Hope: The light of the promised future that is to come

Here's the reflection that I shared during Reflective Evening Prayer this evening at St Mary's Runwell. 
The readings were Lamentations 3:19-33 and 'Hope' is the thing with feathers by Emily Dickinson.

Disasters are frequent occurrences, “some natural, many more due to man’s ham-fisted neglect of the planet or our inability to get by without recourse to violence.” “The result is always the need for a new start, and how we respond and rebuild colours an uncertain future more than ever. Yet, for all the carnage and chaos that catastrophes bring, an odd truth is apparent: disasters do give us the chance to shape things differently.”

As a result, as Terry Eagleton writes in Hope without Optimism, “the most authentic hope is whatever can be salvaged, stripped of guarantees from a general dissolution.” It is whatever survives a general ruin. This is where we find the writer of Lamentations; bowed down with the reality of exile, yet trusting that it is in the nature of God to bring a new beginning from this disastrous affliction which is “wormwood and gall” to him. Similarly, Emily Dickinson claims that, hope is heard most sweetly in the Gale, “the chillest land” and “on the strangest Sea”.

Hope, Eagleton writes, “is to be found in the unfinished nature of the actual, discernible as a hollow at its heart.” “Potentiality is what articulates the present with the future, and thus lays down the material infrastructure of hope.” Hope is about a vision for a future that is different from the present; one which therefore requires imagination and vision. For Christians that vision is of the kingdom of God; which has begun to be realised but is still to come in its full reality.

As a result, in Theology of Hope Jürgen Moltmann argues that “Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present. If we had before our eyes only what we see, then we should cheerfully or reluctantly reconcile ourselves with things as they happen to be. That we do not reconcile ourselves, that there is no pleasant harmony between us and reality, is due to our unquenchable hope. This hope keeps man unreconciled, until the great day of the fulfilment of all the promises of God.

The Church, then, is intended to be “the source of continual new impulses towards the realization of righteousness, freedom and humanity here in the light of the promised future that is to come.” Our hope should “provide inexhaustible resources for the creative, inventive imagination of love.” It should constantly provoke and produce thinking of an anticipatory kind in love to humanity and the world, “in order to give shape to the newly dawning possibilities in the light of the promised future, in order as far as possible to create here the best that is possible, because what is promised is within the bounds of possibility.” “Thus it will constantly arouse the ‘passion for the possible’, inventiveness and elasticity in self-transformation, in breaking with the old and coming to terms with the new.” The Christian hope should always have “a revolutionary effect in this sense on the intellectual history of the society affected by it.”

“Wherever that happens, Christianity embraces its true nature and becomes a witness of the future of Christ.”

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Van Morrison - These Are The Days.

Identities that no longer hold us in the way they once did

Here's the sermon that I shared at St Andrew's Wickford this morning:

When Jesus appeared to his disciples following his resurrection, he was both like he was before his death and different. On the day of his resurrection itself, Jesus appeared to the disciples at various times and places when it was physical impossible to be at so many different places in one day. His glorified body didn’t seem to have the same limitations his earthly body possessed before his resurrection. We are told that he was able to appear and disappear, travel great distances, and pass through the wall or the locked door of a house. As a result, St Paul writes about an earthly body and a resurrection body with continuities and differences between the two.

Resurrection, it seems, is not simply a continuation of our current experience but a new dimension of living. Jurgen Moltmann reflects this idea when he says, the “resurrection of Christ does not mean a new possibility within the world and its history, but a new possibility altogether for the world, for existence, and for history.” Jesus gave us a hint of this, too, is his response to the Sadducees that we read about in today’s Gospel reading (Mark 12.18-27). Those who are resurrected, Jesus says, neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.

We don’t know what it is like to inhabit a resurrected body or live a resurrected life, as the Bible just gives the sense that there are similarities and differences, continuities and changes. As a result, it is unhelpful to speculate about that future. So, what can we say about the nature of relationship in eternity on the basis of Jesus’ response to the Sadducees?

In following Jesus, we follow someone who posed some very significant challenges to our understanding of the place of family. "The obligation to bury one’s father was regarded by many Jews of Jesus’ time as the most holy and binding duty of a son; but Jesus says that that is secondary to the call to follow him and announce God’s kingdom" (Luke 9. 51 - 62). This call cuts across family life and our traditional understandings of family.

In Matthew 12, when Jesus was told that his mother and brothers were nearby, we read that he said: "Who is my mother? Who are my brothers? … Whoever does what my Father in heaven wants is my brother, my sister, and my mother." Then in Matthew 10 we read of Jesus saying: "Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the world. No, I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. I came to set sons against their fathers, daughters against their mothers, daughters-in-law against their mothers-in-law; your worst enemies will be the members of your own family."

Tom Wright notes in his commentary on this passage that Jesus is quoting from the prophet Micah (Micah 7.6) who predicts the terrible divisions that will always occur when God does a new thing. "Jesus came to bring and establish the new way of being God’s people, and not surprisingly those who were quite happy with the old one, thank you very much, didn’t like it being disturbed." "He didn’t want to bring division within households for the sake of it," Wright says, but "he knew that, if people followed his way, division was bound to follow."

Jesus, himself, did not marry and had no physical offspring. As we have seen, his emphasis was on his followers as his family, rather than his blood and adoptive relatives. His death was for the entire family of God - all people everywhere – and, as we are noting today, he taught that after the resurrection people will neither marry or be given in marriage.

