Living Wittily

The Unwise Impatience with the Contemplative Mission of the Church,

When E M Forster in A Passage to India sniffed with the disdain of the omniscient narrator at 'poor little talkative Christianity' he was doing what the best novelists do so well, exposing pretension and presumption and daring to name what is ridiculous. Of course not all Christianity is talkative in that embarrassing way when much speaking disguises insecurity, or pretends maturity, or silences other viewpoints by not shutting up about itself.

But there's still a sharp enough barb in Forster's words to make me uneasy about the contemporary expressions of evangelical spirituality and worship. The urge to talk to the point of overtalking, the impatience with silence as if silence were wasted time, the compulsion to fill every unforgiving minute with maximum information, our praise song factories churning out new stuff at increasing rates of quantity, our uncritical acceptance of prayers that seldom reach the depths of our love or the heights of our aspirations and are often the mere immediate chatter of Facebook exchanges with God.

Add to that our programmatic approaches to mission, activism as the index of discipleship, the concessions made in Christian practices and social attitudes to consumer culture and the radical individualism of personal choice and privatised lifestyles, and there is little time, energy or inclination to stop, shut up, listen, pay attention and let the engines that drive us slow down, quieten down and cool down.

Now all that is overstated, and mostly unfair, and anyway I can much-speak and fast-talk and non-stop with the best of them. But perhaps that enables me to say all this less self-righteously than it might sound. T S Eliot's question (was it wistful, angry or resigned) 'where is the life we have lost in living...' remains one of the most important questions the contemporary church has to ask, and with which the contemporary disciple of Jesus has to grapple.

I know that discipleship is at the centre of current thinking on the nature of the Church's mission, but I'm not persuaded that the way the idea is used to shape and fashion people towards a particular view of mission does justice to the New Testament vision of what it means for each person to follow Jesus. There are other calls of Christ, other ways of being, other paths of following that are equally important to the Kingdom of God, if we take the time to consider and ponder the richness of the people of God and the unsearchable riches of Christ. But the irony is that the more we talk and the faster we live, the harder it is to even see what the important questions are, let alone what kinds of answers there might be.

Which brings me to a question I am considering and pondering myself. What would be the impact on our ways of being the church if we recovered,, in our midst, the contemplative tradition of Christian discipleship? I have in mind certain words that seem to me to offer important theological and spiritual correctives to a church perhaps too fond of unexamined assumptions.

Attentiveness to the way the world is without assuming our quick diagnoses are always accurate. Amos didn't come to the conclusion overnight that worship is a waste of time for those who grind down the poor. His entire collection of prophecies detonates beneath unexamined assumptions.

Attendance - in the sense of waiting before God, just waiting. If we are attending before God our minds can't be in two places at once. Prayer isn't multi-tasking, it is letting God be God, instead of telling God who to be.  

Pondering - rumination and turning things over in our minds, may not be the preferred approach to problem solving in our quick as you can solutions culture. Somewhere in Christian spirituality there is a necessity for the long view, the slow maturation of thought, the virtue of patience which is in fact waiting trustfully. Isaiah looked down the long winding road of exile and realised it would eventually be the road that led back to God.

Recollecting - so many fugitive thoughts, fleeting experiences, volume of emotional and mental traffic passing through our inner processors. Time to assimilate, to collect together what is important and taken in, to absorb the significance of things. Where in our life together in Christian community is there the same urgency towards non-urgency, the same valuing of that discernment and sifting that turns experience into wisdom?

Remembering - in the sense of recalling our calling; meaning time to reorient our hearts towards the Love that not only moves the sun and other stars, but moves our hearts; and with a view to being re-membered, joined together, co-ordinated, so that over time our disjointed living recovers co-ordination, and our strained activism gradually gives way to living that is purposeful, creative and balanced in its intake and outflow of energy.

No this is not all a rant. It's a plea for a recovered humanism towards ourselves, a cherishing of our humanity in a way that takes our deepest selves seriously as ones loved by God. It is a recognition that Christians are called not only to do, but to be, and to give time of day to that genuine instinct for stillness and slowness, two dispositions I for one find unfamiliar, but out of which may come the finding of our life's hopes. It is an acknowledgement that the trivialisation of God is an inevitable process of trivialising our own lives. And it is a growing conviction that Isaiah was right to say to a people who had exhausted their capacity to hope, "they that wait upon the Lord shall renew theyr strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run  and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint..." Waiting - yet another word with which our culture, and the church, and our own hearts, are impatient.

