave like sheep, but with the exception of Dolly, even sheep aren’t clones. Time to stop behaving as though we need to be.

The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us. Thus I suggest that prophetic ministry has to do not primarily with addressing specific public crises but with addressing, in season and out of season, the dominant crisis that is enduring and resilient, of having our alternative vocation co-opted and domesticated.

The italics are Brueggemann’s and state the hypothesis for  the book. The extract, I believe, succinctly states the mission and problem for the church. The church needs to be counter-cultural. And that doesn’t mean that it decries culture, rather it should always be asking if this is the ‘best’ we can achieve. And by ‘best’, I would suggest that that means being more ‘Christ-like’; being fully human and fully spiritual creatures, living life in its fullest measure without fear of discrimination, oppression and injustice.

But the extract also highlights the biggest danger the church faces – becoming ‘co-opted and domesticated’. (The phrase, “Aslan is not a tame lion” has just sprung to mind). My biggest fear of Emerging Church is that the Christian distinctives get subsumed by a desire to be ‘relevant’ – faith and worship are co-opted to suit a context, rather than that happening the other way round. Domestication comes when the church is no longer proactive but reactive and is ‘used’ to provide social services or a place where religious-types can go on a Sunday morning. Or perhaps domestication has come through the church becoming a useful branch of Historic Scotland responsible for the upkeep of a bunch of old buildings. I’m sure there are many ways in which we have become ‘co-opted and domesticated’.

How easy is it though to rediscover our revolutionary voice?

It has also been prompted by a couple of questions from Scott, and in particular his most recent question about some of the underlying assumptions we make when ‘doing mission’. So, in no particular order, some thoughts on theology (and more to follow in subsequent posts).

In or out? The fundamental premise of traditional church seems to be similar to one of the old lottery slogans – “You have to be in it to win it.”  Simplistically put, salvation comes through acknowledging Jesus as Lord and coming to church. That’s deliberately over-simplistic but I believe it captures much of the essence of where traditional church seems to be at the moment. Even more mission-minded churches, with great outreach programmes, still seem to have ‘come and join us’ as the underlying motive. Underlying this emphasis is the RC doctrine of there being no salvation apart from the church. Protestant doctrine nuances this somewhat but still has a focus on being ‘called into community’. Evangelical emphasis is much more biased towards individualism (consider how many phrases used by evangelicals are about ‘personal saviour’ or individuals coming to a ‘saving faith’) but still with the expectation that once someone has made that ‘personal decision for Christ’, they will readily come to church.

EC attempts to turn this on its head somewhat. Its stated aim is to take the sacred into the secular – to transform the secular by being the body of Christ in the world. Slogans like, “find where God is at work and join in,” are often bandied around as being the ‘real’ missional approach. EC is very much about an integrated faith and life and so one’s face suffuses every aspect of our interaction with our secular surroundings. Actually, to be entirely fair to EC, this distinction between the sacred and the secular is seen by EC as a false one. If we speak of God being active in the world, how can we speak of it as being secular? And so, for that reason, to behave one way when in church and to behave differently in society is to display a lack of integrity.

Mission, therefore, is not about evangelising to bring people in, but to participate in the missio Dei and bring about something of the Kingdom here and now, albeit in a provisional form. The extreme of this view gets me on my eschatological hobby-horse though. I find that (despite the popularity of NT Wright within EC theological circles) EC theology falls to far into the ‘realised eschatology’ camp. It’s not necessarily a bad place to be but I think it leads to a works-based (or perhaps works-biased)  soteriology. Maybe this isn’t an entirely fair criticism, but I sense that it shifts in that direction.

Which links me in to another issue associated with the missional style EC adopts. Picking up on the soteriology issue, it begs the question about the ‘Great Commission’ laid upon Christians. Is ‘making disciples’ a matter of showing people that the ‘good work’ they are doing is really God’s work and getting them to acknowledge that and keep working (this is the works-based soteriology coming through)? Because it seems to me that if we acknowledge that God is at work in the world, and that all good works ultimately flow from Him, then there is actually little or no imperative for evangelism. I suppose that one could argue that by bringing a person to faith, their works can become even more effective as they understand their importance and their focus. It means that the works that they do which are less God-oriented can be revised to make them so.

There is, of course, all manner of middle ground, nuanced by other theological suppositions, but it seems that these are some of the theological issues which traditional church needs to wrestle with if it is to co-exist happily with EC. I think that part of the reason that there is suspicion on both sides is that the focus has largely been upon the ‘visible’ – the way each ‘do’ church. I’m not sure that the underlying theological reasons for each side’s has been made obvious. On the part of established church it has often just been assumed that people understand why things are done the way they are done and there is little questioning of it. For EC, their problem is that the underlying theological justifications haven’t really been made voiced effectively. Too much of it has been reaction to established church. There are not too many works enunciating and evaluating the underlying theology of EC from the point of view of what EC does (rather than why they don’t do what established church does).

