Communal discernment and the church meeting
As Baptists, we believe in communal discernment of the will of God, and we engage in such communal discernment through the church meeting. However, this raises a question: is the practice of church meeting just a convenient occasion for communal discernment, or is it of the essence of such work? Is there something special about communal discernment that takes place in the context of church meeting, or is that practice of gathering merely a way of facilitating a process that can happen equally as well in other contexts?
Read MoreChurch as (non-nuclear) family
When the Bible talks of the church as ‘family’, what picture are we meant to see? Not, I am sure, our own instinctive picture of a nuclear family, parents and children alone, a tiny two-generational group separating from wider society. To speak of the church as a family, and of Christians as sisters and brothers is not to make demands about intimacy within a certain congregation, but to make demands about concern and availability across the whole world.
Read MoreTheology, ethics, and church growth: or, how to prove anything with statistics
It is an important part of the role of the academic, particularly the academic who chooses to comment in non-specialist arenas, to be very clear about precisely what is, and what is not, shown by a given piece of evidence. I picked up on a minor Twitter storm yesterday concerning claims and counter-claims about the linkage of church decline with a progressive/accepting stance on issues of sexuality.
Read MoreThought Leaders: Coleridge, the Clerisy, and Catalyst Live
It was a privilege to be a part of the ‘Catalyst Live’ event organised and sponsored by BMS World Mission a few weeks back. The vision, the mix of speakers, and the organisation, were each simply excellent; I got asked to give a couple of talks, but also to engage personally with Jürgen Moltmann. Hearing him tell his own story, of discovering the hope that is in Christ as he read the Bible whilst a prisoner of war in a camp in Kilmarnock, was profoundly moving; talking to him at some length as we planned the interview sessions – well; I have disagreed with aspects of his theology in public, and I stand by those points; but his personal graciousness, gentleness, and humility were utterly captivating and disarming. (At one point, as we shared a sandwich, I asked him who the up-and-coming theologians in Germany were; he responded, then looked at me with a smile and asked who ‘the other rising theologians in the UK’ might be…) I am enormously grateful to David Kerrigan, Mark Craig, and the rest of the BMS team who put it together and who asked me to be involved. I have, I think, three reflections on being part of the event that might be aired publicly. The first concerns the vision of the event. It was cast as for ‘thought leaders,’ and I heard a number of people – all local pastors – express doubt as to whether the event was for them, because they were not ‘thought leaders’. On the one hand, I talked enough to those who organised the event to know that, yes, if you are a local pastor, it was for you; on the other, I understand the hesitation and concern. This collision, I think, bears reflection. In his brilliant, if deeply eccentric, text On the Constitution of the Church and the State, Samuel Taylor Coleridge proposed that the ‘church’ is necessary to the proper functioning of the State, where ‘church’ is understood as ‘the body of educated people who understand and transmit the values/ethos of the nation.’ If the national church happens to be Christian, it is an inestimable boon, he believed, but he made the term ‘church’ broader than merely Christian groups. He envisaged the ‘national church’ necessarily putting in place two individuals in every locality – think ‘parish’ or – perhaps better – ‘village’: the priest and the schoolmaster. The priest’s role is to remind and instruct the adult population of/in the broad beliefs of the culture; the schoolmaster’s role is to induct the children of the community into these broad beliefs. Now, there are lots of questions to ask about this account: what, given that this is a post about an explicitly Baptist initiative, of nonconformity, of those communities that gather seriously but refuse state recognition? Where is the place for principled debate, for those whose calling is to challenge and develop the ethos of the nation? (To be fair to Coleridge, he had a place for this in his account of the national government, which is a synthesis of forces of ‘permanence’ and ‘progress’ – but it seems that at local level there only is space in his system for people who conform to national visions.) That said, he captured something important: every parish, every village, needs its clerisy, its thought leaders. Coleridge was trying to set in stone a particular moment in English history; at this distance, and given his involvement in defining Romantic aesthetics, it is tempting to see this text, although presented as a (real and serious) protest against the Catholic Emancipation Bill, as an act of resistance against the urbanisation of the industrial revolution; of course, his attempts to command the tides of history were no more successful than Canute’s attempts to command less metaphorical tides, and the perfect English village he imagined has become a community-lite shell of weekend cottages or, if it is lucky, of commuter dormitories. That said, locality still matters. Not exclusively – network society is a reality – but then locality was never exhaustive; the county set were not defined by their villages of residence in Coleridge’s ideal England, even. But locality still matters; in the community I live in, we have debates about re-siting the local secondary school, and about housing provision, and about HMO licences, about the changing use of a military base, and about a dozen other things, that in every case relate to national debates, but in evert case also have particular local contexts and shapes. If the role of Coleridge’s ‘clerisy’ – thought leaders – is to speak well into these debates, to show how they are shaped...