Hauerwas and what the church is and is not about

  Stanley Hauerwas, self described as a truculent Texan who swears, is one of the leading exponents of discipleship as theological ethics embodied in virtues and practises that are so reminiscent of Jesus they tell forth the same good news, albeit in fallible humanity trying to be faithful in our following.

Those who have heard Hauerwas lecture know that he doesn't do scintillating rhetoric, and at times is just plain hard to listen to. But he's always worth the effort and irritation it takes to grasp what he's saying because he seldom misses the hearer and hits the wall. His writing likewise can seem at times obtuse, other times persuasive, and occasionally needing to be read with some patience and that intelligent watchfulness that comes from realising this man is a teacher, and a very, very, good one. And if we come away from an encounter with his voice, mind and keyboard with nothing much new to think about, it may be that our own capacities of thought and capaciousness of heart are the limiting factors.

Just been reading his essay on 'The Servant Community: Christian Social Ethics' in the book Living Out Loud, edited by Luke Bretherton. He's at it again. Telling the church to be the church and stop trying to be what people think the church should be.

"The church serves the world by giving the world the means to see itself truthfully. The first question we must ask is not 'What should we do?' but 'What is going on' Our task as church is the demanding one of trying to understand rightly the world as world, to face realistically what the world is with its madness and irrationality."

I used to have an elderly friend who would emphasise her emphatic tone by mixing up her words, and to borrow one of them in response to Hauerwas, abso-bloomin-lutely!!

And how does that work out in practice? Here he is again:

"It is particularly important to remember that the world consists of those, including ourselves, who have chosen not to make the story of God their story. The world in us refuses to affirm that this is God's world and that, as Loving Lord, God's care for creation is greater than our illusion of control. The world is those aspects of our individual and social lives where we live untruthfully by continuing to rely on violence to bring order."

Van Gogh, Thomas Merton and Rowan Williams - and the connection is?

Had a good day yesterday when important things have been done, said and enjoyed.  Journeyed to Glendoick to meet my friend Ken where we spent several hours at the garden centre. In the taciturn and occasionally nasty summer we're having the day was sunny, clear views for miles and the roads still quietish at the end of the school holidays. We don't get the chance to meet often so we tend to make a meal of it. This time we made two meals of it, a bacon and egg roll and a pot of tea, an hour's walk, then Carrot and orange soup with herb scones.

We've been friends more than half our lives and though we'd planned another bookshop crawl in Edinburgh, a civilised conversation over good food for three hours was much to be preferred.

Got home and listened to Albinoni's Oboe Concerto in D Minor while writing and reading, and gloating (no other word will do) over recently bought books. The slow movement of this concerto should be played quietly while reading one of the great narratives of divine and human tenderness in the gospels - for me the encounter of Mary Magdalene with Jesus in the garden.

Of the books being gloated over the one I read next will be The Yellow House, Martin Gayford, (Penguin) is the account of Van Gogh, Gaugin and nine turbulent weeks in Arles. Two geniuses with all their psychological complexities, artists at the zenith of their talent and the extremes of innovation, both eager for friendship but encountering in each other the greatest obstacle to mutual friendship! While working on the Sunflowers tapestry I'm keeping in touch with Vincent in different ways - not trying to understand him, which I think is neither possible nor necessary. But to know the whence of the chaos and the wherefore of the genius, to accept and respect the relationship between his illness and inner turmoil and the immense achievements of his art, and to have an emotional context out of which to work an impression of his favourite painting, and the focus of his desperate longing for sunlight, hope and inner rest.  

