1. Fresh Expressions, the Cross and the Kingdom
One of the sharpest criticisms of the new look in mission represented by fresh expressions – that new look with which, I stress at the outset, I am in entire sympathy – is that it accepts without challenge a private and apolitical perspective that simply colludes with the general culture of consumer choice and the search for what makes me feel better rather than what is true. It is really a two-pronged challenge: on the one hand, where is the cross, the emptying and reshaping of the self by radical grace? On the other, where is the Kingdom, the hope for a transformed society and world, not just an improved network of religiosity? In these pages, I want to attempt a response – not a case-by-case justification of all that goes on under the FX banner, but a reflection on how the practice of FX can and must do justice to these questions and how it can help the historic mainstream of the Church recognize its problems more clearly and courageously as well.
Let me begin with one or two observations on the New Testament Church. It’s clear that the ‘assembly’ that constitutes itself around the Risen Jesus when the good news is proclaimed is distinguished not only by what it ‘confesses’, what it states as true and authoritative, but by the character of its relations – ‘life in the Spirit’, marked by mutual patience, generosity and interdependence (e.g. Gal. 5.22 ff.). But because life in the Spirit is simply life in Christ – since the characteristic prayer of the person living in the Spirit is the ‘Abba, Father’ of Jesus in his agony in Gethsemane (Rom. 8.15, Gal. 4.6) – it is clear at once that the patience, generosity and mutuality of the Spirit-filled community rests on a continuing erosion of what have become our instinctive habits of reacting to others (what Paul calls ‘the flesh’). The character of Christian relations takes for granted both a gift and a discipline: the gift of being caught up into the life of Jesus as he advances towards cross and glory, and the discipline of scrutinizing yourself for the marks of surviving selfishness.
This immediately poses a challenge to any and every Christian community. Have we succeeded in creating a Christian group in which each individual member is living by some degree of mutual patience and generosity and yet which as a whole gives off an air of exclusion and self-absorption? We do not take up Christ’s cross just for the sake of living more fruitfully with our believing neighbours, simply because Christ’s cross is something that he takes up for the sake of the entire world. So individual humility and corporate arrogance or self-satisfaction is not a defensible mixture for a biblical Church. If my membership of the Christian community is not just about what makes me as an individual feel better, the Christian community itself cannot be aimed only at a collective ‘feeling better’.
This is where fresh expressions of Church life have both huge positive potential and huge capacity for misunderstanding. The positive potential is in the fact that fresh expressions begin from a creative dissatisfaction with aspects of inherited patterns of Church life, sensing that they may have become self-serving, to the extent that they will reinforce what their members already think and feel. The new mission agenda seeks to take seriously the strangeness of the world at large. It accepts that in order to speak the Word of God effectively in an unfamiliar context, you will have to let the Word of God itself become ‘strange’ to you and discover it all over again in someone else’s language and culture. It is therefore well-placed to resist the idea that the Church as a community can be content with a sort of internal equilibrium or harmony while doing nothing to carry the cross collectively, to empty itself sacrificially for the sake of the world that has not yet properly heard the good news.
On the other hand, the risk of misunderstanding comes from the possible alliance between a fresh expressions agenda and a sort of religious consumerism. ‘Inherited’ Church does not satisfy an individual’s aspirations for fulfilment, so something new has to be tried. There can be a deeply unhelpful collusion between a generally individualistic culture and a Church that is losing confidence in its own distinctive calling or gift, leading to a desperate scramble to find ‘acceptable’ words or behaviours that will respond to a market demand. In other words, it is not only within the traditional forms of Church life that people can be trapped in a comfort zone, imagining that this is ‘spiritual’ existence.
So critics of the FX approach have a point when they observe the risk of eroding the element of sacrifice, of going beyond what ‘feels’ satisfying or fulfilling by paying the wrong kind of attention to the needs of a secular public. At worst, this ends up in the reduction of worship to entertainment, doctrine to comforting uplift and witness to marketing. And this spells the end of any real link with what the Church of the New Testament claims to be – which is the sacramental foreshadowing of humanity restored to the mutuality of love and service for which God intends it, life in the Spirit.
