Pioneering Spirituality

Ross

• Publisher: Hymns Ancient & Modern
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781848258198
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

A range of practitioners explore what fuels and sustains a life of pioneering mission. What is the spirituality in the UK's wider culture and how do we connect with it? How can spiritual treasures such as the Eucharist, prayer, pilgrimage and community be shared with others? How can communities of disciples grow in this pioneering spirituality?

1. In Their House

JONNY BAKER AND CATHY ROSS

Introduction

This is a book about pioneering spirituality. In what follows you will read many fascinating stories from people who are working out their spirituality in a variety of spaces and places where they are pioneering in mission. You will read of those trying to connect Bible stories with disenfranchised youth, a community reconnecting with the Eucharist, young mothers connecting with God through their babies, spirituality rediscovered through the arts, through pilgrimage, through the depth of community and hospitality in an African context, through identification with a thirteenth-century mystic, through the fight to eradicate female genital mutilation (FGM) and much more. What they have in common is that they are all searching for a spirituality that fuels the practice of mission, that sustains a life of faith in Christ where the priority is to be with those beyond the borders of the Church as we know it, to share Christ and join in with God’s mission, with creation’s healing. This is a spirituality of the road; a mission spirituality (Bosch, 2001). This is also a spirituality that looks for treasure in the other’s place and space.

Several common themes have emerged: the importance of story, place, people, posture, and soulful treasure.

Story

There has been a rediscovery of the importance of story and storytelling in the world of theology. Liberation theology alerted us to the importance of experience and context while narrative theology encourages us to read the Scriptures as story rather than just a set of doctrinal propositions and principles. We are encouraged to reflect on theology as biography and how our own story and context have shaped our understanding of and relationship with God. Clearly, the Bible is a collection of stories, some of which resonate with our own life experiences and some of which are alien and other. The Bible hides nothing of the reality of humanity in the stories we read of prostitutes abused, sisters and daughters handed over to be raped, incipient ethnic cleansing; stories of loss and betrayal as well as stories of a new community, women affirmed in leadership and Jesus’ ultimate sacrifice for us all. These are stories that have shaped history, places and people. And as we read them and ponder over them, as followers of Jesus today, we believe that these stories have the power to shape us and interact with our own stories. This is what forms our spirituality.

Let me (Cathy) give you an example. Recently I returned from a three-week visit to the Democratic Republic of Congo where we had been CMS mission partners 25 years ago. The story of Congo is not a noble one as the Belgians conducted a politics of greed and plunder to rob the country of its rubber. Terror and savagery were the order of the day as hands were cut off those men who did not bring in their required daily allocation of rubber. As King Leopold of Belgium’s rubber policies spread, ‘it branded people with memories that remained raw for the rest of their lives’ (Hochschild, 2006, p. 165). One British missionary was asked poignantly and repeatedly, ‘Has the Saviour you tell us of any power to save us from the rubber trouble?’ (Hochschild, 2006, p. 172). This is part of the tragic story that has shaped Congo’s past. Ugandan theologian Emmanuel Katongole believes that this same story of ambition, greed and plunder continues today, only with different actors. However, he maintains that there could be a very different story. This was a story of power and terror that wantonly sacrificed many African lives but as Christians we know a story of ‘self-sacrificing love that involves a different notion of power and thus gives rise to new patterns of life, engendering new forms of community, economics and politics’ (Katongole, 2011, p. 20). This requires a different story, a story that affirms the value and dignity of each human person and can shape new practices, polity and ways of living together in community.

This is where spirituality comes in. Our spirituality informs and shapes our life stories and fuels our engagement in mission. Katongole challenges Congo, and indeed all of Africa, to live out a different story informed by a very different set of values and practices which reflect the sacredness of human life and dignity. And how is that possible? As his response, Katongole narrates the stories of those who live a different way, the stories of those people who model the way of Jesus in their daily lives, who live out their spirituality by living a different story. He tells us of a Sudanese bishop who set up a peace village to fight tribalism in a small way; he tells us of Angelina Atyam, whose daughter was kidnapped by the Lord’s Resistance Army, which led her on a journey not only of forgiveness but also of advocacy; and he tells us of Maggie Barankitse, who brought together orphaned and abused children of different ethnicities in her Maison Shalom (House of Peace) in Burundi.