 

One of the traits of the bibliophile is gloating over a forthcoming book yet to be printed! This one brings together the Christian whose writing has shaped my own spirituality and thinking in ways decisive for my view of ministry, myself, human relationships, the nature of prayer and the paradoxical imperatives of community, silence and solitude as places and times where and when God is to be found. Ever since I read The Seven Storey Mountain, followed by Thoughts in Solitude I have never had a year when I haven't read Merton's writing. This forthcoming book is by Rowan Williams, and I can't think of someone I'd rather have exploring and reflecting on Merton's continuing relevance in a world where the things Merton made deep concerns remain deeply concerning - cultural conflicts, violence, consumer greed, cultural superficiality and human creativity turned against human interests and flourishing. Merton's great insight that the contemplative was a necessary presence in a world in desperate need of redemption, righteousness, peace and justice remains a major portion of his legacy that is of enduring value. He spoke into the cultural urgencies and reconfigurations of the 50's and 60's and much that he wrote remains valid half a century later. Is that because human nature, our profligacy and pretensions, our anger, angst and anxiety, our propensity for self-preservation and self-harm, remain humanity's greatest threat? And thus a great and fallible human being like Merton can bring together the contemplative and the active, the promise of divine grace enabling human goodness, the monk as holy person in whose prayers are gathered up the broken pieces of a God loved world?

Recovering a Neglected Text: Songs Based on the Song of Songs

The Song of Songs is one of those hidden treasures of the Bible that is more hidden than treasured in contemporary preaching and liturgy. Its explicit sensuality, its celebration of love in all its emotional fervour and poetic physicality, and its unmistakbable affirmation of love as the utter giving up of the self in deepest longing and passionate embrace, tend to mean that those committed to expository preaching give it a skilled body swerve. 

That's a pity, however understandable.  Some of the most lyrical writing, and spiritually perceptive devotional expression, and profound theological imagining has been produced by those in the Christian tradition who have studied and sung and prayed over this collection of Hebrew Love songs. From the mystical Bernard of Clairvaux and his eighty odd sermons on the first couple of chapters to the equally mystical if evangelical Charles Haddon Spurgeon's communion meditations, from the speculative and extravagant Origen to the restrained devotion of the 19th C. Lutheran Franz Delitzsch, from Samuel Rutherford the intense and volatile Scottish Puritan whose letters are marbled with the sensual imagery of the Song, to Marvin Pope whose Anchor Bible Commentary remains the vade mecum of previous interpretations, from such diverse directions in the tradition the Song of Songs has been a rich source of devotional and theological nourishment.

But no. It isn't necessarily the text to read out in church of a Sunday morning, either before or after the children leave. And yes, it is probably wise not to decide to do a long detailed series of expositions verse by verse - though that was done 30  odd years ago by the Rev Willie Still in Gilcomston South Church in Aberdeen.

But still, this book about love and passion and longing is there, right in the middle of the Bible, and it won't go away. So what to do with it. Read it. Think about it. It has much to teach a culture saturated by overstated desire, tone deaf to tenderness and delicacy, suffering an ennui of the heart and losing the capacity for imaginative and winsome discourse (a recent article mercilessly mocked the crass opening chat up lines that now pass for respectful introduction and consideration for the other).

Alternatively, buy Patrick Hawes' beautiful arrangement of 6 songs on the Song of Songs. The soloist Elin Manahan Thomas has one of the clearest and sharpest voices I've heard. The CD is a really good example of exegesis by lyric and music, a genuine expansion and exposition of ideas that lie at the centre of the Song. These ideas give content and substance to those words we try to use when we speak of love, desire, longing, passion, anticipation and fulfilment, devotedness given and received, the move from fear to trust and therefore to that joy which, if never complete, at least finds its home in the mutual enjoyment of human togetherness.

The Song of Songs has been understood as an allegory of  the love between Christ and the Church, between Christ and the soul, and between a man and a woman. That such rich resources to explore divine and human love lie in this earthy but sublime poetry is one of the great miracles of the canon of Scripture. I guess there are those who, if it were up to them, would have wanted it excluded for reasons of modesty.  And the Holy Spirit thankfully thwarted them! So here it is, between Ecclesiastes with his probing mockery of faith that comes too easy, and Isaiah with his defiant imagination in face of exile and imperial power, daring to hope - and between them, Sage and Prophet, this love letter, this unabashed celebration of love, divine and human, love which in the human heart and in the heart of God is the foundation of existence and the meaning and purpose of life itself.

