Being Church

The Formation Of Christian Community

Robin Greenwood

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780281069354
• eBook ISBN: 9780281069361
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Being Church offers ideas and strategies, based on real experience and detailed reflection, on processes that offer support and challenge to church leaders and especially clergy, whether parish clergy, or diocesan advisers, or bishops.

1

Finding how to be Church again

Key virtues of a God-centred Christian community

We cannot be good shepherds and teachers

unless we are reborn in the Spirit

and allow ourselves to be led by God,

open to the new ways of God and truly open to people.

This means that we are dying to our own ego

and our need to be in control,

but also to our need to rebel and prove ourselves.

(Jean Vanier 2004, p. 80)

Centred on God

Our society is in many ways lost and anxiously searching for where we are on the map. Largely bemused as it is by religious commitment and cynical about faith in a loving God, there are signs of a restless seeking for ways of finding meaning and consolation. In baptism parties, bringing ever more people dressed in their most elegant clothes, we can see their longing for Church to have the pearl of great price, clues to the mystery at the heart of life. In the tragic funeral of a baby, churches humbly stand beside those who are numb with grief or full of anger, offering a uniquely safe space for grief and love. With a mixture of urgency and joy, Christian communities now have a particular opportunity to show hospitality to all who seek God. Christian communities need to remember that we have all the gifts we need to be Church, when we are open to God, to the world, to one another and to ourselves.

Being Church again, now, in the specifics of this place and time, requires a confident, and always searching, presumption of God’s existence and of God being of a particular character. Making room for God to be God, and to love God only for God’s sake, is central to this exploration. As Paul writes (Romans 8.26), it is the Holy Spirit praying in us, calling us to the Father, that gives us Christian identity over anything we might do or pray. Knowing God, as truly as we can, guides and corrects our practice of Christian community.

God’s nature

The Holy Spirit draws us to know God in the tender intimacy of sons and daughters, painfully refusing to endorse our prejudices or condone our own short-sighted desires.

‘A ceaseless outgoing and return of the desiring God’ (Coakley 2012, p. 4), is incompatible with a distant patriarchal monologue. To find how to be Church again, in our present context, needs our own hearts to be open to the intensity of God’s love. Coakley continues, ‘It is the Holy Spirit who “interrupts” my human monologue to a (supposedly monadic) God; it is the Holy Spirit who finally thereby causes me to see God no longer as a patriarchal threat but as infinite tenderness’. Worshipping and living out the mystery of the Trinity moves us beyond merely personal choice. It takes us towards the reciprocally ordered practice of Christian community and a serious but joyful sharing in the search for the flourishing of all people and Creation.

When, in the Eucharist, we say, ‘In union with Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit, we pray to the Father’, we are describing the transfiguring life of Christian community.

Recovering relational ways of being Church will include at least some of the following elements.

Awareness of ourselves in our present circumstances

Moving beyond abstract theory, being Church demands that we make ourselves as fully present as we dare at this time. Engaging with and praying through this book, alone or with others, and holding in mind the local neighbourhood and churches, readers could ask:

• What are the realities of life here for very different sets of people?
• What difference is the Church making to people’s lives in this area?
• What is of value in what I (and my church) do already and what could I change in line with God’s purpose?
• In what ways is the Church more of a problem than a resource?
• Where is God’s presence apparent here?
• Where could we join more in God’s work?
• What can I personally contribute to a renewed Church?
• How can I be an encourager of those who are younger?
• How can I relieve the Church’s anxiety by being more generous financially?
• Where can I help to create conversations that build up hope?
• How will I work or pray for God’s Church to become more open and attractive to those who are hungry for hope?
• If I am an innovator already, how can I interweave what I have learnt with others in ways that are mutual and loving?
• How can I work with the people of the third age – the recently retired?
• How can I use people’s natural interests to bring them closer to God?
• How can I and my church be more visible and courteously active in the wider neighbourhood?

Church lived in its practices

Gospel practices are social and cooperative, not activities carried out in isolation.

Surely that is why bride and bridegroom, invitations to banquets, and wedding celebrations are Jesus’ most common metaphors for eternal life. They imply reciprocity, the give and take of mutual reverence and mutual desire, and most of all, happiness.