Through his resurrection, Jesus has gone ahead of us in signing and establishing the Kingdom of God and he does so as the forerunner for ourselves. He was experiencing what we will later experience ourselves. The Kingdom of God, of which the resurrection is the first fruits, will be a place of equality and inclusion. In Jesus’ ministry, as Peter Rollins has pointed out, "we find a multitude of references to one who challenged the divisions that were seen as sacred, divisions between Jew and Gentile, male and female, and slave and free. Jesus spoke to tax collectors, engaged with Samaritans and treated women as equals in a world where these were outrageous acts." Jesus, for example, refused to perpetuate the divisions between Jews and Samaritans when his own disciples want to see revenge enacted on a Samaritan village for rejecting them.

More than this, though, in his incarnation we are presented with a picture of God, in Jesus, being progressively stripped of all his prior identity as God’s Son. Rollins writes that, "This is called kenosis and describes the act of self-emptying. This is most vividly expressed in the crucifixion, where we see Christ occupying the place of the complete outsider, embracing the life of one who is excluded from the political system, the religious community, and the cultural network."

To do this is to cut through the divisions which exist in society because of our different identities. This is what Jesus meant when he said he brought a sword into the world. He cut into "the very heart of all tribal allegiances, bringing unity to what was previously divided":

"There is no change biologically (male or female), religiously (Jew or Greek) or politically (slave or free). Yet nothing remains the same, for these identities are now drained of their operative power and no longer hold us in the way that they once did. These identities no longer need to separate us from each other."

Our "concrete identity continues to exist, but it is now held differently and does not dictate the scope and limitations of one’s being.” As a result, St Paul suggests “We are no longer to act as though we are defined by the things we own, the things that happen to us, or the relationships we have. While these continue to be important, we must hold them in a way that ensures they do not have an inescapable grasp upon us.” “Paul understands this radical cut as emanating directly from one’s identity with Christ, for Paul understands participation in the life of Christ as involving the loss of power that our various tribal identities once held for us."

At the Eucharist we commemorate the act in which Jesus let go of every identity by which he was known, becoming nothing, in order that we might come into a new life within the family or kingdom of God where all are one and where there is no Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no male or female.

Jesus’ resurrection is the first fruits of a new way of being human – a way of being human that ultimately knows no death, no grief, no crying, no pain, no inequality and no exclusion. Jesus’ resurrection is the first fruits of the healing and renewal of human beings, human society and the entire world. That is the meaning of the resurrection. That is where we, and our world, can be heading, if we follow in the footsteps of Jesus. That is what Jesus is indicating to us when he taught that after the resurrection people will neither marry or be given in marriage.

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Anawim - Give Us The Peace.

Optimism, realism and hope

Here is the sermon I preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields today:

‘Boris Johnson must peddle Brexit optimism "as if he were a steroid-boosted cyclist trying to win the Tour de France;" between now and October 31, key Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg has argued’. ‘Johnson’s promise to prove “the doubters, the doomsters, the gloomsters” wrong, and his claim that “no one in the last few centuries has succeeded in betting against the pluck and nerve and ambition of this country”, is in exactly that vein’.

Whether this is a credible Brexit strategy I’ll leave to you to decide but what it has done is initiate a national debate regarding the nature and value of optimism. For instance, in ‘one of the standout moments in Rory Stewart’s ill-fated campaign for No 10’, Stewart ‘compared his rivals’ defiant optimism about Brexit to a man trying to cram three bags of rubbish in an impossibly-full dustbin while yelling, “Believe in the bin bags!”’

Assessing Johnson’s use of optimism in The Guardian, Tim Lott noted that: ‘Optimism gets things done. It has energy. That is its perpetual triumph over pessimism. But unfortunately, like pessimism, it is skewed. It leads to the very unwelcome emotion that pessimism seeks to avoid by pre-empting it, assuming failure in the first place. This emotion is disappointment – attended by its ugly henchmen, bitterness and resentment.’ That is what Lott anticipates will be the result of Johnson’s optimism over Brexit.

Our Gospel reading (Luke 12.49-56) makes clear that this was not a strategy followed by Jesus who told his disciples plainly that he was about to be killed, that they would be scattered and then persecuted. That, as the effect of what he was about to do would be divisive, they would live and minister in an on-going situation of division and persecution. In a series of addresses that are often read in Advent, he explained that, at some point after his Ascension and the coming of his Spirit at Pentecost, the Temple in Jerusalem would be destroyed and they would live in a state of persecution. In AD70 the Romans destroyed the Temple, ending all worship there, and the Early Church in Jerusalem, together with the majority of Jews, was dispersed across the Roman Empire. Many of the letters in the New Testament describe experiences of trouble and persecution prior to that point, but, from that point until the Emperor Constantine adopted Christianity as the religion of the Empire, the early Church experienced the kind of division and persecution about which Jesus had warned.

Jesus was never less than real! In our Gospel reading he confronts us with the reality that once the good news about him gets into households there’ll be no peace and families will split up over it. That reality continues to be the case to this day. However, it may well have been the situation of the Church post-AD70 that he had primarily in mind at the time. He did so in order that his followers genuinely understood the commitment that they were making. That is why whenever he spoke with those who wished to follow him he emphasised the depth of commitment involved; ‘Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple’. There were no false promises and there was no fake news with Jesus.

