Disclosing Church

An Ecclesiology Learned from Conversations in Practice

Clare Watkins

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781351391382
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

From 2006 to 2011 researchers at Heythrop College and the Oxford Centre for ecclesiology and Practical Theology (OxCEPT, Ripon College Cuddesdon) worked on a theological and action research project: "Action Research – Church and Society (ARCS). 2010 saw the publication of Talking About God in Practice: Theological Action research and Practical Theology (SCM), which presented in an accessible way the work of ARCS and its developing methodology. This turned out to be a landmark study in the praxis of Anglican and Catholic ecclesiology in the UK, showing how theology in these differing contexts interacted with the way in which clergy and congregations lived out their religious convictions. This book is a direct follow up to that significant work, authored by one of the original researchers, providing a systematic analysis of the impact of the "theological action research" methodology and its implications for a contemporary ecclesiology.

The book presents an ecclesiology generated from church practice, drawing on scholarship in the field as well as the results of the theological action research undertaken. It achieves this by including real scenarios alongside the academic discourse. This combination allows the author to tease out the complex relationship between the theory and the reality of church.

Addressing the need for a more developed theological and methodological account of the ARCS project, this is a book that will be of interest to scholars interested not only Western lived religion, but ecclesiology and theology more generally too.

1
Disclosing church

Attending to people, attending to the Spirit

“There are only two problems with the Church: the first is people, and the second is the Holy Spirit”. In the last 20 years or so of teaching ecclesiology to undergraduates, this sentence has always found its way into the opening lecture. I never plan for this to happen; I’ve been saying it too long, too frequently and am slightly embarrassed to find it popping up again. The persistence of the assertion is, however, significant: it seeks to express, memorably and uncompromisingly, the nature of the church as that mysterious, practical reality of diverse men, women and children living together ‘in the Spirit’. At the same time, it makes clear that this beautiful pneumatological presence among peoples, lived out in particular and varied contexts, is always, and of necessity, problematic. It is a statement which underpins everything in this book and the research upon which it depends.

Formally, what follows is a work of ecclesiology – the theology of church – and much of this opening chapter will be concerned to locate the current study in the wider fields of contemporary ecclesiology and in the practical theology which increasingly characterises it.¹ However, the work behind this book also represents a more fundamental struggle: to explore what happens to our reading and practice of ‘church’ when we allow the voices and experiences of faith-full² people – including those who might be seen as on the edges of church – to shape our thinking as authentic witnesses to the working of the Holy Spirit in the world. It may well be that people and the Holy Spirit are the only problems with the church, but they are also, together, her most central reality and beating heart. To enquire of the Spirit among people, and of people in the light of the Spirit, is to do the kind of ecclesiology which can be seen as ‘disclosing church’.

‘Disclosing church’ is an ecclesiological practice that has been born out of more than a decade of practice-based theological research, together with many more years of engagement with ecclesiology.³ It is an approach born of a conviction that there is a specific contribution to be made to the understanding of church which depends upon a renewal of thought through engagement with the church’s ‘everyday’. Such engagement can offer some fresh perspectives on what seem to have become perennial difficulties for our own time in speaking about, and being, authentically and effectively, church.

In this introductory chapter something of the context of contemporary ecclesiology will be outlined, so as to demonstrate what it is to which this book’s argument and methods are responding. In particular, current approaches to the perennial ecclesiological dynamic of practical-and-transcendent, human-and-divine, and so forth will be indicated, before addressing some of the more fundamental questions that such approaches share with practical theology more widely. Through this overview of these broad contemporary fields, a set of ecclesiological questions emerges, both topical in their particularity to our present context, and perennial to the traditional theological struggles to articulate church, which have been with Christians from the beginning. This confluence of questions sets out the difficulties – practical and theological – to which this book, and the research which underpins it, responds.

