SUBVERSIVE SPIRITUALITY

I know some of you will find this hard to believe but I once had an interview to become an officer in the Intelligence Corps. Part of the interview process was having a lecture on “subversives,” groups who were trying to undermine the values of the United Kingdom. Some thirty years later I am now wondering if one my ambitions should be to get Mosaic Edinburgh, our fledgling missional community, on that list? Now before anyone contacts MI5 about me and I end up in Belmarsh Prison with Abu Hamza here is what I mean.

Christendom dominated European society from around the eleventh century until the end of the twentieth and now in the UK it’s in its death throes. In Christendom the Church had a privileged position in society and provided the basic beliefs and values of the culture. In Christendom to be a good a “citizen” was seen as virtually synonymous with being a good “Christian.” There was really no dispute about the validity of Christian morality, it was just universally assumed, though not practiced, that the best context for sex was a committed heterosexual marriage. How things have changed! On a whole range of issues in political correct Britain today Christianity is on a collusion course with the values and attitudes of the culture that surrounds it. Christian unions have been thrown of campuses for refusing to allow practicing homosexuals to be part of their leadership group.  Christian staff working along side turban headed Sikhs and Hijab wearing Muslims have been disciplined for wearing a small cross.  The laws that enshrined Christian values are continually being rolled back, just this week we have watched as the final legal barriers to euthanasia in our country have been dismantled. The response to this undermining of Christian values by some Christians and churches has been to protest and fight any changes in the law. While I understand why they are doing it, I think these Christ followers are misguided and maybe even being counter productive to the Kingdom of God. Christendom is gone.  Christianity is not longer uniformaly accepted by the majority of our population, we are not central in British culture we are marginal.

This isn’t all bad news; in fact as I am decidedly agnostic at best about Christendom, I think it may be the best thing that has happened to the church since Constantine embraced Christianity for political expediency. Now that the Church no longer wields power and control in our society maybe there is an opportunity for us to rediscover a more authentic form of Christianity. Stuart Murray in The Church After Christendom says, “Becoming again a marginal mission movement involves rejecting many of the attitudes and assumptions inherited from Christendom. The invitation is to return to our roots and recapture the subversive pre-Christendom dynamism that turned the world upside down from the margins” p155 The passing of Christendom gives us the opportunity to rediscover what it means to be the kind of subversive, counter culture, community the early church was. The early church couldn’t impose its values on others all it could do was live those values in front of others. The early church didn’t seek to legislate the Kingdom of God but to embody it as a community. This is what turned the ancient world upside down, they saw and felt the tangible Kingdom of God in the lives and community of believers. In a culture in which life was cheap, the early Christians looked after abandoned babies and the terminally ill. In a culture divided by class and status, slaves and free, high class and low class, men and women mixed freely. In a culture of violence they turned the other cheek. In a culture that treated woman as property and the means of male sexual gratification Christians offered dignity and love. This is the basic thesis of Rodney Starks great book, The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal, Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Roman Empire. These early Christianity communities didn’t impact their culture by laws but by being salt and light, bringing transformation from the inside out. The quality of their lives exerted a magnetic affect on the surrounding culture.

As I dream about the future for our, at present little, group of Christ followers in Edinburgh that’s my dream and prayer. I long for us to become a dangerous subversive community. A community which is utterly committed to the task of undermining the greed and shallow hedonism of Western culture by living out the values of the Kingdom of God. A community where that Kingdom becomes tangible to those we encounter. A community where, just as in the earliest days of the church, the least, the lonely and left out of today’s society find community, love, hope, dignity and humanity. I want to be part of a dangerous community, which is committed to changing my culture not through random acts of extreme violence but through planned acts of extreme compassion. Funny the things you dream of on a Monday morning.

THE WRONG MESSAGE OF THE MINSTER

We have just been on holiday on Yorkshire and before going I had it in my mind that one  of the highlights would be taking the family to York Minister. I thought it would be a great chance to see the biggest Gothic cathedral north of the Alps but more importantly talk about some of the Celtic missionaries who had helped found it. Personally I was looking forward to maybe finding out a bit more about the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, who has always really impressed me. I was also keen to find out more about the VISIONS fresh expressions alternative worship service that the Minister has in its crypt.