That level of commitment is necessary because the conflict he describes and the prophecies he makes will, he says, be an opportunity for his disciples to tell the Good News, if they stand firm. For example in Luke 21 we read of his saying: Countries will fight each other; kingdoms will attack one another. There will be terrible disasters everywhere; you will be arrested and persecuted; you will be tried and put in prison; you will be brought before rulers for my sake. This will be your chance to tell the Good News (Luke 21. 10-13). That is what Jesus looked for from his followers in times of conflict and difficulty and he promised both his support and enabling in doing so: ‘Make up your minds beforehand not to worry about how you will defend yourselves, because I will give you such words and wisdom that none of your enemies will be able to refute or contradict what you say.’

The situations in which we are called to do this change throughout history but what is unchanging is the call to tell the Good News whether in situations of military defeat, as in the post AD70 situation for the Early Church, or in times of victory, as with the beginnings of Christendom post-Constantine. Today we seem to be called to do so in a political and social situation which has shifted towards the mind-set of populism, with its emphasis on national interests and the erection of walls and tariffs to protect ‘us’ against ‘them’. Whatever we think of that situation, Christ calls us to tell the Good News of God’s love shown in Christ’s incarnation, death and resurrection with all its implications for society through the coming of the kingdom of God.

Jesus’ warning that his disciples will experience not peace but division is clearly realistic rather than optimistic but it also contains, within the arc of his warning and within the pattern of his actions, a hope for the future which is optimism built on realism. The warnings Jesus gives about fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, and so on, for example, include a quotation from Micah 7.6, a passage in which the prophet warns of imminent crisis and urges that the only way forward is complete trust in God. The prophet says although his experience is of division, ‘I will look to the Lord, I will wait for the God of my salvation; my God will hear me.’

The Biblical witness, as our Vicar has regularly reminded us, is that the place of setback, hardship and failure is also the place of revelation and relationship. From the exile of 585 BC onwards, God’s people have habitually experienced renewal emerging out of times of setback, hardship and failure. Jesus saw a crisis coming for those to whom he spoke; a crisis of which his own fate would be the central feature. He would be rejected and killed but would rise from death before ascending to his Father and sending his Holy Spirit on all who follow him. Jesus realistically prepared his disciples for the experience of despair and loss when he was crucified and of later hardship and persecution following his Ascension.

He did so because he was absolutely sure that they would experience a depth of relationship with God in their troubles. That, like him, they would come through the valley of the shadow of death into an experience of the kingdom of God - of God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven – that is resurrection. God’s presence in the time of trouble and God’s resurrection of Jesus and, through Jesus, his people, provides the basis for Jesus’ hope about the future, which for those who believe is not just optimistic, but realistic.

Optimism is generated by our energy (or bravado) moving into an unknown future, whereas hope is generated by God’s initiative in Christ reaching back into our present. Slavoj Žižek has argued that ‘In our predicament every direct optimism is a fake’. This is because ‘the only bearers of true hope are those who dare to confront the abyss we are approaching’. That is a realism which accords with that of Jesus. Similarly, Jürgen Moltmann who wrote a Theology of Hope based on lived experience as a prisoner-of-war, said that ‘Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present’. ‘There is no pleasant harmony between us and reality … due to our unquenchable hope’. Hope keeps us un-reconciled, ‘until the great day of the fulfilment of all the promises of God’. The Church is intended to be ‘the source of continual new impulses towards the realization of righteousness, freedom and humanity here in the light of the promised future that is to come’. Our hope should ‘provide inexhaustible resources for the creative, inventive imagination of love’.

We do so, to quote our Vicar, by modelling what the kingdom of God (our term for an alternative society, our language of God’s future now) means and entails in visible and tangible form – that is a community living by faith and in whose life are seen the things God makes possible: ‘The church has to believe it’s about more than spirituality and it has to let its financial needs and the material poverty of many it encounters become entry-points to new adventures, new relationships, new discoveries in God’s kingdom. What are needed now are communities of ordinary virtues, but ones infused with grace: thus trust, honesty, politeness, forbearance, and respect are the bedrock of such communities, while tolerance, forgiveness, reconciliation, and resilience are among its abiding graces.’

In 2004 Clay Sinclair quit his day job to pursue an art career full-time. Having become an internationally recognised artist with his provocative pop paintings on perspex, dealing with issues of power, prestige and possessions, in 2014, for the sake of true riches, he willingly, and with no loss of dignity, opted to become a little poorer and more obscure by relocating to Stroud, where he opened a gallery. Over the past few years has been exploring the possibilities of fashion and the positive impact it can have on individuals, communities and environments.

In 2016, the day after the Brexit referendum, he tongue-in-cheekily declared The People’s Republic of Stroud as a call to community unity after witnessing some horrible post-Brexit abuse towards a refugee charity shop next to his gallery. The People’s Republic of Stroud, along with associated t-shirts, has become a unifying brand that is now firmly established in terms of its ethos and visual identity. Using organic cotton, fair trade and transparent production suppliers, along with local screen-printers he has created a brand that not only brings the community together, but has become a model for sustainable and ethical fashion. To move this successful, inclusive and ethical fashion brand beyond the five valleys of Stroud he has now launched The People’s Republic as an ethical and philosophical clothing brand which aims not only to clothe the world with ethical, sustainable and revolutionary fashion, but also help facilitate the connection between ourselves, others and the planet..

