Handing on the Torch

Christianity is the largest movement our world has ever seen. Nearly one third of the world’s population identify themselves as Christians, making Christianity by far the world’s largest religious group. A recent report on the size and distribution of the world’s Christian population, ‘Global Christianity’, says that 2.18 billion of the world’s 6.9 billion people are Christian, compared with about 600 million of the world’s 1.8 billion people in 1910. This means that “Christians make up about the same portion of the world’s population today (32%) as they did a century ago (35%).”

The report says that 1.3 billion (61%) of Christians in the world live in the ‘Global South’, compared with 860 million (39%) who live in the ‘Global North.’ The study says that about half of the Christians in the world are Roman Catholic, 37% are Protestants, 12% are Orthodox, and the remaining 1% are of other Christian traditions.

Christianity continues to grow at an immense pace – especially in Asia (including China ), Africa and Latin America . At the same time, Christianity in the West struggles to grow and – perhaps – even to survive. In this year’s Lent course - Handing on the Torch - sacred words for a secular world  - we will consider some of the reasons for this and what it might mean for individual Christians, for churches and for Western culture, in a world where alternative beliefs are increasingly on offer.

This course, which has been prepared by York Courses, comes in five sessions:

Session 1 – A Christian Country?

Session 2 – A Secular Society?

Session 3 – A Beleaguered Church?

Session 4 – Competing Creeds? and

Session 5 – Handing on the Torch.

The participants on the course CD are Archbishop Sentamu - the Archbishop of York, Clifford Longley - RC author, broadcaster and journalist and Rachel Lampard - who has responsibility for the Methodist Church 's engagement with political issues. Bishop Graham Cray - Archbishops' Missioner and leader of the Fresh Expressions team - provides the Closing Reflection at the end of each session and Dr David Hope - former Archbishop of York - introduces the course.

As in previous years, this course is being organised by the Seven Kings Fellowship of Churches and can be studied at the local Methodist Churches, St John’s and St Peter’s Aldborough Hatch. Those attending in previous years have greatly appreciated the York Courses that we have used, so, if you want to learn more about the Christian faith, tackle the biggest questions facing humanity, and examine your own beliefs, in fellowship with others, then this course is for you.

The course can be studied at:

* St John’s Seven Kings on Wednesday mornings (from 10.45am) and evenings (from 8.00pm) on 29^th February, 7^th, 14^th, 21^st, and 28^th March.

* St Peter's Aldborough Hatch on Wednesday mornings (from 11.00am) on 29th February, 7th, 14th, 21st, and 28th March.

* Goodmayes Methodist Church on Thursday afternoons (from 2.00pm) on 1st, 8th, 15th, 22nd, and 29th March. 

A Seven Kings Fellowship of Churches Lent Service led by the Philadelphia Church will bring the course to a conclusion on Tuesday 3^rd April at 8.00pm at Seven Kings United Free Church.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

After The Fire - Joy.

The Holy Spirit in the world today

Graham Tomlin, Jurgen Moltman, Ken Costa and Rowan Williams

Q & A with Moltmann, Costa & Williams

Miroslav Volf

I've spent today with friends and colleagues from the Diocese at the conference on 'The Holy Spirit in the world today' organised by St Mellitus College and held at Holy Trinity Brompton.

It has been a lengthy (made longer by a station evacuation at Holborn) but very fruitful day hearing from some of the most interesting and stimulating contemporary theologians including David Ford, Jurgen Moltmann, Miroslav Volf and Rowan Williams.

The day got off to the best possible start with a wonderful homily from Rowan Williams in which he spoke of the Holy Spirit as desire or longing to become the new humanity for which we have been created by God. Quoting St Symeon - "Come, you who have become yourself desire in me, who have made me desire you, the absolutely inaccessible one!" - and Mother Maria Skobtsova - "either Christianity is fire or there is no such thing" - he argued that the Holy Spirit is the desire in us to be where Christ is - God's child - and to become Christ-like - self-emptying. True freedom, he said, is freedom for a full humanity. Full humanity is Christ-shaped. Freedom is kenotic - for self emptying - humanity overwhelmed by the energy of gift.

By contrast Ken Costa seemed to me to provide only a lightweight comic turn between the heavyweights with a contribution which had plenty of jokes but was light on illustrations of his theme that the Holy Spirit was active in the world of work and economics. Philip Ritchie and Graham Hamborg however assured me that that message was a necessary one for those who tend to view the Spirit as primarily working through the Church and, to be fair to Costa in the later Q&A with Moltmann and Williams he did provide examples to back up his argument.

