Living Wittily

The Best Baptist Preacher of His Age - By Some Distance.

In 1855 Charles Haddon Spurgeon, aged 20, stepped into New Park Street pulpit and preached a sermon on the Immutability of God. The sermon shows Spurgeon the pastoral exegete, evangelical mystic and Calvinist preacher, each of them demonstrably present, and for the next three decades, gifts that would make him one the greatest preachers of any age in the English pulpit.

I have an original 1878 bust of Spurgeon, a piece of genuine Victorian Evangelical celeb culture. It sits comfortably on the Church History bookcase surrounded by volumes on Puritanism - I guess it might explode if I placed it beside Newman on the Oxford Movement shelf. The first paragraphs of the sermon, despite his early years, are vintage Spurgeon. In the wide corpus of his sermons there are countless paragraphs that combine spiritual passion, biblical rootedness and homiletic gift to such effect.

"There is something exceedingly improving to the mind in a contemplation of the Divinity. It is a subject so vast, that all our thoughts are lost in its immensity; so deep, that our pride is drowned in its infinity. Other subjects we can grapple with; in them we feel a kind of self-content, and go our way with the thought, “Behold I am wise.” But when we come to this master science, finding that our plumbline cannot sound its depth, and that our eagle eye cannot see its height, we turn away with the thought that vain man would be wise, but he is like a wild ass’s colt; and with solemn exclamation, “I am but of yesterday, and know nothing.” No subject of contemplation will tend more to humble the mind, than thoughts of God....

But while the subject humbles the mind, it also expands it. He who often thinks of God, will have a larger mind than the man who simply plods around this narrow globe.... The most excellent study for expanding the soul, is the science of Christ, and Him crucified, and the knowledge of the Godhead in the glorious Trinity. Nothing will so enlarge the intellect, nothing so magnify the whole soul of man, as a devout, earnest, continued investigation of the great subject of the Deity.

And, while humbling and expanding, this subject is eminently consolatory. Oh, there is, in contemplating Christ, a balm for every wound; in musing on the Father, there is a quietus for every grief; and in the influence of the Holy Ghost, there is a balsam for every sore.

Would you lose your sorrow? Would you drown your cares? Then go, plunge yourself in the Godhead’s deepest sea; be lost in his immensity; and you shall come forth as from a couch of rest, refreshed and invigorated. I know nothing which can so comfort the soul; so calm the swelling billows of sorrow and grief; so speak peace to the winds of trial, as a devout musing upon the subject of the Godhead. It is to that subject that I invite you this morning."

 

The Lord's Supper and Other Rituals of Hospitality

Us Baptists say we don't go in for ritual. A living faith doesn't need a script, a performance, a ritual. And as for liturgy, a whole service by the book, is too near to a scripting of the Spirit, that too is a no, no! Or so we like to think.

But I've had to listen to countless extempore prayers which lack the deep down freshness of words that are both original enough to fly below our complacency and familiar enough to pull our hearts back to the One who calls us here, and in whose name we eat this bread and drink this wine. And I know of no Baptist Church communion service where certain prescribed actions are not performed; reading of Scripture to ground the 'institution of the Lord's Supper; prayers of thanksgiving for bread and wine; the giving out of bread, now nearly always eaten as taken; the distribution of wine, in little glass, or worse, plastic glasses, as if it was a free sample at a local produce market. Singing a song or two, before or after. With minor variations that is the Baptist communion ritual.

I personally think ritual is important, and good Liturgy is one of the Church's ancient and modern treasures. The question is whether the ritual is more than mere ritual; the issue is how much emotional, intellectual, spiritual and personal investment is poured into the words, the actions and thoughts expressed in this regularly rehearsed and performed ritual. There's a place for beauty, symbol, gensture, colour, music and sound tuned to worship, words carefully crafted into devotion, so that what is done doesn't just happen - it is, and is intended to be, an event.

Frederick Buechner as so often, sees through the self-righteousness of those who are too spiritual for their own good, and shows up the ignorance and poverty of Christian imagination.

"A ritual is the perfromance of an intuition, the rehearsal of a dream, the playing of a game. A sacrament is the breaking through of the  sacred into the profance; a ritual is the ceremonial acting out of the profane in order to show forth its sacredness.

A sacrament is God offering his holiness to men and women; a ritual is a man or woman raising up the holiness of their humanity to God."

Ritual is essential in human life. Courtesy is dependent on ritual, the handshake, deference and good manners at the table, introducing a stranger by name and offering the names of others; hospitality is at its best as a ritual of welcome, a well practiced enactment of pleasure at the presence of an other. 