Clay’s enterprise is an experiment of hope in times of division; in a time when we experience not peace but a sword and when peace with God means conflict with the world. God’s initiative in Christ means the future is already secure. We don’t have to create it, we just have to imitate God’s future now; a realisation that provides a realistic basis on which such communities of hope can be built. So, may hope provide us with inexhaustible resources for the creative, inventive imagination of love. May hope keep us un-reconciled until the great day of the fulfilment of all the promises of God and may we all embrace the true nature of Christianity becoming witnesses to the future of Christ. Amen.

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Daniel Amos - Strong Hand Of Love.

HeartEdge Mailer | July 2018

HeartEdge is a growing international ecumenical network, passionate about nurturing Kingdom communities via four C’s - congregations, culture, commercial activity and compassion.

Each month our Mailer brings you inspiration, ideas and resource. If you haven't already, you can subscribe - sign up here!

This month:

• Pádraig Ó Tuama on stories and conflict, Alastair McIntosh on hope and Nadia Bolz-Weber on forgiving the asshole
• Michael Battle, Rowan Williams on 'ubuntu', Liz Adekunle on 'sorry'
• Bread church, Jürgen Moltmann on Small church plus Waterway Chaplains
• Also - Cre8, The BFI Community Cinema and Luminery Bakery
• Nadim Nassau on El, slave culture and a little blue statue, Also Waterloo and Unveiling festivals - and Final Word from Ruth Gouldbourne on welcome!

Read the July Mailer here.

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The Band - Daniel And The Sacred Harp.

Abiding in Exile

Last night I offered the following reflection for Week 4  of the Lent Course at St Martin-in-the-Fields, drawing on the chapter 'Abiding in Exile' from Ben Quash's book 'Abiding':

On the day he died, Jesus walked the Via Dolorosa through the streets of Jerusalem. Jesus' journey is traditionally commemorated by the Stations of the Cross. Following in the footsteps of Jesus through the Stations of the Cross has been part of the Christian practice of Lent and Holy Week since the time of the early Church. The Stations of the Cross were created for those who weren't physically able to go to Jerusalem and literally walk the Via Dolorosa, the Way of the Cross, in its streets. Those who began this practice, the Franciscans in particular, understood that travelling the Way of the Cross imaginatively and prayerfully was meaningful and valid spiritually, albeit different from the actual physical experience.

This is an example of our being able to move while standing still, of journeying whilst staying put. That is what this chapter is all about and it subverts our usual understanding of what is meant by abiding. The most famous passage about abiding in the Bible sees us grafted into a vine that is planted in the ground in a particular place and it is from this passage that many of our understandings of abiding in terms of rootedness derive (John 15). However, all images have their limitations when it comes to expressing and understanding the wonderful depths of God and the inadequacy of the image of the vine and the branches is that it suggests that our abiding is a static thing.

The point of the image of the vine and the branches is that we are to abide in Jesus. Jesus came to us as person and a characteristic of human beings is that we move and travel as well as settling and establishing homes to which we return. Jesus left God's side to be incarnated as a human being and returned to God at his Ascension. In his mother's womb he travelled to Bethlehem, as a child he was exiled in Egypt and his ministry was an itinerant one. Therefore, we are called to abide in someone who moves, meaning that we are called to move when God moves and stay when she stays.

Ben Quash notes that this reality for us as God's people is symbolised for the Israelites during the Exodus in terms of the pillar of light by day and pillar of fire by night that led the people through the wilderness (Exodus 13. 17 - 22). When the pillar moved, the people moved, when the pillar stopped, the people also stopped. He says that what we see here is ‘the very remarkable idea of a presence (or an abiding) that moves.’ He quotes Jurgen Moltmann, who says this is a ‘good symbol for the mobilizing presence of God in history’. ‘God dwells with the Israelites all the time, but God is also moving all the time. He is always before them, but by having God always before them, they find themselves moving. God dwells among the Israelites as a ‘Trailblazer’, says Moltmann’.

Our abiding in Christ therefore involves times of moving and times of staying still. These can be physical - actual journeys or places to be - or, as we have reflected in relation to the Stations of the Cross, they can be movement or rest in our spirits and imaginations. This then helps us to understand and make sense of the nature of Jesus' call to us as his disciples, remembering that he called some to travel with him on his itinerant ministry, but also needed other who remained in their homes in order to support those who were on the road. Jesus' call to us could, therefore, be about physical travel or movement, as for someone on pilgrimage or those called to be missionaries in another place or country, but it could also be to imaginative travel, as with the Stations of the Cross, which takes us ever deeper into our faith while we remain where we are physically and geographically.

Ben Quash calls this the ecology of vocations writing that: ‘for some the knowledge of the special sort of home God offers needs to be discovered in having no permanent resting place in the world, and for some the discovery of God’s infinitely new and transforming horizons is best achieved by staying still.’ He quotes Michael Paternoster as saying, ‘some people need to stay where God puts them, even when they feel like moving, and some people must move when God requires them to, even if they feel like staying.’

The reality of God is one of infinite depth. God created all things and therefore all things exist in him and he is more than the sum of all things, so it is impossible for us with our finite minds to ever fully know or understand God. However profound our experience of God has been, there is always more for us to discover. This means that knowing God is like diving ever deeper into a bottomless ocean where they is always more to see. We are within that ocean and, therefore, are abiding within it, but can always be moving because there is always more to see and uncover and discover.