Moltmann, like Williams, was simply wonderful. A brief initial interview by Costa revealed the humanity which informs his theology and then he spoke on 'The Church in the power of the Spirit'. His perspective is a European theological voice not commonly heard in Church debates within the UK which is informed by the destruction of state Christianity that occured in Europe following the First World War but which is only slowly occuring in the UK. As a result, he is comfortable seeing the Spirit's initiative in and the need for the Church to ally itself with human rights organisations and Greenpeace, alliances over which much of the UK Church still agonises or resists. He emphasised the extent to which his theology had been a response to world events - The Theology of Hope was a response to Germany after the War and The Crucified Christ a response to the assassination of Martin Luther King - and an attempt to resource the Church for ministering in the light of those events.

'Think globally, act locally' is a lesson that the Church can inhabit and so he began with stories of the Church in Germany and his own church of St Jacob's Tübingen. This is a church which has moved from being a church for the people (religious caretaking) to become an inviting, participatory community church of the people where the gifts of all are trusted. The opposite of poverty and property, he argued, is community because in community we discover our true wealth the spirit of solidarity through which all our needs can be met. Such spirit-filled communities are seen in the fulfilling of Joel's prophecy at Pentecost and the descriptions of the Jerusalem Church in Acts. Such spirit-filled communities are bridgeheads to new life on earth where righteousness will dwell.

He posited three paradigms of Church - the hierarchical, the hierarchical community and the charismatic community - which equated to the Father above us, Christ with us, and the Spirit within us. The Church is come of age, he suggested, so we are no longer just God's servants or his children but, his friends. Peace with God, however, makes us restless in the world and a revolutionary Christiaity will both call the world evil and seek to change it, ultimately by reconciling the cosmos. The Spirit of God is no respector of social distinctions which divide us and awakens democratic energies for a new humanity.

Graham Cray drew on John V. Taylor's The Go-Between God to identify criteria for discerning the work of the Spirit in leading God's mission and the part that the Church plays within it. Discernment involves learning of what God is doing and learning to do it with him. This means understanding the shape of the Spirit's ministry. The Spirit is essentially relational and arranges the meaningless pieces of reality until they suddenly fall into shape. The Spirit anticipates in the present, things which are still to come. The Church is, therefore, to live in each culture as an anticipation of the future. Christ-likeness is the ultimate test of the Spirit's presence and where the Spirit is making Jesus more real neither caution nor convention or reputation ought to make us resist his possession of us. The Spirit is manifest in the translation of Christ in all times and cultures, so that he is multiply incarnate.

Cray's specific criteria for discernment were: charism, character, content, characteristics, community, cultivation, and experience. However, each of these is open to interpretation as was illustrated by his response to a question regarding the Episcopal Church which he thought to have departed from scripture. The actions of the Episcopal Church in relation to the LGBT community could be understood within Cray's criteria as a discerning of a move of the Spirit in a direction that subverts previous understandings of scripture, as in his biblical example from Acts of Peter's re-evaluation of his understanding of God's mission in response to the Spirit's work in Cornelius.

Paul Westin helpfully summarised Lesslie Newbigin's understanding of the work of the Holy Spirit in mission. Newbigin blazed a trinitarian trail in thinking about mission as he responded to the changing thinking seen at the major mission conferences of the twentieth century. For Newbigin pneumatology is mission, as the gifts of the Spirit are always for mission. It is the Spirit which takes the initiative bringing the Church after, in contrast to the Church-centric focus of the 1938 mission conference in India. The Spirit brings new forms of Church into being and by doing so works towards unity which is the deepest expression of the Gospel.

Miroslav Volf posed the key question in a globalised world of whether and how religious exclusivists can live comfortably with each other i.e. is monotheism by its very nature exclusivist? He answered this question by arguing that Christian monotheism contains democratising and universalist aspects which justify political pluralism, including the Spirit of justice and of many languages/cultures, so that a consistent religious exclusivist ought to be a political pluralist.

Having set his question up in an interfaith context I felt that Volf should have explored an interfaith answer and was disappointed that he unpacked only a Christian answer. Others thought that this decision was appropriate to the nature of and audience at this conference. As a side issue he also suggested that the example of religious conflict in India indicates that the pluralism of Hinduism is no more effective at warding off exclusivism than is monotheism. This would have had my friend, the Hindu educationalist, Jay Lakhani fuming at the suggestion that his faith should be defined by its worst and therefore least representative practices (an approach that we rightly resist when used by Richard Dawkins' to stereotype Christianity), particularly when he views the pluralism of Hinduism as the solution to religious exclusivity (a position which has an imperial aspect as it requires other faiths to reframe themselves in Hindu terms). All this in my view indicates a need to examine this issue within the worldview of each of the monotheistic faiths, although this too might involve remaining within, as opposed to challenging, the exclusivist mindset.