Rightly performed, and invested with emotional integrity, ritual provides important structures to our hopes, cares, fears and delights. So yes, when I come to worship I am looking for ritual, not mere ritual, but that rehearsal of important words, significant actions, shared symbols, and the regular recalling of the why and what of our faith. So even if it's diced bread and small plastic wine receptacles, the breaking and pouring, the sharing and drinking, the remembering together and speaking Gospel words together, these rituals of a Body enacting the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, are of great importance. Ritual only becomes empty ritual, not when it is empty, but when the hearts that perform it lack the passionate love and faithful obedience of to Jesus. Such passionate love and faithful obedience seeks to turn every ritual into worship, to convert every radical action into service, tries to ensure every imaginative thought is made captive to Christ, and asks God to transfigure every routine tedium into the silver and gold of a Kingdom in which faith, hope and love are the default settings of Christian existence.

The cake in the picture was part of our family ritual for Sheila's birthday - baked by Andrew (our son). It was consumed with well rehearsed alacrity, and I have to confess, without too much deferring to one another.

When the Aim is an Ethos and a Discipline: Further Thoughts on the Order of Baptist Ministry.

While at the Second Convocation of the Order of Baptist Ministry we spent some good time reflecting on the aim of the Order. I had come to the Convocation because the intimation and invitation seemed a good way of creating space to gather my thoughts and allow the sediment of a too full life to settle a little. Too much sediment and water becomes worryingly opaque.

What follows is a personal reflection shared with the others, and providing a basis for further reflection. During the discussion of the aim of the order the sediment settled enough for me to see that such an Order would provide and important alternative to other understandings of ministry prevalent within our own communities of faith. That is, the Order would  provide an alternative living out of Baptist Ministry that, with intentional seriousness of purpose, seeks to pay close attention to both words, Baptist and Ministry, thereby offering a framework of relationships which will enable, encourage and enhance ministry in a self-consciously Baptist way.

Not that Baptist is the only way, or even the best way. But if we take our identity under God seriously, then we are called to be Baptist in those essential convictions and practices which are inhabited, and lived out, in the gift and calling of our varied but shared ministries within Baptist communities.

This means that the Aim of the Order would be neither critical of other expressions of ministry, nor satisfied with our own ways of living out our vocations. Ministry is too rich, varied and expressive of the diversity of the Body of Christ to be captured or constrained by any particular model or embodiment. Baptist however is a term we consciously own, as the talent entrusted by the Lord to our particular communities of faith. While the name Baptist is rightly contested, and understood in Baptist communities in different ways, the Order seeks to give lived expression to the theology, practices and spirituality that are quarried from the rich seams of our own historic and theological peculiarities.

By being faithful to our own Baptist particularity we remain alert and obedient to God who called us to follow and serve Christ in ministry. We do this precisely by seeking to sustain authentic Baptist ministry as a gift to the whole Church of Christ. Calling is always a gift, and the Aim of the Order, it was felt, ought to articulate the specific peculiarity of what we believe is God’s gift to us. Therefore we commit ourselves to walk together under the rule of Christ, faithfully following after the Great Shepherd of the sheep, as Baptist Christians encouraging and accompanying each other in fulfilling the vision of service we believe is entrusted to us.

Nevertheless, and that word is a decisive caution and qualifier – nevertheless we recognise humbly and gratefully the richness and necessity of other forms of ministry, which have their own validity, and which are God’s varied gifts to the Church as the Body of Christ. As Baptist we gladly acknowledge our dependence on the insights and resources of the Church Catholic, and seek to sustain and enrich Baptist ministry by appropriating the gifts and spiritual resources of the wider ecumenical consensus of faith in the Triune God. The Order aims to explore and enrich Baptist pastoral spirituality by conscious indebtedness to the rich catholicity of Christian thought and experience: building upon disciplines of prayer in the Daily Office, developing and sustaining a pastoral disposition that is both attentive and contemplative, and pursuing in prayer and study, a humble receptiveness to the knowledge and wisdom of the Triune God.    

The Order aims to give faithful expression to a vision of Baptist ministry and therefore the aim could be stated:  To embody, encourage and enable ministry that is intentionally Baptist, vocationally pastoral, and spiritually faithful, under the rule of Christ.                       

Baptist Spirituality as Seeking the Mind of Christ

The last two days were spent at Gartmore House at the residential Council of the Baptist Union of Scotland. Two of the sunniest days of the year in one of the picture postcard locations of Scotland. To take two days out of a working week there need to be some compelling reasons for going to what is essentially a two day committee meeting. Or is it?