In the last book of The Chronicles of Narnia, 'The Last Battle', C.S. Lewis describes his characters dying and entering eternity. In eternity they find themselves back in the land of Narnia but it is a Narnia that has more depth and beauty than previously. As they explore this revitalised Narnia, their cry is one of exploration, 'Come further up and further in'. When they reach the garden at the centre of Narnia, they discover that this is a gateway to another Narnia that has yet more depth and beauty than that which they had just left. Lewis' idea that we abide in eternity in the world that we know but know it in ever increasing depth reminds of T.S.Eliot's phrase that, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.’

This, I think, is the form of abiding that Ben Quash describes in this chapter. It is both a running while standing still and an abiding whilst travelling. The God of movement wants to keep us exploring the depths of the world and himself. The God who dwells with us wants to keep us abiding in her refreshing rest. The God of stillness and change wants keep us growing as we remain rooted in him. Quash writes that we have been called to live lives of abiding, while at the same time we have been told, puzzlingly, that we have no abiding city. We are invited to exchange changeless abiding into changeable abiding.

I want to end with a meditation on the symbols that we use in baptism; oil, light and water. As baptism is our entry to Christian faith, it is easy for us to think of these symbols as being primarily about our beginnings in faith, but they also speak powerfully to us of the journey of faith that we begin at our baptism. The faith into which we are baptised is that in which we abide but in order to do so we must move and change and grow and travel:

Oil …
bleeding
from the pressurised
crushed
and wounded
to
free us up
lubricate
our rusting
static lives
and
facilitate
our ever moving
onward
forward
Godward

Light …
revealing our past
lighting our future
shining like a lighthouse
in our storms
burning like a warning beacon
in our wars
warming like the sun
on our journeying
glowing like a fire
through gaps and cracks
in shattered, splintered lives

Water …
cleansing our grubbiness
reviving our tiredness
refreshing our thirstiness
nurturing our liveliness
babbling communication
rippling out our influences

May we -
baptised in water,
anointed by oil,
lit by the Spirit -
live and move freely
like a babbling brook
speaking life
to parched ground
leaping boulders and barriers
sparkling in the ever present
light of the Sun.

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Moby - This Wild Darkness.

Discover & explore: Hope

The first in a new series of Discover & explore services was held at St Stephen Walbrook today. These services, which feature the Choral Scholars of St Martin-in-the-Fields, explore their themes through a thoughtful mix of music, prayers, readings and reflections. Themes for the current series are based on Eric Whitacre's anthem 'Hope, Faith, Life, Love' and, as a result, this series of musical discovery explores the themes of hope, faith , life, love, dreams, joy, truth and soul.

Today's theme was Hope. Next week (Monday 8th February, 1.10pm) we will explore the theme of Faith in a service led by Revd Sally Muggeridge.

Here is the liturgy and reflection from today's service:

Opening responses

Truly the eye of the Lord is on those who fear him, on those who hope in his steadfast love. (Psalm 33:18)

Let your steadfast love, O Lord, be upon us, even as we hope in you. (Psalm 33:22)

For God alone my soul waits in silence, for my hope is from him. (Psalm 62:5)

Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God. (Psalm 146:5)

Reflection

Five sixths of the medieval part of the city of London, including 13,000 houses and 84 churches, were destroyed by the Great Fire of London that lasted 4 days in total. This was a disaster zone where everything was lost and people were in despair. Where is hope to be found in such a situation?

Of course, we know what happened. King Charles II invited architects, surveyors and engineers to present alternative plans. Although many of his plans were unrealised, Christopher Wren and others then rebuilt the City in a new way using better materials.

This is the starting point for an exhibition at the Royal Institute of British Architects entitled Creation from Catastrophe: How architecture rebuilds communities, which explores the varying ways that cities and communities have been re-imagined in the aftermath of natural or man-made disasters.

Disasters are frequent occurrences, “some natural, many more due to man’s ham-fisted neglect of the planet or our inability to get by without recourse to violence.” “The result is always the need for a new start, and how we respond and rebuild colours an uncertain future more than ever. Yet, for all the carnage and chaos that catastrophes bring, an odd truth is apparent: disasters do give us the chance to shape things differently.”

As a result, as Terry Eagleton writes in Hope without Optimism, “the most authentic hope is whatever can be salvaged, stripped of guarantees from a general dissolution.” It is whatever survives a general ruin. This is where we find the writer of Lamentations; bowed down with the reality of exile, yet trusting that it is in the nature of God to bring a new beginning from this disastrous affliction which is “wormwood and gall” to him. Similarly, Emily Dickinson claims that, hope is heard most sweetly in the Gale, “the chillest land” and “on the strangest Sea”.

The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, reflecting on the Arab Spring, recently wrote: “Today, many see “hope” and “optimism” as obscene words.” Nevertheless he still finds “reasons to feel encouraged” despite the fact that, “the physical causes of the revolution on 25 January 2011 – corruption, tyranny and poverty – still exist, and have an uglier face.” In fact, the situation is so dire, he says, “that it is not sustainable; the revolution is still possible because nothing else is.”

Eagleton finds hope in the same place. Hope, he writes, “is to be found in the unfinished nature of the actual, discernible as a hollow at its heart.” “Potentiality is what articulates the present with the future, and thus lays down the material infrastructure of hope.” Hope is about a vision for a future that is different from the present; one which therefore requires imagination and vision. For Christians that vision is of the kingdom of God; which has begun to be realised but is still to come in its full reality.