 Well the visit to the Minister left me with a bad taste in my mouth. That’s because they wanted to over £7 to see round it! As we were on a tight budget that priced us out. They did allow you to go into the services free but that didn’t fit for us, Anglican evensong is not really appreciated by two teenagers and I didn't think as a matter of integrity I could then look round the place. There were however thousands of tourists who were paying many of the Asian but I did notice many who looked at the price and left. I had a look in the bookshop and had a sinking feeling there. It was filled with what I can only describe as middle class tat, scented candle, t-towels, models of the cathedral, little gargoyles and some icons. Among the books there were kids bible story books but I couldn’t find any books that someone who was interested in finding out more about Christianity would have found helpful in English never mind in any other language.

The second thing that got to me was the only statue in the Cathedral precinct. It was of the Emperor Constantine, who was proclaimed emperor in York. A sign behind the statue explained Constantine had been the founder of western Christendom. On the front of the statue of Constantine, who was seated with his sword drawn, were the words, “By this sign conquer” There was no explanation about the cross being the sign, just a man with a sword and the explanation behind that he had been the founder of Christendom. I watched an Asian couple read the inscriptions and then look at the statue and have their photographs taken in front of it. I thought about the fact that they had probably read that this was the second most important Christian site in England, a place of Christian worship and pilgrimage for over a thousand year. That it was seat of the Archbishop of York, the second most senior Church of England bishop. They must have concluded that if anything would express the essence of what Christianity is all about it would be York Minister.

The more I think about it the more deeply troubled I am about the message that the Minister gave these tourists abut Christianity. Personally the plainest message I could see that the Minister proclaims to visitors is, Christianity is about Power and Money. Oh I am sure it would be different message if people went to a service, but most tourist don’t. The medium is the message and to me the message of York Minister as a building and institution is Christianity is about power and money. There is only one statue around the Minister and its not of someone who embodied Christian values and advanced the Kingdom of God like William Wilberforce or St Cuthbert but a military man with a drawn sword, I doubt it many people notice the point was broken. Anyone from former colonies of Britain must have been reinforced in their perception that Christianity is essentially aggressive and imperialistic by the words “by this sign conquer” .

 I realise it must cost an enormous amount of money to maintain the Minister but there must be a better way of doing it than charging the way they do. I think it destroys any sense of pilgrimage the place has. The admission price reduces it to another tourist attraction among many of others, just another historic building. I may being unfair but I think there is a deeper issue. My understanding of Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple wasn’t that his motivation was the vast profits that the Temple authorities were making. It was the fact that all of this was taking place in the court of the Gentiles, the only place were seekers of the true God outside God’s people could come to get a sense of what He was all about. Jesus anger was that those seeking to find out more about His Father were being prevented from doing so. As I watched many young Asians turn away from the admission area having seen the price I wonder what Jesus would have thought about what was happening.

 I am sorry if I have been unfair to York Minister but I really do feel it gives the totally wrong message to hundreds of thousands of tourists about the essence of Christianity.

CONFESSION: I PROCLAIM A DIFFERENT JESUS!

There has been a lot of talking about missional church folk presenting a different Jesus. Well I want to make a confession, as someone deeply committed to the missional church movement I do indeed present a different Jesus and will continue to do so. I present and try and follow a different Jesus from the one that the evangelical church in Christendom Europe (and I suspect America) shaped by modernism proclaimed. That Jesus was a Saviour but in practice little else. I affirm wholly and completely that Jesus is the Saviour of the world and outside Him there is no salvation. The problem is that the Christendom church presented Jesus as a Saviour but in practice ignored Him as an example and as a teacher. They wanted to be saved by Jesus but not shaped by Him. He was a Jesus who offered a heavenly reward devoid of real earthly change or challenge.