It was time well spent - which doesn't always have to mean there were tangible results, concrete achievements, far reaching strategic decisions. Though each of these were evident without being the main deal. Meeting with over 50 other Baptists for a series of long conversations, in a community that believes when we meet together in Jesus' name, the risen Lord is present and we are together trying to understand the mind of Christ, is some of what we mean when we use that most Baptist of phrases, communal discernment.

When we meet together with that intention fo helping each other discern, find words for, and jointly own, what we believe to be the mind of Christ we are doing several things at once.

We meet together under the Lordship of Christ,

His living Presence assumed because promised,

our thoughts and words open to the guiding wisdom,

the disruptive purposefulness,

and the generous giftedness of the Holy Spirit,

with Bibles open and our hearts focused

our wills quietened to obedience,

and our minds malleable and receptive,

listening to God expectantly, attentively and trustfully,

listening to each other humbly, carefully, openly and generously, 

listening to God through each other in shared conversation,

submissive to the witness of Scripture,

in the context of worship,

in a disposition  of prayer

in the shared love, life and faithfulness,

of the Triune God into whose life we are drawn,

by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,

through the love of God,

in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.

A communal Baptist spirituality 

embodies the crucial disctinctives of our tradition,

it's radical roots in a gathered community,

its Trinitarian foundation lived out

as we are called into relationship with the living risen Christ,

nourished and nurtured by the Holy Spirit,

seeking to bear witness to the creative, reconciling, renewing love of God,

in a world fractured, often self-destructive, and its own worst enemy,

and doing that by being a community of contradiction,

where forgiveness, love, welcome, peacemaking and hope

are the central values of the good news that,

God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself.

What happens at the Council is no more important than how it happened, and why,

and that it happened through such a dynamic and risky process.

But one with a profound theological rationale,

rooted in a faith tradition in which the gathered community

is believed to be a true church of Christ.

That means called to follow faithfully after him,

on a road that leads to the cross and beyond,

to life affirmed, recovered and gifted by the Resurrected Lord,

to be lived as love on fire energised by the Holy Spirit,

and therefore our lives of discipleship continuously transformed

by the renewing of our minds

that we might present our bodies as a living sacrifice,

holy and acceptable to God,

which is our spiritual worship. 

 ...........................

That is as near to a Baptist spirituality as I can come. I offer it as the primary reason for taking two days to seek together the mind of Christ as we seek to serve God in the power of the Holy Spirit. And if taken seriously, it justifies far more time given to such prayerful conversation and communal discernment.

Anyway, as a young friend sometimes says after defending her corner against all grown ups who think they know better, 'That's what I think' :)

Who we once was and who we now wish to be!

Just spent a weekend at a church helping celebrate their anniversary. A Church Anniversary is a bit like a birthday but without the presents. Years ago it was a big deal, and the biggest social event in the Church Calendar. Now the date survives in some church programmes but it isn't the major occasion it used to be.

I suppose one of the more useful functions of an anniversary is gratitude for what has been. That has to be combined though with a willingness to ask about the future. And these two questions, who we have been, and who we are now called to be, lie at the heart of our identity, both as local church, and as denominational expression of our own distinctives.

Nothing of this is peculiar to Baptists. Every denomination is now in that place that can be called liminal. And in a culture fast dissolving and reforming into ever more complex and unpredictable expressions of community and conviction, and evolving increasingly diverse moral codes and social mores, the church is in danger of being what it has always feared being, and at times succeeded in being - an anachronsm desperately seeking relevance to give content to its being and reason for being.

I enjoyed my time with the friends who shared the weekend. Many spoke of being helped and provoked to think in new ways. But I am left with the feeling, not just arising from this weekend experience but from many encounters with churches seeking to find a good way ahead, that who we have been and who we would now feel called to be, are going to be very different pictures. Going to think more about this  - but not expecting it will make gently encouraging devotional reading!!

"The cross unmasks the world..." Not mission but witness?

The answer to Tony's question is that the book available for $38 in the States is Resurrection and Discipleship, the earlier and larger book by Lorenzen. It's also the one from which Graeme quotes.

The one shown on the right is the book I quoted from (Stuart's copy which I'm still clutching) which expands on the earlier sections on Discipleship and Justice. And it is indeed expensive wherever it's for sale - the $21.95 one on Amazon is from a US seller who doesn't so international shipping.