Someone asked me recently what my position was on EC and I had to answer that I am a ‘supportive sceptic’. I suppose that until I become convinced that the same theological rigour has been applied to EC as the established church has had to deal with (and I might not necessarily agree with some of the positions found in the established church, but at least I understand why they hold them) then I will always be sceptical of EC practices. At the moment I’m simply not convinced that the cry of holistic/integrated faith and life rings true. Sometimes I wonder if it’s just an excuse for not getting out of bed on a Sunday morning.

I’ve been looking at Fresh Expressions – the Church of England/Methodist project into finding, strangely enough, fresh ways for people to express or explore their faith. In many respects it’s the background to much of what is happening within the Church of Scotland. What’s been interesting is that Emerging Church in its guises as ‘alternative worship’ or ‘seeker-sensitive’ or whatever other label one might care to apply is actually a subset of the overall strategy. By broadening out what ‘church’ is, in the sense of how to be a worshipping community, then the unity of the church is maintained. However, this opening out and creating space within the structure of ‘organised religion’ is not universally accepted as ‘a good thing’. How can one be a radical voice or a ‘fresh expression’ when one is still part of the ‘established’ church? The very fact that a group is still within the structures of the ‘parent’ denomination means that it can only ever be emerging and never really emerge.

In the book Evaluating Fresh Expressions, an article by Dr Peter Rollins, co-ordinator of the emerging church movement Ikon in Belfast, is pretty hard-hitting when it comes to this subject. He questions whether maintaining the close connection with the structures of ‘traditional’ church allows an emergent expression of church to find its real voice. He goes so far as to suggest that maintaining such a connection is a “restriction, misrepresentation and even perversion of the very message that they offer to both those outside and those within the church” (p84).

The challenge of such a view (and this is the point of the essay) is that we then have to look beyond our own denomination and tradition and consider what it means to be part of the ‘church catholic’. Barth offers a similar challenge. Church, he suggests, is, at its most basic, a statement of faith, derived from the creedal statement – “We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church.” As such, it is not a matter of ‘knowing’ it is right, wrong or whatever, but believing that the church, the body of Christ, simply ‘is’. For Barth, that ‘being’ is marked by the work of the Spirit within and through the church. That calls into question our ideas of the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways of ‘doing’ church. But it also continues to call into question what it means to be church and what the purpose of church is. Barth is still, in a sense, tied to the institution of church. This, in large part, is to avoid the dangers of 0f individualistic experientialism; a danger I think some expressions of Emerging Church are at risk of slipping into. That, of course raises the question of whether it is indeed a danger. Barth’s big argument here is that we are called as a saved people, not as individuals as such. It was the nation of Israel God established, not a disparate group of individuals. But maybe that’s a subject for another essay.

In the meantime, when we consider/believe we are ‘one church’, how far are we prepared to go to count other expressions of church as still part of the body of Christ and therefore part of our Christian fellowship?

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Solidarity with the world means that those who are genuinely pious approach the children of the world as such, that those who are genuinely righteous are not ashamed to sit down with the unrighteous as friends, that those who are genuinely wise do not hesitate to seem to be fools among fools, and that those who are genuinely holy are not too good or irreproachable to go down “into hell” in a very secular fashion.

Barth CD IV/3, p774

Today’s class was a starter on Barth’s ecclesiology and it focused on the creedal statement, “I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic church.” That was interesting enough and, in fact, inspired my likely essay for the course. But what was fascinating was a section on who was a ‘true’ Christian. There was the very thorough consideration of all the possible ‘marks’ of a true Christian and ultimately Barth’s deliberations seemed to come down to – “we don’t know”. And his advice? Get on with being a ‘true’ Christian yourself and just assume everyone else you’re concerned about is as well.

He had pretty much the same to say about church disunity. Having utterly savaged the ‘scandal’ of church division he concludes, pretty much, the same sort of thing. As a community of believers, get on with being just that and worry more about your witness to non-believers than trying to get other churches ‘back on track’.

Barth obviously used considerably more words to say that than I have, but it was his way of covering all the possible ‘get-out’ clauses and excuses. It’s fascinating to read a theologian who almost seems happy to stop at the ‘I don’t know’ place and to practically hear his thoughts as he struggles with the implications of where his ideas are going.