Benedict XVI in London, Education, Dialogue and Freedom ( I )

When Tony Blair famously said the priorities for a 21st Century economy were "Education. Education. Education", he said more than he meant, and New Labour delivered less than he promised. Long before him the Scottish Reformation Kirk aimed to have a school in every parish, an historic decision Pope Benedict XVI commended in his response to the Queen's welcome. Education remained closely related to the Church in its various expressions in the following centuries, Catholic, Established and Nonconformist, until from the mid 19th Century onwards the state increasingly took responsibility for universal education. The resources needed, and the economic implications of having an educated, skilled and trained population capable of competing in modern industrialised societies, made it increasingly necessary that Government rather than Voluntary Agencies should drive educational provision.

Alongside state provision in Britain, the Catholic Church has had its own established network of faith schools. Education remains a primary goal of Catholic social policy and theology today, and involves massive commitments of resources worldwide. When Benedict spoke on Friday to several thousand young people at St Mary's University College he spoke of those things that make life good and make for human happiness. To be happy is to be a friend of God. To live well there must be good models, those whose lives are worthy of imitation. There is much in Benedict's public discourse, and in his message here in Britain, that reflects the profound thinking of his encyclicals Deus Caritas Est and Caritas in Veritate. To be friends of God is a description of a relationship in which love is the exchange of divine grace and human response. He spoke of God's love, and God's desire for happiness and holiness as essentials of a full humanity, and did so as one who has thought profoundly, and spoke simply.

This is a Pope whose theological emphases decisively shape his public discourse, and he talks with ease and practised confidence about the love of God, but also about those cultural and intellectual trends that undermine and erode the humane goals of education as a humanly formative activity. To talk theologically, and with a heightened social conscience in a showpiece Catholic educational establishment, is to introduce a quite different level of discourse about the meaning, significance, purpose and practice of education. Whatever arguments there may be about the place of faith based schools in a pluralist culture, they provide an important corrective and in a democarcy a required alternative, to secularised education evacuated of religiously formative education.

John Henry Newman's Idea of a University reads today like an impractical, unaffordable, unwanted and idealistic educational utopia. Unless of course you want to challenge the prevailing secular view that education is a process whose primary goal is economic growth and development, student employability and mass produced graduates. But I'm reluctant to concede the inevitable and final necessity for such educational reductionism, or that these are the only or best educational goals. It may indeed be inevitable that state funded education in our universities has to bend to the economic priorities, and available funding of the Government of the day. But there will still be, in my own view, a place for those institutions which exist to serve more humanising ends, including religious instruction, moral formation, humanising values, intellectual humility, and these explored within a faith tradition both itself open to critique and yet critically aware of alternative worldviews.

Benedict has a similarly rich and humane view of the purpose of religious encounter between different faiths. Such meeting he said yesterday, is a necessary expression of human formation, cultural development and social interaction. Co-operation and dialogue engender mutual respect, and enable faith traditions to support each other in seeking freedom of worship. of conscience and of association. Nor should such co-operation and mutual understanding be selfish, but provide a platform from which faith groups can work for peace, mutual understanding and witness to the world. Living alongside each other and learning and growing in respect and knowledge of each other, provides a fertile soil for peace, justice and works of compassion to grow.

Whatever else can be said about this Papal visit, each time Benedict has spoken he has been generous in spirit, rigorous in intellect and both warm and dignified in his responsiveness. And the issues he deals with are of common concern to all humanity - justice and peace, the foundation of moral standards, religious freedom and freedom of conscience, the nature of education, the relations of faith and reason, and of spirituality and secularity. This is a man of courage, conviction and adamantine firmness on dogma; he is also a man of intellectual power, pastoral passion for the global church and ranks as one of the greatest Catholic theologians of the past 50 years. Interesting that the current Pope and the current Archbishop of Canterbury are both regarded as scholar theologians of the first class, at a time when intellectual range and depth are discounted in the markets of contemporary communication culture.