One of the things that attracted me to the missional movement was its emphasis on Jesus. There was an emphasis on Jesus as Saviour but also as teacher and example, in other words a commitment to being saved AND shaped by Christ. Stuart Murray in a book called POST-CHRISTENDOM puts the issue like this:

“Our greatest resource in post-Christendom is Jesus. … Our priority must be to rediscover how to tell the story of Jesus and present His life, teaching, death and resurrection – recognising past attempts have seriously missed the mark. We cannot continue to present Jesus only as the Saviour from guilt few feel in post-Christendom. Nor can we invite people to follow a Jesus who merely guarantees life after death to those who are otherwise comfortable or a Jesus whose Lordship affects only a limited range of personal moral decisions. We can no longer present a safe establishment Jesus who represents order and stability rather than justice, who appeals to the powerful and privileged for all the wrong reasons. Nor can we reduce Jesus to dogmatic statements in simplistic evangelistic courses or perpetuate the overemphasis on his divinity at the expense of his humanity that Christendom required.

Instead, we must present Jesus as (amongst much else) friend of sinners, good news for the poor, defender of the powerless, reconciler of communities, pioneer of a new age, freedom fighter, breaker of chains, liberator and peacemaker, the one who unmasks systems of oppression, identifies with the vulnerable and brings hope.

But if we would present Jesus in such ways to others we must encounter Jesus afresh ourselves” p316

 For years I wondered how “evangelical” Christians could be involved in the Klan in the States, protestant para-militaries in Ulster and in the security forces of apartheid South Africa. I wondered how saved people’s underlying values reflected Western consumer culture so clearly. Then it struck me they had been present by Jesus whom they had been told had to save them but they had never heard about a Jesus whose shaping was equally necessary. This idea that we can be saved and remain unchanged should get an allergic reaction from those of us who are part of the Wesleyan Holiness movement who have always believed that salvation necessitated real progress in sanctification. The problem was that we defined holiness in legalistic terms, in terms of what we didn’t do instead of positively in terms of listening to and follow Jesus.

Surely the God given definition and demonstration of Holiness is Jesus? In Jesus teaching on the Sermon on the Mount we hear holiness defined and in His actions in the Gospels, embracing the least, the lonely and left out we see holiness demonstrated. This Jesus establishes the Kingdom of God by his passion and resurrection but calls on us to serve it in the here and now as well as wait for its consummation. His teaching and his actions show us what it means to live and serve that Kingdom. Yet all too often we have been content to be saved by Jesus but have resisted being shaped by Him. I call a that a different Jesus, a Jesus different from the one who I encounter in the Gospel who embraces his cross to save me but calls on me to embrace the cross to serve Him.

So I am committed to another Jesus, the Jesus who saves me but also has the right to shape me. This is the Jesus I want to proclaim and follow in word and deed. This is the Jesus I want to unleash in my life, in my church and in this world. This is the Jesus that the missional church movement has helped me rediscover if someone considers that heretical I wonder what Jesus they follow? (I would highly recommend Alan Hirsch’s RE-Jesus: A Wild Messiah for a Missional Church, on this subject)

RENEWAL MOVEMENTS AND REACTIONARY MOVEMENTS

I am working my way through a well written and thought provoking book at the moment called MISSION SHAPED QUESTIONS edited by Steven Croft. It’s a collection of essays which are looking at critical questions surrounding mission in post-modern and post-Christendom Britain.

The essay which is particularly exercising my grey matter this morning is one by renowned New Testament scholar James Dunn. In his essay “Is there evidence of fresh expressions of Church in the New Testament” he looks at the character of NT Christianity and how it freshly expressed the faith of Israel. Of course this area of Christian and Jewish divergence is Dunn’s particular area of interest and expertise so what he says comes with real understanding and authority.

He sees the New Testament Christianity as having five characteristics and goes on to draw out these implications based on those characteristics:

• A Christianity that has lost all sense of newness, of what had only been hoped for being now realized, is no longer Christianity as defined by the NT.

• A Christianity that cherishes no sense of intimate relation with God through Christ, that regards the Spirit as effectively shut up in the bible or confined to the church, and that treats experience of the Spirit as essentially threatening, is no longer Christianity as defined by the NT.

• A Christianity that regards the maintenance of and faithfulness to tradition as its highest responsibility is no longer Christianity as defined by the NT.

• A Christianity that can think of Church only as building and not as people and that is not seeking new ways to be the people of God, to be church, is no longer Christianity as defined by the New Testament.

• A Christianity that defines itself less in terms of Christ and more in terms of ecclesiastical hierarchy and liturgically correct forms is no longer Christianity as defined by the NT.