Read MoreOnce again: on being unapologetically charismatic
‘Are you a closet charismatic, Steve?’ I was having lunch with someone I like and respect greatly when he threw this one at me a month or two back. My response was heartfelt and immediate: ‘What do you mean, “closet”?’ On this issue, I’m out and proud – although hardly uncritical of the movement as a whole, or in its various strands. Because of this, I initially looked seriously at the first reports from the ‘Strange Fire’ conference that happened across the pond a while back; I have to admit that I quickly lost interest: there are some serious theological criticisms to be made of the charismatic movement, but there was no-one on that platform capable of making them. I picked up a farrago of unsubstantiated assertion, inaccurate history, poor exegesis, and – well, generally, it wasn’t good, and I quickly tuned out. One point stuck with me from what little I read, though. My friend Andrew Wilson, who clearly has far more patience and Christian charity than I do, engaged seriously with some of the arguments presented at the conference on the Think Theology blog here; I want to pick up just on one theme, albeit a rather central one: the definition of ‘charismatic’. Andrew quotes, and accepts, a definition offered at the SF conference by Tom Pennington: to be ‘charismatic’ is to support the continuation of the ‘miraculous gifts’. I am not convinced by this definition. My concern with this is simple, and deeply partial, in the sense that it is based only on my own experience and knowledge only, and not on any serious research. The charismatic movement which I know might formally be characterised theologically by its belief about certain spiritual gifts, but this is some distance from its lived concerns and interests. Andrew makes the point that the ‘charismatic/cessationist’ debate is not about belief in continuing miracles: conversion – God giving new life to someone dead in their trespasses and sins – remains the fundamental miracle of the church’s experience, and is believed and rejoiced in on all sides of this debate. I want to push this further, though: consider the ‘gift of healing’: on the ‘cessationist’ side, I have never met a pastor who does not pray seriously for God’s healing for his/her flock when they are ill; on the ‘charismatic’ side, I do not think I have met anyone who claims to have ‘the gift of healing’ (I know they exist; my point is that much – perhaps most – charismatic life is not narrated in these terms). I know many people – including one of my own children – who can give serious testimony to seeing instantaneous and apparently-miraculous healing happening in response to prayer; but the language of a ‘gift of healing’ is not the way these testimonies would be framed. Similarly, I think of people in congregations I have led (or been a part of) who would regularly prophesy in our worship times; none ever (in my hearing) claimed a ‘gift of prophecy’; that was not their self-understanding of how they were ministering. Again, I stress, I am reflecting on my own experience – but I have been on the speaking or leadership teams of several major charismatic conferences in the UK over the last decade; in some of these prophecy, healing, and salvation were daily realities; I never recall hearing the language of ‘gift of healing/prophecy’ in any context in any of them. When I have been present when messages in tongues have come, the request from the front has always been something like ‘Did anyone sense God speaking as that message was brought?’ not ‘Does anyone have the gift of interpretation?’ Again, I know lots of people who pray in tongues. It happens that I pray in tongues every day (that rumbling sound you can hear is the collapsing of my academic credibility). I suppose if someone asked me ‘have you received the gift of tongues’ I would say yes, but I do not recall ever being asked that question, and I do not habitually think of my spirituality in those terms; my ordinary daily discipline is to say an office, to pray in tongues, and to intercede for needs I am aware of; during the day, I will respond to events/thoughts in prayer regularly, sometimes praying in tongues, sometimes not (our family prayer time at night is obviously in English exclusively). The daily office – and the family devotional material we use – would be as much a ‘gift’ in my narration of this as the ability to pray in tongues; to speak of ‘the supernatural gift of tongues’ is just...
Read More
Recent Comments