 

Emerging Church, Rabbi Gamaliel and the Theological Curriculum

Just spent the last couple of days meeting with colleagues in Oxford, at Regent's Park College. We were looking at the issues for theological education arising from the flux and diversity of expression in church community that has come to be called emerging church, or fresh expressions, or whatever catch phrase we care to use in the vain attempt to catch in neat definition this phase of the church's life in contemporary Westernised Christian culture.

Stuart Murray Williams is one of the central figures trying to interpret, understand and evaluate what is of permanent value and what of transient interest in the plethora of alternatives on offer for those no longer satisfied with 'inherited church' or 'traditional church' or 'mainstream church'. See - even the non emergent status quo is now accruing nuanced definitions! And given the long list of options from cafe church to to Sci Fi church, Post-Alpha church to Cyber church, from menu church to common purse community, it was an important exercise to try somehow to grasp the significance of whatever is happening, in a culture that values the 'whatever' word.

Not rehearsing it all here, but several really important questions are at least worth posing:

What is necessary for any group to legitimately claim for itself the word church as a valid descriptor of what it is and how it expresses its life? What is the ecclesial minimum for a group to call itself church?

How important is sustainability in any of these new developments in Christian mission and community? If it is a transient phase is that necessarily a sign of failure? And if some of these survive and become self-sustaining is that validation, 'if it is of God it will prosper'?

If a group aim to accommodate a culturally specific group (Goth church for example), how does that relate to the catholicity of the Church? If Christian community is inclusive, how does that square with groups whose nature, aim and identity are so specific and culturally focused that by definition others would find them all but inaccessible?

If these new and imaginative and creative initiatives are part of a search for a more authentic and participatory way of being Christian community engaged with surrounding culture, what are the criteria for such authenticity?

Given that fresh expressions of emerging or emergent church are self-consciously developmental, uncontrolled and organic, what is it that nevertheless enables them to define themselves as Christian? Where are the theological and spiritual parameters, and who sets them?

And the specific question for theological education as formation and preparation for ministry in such a cultural flux - what impact should such developments, and the need to understand them, have on curriculum content, styles of teaching and a theological understanding of ecclesiology and Baptist Identity?

All good questions - much sharp discussion - several tentative conclusions - and most importantly, food for thought and reason for dialogue.

Christian witness - bespeaking hopefulness to a culture mired in its own despair

Hope. To look to the future as open and replete with new possibility. To see our past and our present circumstances without conceding they determine who we will be, and what is now possible.

If there's one disposition, one emotion, one word for which our times are sick with hunger, it's hopefulness.

 Are any of us immune to that darkness and heaviness of soul that occasionally descends as we glimpse our own shallowness, sense the superficial transcience of a life lived too rapidly, and long for something more permanent, durable, worth giving our lives to?

How to bear witness to Jesus who brings freedom in a culture suffering an advanced case of creeping exhaustion through trying to keep the creaking economic machinery going through the cycle of sustainable economic growth, global recession, and economic recovery. Remorselessness engenders hopelessness, and it's no accident that a theology of hope has an umbilical connection to liberation theology.

And alongside the search for meaning and identity through our capacity to participate in a consumer culture, isn't there something existentially significant about the contemporary pursuit of belonging, identity and connectedness through Facebook, Twitter and yes the blog? 

One way or another we each try to locate our own living in the excitement and sameness, the creativity and the mess, the valuable and the trivial, the enduring and the disposable, the worthwhile and the wasteful, the optimism and the despair,  that is the cultural flux of our times.

So I think of some of the great words that bespeak hopefulness. Bespeak - that is speak and make be. Speak into existence. Talk up. Not in the silly sense of make-believe, but in the prophetic sense of re-imagining a world in which hope and not cynicism is the default posture of our forward thinking. For example:

Amos 9.13, at the end of a doom laden sermon or two:

The time is surely coming, says the Lord, when the one who plows shall overtake the one who reaps, and the treader of grapes the one who sows the seed; the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall flow with it.

Isaiah 55.12, as a promise that simply denies to the status quo its claims to permanence and determinism

You shall go out with joy, and be led forth in peace, and the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.

Revelation 22.1-2, one of those texts that Hollywood would need CGI's to do justice, a vision of life and movement, of growth and fulfillment, of international healing and peace. 