Dunn goes to described early Methodism as a renewal movement within Anglicanism seeking to restore these characteristics to the church, to express them freshly, to be a fresh expression of church to use the current British term. He goes on to say “Methodism reminds us that fresh expressions are not the only way in which Christianity began but also the way in which Christianity will be revived.”

 As part of my doctoral course we did a huge survey of church history and what struck me was the regularity with which revival/reforming movements emerged in the church to “freshly express” these characteristics Dunn is talking about. There were the Montantists and Dontatists in the Early Church. In the Catholic Church the Franciscans and the Brethren of the Common Life. Then of course the Reformers themselves and the Annabaptists. When the reformed tradition was established along came Pietists and Moravians. Of course we have mentioned the Methodists but when Methodism became institutional the Free Methodists, Wesleyans, Nazarenes and Salvation Army emerged as “fresh expressions.”

But sadly that is only half the story because in each of those cases the renewal movements were met by reactionary movements within the church that tried to defend the ecclesiastical “status quo” as they understood. Wesley clung onto the Church of England but most Anglicans wrote him off as an “enthusiast” of the worst kind. William Booth was forced out of the Methodist Reform Church and Phinees Bresee was forced out of the United Methodist Church. Renewal movements inevitably are met by reactionary movements in the Church. I think in general these people’s hearts are in the right place, to start with, but they end up defending the status quo which they fail to realise was once a fresh expression of the church opposed by a previous reactionary movement.

I think this gives me some perspective of the current controversy between those of us who want a fresh missional incarnational expression of NT and Wesleyan Christian within the Church of the Nazarene for our 21^st culture and the so called “concerned Nazarenes” who claim that such a movement is seeking to destroy the church just as those who forced the early Nazarenes out of the Methodist Church claimed. Its only to be expected. As I currently work part time for an Episcopal Diocese in Scotland I am encouraged by the determination of the Anglican Church in the UK to encourage and enable fresh expressions of church, protect them from reactionaries and keep them within the Anglican communion. My prayer is that my own church would exhbit the same nurturing and protective attitude to those of  uswho want to freshly express our faith and heritage incarnationally in our communities.

MISSIONAL: What’s in a Word?

Ann and I laughed a bit when we lived in the States at words which it seemed to us our American friends had made up, like “Winningest.” Now one of these recently created American words is making waves in the church in general and in my own denomination in particular and its no laughing matter. That word is “MISSIONAL.”

I do worry that the word Missional is being devalued into a sales a gimmick by the Christian publishing industry, every second book I see coming out at the moment seems to have it in its title. There is a whiff of bandwagon around the word with some organisations simply changing “evangelistic” for “missional” in their literature without fully understanding the nuanced differences.  All the publicity surrounding “Missional” has brought the heresy hunters out of the cyber wood work. Numerous “discernment” ministry web sites are claiming that “Missional” is the key word for new agey, emergent Christians whom the Holy Spirit has revealed to them are actually pagans trying to help the Devil take over the Church. One of these groups in my own denomination, the Church of the Nazarene, says on its website that “Missional is a term of the Emerging Church, not of Biblical Christian churches.”  Right now at our 4 year Nazarene international get together in the States this self styled “Concerned Nazarene” group (I am certainly concerned they are Nazarenes) are handing out thousands of DVDs to delegates which claim among other things that anyone using the term “missional” or is open to any teaching they say is characteristic of the “Emerging Church” is heretical and is trying to lead the denomination into an apostate future. The inference is that such people, and I would include myself in their number, should be shown the proverbial denominational door.

Normally I would ignore these people but I now feel I can’t and must be clear about where I stand on the issue. The “Concerned Nazarenes” are a strange group led by someone who proudly announces he was a former drummer in several rock bands (????) I am not quite sure what he thinks this information does for him.  In fact this guy is relatively new to the Nazarene Church and I actually think he has fundamentally misunderstood our church. Our Church stands in the Wesleyan tradition and many of the issues he seems to have to me at least stem from our Wesleyan theology rather than the “emerging church” theology. His agenda seems to be to call us back to some American Baptist reformed fundamentalist past we never had! What worries is that some of these DVD’s might make their way back to the UK and take some people in with their talk about defending biblical Christianity.