 

"The cross unmasks the world as the "world" - bereft of love and therefore of God, driven by selfishness, self-interest and violence. Where the "world" remained true to itself by fording Jesus to the cross, God remained true to God's self. God, being love, identified with the victim, took the crucified one onto God's own being, and thereby created new life out of death. The violence of the world was transfigured into a new ontology; the ontology of justice. That means that at the center of life, in the foundation of being, there is not nothing, but God; there is not violence but nonviolence; there is not war but peace; there is not hatred but love." (page 79-80)

Now I have issues with the term "missional". Far too agenda driven, dominating, smacking of ideological imperialism and conquest or control seeking. For Christians the preferred and New testament term is "witness". And that last sentence about what is at the center of life is as comprehensive, challenging and attractive as any statement of the church's call to witness as I know. And if nonviolence, peace and love were further up the agendas of Baptist communities we might be able to stop agonising about models and methods of mission and start affirming the models and methods of the God revealed in Christ - peace-making, reconciliation, love, the grace of generosity and the generosity of grace. Or so it seems to this baptist with a small b, or to this small baptist :)

Resurrection and Discipleship - the Theology of Thorwald Lorenzen

 
Stuart has just bought a book. Another book. I'm guilty of envy. I've borrowed it clutchingly. Stuart burst or robbed a bank to buy it - as you have to if a book is both brilliant and scarce. Why hasn't Smyth and Helwys republished this slim masterpiece of applied theology and saved the rest of us from enying the possessions of someone else who hands over their wodge of cash smilingly and think the deal is still a bargain? I've been allowed to borrow it on the secure assumption that my envy will remain a sin of disposition and won't graduate to the sin of misappropriation.

Resurrection, Discipleship Justice. Affirming the Resurrection of Jesus Today, by the Baptist theologian Thorwald Lorenzen, argues that the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus are relational events aimed at the establishing of justice. So resurrection is relational; but (my phrase, not Lorenzen's), Christian relationship is also resurrectional. In other words the resurrection defines discipleship and community. To be a new creation in Christ is to be radically resurrected so that as the blurb says, "resurrection faith has to be understood in terms of intentional and serious Christian discipleship."

Here are two brief quotations taken at random cos I haven't read the book - yet. I am about to hand over a wodge of cash smilingly when I click the add to your basket button. When it comes it will feature here for a week - at least. And maybe Stuart will guest post as well....please?

"The Holy Spirit is relationship par excellence. The Holy Spirit brings together what belongs together. The Holy Spirit makes what happens between people interesting."

"The Kingdom of God is celebrated when love becomes an event."

Pages 54 and 74 

 

Baptist identity - is it what we take ownership of, or what we give ourselves to?

The past couple of days I have been with the Baptist Union Council sharing in a residential conference, and trying to practice what we say we believe about a Baptist way of being the church. Communal discernment is all very fine in theory, can be strongly defended biblically, can be shown to be good practice in a community impatient with hierarchy but staying this side of anarchy. But it's hard. And what makes it hard is the ingrained bias of our default habits of thought.

For example, Scottish Baptists are just not comfortable with silence, as if it suggests no one has anything worthwhile to say. Well, actually that might indeed be what it suggests, and in that case silence is the more creative option. Then there's the question of agendas, time constraint and the safety felt in a followed programme, so that departing from what was planned seems radical and risky- what might be radical and risky is to abandon any programme that imposes control, and trust the Holy Spirit to push, persuade, pull and prepare us to see what at present we can't see, to hear what we are too busy to listen to, to think what we previously thought unthinkable, to feel more deeply than we have for years, to reach out to each other in the fellowship of the One who washes feet, breaks bread, shares wine, and walks beside us on the way.

 My own contribution, for what it is worth, and it is worth something I think, was to ask that we choose our vocabulary more carefully. No one was swearing! But some words we use seem to suggest mechanism rather than organism. For example to say we should have a sense of ownership, requires of us a more self-centred and self conscious taking to ourselves of something, denomination, church whatever. I prefer the word belonging, in which the driver is not what I own, but what I give myself to. And indeed the most important form of ownership of Baptist identity isn't to own the principles and practices, but to give ourselves to them. To present our bodies as living sacrifices to Christ, living out his teaching, expressing his risen life within and amongst us, embodying his presence in a world hungry for bread, desolate of light, and where for all our claims to grown up cultural maturity, the church encounters a world frightened of its own shadow side.

I'm not sure where Scottish Baptists will be in a decade. But wherever it is, I would want us to be Christian in our vocabulary. So, why is it we have bought into the word "risk", as if risk was good for its own sake. My own understanding of Christian discipleship is that to follow Jesus is a decision high in risk, offset by trust. Do I trust this One who says, Come and follow me, take up your cross and come.... Radical is a word so overused now it refers mainly to things that might be thought or done slightly differently. I see it as a disruptive word, referring to definite discontinuity with status quo, a word itself redolent with risk, inviting to ways that are different, daring a new way of thinking that is only ever confirmed when practised.