As a result, in Theology of Hope Jurgen Moltmann argues that “Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present. If we had before our eyes only what we see, then we should cheerfully or reluctantly reconcile ourselves with things as they happen to be. That we do not reconcile ourselves, that there is no pleasant harmony between us and reality, is due to our unquenchable hope. This hope keeps man unreconciled, until the great day of the fulfillment of all the promises of God.

The Church, then, is intended to be “the source of continual new impulses towards the realization of righteousness, freedom and humanity here in the light of the promised future that is to come.” Our hope should “provide inexhaustible resources for the creative, inventive imagination of love.” It should constantly provoke and produce thinking of an anticipatory kind in love to humanity and the world, “in order to give shape to the newly dawning possibilities in the light of the promised future, in order as far as possible to create here the best that is possible, because what is promised is within the bounds of possibility.” “Thus it will constantly arouse the ‘passion for the possible’, inventiveness and elasticity in self-transformation, in breaking with the old and coming to terms with the new.” The Christian hope should always have “a revolutionary effect in this sense on the intellectual history of the society affected by it.”

“Wherever that happens, Christianity embraces its true nature and becomes a witness of the future of Christ.”

Intercessions

We pray for all those currently experiencing natural or man-made disasters and for whom life is wormwood and gall. By living all the way through these experiences of vulnerability may they find their way to a place of new beginning in which power can be plucked from weakness and life made fruitful once again. Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

May we find in the unfinished nature of the present, a vision of a better future; a vision of the kingdom of God. Give us the imagination and vision we need to shape things differently and rebuild colours in an uncertain future. Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

May your Church be a source of continual new impulses towards the realization of righteousness, freedom and humanity here in the light of the promised future that is to come. May we see the inexhaustible resources for the creative, inventive imagination of love that hope in you provides. Constantly arouse in us a ‘passion for the possible’, inventiveness and elasticity in self-transformation, by breaking with the old and coming to terms with the new. May this hope continue to have a revolutionary effect on the intellectual history of our society. Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

Blessing

Places of new beginning, power plucked from weakness, life made fruitful once again, the realization of righteousness, freedom and humanity, resources for the creative, inventive imagination of love, visions of a better future, visions of the kingdom of God; and may those blessings of God almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, be among you and remain with you always. Amen.

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Bob Chilcott - Even Such Is Time.

East London Three Faiths Forum Tour of the Holy Land: Day 1

The Middle East is the cradle of all three Abrahamic faiths and Israel/Palestine is full of holy places sacred to all three faiths. Jerusalem is a holy city, a place of pilgrimage for Jews, Christians and Muslims. The magnificent Dome of The Rock is the earliest mosque in the world, marking the Night Journey of the Prophet from Makka. Many of the present-day inhabitants of the Holy Land are still guided by their religious faith in their lives. Visiting the Holy Land, and praying to God there, in the company of other people of faith, is the journey of a lifetime.

The East London Three Faiths Forum 2014 tour was led by Imam Mohammed Fahim of the South Woodford Mosque (a native Arabic speaker), Rabbi David Hulbert of Bet Tikvah Synagogue, Rev. Simon Hill of St. John the Evangelist, Copthorne, W. Sussex,  and myself. The itinerary mostly duplicated those of the Forum's earlier four successful visits, in the autumns of 2008, 2010, 2011 & 2013, and we were led by the same professional tour guide, Eli Rockowitz.

The tour aimed to include as many significant sites of religious pilgrimage as possible in the seven days available with a good balance of sites of Jewish, Christian and Muslim interest. The trip was an opportunity to learn about the holy sites of the other two faiths, as well as venerating our own. 

In my contributions during the trip I aimed to complement the historical information we were given about the various sites we visited with some spiritual reflection. Our first day was spent in Jerusalem where we first visited the Garden Tomb. Simon Hill led us in Morning Prayer while we were at the Garden and I shared the following thoughts on the resurrection:

The reaction of the women who arrived at the tomb after Jesus’ resurrection suggests to us that there was nothing in the Judaism of their day that had prepared them for the idea that one person could rise from the dead. They were distressed and fearful, in part, because they had no way of understanding or comprehending what had happened. It was totally outside of any frame of reference that they had.

Most Palestinian Jews at the time believed that God would resurrect the bodies of the dead at the end of the age. When Jesus had spoken to the disciples about his own resurrection, it is probable that they would have understood him to have been meaning that he would rise again as part of this general resurrection at the end of the age. This belief in a general resurrection was not accepted by all Jews. The Sadducees, in particular, argued that there was no resurrection at all. But even where this belief in a general resurrection was held, there was never any thought that one person would rise ahead of everyone else.

The reaction of these women - bewilderment and fear – is entirely consistent with situations where we are confronted by things that are totally outside our way of understanding the world and life itself and which radically challenge beliefs which we had thought were unchallengeable. The idea that one person could rise from the dead was so far outside their understanding of life, death and God that they could not have invented it. And, if they had, then they would not have responded with astonishment and fear because they would have known where the idea had come from and would have wanted to have appeared confident in their claim. You don’t convince anyone by being confused and in hiding.

So, instead the reaction of these women suggests that something significant had occurred and that that significant something could only have been the bodily resurrection of Jesus.

The second factor in this story which suggests that Jesus did rise from the dead is the idea that it was women who first discovered his resurrection. The Judaism of their day, like most cultures at that time, was patriarchal. The testimony of women, particularly in a court of law, was either inadmissible or regarded as of lesser value than the testimony of men. If the disciples had wanted to make up a story about Jesus rising from the dead then they certainly wouldn’t have said that it was the women in their group that had discovered his resurrection.