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the lamb, through the middle of the street of the city. on either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

And the lines from Browning's Paracelsus, Victorian rhetoric and human longing for a future drawn forwardt by the sense that in the murk and darkness we might be a bit like Moses sometimes, and have to draw near to the thick darkness in which god dwells.....

If I stoop
Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud,
It is but for a time. I press God's lamp
Close to my breast; its splendour, soon or late,
Will pierce the gloom. I shall emerge one day.

God is love. God is light. But a Christian understanding of God, standing this side of resurrection, manages to look at a tired, scared, fragmented world, buckling under the strain of human activity, and pray, The God of hope fill you with all hope. It is God who bespeaks the future, not us. Thank goodness, and thank God!

Faith then, is  both defiant and imaginative - refusing to concede that how things are is how they must be. Instead faith sends out trajectories of hope towards a future differently imagined. Not because we can simply wish fulfil the future - but because wherever our human future takes us, God is already there, and there as eternally creative love, reconciling our shattered cosmos, and bringing to completion our own brokenness through that same reconciling love.

The Colossian Christ, the image of the invisible God, the one in whom all things hold together, in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell - there is the core of any theology that claims to be Christian and relevant to a culture mired in its own despair, and apparently hell-bent on foreclosing on its own future. To bear witness to a different future, and live towards that future by a life of peace-making and conciliatory love, and to embody these in actions of generous, gentle, costly healing of whatever is hurting around us, - that is to bespeak hopefulness, is to be the Body of Christ, broken for the nourishment of the world.

In Christ all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of the cross.

(The painting is Hope in a Prison of Despair, Evelyn De Morgan, Pre-Raphaelite)

(The space image above can be found here )

Haiku and Holiday in Ireland 5: The Burren, the Faith and the Pub

Amongst my favourite books are those which don't have their edges trimmed. Instead of neat guillotined sides there is a roughly textured layering of paper sheets, not a concession to economy but an aesthetic delight that makes each page unique, and when lying on its side, gives the whole book a soft sense of happenstance, the binding together of different sheets into a finished whole that looks so right that any attempt to machine it into uniform neatness would be unthinkably crude.

Imagine then a large geological volume with sheets made of rock, miles long and wide, lying on its side with the edges facing the sea, grey and green in colour, and formed over millions of years. The layers are clearly differentiated but belong together, the geological pages lie flat one on another and their edges are untrimmed.  And if you can imagine that, then you have some idea of what The Burren is. A massive geological structure and substructure that dominates northern County Clare. We visited it and walked on it, over it, alongside it by the sea. And looking at those places where it layered its way down to the sea was like standing beside a gigantic volume of natural history, created millions of years ago.

The Burren has some of the most diverse fauna in the world. Even the small area of seashore we explored displayed all kinds of small plants, flowers and grasses. 

1.

Laid aeons ago,

Carboniferous limestone,

layered stone pages.

2.

Barren Burren rock,

diversity of flora -

fertile paradox.

We also visited a number of Irish pubs, and as well as the company and conversation, I took time to look at some of the pictures and writings on the pub walls. In several we saw fading photographs or pictures of three very different historical figures. I couldn't help sensing that the fading pictures were slow process reminders of a slow relinquishing, generation by generation, of the Catholic faith, the Christian tradition that has so defined the history, culture and spirituality of Ireland. There were often pictures of Jesus or Mary; sometimes a photo of JFK; and often images of John Paul II (and the present Benedict XVI) - but I was interested in the reluctance to remove the pictures of the Pope of the people. A long conversation with two Irish friends, over a wonderful meal and an afternoon of meandering, themselves no longer regularly practising their faith, but a tangible sense of loss, and anxiety that their grown up children, and their grandchildren would be very different people living in a historically changed Ireland, leached of the dynamic cultural colour that comes from shared religious belief.

Whatever theory of secularisation we buy into, and however we interpret the decline of Christian faith and belonging in Western Europe, there is something profoundly unsettling in living through a transition away from those values and convictions that have, like the Burren, been laid down over generations till they all but defined the human landscape. And the Church of Jesus Christ, in its varied traditions and expressions, is called now to exist in a place where familiar landscapes, known topography, cultural comfort zones and previous privilege are being swept away with the same ruthless thoroughness as those last glacial ice flows that stripped vegetation and topsoil from 1200 square kilometers of NW County Clare, leaving a more barren surface - but one where smallness, diversity and beauty could still flourish.