In this book we read how the stories of these pioneers’ lives have shaped their spirituality and involvement in mission. As we read these stories we begin to see the red thread of God’s Holy Spirit at work, which may also inspire us to find that red thread in our lives. Katongole discovered that it is the stories that we carry that make a difference. If we carry assumptions of brutality, greed and chaos then that will carry over into our lifestyle, and the way we look at and organize the world. But if we can live out a different script – a story of love and sacrifice, one of justice and compassion, of beauty and belief fuelled by a spirituality that is nurtured by the bountiful love of God – then a very different story and way of being in the world can emerge. This is what we hope you will find in the chapters that follow.

It is interesting and perhaps not surprising that pioneers look to stories of other pioneers in mission. In this book, for example, Andy Freeman is inspired by St Francis, Kate Pearson by Angela of Foligno, Beth Honey by the early Irish Christians. These have all brought great changes and renewal in the world through their inspirational lives of mission and discipleship. Steve Bevans identifies these sorts of stories in his chapter as a key part of living out a mission spirituality. Those stories are also run through with that same red thread and it becomes something of a line that weaves down through the ages; the story we now find ourselves in.

Alastair McIntosh’s book Soil and Soul (2004) tells the story of how the island of Eigg off the west coast of Scotland is freed from a landowner through setting up a community trust which campaigns to regain the island and free it from the domination of the laird. I (Jonny) am sure McIntosh would not use the word ‘pioneer’ for what he does but he clearly is, as the person who sees and then builds the change. It is a modern-day tale of David and Goliath. He draws on liberation theology and Walter Wink’s trilogy of the powers with a threefold process of naming, unmasking and engaging the powers to describe the spirituality of the process. A big part of the battle is helping the islanders believe that this is even thinkable, possible or dreamable. One of their secret weapons is poetry. The bards are the storytellers who keep alive a counter-narrative to that of the wider dominant consumer private ownership narrative in an artful, soulful and powerful telling that helps people begin to believe in another way, another world. He suggests that prayer is one of the indispensable means by which we engage the powers and uncouple from our own participation in that domination system (McIntosh, 2004, p. 120). This may all sound rather political and dramatic, and it is. But its significance is that a pioneering spirituality is not about a story that is reduced to a set of privatized practices, something domesticated and co-opted unwittingly in service of the gods of the age. It is a spirituality shaped by a story that enables deep transformation in the world, and in our own hearts and minds. Ann-Marie Wilson’s chapter, for example, explores how an active spirituality can support the eradication of FGM from the world.

At CMS one of the modules we explore with pioneers is on mission spirituality, and this, of course, opens up Christian spiritual practices. But its starting point is to help discern the spirituality in the wider culture that already demands our allegiance, the wider story or worldview of the culture, one predicated on the logic of consumption with its associated set of practices and rituals. There is no neutrality, as liberation theology so powerfully reminded us. A Christian spirituality requires an unlearning and a freeing from addiction to this wider spirituality of consumption and a conversion to the service of a different God out of a different story, a different way of living. Johnny Sertin explores how being and doing together can form a mission spirituality in this way. This is actually a tough side to spirituality, a sort of soulwork. Teresa of Avila (1987) uses the metaphor of preparing a garden to describe prayer which she says in the early stages is hard work. It is hard to do this alone and requires a community and practices to call us continually to follow in the way of Christ, to come home to ourselves and support us on that journey.