Life in the Spirit is not a ‘spiritual life’ in which certain specific spiritual needs are catered for, but life in the communion and solidarity that is the maximal expression of the image of God. God is revealed as Father, Son and Spirit, a life of irreducible difference and unqualified interdependence. For created persons, the calling is to let ourselves be drawn more and more deeply into dependence on God as Source and Father by deepening our relation with the incarnate Son, Jesus, a relation that is made effective by the sharing of Jesus’ Spirit. In that renewed communion in and within the Trinity, our individuality is radically transformed so that we are made able to live in reciprocal love and gift. The Church exists to manifest the new humanity, the restored image. Once we forget this, we slip into just that fragmented picture of human existence that the gospel promises to deliver us from, with ‘religion’ or ‘spirituality’ as an activity among others that relates to an interest or need among others. The point is memorably expressed by the great Anglican poet and novelist Charles Williams when, writing about the Kingdom of God as it appears in the gospels, he says that it is ‘not a state of being without which one can get along very well. To lose it is to lose everything else’ (p. 63).
So the challenge for any church community, ‘inherited’ or experimental, is going to be the same: how do we inhabit and understand its life so that we keep before us the call to show a comprehensive newness of human possibility? There are not going to be any crystal-clear methods to avoid error here, but I want to suggest three questions about church life that need careful attention as at least a basis for honest and faithful discipleship.
- How does the community enable its members to grow in prayer so as to enter more fully into the central mystery of Christ’s relationship with his Father? Teaching about prayer cannot just stop with exhortations to be confident about asking God for things. That in itself is, of course, perfectly biblical in one way, but it can – as in the more toe-curling varieties of prosperity gospel culture – become just another way of consumerizing faith. Nor can it stop with encouraging emotional intensity in devotion. There has to be some real help in stilling and opening the mind and heart to receive not just a set of feelings or a set of answers to prayer but an abiding relation to the Father in Jesus Christ. The community has to take it for granted that everyone is capable of growing; and the worst thing we can do is to go on treating people as less than spiritual adults.
- Can the community point to something in its collective life that makes a contribution to the wider society which would not be made if there were no Christian presence around? In other words, can it point to a distinctive practice that shows in some area of public life that there are alternative ways of managing human relations or problems to the ones that prevail most widely in our culture? This may be something relatively modest – not every worshipping community will generate a Mother Teresa – even if it is only the free provision of space for social needs or a programme of volunteering or the organizing of leisure activities for children in a safe environment. The point is simply to show that there is something specific that is happening as a result of Christian commitment locally that can be pinned clearly to a set of distinctive convictions about how human relations should flourish.
- How far does the community encourage and enable its members to teach and to learn from one another? Is there an atmosphere in which people can share what is genuinely on their minds, without any sense that there is a blueprint of acceptable behaviour or a standard level of ‘spiritual’ attainment or stability against which they will be judged? Mutuality, mutual service, has a lot to do with how believers work to build each other up, instead of concentrating obsessively on ‘how I’m doing’ or being too embarrassed to talk seriously about discipleship at all.
In all these ways, Christian communities challenge the corporate imagination of their social context, seeking to nourish critical, self-aware persons who are not afraid to be silent and receptive before the mystery of God and not afraid to be engaged with each other in exploring the new humanity they have discovered. They have moved beyond being consumers, being passive; they are taking responsibility for becoming mature, with the help and nurture of their community. So, looking back to the risks identified earlier in both inherited and emerging styles of Christian life, we can say that they are resisting entertainment, marketing and uplift, the great temptations of an evangelistically minded Church in an unsympathetic environment.
At the heart of this is the belief that the good news cannot be good news just for me as an individual. Evangelism must be more than the invitation to find Christian faith an attractive option for myself; that would be to shrink the universal impact of the gospel. As soon as I hear the promise of grace for myself, I hear the summons to make my renewed life good news for the neighbour and the stranger. And this is of course just where some of the distinctive emphases of FX come into their own in a positive way. Good news has to be audible. It must be recognizable at least as news, and for that to happen there has to be real attention to how sense is being made in the context in which you are trying to communicate. This is very definitely not the same thing as simply looking for a more accessible way to express challenges or mysteries with the danger that the element of challenge and mystery melts away. It is a slow and patient exercise in discovering what can and can’t be heard.