And maybe that is as good a metaphor as I can think of for the reinvention of the Christian community - flowers in rocky places, beauty surviving an ice-age environment, Christ-embodying community flourishing in a globalised world where human value, and humane values might otherwise perish in an inhospitable climate.

Worship as our amazed yes to the love of God.

Two books being read in tandem provide important comment on worship as foundational to Christian existence, Christian practice and Christian experience. I deliberately put experience last - avoiding the too easy assumption that it is our personal experience that matters. Christian existence is not individual; Christian practice is not personal choice; and Christian experience cannot remain private however specific it is to our own personal circumstances. So N T Wright has an important comment in his book, Virtue Reborn:

"The life of worship is itself a corporate form of virtue. It expresses and in turn reinforces the faith, hope and love which are themselves the key Christian virtues. from this activity there flow all kinds of other things in terms of Christian life and witness. But worship is central, basic, and in the best sense habit-forming. Every serious Christian should work at having worship become second nature."

Worship is a "whole person vocation", according to Wright. And the essential lived relationship between worship, mission and the communal embodiment of the love of God is the core reality of Christian existence and God's good news for the world. And as often in recent years, I am left uneasy at the focus given to mission as the church's primary calling. The spring and source of the church's life, and its first calling, is glad, grateful, self-surrendering worship, expressed in a Christ-like obedience to the out-reaching and in-grasping love of God, an unembarrassed embracing of God's call on the church to be the Body of Christ, to embody the love of God, and to respond with an amazed yes. That amazed yes, that self surrender, that unembarrassed embrace of God's call, is the essential response of worship. And it is the energy source of mission.

Which is why there are probably important questions to be asked about contemporary worship styles, about the assumptions that drive our practices when we meet together, about the importance of customer satisfaction as a criterion for what we do, about the words we choose to sing, and yes, tedious as it may sound, about the theology that shapes all the above. Theology - our way of thinking about God - is betrayed in the how and the therefore of worship. If worship of God in Christ by the power of the Spirit is the energy source of mission, then I am left asking, how often have I been compelled to utter that amazed yes, how powerfully and persistently am I drawn to that act of glad self-surrender, how clearly and persuasively have I been called to that unembarrassed embrace of God's call to be as Christ to the world? Because if the God being worshiped is the God of all grace and love, the God revealed in Jesus, the God active in the church and the world through the Holy Spirit, then worship must surely be more than what we often take it to be. They are important criteria - arbitrary you might think - but as New Testament as they come. Amazed yes. Glad self-surrender. unembarrassed embrace.

Enjoying the diversity of difference and resisting the absurdity of division

Following the previous post on Baptist identity and my preferred disposition of persuasive humility, Chris asked a fundamental question with which I have great sympathy. From what I know of Chris (only from her blog, we haven't met yet, though I hope we can do that one of these days), she is an ecumenical enthusiast, and impatient of the barriers that seem to get in the way of Christian unity and a mutual recognition of each other as fellow travelers on the road with Christ. She always writes (here) with a generosity of mind to others, but also with sharp and critical awareness - so as a retired teacher herself, she knows when someone is writing, thinking or speaking tosh!

So when Chris asks her question she does so as one whose complaint I share. There are too many artificial barriers; more than enough personally invested agendas; a surplus of piously defended principles that have little purchase in the contemporary world; too many long memories of bitter divisions, and toxic after-lives of forgotten disputes; too much proud defensiveness about one's own precious if growingly obsolete traditions. And so on. And just to say, my reply presupposes my complete agreement about the unacceptable face of anti-ecumenism.

Here is the comment and question Chris offers, followed by my reply:

Chris:   When I read this, and the post that precedes it, and in fact great chunks of your blog, it keeps hitting me that it's absurd that you call yourself a Baptist and I call myself an Episcopalian. There is far too much we share - and I'm going beyond the basic tenets of faith here - for us to be described as different. "Our sad divisions" are just that - and in this time they are also absurd. Aren't they?