It is interesting, in this context, that the first known pagan written critique of Christianity builds on the Gospels’ report of women as the first witnesses and proclaimers of Jesus’ resurrection. It is called The True Word and was written by the middle Platonist Celsus in A.D. 175. Celsus claims that a ‘hysterical’ female was the witness to Jesus’ resurrection. To Celcus’ patriarchal mind all women were unreliable witnesses because they were hysterical and as a result, he then discounts the claims of the Gospels about the resurrection.

Both these factors then can give us confidence that the resurrection stories are telling us about actual events because if they weren’t then the Gospel writers would not have written them as they have. If the stories about the resurrection had been made up, then in order to be convincing they would have had men as the first people to discover that the resurrection had occurred and those people discovering the resurrection would be portrayed as entirely confident and clear about what they had seen and heard instead of the portrayal that we actually have, one of confusion and fear.

In 1 Corinthians 15 we read that Jesus has been raised from death as the guarantee that we will also be raised from death. He is described as being the first fruits of those who have died. In rising from the dead, he has gone ahead of us into the new risen body and existence that we shall experience in future when Jesus returns to this earth to fully bring God’s Kingdom into existence here.

When Jesus walked the earth he looked ahead to that future time when the Kingdom of God will be made perfect, and all suffering will come to an end. But he also announced that, because of him, there is a sense in which that Kingdom has already begun. When he healed sick people and brought good news to the poor it was a sign that the Kingdom had come. In the same way, when he overcame death by rising from the dead he became the first fruits of the Kingdom, an example of what we will all become in future.

By his resurrection, Jesus has gone ahead of us in signing and establishing the Kingdom of God and calls us to follow where he leads. In this way, as the theologian Jurgen Moltmann says, the “resurrection of Christ does not mean a new possibility within the world and its history, but a new possibility altogether for the world, for existence, and for history.” That’s the first indication of what resurrection means in this passage.

God deliberately chose women to discover Jesus' resurrection because the Kingdom of God, of which the resurrection is the first fruits, is to be a place of equality and inclusion. In his ministry, Jesus consistently included in God’s Kingdom those people in Jewish society that were excluded – he included women in his followers, he brought lepers and possessed people back into the community by healing them, he ate and drank with tax collectors, sinners and prostitutes.

Therefore, it is significant that it is people who were thought of as being second class in the society of his day who become the first witnesses to his resurrection. In the Kingdom of God which Jesus’ resurrection inaugurates, no one is second class and this is why the Apostle Paul writes in his letters, “there is no difference between Jews and Gentiles, between slaves and free men, between men and women; you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Jesus’ resurrection is the first fruits of a new way of being human – a way of being human that ultimately knows no death, no grief, no crying, no pain, no inequality and no exclusion. Jesus’ resurrection is the first fruits of the healing and renewal of human beings, human society and the entire world.

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Herbert Howells - O Pray For The Peace Of Jerusalem.

Resurrection: First fruits of the kingdom of God

“They entered the tomb, where they saw a young man sitting on the right, wearing a white robe - and they were alarmed. “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “I know you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He is not here – he has been raised! Look, here is the place where they put him. Now go and give this message to his disciples, including Peter: ‘He is going to Galilee ahead of you; there you will see him, just as he told you.’” So they went out and ran from the tomb, distressed and terrified. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.” (Mark 15. 5 - 8)

To us, the resurrection is a wonderful event. One that we have been celebrating since Easter Sunday in hymns such as Jesus lives! and Thine be the glory risen, conquering Son. But to the women who first encountered the resurrection it was anything but wonderful. Instead, it was a shocking, unexpected, fearful experience.

We are often surprised to read that that was their reaction because we are so familiar with the resurrection stories and the idea of resurrection itself. And we wonder why they weren’t instantly grateful to know that their teacher and Lord was alive again. But those people who were there at the time were on unfamiliar and disturbing ground and they were unable initially to see the wonder and glory of what had occurred.

And many people today who are not Christians would react in ways that are similar to the reactions of those women. Many would struggle with the whole idea that someone can rise again from the dead and would view this central Christian belief as a reason for rejecting, rather than accepting, Christianity.

So, what I would like to share with you this evening then are two things from this passage that suggest that Jesus did rise from the dead and two things that suggest why his rising is important for us today.

First, the reaction of the women suggests to us that there was nothing in the Judaism of their day that had prepared them for the idea that one person could rise from the dead. They were distressed and fearful, in part, because they had no way of understanding or comprehending what had happened. It was totally outside of any frame of reference that they had.

Most Palestinian Jews at the time believed that God would resurrect the bodies of the dead at the end of the age. When Jesus had spoken to the disciples about his own resurrection, it is probable that they would have understood him to have been meaning that he would rise again as part of this general resurrection at the end of the age. This belief in a general resurrection was not accepted by all Jews. The Sadducees, in particular, argued that there was no resurrection at all. But even where this belief in a general resurrection was held, there was never any thought that one person would rise ahead of everyone else.

The reaction of these women - bewilderment and fear – is entirely consistent with situations where we are confronted by things that are totally outside our way of understanding the world and life itself and which radically challenge beliefs which we had thought were unchallengeable. The idea that one person could rise from the dead was so far outside their understanding of life, death and God that they could not have invented it. And, if they had, then they would not have responded with astonishment and fear because they would have known where the idea had come from and would have wanted to have appeared confident in their claim. You don’t convince anyone by being confused and in hiding.