And it is very much in the mainstream tradition of Christian mission. Recently I was taking part in the celebrations of the 300th anniversary of the Indian SPCK, and was reminded of the way in which, in India as elsewhere, the actual translation of the Scriptures into local languages frequently had the effect of reviving the languages themselves, especially when they were the languages of oppressed or marginal groups. Suddenly, with the Bible available in their own language, such people found they had new things to say. It was not just that the Bible had been translated into their language; their language had been ‘translated’ into a new register, and so their lives changed. This kind of exchange or interaction is always a mark of mission doing its work; and a missionary ‘translation’ that does no more than look for vague equivalents of ideas and images, without actually galvanizing the new context, is failing. New humanity means newness in language; and if all that missional strategy achieves is ways of saying the same thing in less confident and challenging idioms, something is missing.
One of the most remarkable recent experiments in creating the reality of ‘church’ virtually from nothing was the project at Penrhys in the Rhondda Valley, led by John and Norah Morgans. In 1986, the Moderator of the URC in Wales and his wife chose to move to this destitute and profoundly troubled estate with the goal of nurturing the emergence of a genuinely local Christian community worship and service. The following eighteen years saw an extraordinary flowering of the life of the Spirit in Penrhys – not in the form of huge congregations or a classical revival, but in the shape of a steady transformation of expectations and horizons. Collaboration on the setting up of a health clinic, the use of the small worship space within the two converted houses that formed the church centre for concerts, popular and classical, by world-class performers, the growth of an international network of volunteers and supporters, the regular retreats with the Cistercian monks of Caldey Island for young people on the estate, even the simple fact of some teenagers deciding it was worth sitting their A-Levels – all this and a good deal more is described in John Morgans’ diaries, published privately by him in 2008 as Journey of a Lifetime.2 As a chronicle of how the Church ‘translates’ the expectations of the community in which it stands, how it defines and enables alternative life-choices for people trapped in any number of self-destructive patterns, it could not be bettered.
But it is not a chronicle of steady success. John Morgans is completely honest about the draining cost of keeping motivation alive in circumstances like these, and about the sense of ‘two steps forward, one step back’ (sometimes two steps back) that accompanied the development of ministry in Penrhys. ‘Grasping the divine resources available for transforming personhood, relationships and community’, he writes, ‘demands constant patience. It is the work of maturing. It cannot be slick and it is always costly’ (p. 442). But what is lastingly achieved is a different sense of possibility, the possibility of some kind of human wholeness – shown perhaps only fleetingly but setting a new horizon for what people can hope for. The basic characteristics of the life of Llanfair Penrhys, the church centre on the estate, had to do with communal ministry, service and depth of spiritual discipline (p. 443). The stress on communal ministry came from the recognition that ordained ministers in contexts like Penrhys – but in many other quite different contexts too – faced isolation and burnout; there had to be a mutually supportive core group at work. Service was an obvious imperative in a community desperately in need of a ‘catalyst for change’ (p. 458) but not in need of paternalistic solutions imposed from outside. And one of the most moving aspects of the diaries is the tracing of a greater and greater deepening of prayer, with help from, among others, the contemplative monks of Caldey – Roman Catholics who had no problems in wholeheartedly supporting a Welsh Nonconformist initiative.
Set alongside the three questions which I earlier suggested should be near the heart of the life of a mature and biblical community, Penrhys demonstrates dramatically what it means to live under such scrutiny. The centrality of the life of worship and the expectation that people would grow and want to grow spiritually are manifest throughout Morgans’ narrative. The perceptible change in the environment, the change in what can be imagined and spoken of, is clear in countless stories of particular people finding unexpected extra dimensions to their lives. The neediness, the sense of urgency around deprivation and hopelessness, broke down inhibitions about sharing and supporting within the family of believers and would-be believers. Reading John Morgans – and seeing the work in Penrhys as I was privileged to do in the nineties – you could say (to borrow a phrase I have used elsewhere) ‘I have seen the Church and it works.’ Would you characterize Penrhys as ‘inherited’ or ‘emergent’? I don’t think the question could be answered; quite simply, it was a church: a community in which by the bearing of the cross of self-forgetfulness and mutuality, the new humanity was allowed by God’s grace to be visible.
Some may hear at this point echoes o...