David Ford summed up a part of what the conference has covered to date with the following questions: What is real humanity in the Spirit? How do we relate the world and the Spirit? How do we shape the Church globally in the Spirit?

Ford also gave these key elements in wise and creative theology inspiered by the Spirit:

• retrieval of the past and of scripture;
• engagement with God, the Church and the world;
• mastering the disciplines of thought;
• wrestling with mediums to come to and to commuicate new understanding.

In his experience intensive conversations had led to the greatest breakthroughs. Conversation and dialogue is therefore a key location for the movement of the Spirit in the world.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hillsong United and Tim Hughes - Consuming Fire.

A crisis of faith & life (3)

It is here that the theologians of the exile can help us in hearing and responding to the call of God:

• First, because they have been there before us - they were the divorcees of God – we can understand from them something of why we feel as we do.
• Second, because their pattern of reflection and re-interpretation based on the tradition gives a biblical means of reviving our roots and re-claiming our disputed lineage. We need to dream up what Church is and can be for future generations all over again. As a start, we could re-examine our biblical and church heritage by retelling the stories to ourselves and to others. This is where developments in narrative theology and storytelling may be of some use to us in finding a way forward. Graham Cray has argued that we are a ‘hinge generation’ making the transition between a Church that was addressing modernity and one that will in future address post-modernity and beyond. Therefore, we should not expect to have all the answers to hand but instead should engage in a re-examination of our roots in order to imagine our future on a scale that is at least equal to that of the theologians of the exile.
• Third, our interim strategy should involve the threefold approach of assimilation, voicing hurt and articulating hope:
  
  · Assimilation: as we operate within a culture which is at best ambiguous towards Christianity, the Church needs to develop the Joseph’s, Daniel’s, Nehemiah’s and Esther’s for our generation. These will be people able to be hidden advocates for our faith and able too from within to show up the inadequacies of the dominant culture and point that culture towards Christ. The examples of The Relationship Foundation and Work Structuring Ltd give us two models from the worlds of public policy and work that provide hints about the way to go;
  
  · Voicing hurt: following Jesus – who has removed all the barriers to intimacy - we should expect to move corporately into the intimate relationship with God that these theologians experienced individually, thinking and acting as God does. Our experience as the body of Christ should be that we think with the mind of Christ. Jesus’ thought and action was modelled on the suffering servant and our aim should be to live as Jesus’ body in and through that same model.
  
  · Articulating hope: we need to protest the present because it hurts and is less desirable and faithful than what is promised in the theological tradition. Hope springs from hurt and therefore the future will only be re-imagined if we do not feel satisfied with the present. We need to make common cause with those most hurt by the dominant culture because God hears and wants to respond to their cries through us. They are also in the places where the inadequacies of the dominant culture are most apparent. Common cause can also be made with those identifying judgement on the dominant culture. Judgement on consumer capitalism is most likely to come through the changes that it has and is making to the eco-system. We need to further develop our theology of green issues speaking and acting publicly and symbolically in this arena.

In the West we exist within a time of crisis. We are the generation for whom the city has fallen - the ‘hinge generation’ existing between paradigms. Our experience may be of exile, loss, and bereavement, the ending of our known world. This experience can be a means of identification with Jesus in suffering, a means of entering in to the paradigm of the suffering servant – a paradigm that is more authentically Christian than that of the dominant culture – and a means of entering into a mature, intimate relationship with our God. Our God is a God of new beginnings, of fresh starts. He is the resurrection God and, therefore, the one who gives hope that we can rise from the ruins:

“There ain’t nobody asks to be born There ain’t nobody wishes to die Everybody whiles away the interim time Sworn to rise from the ruins by and by

The engines are droning with progress The pistons are pounding out time And it’s you and me caught in this juggernaut jaunt Left to rise from the ruins down the line

We will roll like an old Chevrolet The road to ruin is something to see Hang on to the wheel For the highway to hell needs chauffeurs For the powers that be

Go and tell all your friends and relations Go and say what ain’t easy to say Go and give them some hope That we might rock this boat And rise from the ruins one day

Ever try to carry water in a basket Ever try to carry fire in your hand Ever try to take on the weight of the everyday freight Til’ you find that you’re too weak to stand

Why so pale and wan, fond lover Why so downcast and desperately sad We can walk, we can talk We ain’t yet pillars of salt We will rise from the ruins while we can."

(Mark Heard - Rise from the Ruins)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Mark Heard Tribute Project - We Know Too Much.