Post-Christendom Church

Visitors from the East came looking for Jesus in a palace but found him in a manger. They looked for him at the heart of privileges won through personal power but found him in a place of poverty and dispossession. The visitors from the East looked for a King according to their understanding of kingship but only found Jesus when they left that understanding of political power and rule behind to encounter a King whose every breath is service of his subjects.

The slogan of the Early Church was that Christ is Lord. This was a direct political challenge to the Roman Emperor, to the Caesars who were worshipped as gods and whose personal and political power extended across the known world. However, by saying that Christ was Lord, the Early Church was not seeking to set up Christ as an alternative Emperor instead they were seeking to say that there is a different conception of power, of kingship and of rule, exemplified in the loving service and sacrifice of Christ and standing in stark contrast to the selfish exercise of personal power exemplified in human rulers and empires. By living out the statement that Christ is Lord they were living in the truth of Jesus’ words when he stood in front of Pilate and said that his kingdom is not the kingdom of top-down power and control that Pilate exemplified.

Tom Wright, the Bishop of Durham, puts it like this:

“… the whole point of the Gospels is that the coming of God's kingdom on earth as in heaven is precisely not the imposition of an alien and dehumanizing tyranny, but rather the confrontation of alien and dehumanizing tyrannies with the news of a God — the God recognized in Jesus — who is radically different from them all, and whose inbreaking justice aims at rescuing and restoring genuine humanness.”

This is an understanding of politics, power and kingship that was lost, in part, for a large period of the history of the Church beginning with the adoption, by the Emperor Constantine, of Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire. There were long periods of the history of the Church where Patriarchs and Popes held political power over large parts of the then known world and periods where alliances between Church and State gave Christianity huge power and influence within society. These periods of Church history are known as Christendom and we now live in a period after Christendom while often still remembering the final days of Christendom through which many of us have lived. Days when legislation was generally rooted in the Christian scriptures, the Church was the dominant and determining voice within our society, the nation was generally considered a “Christian” country, and levels of churchgoing were higher than now.

These changes have had increasingly significant implications for churches in this Deanery and more widely as we struggle with changing patterns of churchgoing, multi-faith parishes, less people with free time for volunteering, and the financial demands of maintaining large, old building through the generous giving of local congregations. These are all issues that we have grappled with at St John’s Seven Kings over the past few years; with the past year seeing us making significant changes to the way that we respond to these challenges.

Initially these changes were driven by a secular agenda which sought to drive Christianity to the margins of public life by arguing that religion was entirely a matter of private faith, but that drive has been counter-balanced by recognition of the diversity of faiths that now exist within the UK. We still see the secularising agenda in the militant atheism of people like Richard Dawkins and Polly Toynbee but what has been enshrined in law is an equality of religions and beliefs, not the eradication of religion for which the militant atheists have argued. So, in the Post-Christendom world, Christianity is losing most of the privileges that it previously possessed in order that it receives equal treatment from the State to that of other religions and beliefs.

Many still yearn for the Christendom period to return but the reality of today is that we are in a Post-Christendom period and we have to deal with the reality of where we are, not yearn for the supposed ‘Golden Age’ of the past. The reality of being in a Post-Christendom period also means that we are actually much closer to the situation of the Early Church than was the case when the Church had political power and influence.

Our text for 2010 - “Be alert, stand firm in the faith, be brave, be strong. Do all your work in love” is taken from 1 Corinthians 16. 13 & 14 and is how St Paul ends his first letter to the church in Corinth. Our pew bibles tell us that, “Corinth was a great cosmopolitan Greek city, the capital of the Roman province of Achaia. It was noted for its thriving commerce, proud culture, widespread immorality, and variety of religions.” Not so different from our own culture and city then!

Being church in that kind of city and culture was no easy task and so Paul’s letter shows how the Good News speaks to the questions and issues faced by that church. By doing so, Paul was declaring the lordship of Christ over those issues and the culture and city in which the Corinthians lived. Once he had addressed those issues that were contemporary for the Corinthian church, he ended with the exhortation which is our text for 2010, “Be alert, stand firm in the faith, be brave, be strong. Do all your work in love.”

This is why, I believe, these verses to be a relevant message for us at St John’s, and also for Christians more widely, in 2010. At our Annual Parochial Church Meeting in 2009 we spoke about the challenges of the changing culture around us and over the course of 2009 we have faced up to financial pressures, made key changes to our use of the Parish Centre, and have discussed ways of dealing with disagreements. Not only that but we have increased our involvement in our local community – something which has always been strong at St John’s through our involvements in Redbridge Voluntary Care and the Redbridge Night Shelter, among others – through involvement in community campaigns to improve facilities in the area.

Tom Wright writes of the Church “doing to the rulers of the world what Jesus did to Pilate ... confronting him with the news of the kingdom and of truth, deeply unwelcome and indeed incomprehensible though both of them were.” Part of the way, he writes, “in which the church will do this is by getting on with, and setting forward, those works of justice and mercy, of beauty and relationship, that the rulers know ought to be flourishing but which they seem powerless to bring about.”

When we argue publicly for improved community facilities in the parish and provide through our Parish Centre a place within which our local community can come together then, we are doing what Jesus did when he stood before Pilate demonstrating a different kind of kingship and what the Early Church did when they declared Jesus Christ to be Lord rather than Caesar. By “doing God in public” we declare the Lordship of Christ over our community and create signs of the kingdom of Christ that we know in part but which is still to come in full.

Again, Tom Wright puts it well when he writes:

“… it is vital that the church learn to critique the present workings of democracy itself … we should take seriously the fact that our present glorification of democracy emerged precisely from Enlightenment dualism — the banishing of God from the public square and the elevation of vox populi [‘voice of the people’] to fill the vacuum, which we have seen to be profoundly inadequate when faced with the publicness of the kingdom of God.”

None of this is easy but these verses from 1 Corinthians exhort us to stand firm. Dealing with the challenges faced by the 21st Century Church in a Post-Christendom period requires the alertness, bravery and strength about which Paul writes. As we take forward in 2010 the decisions and changes we have made in 2009, we will need the same alertness, bravery and strength.

Alertness involves being aware of the real issues that we face, bravery is needed to face them fully, and strength is needed to persevere with the direction we have taken.

We can be encouraged with new members, increased giving, increased hall income, an increased community profile, new stewardship responses, and funding for our community garden project. These, and other aspects of St John’s, are positive signs which indicate that, although we haven’t resolved all of the issues we face, we are on the right lines and need to take St Paul’s words to heart in 2010.

Most of all, we need to continue living out St Paul’s final exhortation to do all our work in love. It is love that needs to underpin all we do and which will continue to hold us together. Love for each other needs to characterise every action, interaction and decision. Love needs to be at the forefront of our vision, our relationships and our mission. Love is how we stand firm in our faith. Paul writes in his letter to the Corinthians that love is the best of God’s gifts to his people. God is love and when we live in love we live in God.

So, as we move forward in 2010, let us be alert, stand firm in the faith, be brave, be strong, and do all our work in love.

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M. Ward - Vincent O'Brien.