(Richard Rohr in Finley et al., 2012)

Unlearning notions of Church as individuals who happen to turn up to services and social events requires a new common awareness, reached through preaching and living together the baptismal calling to be ‘in Christ’. To be Church is to be ordered together as companions in faith, tears and joy. In a Church struggling to be ‘grown up’, from within our varied journeys we must love and tease one another into practices of vulnerability and interdependence. Heroically or lazily to soldier on being Church ‘as we’ve always known it here’ is in reality to cut ourselves off from ‘Church’. Being Church is to be united within the group of all groups held by Christ and moving at the Spirit’s direction in a mutually accountable relationality.

Practices of faith have been passed on from earlier generations, recapitulating time after time in ever new situations, following the way of Jesus since Pentecost. Churches are those who allow ourselves to be drawn towards God’s final purposes now, in this moment. How we make ourselves present as Church in this situation tells the story of what we have absorbed of God’s desire for the fulfilment of the world and its peoples.

Church for the formation of desire

As Church we are easily tempted to become distracted from our true identity and purpose. We are perhaps harassed by falling numbers, rising damp or too many parishes grouped together and diminishing clergy numbers. We may be disapproving and unforgiving of the behaviour of others. We will surely have disputes among musicians, fight over which version of Scripture to read, or scapegoat those whom we find difficult.

Taking into account the wisdom literature in Scripture and Jesus’ own ease with touching, sensuality, tiredness, hunger, grief, anger, celebration, feasting, respect and compassion, we can recover, in our present contexts, Church rooted in God’s intensity of love and movement towards us.

The invitation of Scripture is to let God be our primary obsession. Moses’ decision to liberate his oppressed people was transformed from the moment when his attention was arrested at the bush that, burning, was not consumed (Exodus 3). He responded in awe; he removed his shoes in worship. God invites us now to stop and turn around, accepting the gift of illumination, our hearts burning and our purposes ventilated by the Holy Spirit. As God communicated to Moses a biased compassion for those in need of liberation, our society needs Church to hear this message and act on it now.

This ‘towardness’ that Scripture reveals is a reminder of how we are regarded by God and allured into participating in God’s own ways with the world. Living in the Spirit, churches recover confidence that in all the mess of human interrelating, the central truth is that we are desired by God. As we become so assured, we grow in the self-esteem that allows us to participate in God’s own desires. We also grow in confidence to let go of old securities and transcend our previous certainties.

Rowan Williams speaks of this movement in terms of going beyond what we used to hold as ‘theologically correct’ and so discerning a development in our belief. He describes this as a centring on the cross of Christ so that it may in turn permeate our ways of exercising and receiving authority. This movement is ‘a steady and endless enlarging of the heart through union in prayer and virtue with the Word, which is also a steady and endless growth in knowledge of the Father’ (Ford 2007, p. 220).

The interplay between desiring and receiving God’s promises for the work of God’s people is a core theme in the book of Revelation. Churches are invited to enter into God’s knowledge, judgement, instructions, guidance, encouragement and promises. In learning what it is that God offers, churches are encouraged to receive these blessings as the most direct way of discovering their transformed identity. Their ultimate calling is for their names to be linked with the name of Jesus himself (Revelation 3.11–12). Directed by the Spirit, embraced by the Father, with all nations, in intimacy with Jesus in a mealcentred community, such churches can reveal to the world their most profound potential for the world’s healing.

Called to unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity

Every genuine practice of Church is connected to every other. In the accumulated experience of the Church this is to become united, learn holiness, choose catholic order and learn to be apostolic. Whether in a cathedral or in 25 parishes held in plurality, being Church is Christian community that has certain characteristics:

• Being Church is being united as God’s people (Psalm 133.1–3), celebrating difference, held up in prayer and learning God’s many-layered wisdom and ministering from the Spirit’s gifts (Ephesians 3.10). Such a church will offer hospitality, living out of God’s abundant generosity, welcoming everyone, of any age, at all times and growing as God’s people, for ever linked with the name of Jesus Christ (Ephesians 1.17–18 and 4.1–6).
• Being Church is desiring and learning holiness (Isaiah 6.3; Revelation 4.8). To desire holiness is to respond to the call of God to the people of God to be like God (1 Peter 1.14–16) in goodness and beauty (Psalm 19.7–10). The priority will be the transformation of desire through prayer and worship: ‘Come, Holy Spirit!’ A church that is a school for holiness will be one where its people have chosen to let themselves be drawn towards God, rather than alternative distractions, and to praise in participation through kinds of music, words and action, celebrating with all who have gone before and those yet to come.
• Being Church is being in catholic interconnection with all Christians, Jews and all faiths open to being part of God’s ways with the world (Ephesians 1.10; Genesis 12.3). The Church is its people dispersed and engaged in every aspect of human life and endeavour. This Church will flourish through engaging across boundaries and learning and contributing to learning to build up capacity and hope in neighbourhoods. Such a Church will be always looking out as well as building a house for creativity, sharing God through music, drama, literature, art, economics and politics. It will be keen to connect with people everywhere, sharing joy, pain and the search for sustainable futures (Genesis 12.1; Luke 9.23).
• Being Church is being a company of learners, teachers and sent ones (Matthew 28.16–20). Apostolicity is the gift and calling that combines the exercise of authority with obedience, worship, sending and being sent, being confidently identified with God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, passing on faith, welcoming strangers and showing how to be in communion with Jesus (Matthew 25.35, 40). Apostolicity begins in the sending by the Father of the Son and the Spirit so that in the world the Church can do what Jesus did in the power of the Spirit: healing the sick, feeding the hungry, drawing people back into relationship with God, and reconciling people and communities. It often means walking towards controversy and complex deliberation for the re-interpretation of faith in ever new situations. Such a Church will offer different paths of learning that help people pursue greater dignity in their everyday lives; it will be searching for new truth, with God at work in the everyday, and will be engaged in living faithfully, whatever life sends.

Searched and sustained by the Holy Spirit

Church identity, drawn from a wisdom interpretation of Christian tradition, explodes out of the worship of God and a discernment of God’s true nature. Within the early centuries of Christianity, through worship, prayer and vigorous unfinished disputes, among Christian communities there has evolved the distinctive doctrine of God as Trinity.

Worship, as the core activity of Church, is the most potent aspect of being together in Christ. Through the structuring of practices and relationships, inward and outward, the Church’s character is identified. Being Church is a constant exchange between inherited tradition and innovation. Tradition is the living reality of the Risen Christ in the Church and world today, made real through the Holy Spirit. Church is the embodied movement of the Spirit, creating simultaneously a stable and unpredictable environment. It is like an incredibly multi-coloured and variable-patterned piece of knitting that’s still being worked on the needles. Within this transformational tradition-process, the work of the Holy Spirit periodically fosters the emergence of the prophetically new, which can be accepted as authentic when it is reformulated in discernible continuity with what Christians have previously recognized as God’s transformative work (Luke 7.11–30).

So for churches serving the kingdom in the way of Jesus and led by the continuing work of the Holy Spirit, stability and change and continuity and the radically new are both embraced. Examples of this today are the constant renewal of the shape of the liturgy within an obvious continuity, the emergence of new expectations of the relation between those ordained and the Church as a whole through constant wrestling with Scripture and contemporary culture, and similarly, radically new expectations for women in ordained office.

The interrogation at the heart of the book of Job is, ‘Can you honestly claim that you fear God for nothing?’ (Job 1.9–12). In the wisdom tradition represented by Job, Jesus refuses to identify faith in God with the repetition of old truths in new situations. There is a decisive sign of the novelty of Jesus confirmed in the account of his baptism and temptations (Mark 1.9–12). The Holy Spirit, believed by fellow Jews to have been quenched since the last biblical prophet, comes to Jesus, who is in intimate relationship with the Father and called to reveal God’s purpose. Th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for this Book
• Title page
• Imprint
• Dedication
• Table of contents
• About the author
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Finding how to be Church again: key virtues of a God-centred Christian community
• 2. God’s people on the move: genuine innovation requires a new way of seeing everything
• 3. A listening Church: learning from the wisdom of mystics and organizational theorists
• 4. Learning together: choosing cooperation rather than competition
• 5. Formed in the walking of Jesus: community formed in encountering and being healed by Jesus
• 6. From strategies to virtues: choosing and living practices to build the Church’s character and purpose
• 7. Grown-up Church: maturing through personal and corporate awareness
• 8. The unresolved dilemma: baptismal promises and ordination vows
• 9. Virtues and habits of churches and priests: taking responsibility together for being Church
• 10. Spirit-led community: growing in hospitality and love through sharing in the Eucharist
• 11. Open and pastoral: Church as the giving and receiving of love
• 12. Communicating: letting down barriers and being real
• 13. Integrating wholeness: being drawn by God’s Spirit in the whole of life
• References and suggestions for further reading