So, instead the reaction of these women suggests that something significant had occurred and that that significant something could only have been the bodily resurrection of Jesus.

The second factor in this story which suggests that Jesus did rise from the dead is the idea that it was women who first discovered his resurrection. The Judaism of their day, like most cultures at that time, was patriarchal. The testimony of women, particularly in a court of law, was either inadmissible or regarded as of lesser value than the testimony of men. If the disciples had wanted to make up a story about Jesus rising from the dead then they certainly wouldn’t have said that it was the women in their group that had discovered his resurrection.

It is interesting, in this context, that the first known pagan written critique of Christianity builds on the Gospels’ report of women as the first witnesses and proclaimers of Jesus’ resurrection. It is called The True Word and was written by the middle Platonist Celsus in A.D. 175. Celsus claims that a ‘hysterical’ female was the witness to Jesus’ resurrection. To Celcus’ patriarchal mind all women were unreliable witnesses because they were hysterical and as a result, he then discounts the claims of the Gospels about the resurrection.

Both these factors then can give us confidence that the resurrection stories are telling us about actual events because if they weren’t then the Gospel writers would not have written them as they have. If the stories about the resurrection had been made up, then in order to be convincing they would have had men as the first people to discover that the resurrection had occurred and those people discovering the resurrection would be portrayed as entirely confident and clear about what they had seen and heard instead of the portrayal that we actually have, one of confusion and fear.

These are not the only factors which give us confidence that these stories have the ring of truth but they are two that emerge clearly from this account of the resurrection in Mark’s Gospel. What of the meaning of the resurrection though? Why is it so important and how can it affect us today if we believe that it occurred?

Again, two ideas drawn from this account. First, the message of the young man to the women (verse 7) – “He is going … ahead of you”. Literally, this means that Jesus had gone to Galilee where he would show himself to the disciples when they followed him there. But, at another level, it indicates what Jesus’ resurrection means. We read in 1 Corinthians 15 that Jesus has been raised from death as the guarantee that we will also be raised from death. He is described as being the first fruits of those who have died. In rising from the dead, he has gone ahead of us into the new risen body and existence that we shall experience in future when Jesus returns to this earth to fully bring God’s Kingdom into existence here.

When Jesus walked the earth he looked ahead to that future time when the Kingdom of God will be made perfect, and all suffering will come to an end. But he also announced that, because of him, there is a sense in which that Kingdom has already begun. When he healed sick people and brought good news to the poor it was a sign that the Kingdom had come. In the same way, when he overcame death by rising from the dead he became the first fruits of the Kingdom, an example of what we will all become in future.

Jesus wants us to be signs of God’s Kingdom in the same way that he was. He commanded us, his followers, to love in the way that he did. He wanted people to see us practically demonstrating love, so that we will clearly be recognised as men and women who belong to God. When Christians take action on behalf of the world’s poorest communities, as we will be doing shortly by collecting for Christian Aid, we not only put into practice the values of the Kingdom of God here and now but also become signs of what the Kingdom will be like when it is made perfect in eternity. That is what it means to pray, ‘Your Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.’          

So, by the resurrection, Jesus has gone ahead of us in signing and establishing the Kingdom of God and calls us to follow where he leads. In this way, as the theologian Jurgen Moltmann says, the “resurrection of Christ does not mean a new possibility within the world and its history, but a new possibility altogether for the world, for existence, and for history.” That’s the first indication of what resurrection means in this passage.

The second, takes us back to the women and their position in a patriarchal society. God deliberately chooses women to discover Jesus' resurrection because the Kingdom of God, of which the resurrection is the first fruits, is to be a place of equality and inclusion. In his ministry, Jesus consistently included in God’s Kingdom those people in Jewish society that were excluded – he included women in his followers, he brought lepers and possessed people back into the community by healing them, he ate and drank with tax collectors, sinners and prostitutes.

Therefore, it is significant that it is people who were thought of as being second class in the society of his day who become the first witnesses to his resurrection. In the Kingdom of God which Jesus’ resurrection inaugurates, no one is second class and this is why the Apostle Paul writes in his letters, “there is no difference between Jews and Gentiles, between slaves and free men, between men and women; you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Just as we are called to be signs of God’s Kingdom in the way that we love, so we are also called to be signs of God’s Kingdom by the way in which we include those who are excluded in our day. In our churches we need to be able to demonstrate that we are all one in Christ Jesus by there being no difference in the way that we accept men and women, white and black, rich and poor, straight and gay, non-disabled and disabled, the settled and the migrant, people of faith and people of no faith. We are called to be a people of liberation who cross the divides erected by our society. Who, as Jurgen Moltmann has said, in solidarity enter “the brotherhood of those who, in their society, are visibly living in the shadow of the cross: the poor, the handicapped, the people society has rejected, the prisoners and the persecuted.”

Jesus’ resurrection is the first fruits of a new way of being human – a way of being human that ultimately knows no death, no grief, no crying, no pain, no inequality and no exclusion. Jesus’ resurrection is the first fruits of the healing and renewal of human beings, human society and the entire world. This is the meaning of the resurrection. This is where we, and our world, can be heading, if we get on board with God.

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Switchfoot - Love Alone Is Worth The Fight. 

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.

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Hillsong United and Tim Hughes - Consuming Fire.