Place

There is a growing attentiveness towards and an appreciation of the importance of place. Social geographers remind us how knowledge and discernment are situated in particular places and communities. Of course, places are not just physical landscapes; they also embody and hold memories that contribute to a spiritual and emotional landscape of a place. As a New Zealander (Cathy), I hear of thousands of young people making an annual pilgrimage to Gallipoli in Turkey on ANZAC Day (Australian and NZ Army Corps) where tens of thousands of soldiers lost their lives in an ultimately fruitless campaign. The place has power to draw people there to evoke the memories and to share the pain. We saw a more recent example of this when the Germanwings flight plunged into the French Alps and families wanted to visit the crash site to be near their loved ones who had died.

For the Māori people of Aotearoa/NZ place is very important. At any formal introduction, they will tell you their mountain, their river, their village, and they will tell you all this before their name, such is the importance of place. For Māori, land is sacred, land is family and land can speak. Land ownership in Māori culture is very different from European understandings of it. Sadly, early settlers and missionaries were not attentive to this and the consequences have meant that some Māori have been deprived of their ancestral lands and marginalized from what they consider to be their homelands, their place. If the early settlers and missionaries had been able to listen to the culture and context, to the importance of place, and begin to appreciate differences in worldview, history may have played out very differently; the marginalization of one culture by another may have been avoided, or at least its harmful effects diminished. If we do not listen to the stories of the other, if we are not attentive to the importance of place, then their voices are not heard and invisibility and marginalization can result.

So place is important for our being in the world. German philosopher Martin Heidegger writes about dwelling as a way of existence. For him, it is much more than just living in a house; rather it is a way of being in the world. To be is to be in a place. ‘Only by knowing our surroundings, being aware of topography and the past, can we live what Heidegger deems an “authentic” existence’ (Marsden, 2014, p. 20). To be human we have to live in a place and ‘to live is to live locally and know first of all the place one is in’ (Marsden, 2014, p. 24). A theological expression of this is the Incarnation. Jesus fully immersed himself in our world, in our place and neighbourhood, and lived among us. This points to practices and virtues such as commitment to a place, radical hospitality, deep relationships, intentional engagement in the local community. This calls for a loyalty to and a delight in the local. It also requires a kind of expectancy to discern the presence of God already in that place. Kenyan theologian John Mbiti reminded us that the missionaries did not introduce God to Africa, ‘rather, it was God who brought them to Africa, as carriers of the news about Jesus. African religion had already done the groundwork of making people receptive to the gospel of Jesus Christ’ (Mbiti, 1986, p. 12). So we also need to remember that God’s presence is already in a place as we seek to encounter this living God.

As you read the chapters that follow we hope you will note the attentiveness to place, the celebration of the local and the need to be fully immersed in the community in which we live and serve. John Wheatley and James Henley are examples of this in their living among young people and seeking to develop an active spirituality. That is a spirituality of place.

People

Spirituality is, of course, about people – the people we encounter on the way. The Emmaus road is perhaps the archetypal example of this. ‘We discern in this familiar story the way a stranger becomes a friend, a guest becomes a host, one who listens becomes one who proclaims’ (Bevans and Ross, 2015, p. xii). This encounter begins with sharing a journey and a story and ends with sharing a meal. So many of our human encounters mirror this – sharing of stories, friendship and food together. Telling stories and being heard are part of what it means to be human. Around the meal table – wherever that may be – stories can be told, many voices can be heard, memories can be created and nurtured. The youngest can be heard and listened to, the voiceless can be given a voice.

Jean Vanier claims that as we eat together we become friends – no longer guest nor stranger, no longer on the margins nor at the centre. Indeed, these categories begin to break down, as we were all strangers until God welcomed us into his household by grace to be his friends – the supreme act of God’s hospitality. Friendship is a powerful force for good; friendship moves us towards wholeness and takes us beyond categories of marginalization. Jesus offered his disciples friendship rather than servanthood (John 15.15) and this is what the Eucharist, Jesus’ sacrificial meal, offers us – an invitation to friendship, community and family. Kim Hartshorne’s chapter explores how the Eucharist has become central in the Upper Room community i...