Jim:   Hello again Chris. I'd like to respond to your questions more fully in a post but I'll at least hint at what a response might be. Ecumenical is for me a good word, a generous word, a hospitable word. Diversity likewise reflects something of the fecundity and variegation of created life, human culture and faith expression. Neither term necessitates that difference become sad division. But both safeguard the freedom, identity and integrity of the many Christian traditions that make up the Church, the Body of Christ. Baptist, Episcopalian, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian and a wheen more are for me the names by which we recognise each other, not slogans by which we disenfranchise, diminish or oppose each other. My being a Baptist can never justify me breaking fellowship with other Christians - indeed as you suggest, it says as much about what is shared between us. But it does allow for my own faith story to be heard, coming as it does within a different tradition; and it requires of me to hear your faith story, and value and learn from it. Absurd - division is always absurd in a faith based on the Gospel of reconciliation. But diversity is not absurd, it is the context within which conciliation, peacemaking, fellowship and mutual recognition are worked out. Or so it seems to this Baptist, seeking to witness with persuasive humility to another valid way of being the Church.

Chris: I'll be fascinated in a further exploration of this - though if this is a hint it's a generous one! I knew when I posted the comment that I wouldn't want to lose the lovely things that I associate with my church - which were vital components of my conversion, actually - and of course if you call it "diversity" you cast our differences in a much more benign light. Maybe I'm affected by the book I'm reading about the dissolution of the monasteries - such cruelty in the name of religion! I'll await further developments ...

When Chris says there is far too much we share for us to be described as different, my whole self, (mind, heart and affections), affirms the truth of what she says. A thoughtful, outspoken, Episcopalian, hillwalking chorister peacemaker, who has spent a lifetime teaching, and a thoughtful, outspoken, Baptist preacher, teacher, academic and tapestry worker, for all the other differences, do indeed have a deep and durable affinity. And it's this. To be in Christ, to be incorporated into the Body of Christ which is the Church, in all its variegated glory, Baptist and Episcopalian and all the rest of them / us! That is the fundamental truth that renders other differences relative, but not irrelevant. I think it does matter that we remain true to those stories and traditions that have shaped us. But part of that being true to our own tradition is, I passionately believe, to value difference not as division but as diversity, not as threat but as opportunity, not as opposition but as co-operation, and not as obstacle but as tepping stone to deeper, richer understanding of a Gospel far too gloriously complex and far too redolent of new possibility, for any one tradition to constrain let alone contain it.

All that said. I still lean heavily towards Chris's sense that difference made excuse for division is sad, and absurd, in a church for which Christ himself prayed, that we may be one even as Christ and the father and Spirit are one.

And Chris's second comment about cruelty and brutality in the name of religion is a reminder to ecumenically generous people that the forces let loose by religion, politics and power, are never neutral, and often malign. In that sense the irony of a divided Christianity is itself an impetus to a recovery of a lived Gospel of reconciliation, peace-making, just relations and forgiveness. I am so tired of offensive behaviour, sullen doctrinal judgmentalism, partisan Christianity, rationalised dislike or worse of those who differ in their experience of God in Christ. And yes, when such over-againstness is given the twin engines of religion and political interest, as in Tudor England, then the Gospel of peace becomes an instrument of power, and the Prince of Peace is betrayed for the one Machiavelli called The Prince.

Because whatever else I stand for as a Baptist, I stand in the tradition of the persecuted, not the persecutor, and a tradition that rejects the coalition of church and state, and of political will with the mission of the Church of Jesus Christ. So I'm no ecumenical idealist unaware of the realities of division, divisiveness and a divided church; but I am one who believes Jesus' prayer was not a waste of words or time - "that they may be one." And where there is celebrated diversity, and humbly persuasive wearing of the amazing technicolour dream-coat of the Church (I know, exegetical daftness but it's just a bit of fun!), then at least we can argue we are trying to walk together after Christ, and glad of the company of each other.

Chris, we must meet for that coffee.

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On another note: A brief report of the recent Baptist Union Council, along with downloads of two of the papers, can be found at the Scottish Baptist College Blog here