If baptists are radical believers, and if we are people who give ourselves to what we believe, then maybe we need to find radical, risky, costly, personally disruptive ways of being together, thinking and praying together, walking with Jesus together. 

The statue is the magnificent Thorvaldsen's "Christus", in Copenhagen. The artist's intention was that " you only see his face when you kneel at his feet". Maybe that is where communal discernment begins.....

Baptists, religious freedom, and catholicity of spirit

After our emergence in the 17th Century, Baptist communities in the British Isles existed in peace only after religious toleration became an accepted cultural attitude with legal and religious validity. For that reason liberty of conscience in matters relating to God has remained a core Baptist principle. Baptists were born in an age of zealous persecution, and like other dissenters suffered from religious intolerance. The Baptist conscience is therefore genetically predisposed to resist religious oppression, to refrain from judging the faith of others in ways that are obstructive or repressive.

(The first Baptist meeting house at Goodshaw was started in 1685, probably at the house of Henry Butterworth or in his blacksmith shop.)

More positively, Baptists who affirm liberty of conscience before God, gladly recognise and respect the work of God in the lives of others, even when their experience is different. "Baptist Catholicity" is a phrase being used increasingly to describe that way of being Baptist that traces our rootedness back into our own tradition, but then back further into the deeper loam of the Christian tradition in its rich diversity. A dissenting ecclesiology need not mean sectarian isolation, and a Baptist commitment to Christ-centred discipleship gives no mandate to disenfranchise other Christian traditions.

I was nudged, if not shoved, to think about all this late last night when I was reading Evelyn Underhill's book on worship. Written in 1936, against the darkening skies over Europe, by a middle-aged, middle class, genteel Anglican steeped in mystical theology, and conductor of refined devotional retreats in rural Pleshey, the book is one of the few credible attempts to describe what worship is from the perspective of one who understands transcendence, adoration, and the response of human finitude to the Eternal.

I don't know how many readers of this blog have ever read Evelyn Underhill. Not everyone is patient now with a style that can seem rarefied and lacking practical usefulness. What I like about her is that much of her writing does indeed lack practical usefulness! Instead she explores why the human heart must worship, and finds the answer in the nature of God, the attraction of Love Eternal, the innate response of human longing to the Word Incarnate.

So when I read Underhill's paragraph (cited below), I thought of why I am a Baptist, and why as a Baptist I am passionately outspoken about our traditional commitment to religious tolerance. And why in faithfulness to Christ and to the Church which is the Body of Christ, I am respectful and receptive to the truth of Christ as we encounter Him in the experience and faith of other Christians. Such Christ-centred openness to other Christians requires theological humility, a sense of our own need of the other, and a spiritual obedience to the apostolic logic of welcoming one another as God in Christ has welcomed us.

"Some of the friends and fellow students who have read these chapters have been inclined to blame me for giving too sympathetic and uncritical an account of types of worship which are not their own. It has been pointed out to me that I have failed to denounce the shortcomings of Judaism with Christian thoroughness, that I have almost unnoticed primitive and superstitious elements which survive in Catholic and Orthodox worship, that I have not emphasized as I should the liturgic and sacramental shortcomings of the Protestant sects.

But my wish has been to show all these chapels of various types in the one Cathedral of the Spirit; and dwell on the particular structure of each, the love which has gone  to their adornment, the shelter they can offer to many different kinds of adoring souls, not on the shabby hassocks, the crude pictures, or the paper flowers.

Each great form of Christian cultus is here regarded...as a "contemplation to procure the love of God"; for its object is to lead human souls, by different ways, to that act of pure adoration which is the consummation of worship".

Evelyn Underhill, Worship (London:Nisbet, 1936), pages xi-xii.

Denominational amnesia and loss of convictional integrity

Now I don't want to trivialise  denominationalist, post denominationalist arguments. But I can't make up my mind whether this cartoon is saying something funny in a serious way, or saying something serious in a funny way.

But for myself, I remain passionately committed to the diversity of the Body of Christ, and a yearner for its unity to be expressed in the co-ordination and harmonic actions that embody the presence of the risen Christ in the power of the Spirit to the glory of the Father. The reasons why a denomination was first formed can of course lose their validity and convictional hold for later generations - but not necessarily so. And not if those reasons continue to express distinctives made authentic in convictional practices that are to the enrichment of the whole body. Something about if the whole body were an ear where would be the sense of smell.....

The cartoon is on page 62 of the Brazos Introduction to Christian Spirituality, Evan B Howard, (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2008). Don't be fooled by the title - this "Introduction" is 500 pages of double column large format hardback. It's a superb resource and very, very good value - The Book Depository has it for around £13 including postage.