That’s why I want to make clear why I am passionately committed not to the word MISSIONAL in itself but to the understanding of Christianity and the Church that it expresses. As my denomination has MISSIONAL as one of its core values I also want to take a stand against these people who are trying to suggest that it somehow endangers the church. In my view it is those of who passionately committed to the Church of the Nazarene being a Missional Church who are being true to our church’s values, heritage and theology. I take great comfort from the fact that despite the theological opinion of a former rock drummer most of our theologians take the same position.

So where did this word “Missional” come from?  Well I would argue for reasons that should be come clear that the concept has always existed but it was first used in an American book called “Missional Church” published in 1998. This book reflecting on mission in America drew on the work of UK missionary leader Lesslie Newbiggin and other mission thinkers and theologians in the 20^th century who had been rediscovering the importance and relevance of the doctrine of the Trinity for amongst other things, mission.

 Theologically speaking the concept of “missio” (ltn for sent) or mission was used first to describe the eternal sending which went on within our Trinitarian God, before it was used to describe the sending of the Church or missionaries. Within the Trinity the Father, Son and Holy Spirit have eternally been reaching out and giving themselves to one another in love. The important point to grasp from this is that mission is rooted in the very nature of God, mission then overflows into the world. Anglican theologian Michael Moynagh expresses it like this, “God engaged in a missionary act when he created the universe. Creation was the outward movement of God. It was an overflowing of the Trinity’s life as something new was brought into existence. God continues in mission as he sustains the universe, a flow of non-stop love towards creation. God also engages in mission by redeeming the world. This redemption is made possible through the death and resurrection of Christ. It continues through Christ, in the Spirit. God’s purpose is to restore and perfect the whole of creation. Mission, therefore, is no add on for the church. The Church becomes like God when it engages in mission. It falls away from God when it neglects mission.”

The all important implication of this reflection of God’s missionary nature is that the essence of the Church is “missional” that is that the church exists for mission. As the Father, sent the Son and the Father and Son sent the Spirit on mission, our Trinitarian God now sends the Church to join Him in his mission, the continuing Missio Dei, the Mission of God. When we use the word Missional we are trying to capture this concept that mission is not just an activity of the church it is the very nature of the church. Or put another way, its not that the Church of God has a mission but that the Mission of God has a church.

Speaking personally for me to be “Missional”  is to understand and live in the light of the fact that as a member of God’s people, individually and collectively, we exist to join God in his transforming mission to our world. This is explosive when it comes to our understanding of what Church is and what it means to be the Church. I grew up in the church and I grew up with the understanding church was a place where things happened. Going to church meant going to a worship service in a building. Moreover in general what happened during that service was designed to suit those who were already members. The word Missional has now inspired a paradigm shift in how I understand what it means to be the people of God. I now understand the church and my life as being Missional. Therefore Church doesn’t exist for my benefit and I don’t exist for my own selfish fulfillment. In famous words of Archbishop Temple, “The Church is the only society on earth that exists for the benefit of non-members.”   Church isn’t there to make me happy. Church exists for mission, it exists for God and those he is reaching out to in love. For me Church isn’t an institution I belong to but a revolution I am giving my life to. Reggie McNeal puts it like this “Our job is not to do “church” well but to be the people of God in an unmistakable way in the world. We are to be the aroma of Jesus in the cemetery of decaying flesh. We are to be different in the hope we offer, in the grace we exhibit, and in the obvious sacrifice of love we display in dealing with others.”  

To be missional then is to root our understanding of, and living as, God’s people in the very nature of God Himself. It’s about creating a community of that embodies serves and extends the Kingdom of God in this world as Jesus did. That’s why I am passionate about the word Missional because I believe in what that word summaries; I aspire and am committed to giving my life to it. That’s why I won’t be told by the “concerned Nazarenes” I am New Age Emergent Church heretic seeking to lead my church into apostasy. As far as I can see “missional” sums up the Apostolic understanding of the Church, it describes Wesley’s practice of Church and Bresee’s reason for founding the Church of the Nazarene. Above all Missional for me means being obedient to Jesus’ words, “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you." ^{John 20:21} in the committed company of other Christ followers. Those who advocate the Church of Nazarene being a “missional church” are not leading the church away from God but seeking to reconnect the Church to the God who is and has ever been, missional.