Church concrete, church mystical: the classic tension in contemporary key

The ecclesiological challenge of articulating the sense in which the church can be understood as both ‘human and divine’, both institution and of the Spirit, is perennial. It is just such a tension that underpins St. Paul’s image of the Body of Christ in writing to the Christians in Corinth⁴ and that shapes a number of other New Testament images of church.⁵ The nature of the church as the community of the Spirit can be seen as one of the fundamental things at stake through the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century: is the Spirit unfailingly identified – even ‘possessed’ – by the institutional church? Or does the Spirit transcend all organisations and structures, even those of church?⁶ In the twentieth century, these questions emerged in new ways, whether through the radical Protestantism of Brunner’s argument that ‘true church’ – being an entirely spiritual reality – has nothing to do with ‘institution’⁷ or through the long hard debates of the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council, which resulted in a formulation of church as one reality made up of divine and human elements, analogous to the mystery of the incarnation.⁸ The church has always presented itself to Christians as both a very human community and a reality in the world which, in some way or another, communicates God’s presence to its members, and to the whole human family.⁹

It is not surprising, then, that contemporary ecclesiology is patterned by the same inherent and proper ecclesiological tensions. However, in our own time, shaped by modern understandings of what is ‘real’, and of a certain materialism and pragmatism in the West, there can be traced a growing preoccupation with church as a concrete, organised, social reality. Indeed, theologians themselves increasingly prefer accounts of church which deal with practical (which is to say largely empirical) sources, rather than systematic, ‘purely theological’ sources.¹⁰ Such tendencies have not been without their critics. For example, Gary Badcock’s work of 2009 sets out explicitly to correct what he perceives as this imbalance of sources, commenting:

the preference for a practical theology over a systematic (and particularly a dogmatic) treatment of the doctrine of the church has in fact been commonplace in theological thought for quite a long time. Books in ecclesiology today belong, mostly as a matter of course, to the genre of practical or applied theology.¹¹

The shift in ecclesiology toward practical theological methods has been problematic, even as it has given fresh energy to ecclesiology. So, Paul Avis, a leading British ecclesiologist, in recognising this empirical turn, rightly questions any tendency to overstate the ‘theoretical’ nature of traditional ecclesiology over and against any naive adoption of ethnographic and other empirical approaches, which fails to recognise that these, too, are heavily theorised.¹² There are some recent fine examples of more integrated approaches to a practice-based ecclesiology – for example, the work of Pete Ward¹³ and (from a quite different tradition) Neil Ormerod.¹⁴ Nonetheless, the fundamental struggle, identified by Healy and Badcock, to find ways of integrated speaking of the church, with both theological precision and continuity as well as contemporary, practice-informed authenticity, remains. Ecclesiology’s turn to practice and the empirical is problematic methodologically as well as theologically.

The present book speaks directly into these debates, and in particular, seeks to offer an alternative in increasingly polarised accounts of church through a particular practice of attending to the various voices of church experience, culture, the academy and church traditions as – together and distinctly – theological authorities. In order to demonstrate more clearly what the issues are here, I will briefly explore the work of one writer, whose work has been key in the ecclesiological turn to the practical, and in the identifying of the problems that attend it: Nicholas Healy.

In what has become a highly influential work, written at the turn of the millennium, Nicholas Healy comments on contemporary ecclesiology: “In general, ecclesiology in our period has become highly systematic and theoretical, focused more upon discerning the right things to think about the church rather than orientated to the living, rather messy, confused and confusing body that the church’s actuality is”.¹⁵ Whilst this work is now well over 15 years old, and Healy’s own position has shifted somewhat, as we shall see, we begin here because of the ways in which this comment, and Healy’s response to it, describes with particular clarity a contemporary identification of the perennial ecclesiological challenge: that of the integral nature of church as ‘both human and divine’.

It is significant that Healy’s work of 2000¹⁶ begins with an account of what the problem with contemporary ecclesiology is: that it fails to take full account of the lived realities of church, and tends, rather, to abstract doctrinal approaches, which Healy describes as ‘blueprint ecclesiologies’.¹⁷ We are left, he argues, with a repeated ‘two-fold construal’ of church, which separates the concrete from the doctrinal, and which tends to privilege what is ‘heavenly’ over what is ‘earthly’, leading to an undue authority being given the purely theological over the practical.¹⁸ Such a separation of the ‘ideal’ church from its practised reality is not only inauthentic, but – according to Healy – dangerous, in so far as it disables Christians from speaking of the realities of sin at work in church life.¹⁹

Healy’s concern throughout is to explore ways of doing ecclesiology which enable an integrative holding together of the eschatological reality of Church as ‘of the Kingdom’, with the realities of ecclesial living. He calls for an ecclesiology rooted in “theological reflection on the church… [which is]… from the very outset a matter of practical rather than theoretical reasoning”.²⁰ Significantly, he recognises such integrated ecclesiological thinking as characteristic of ecclesiologies of the pre-modern era, and it is the search to speak in continuity with that tradition, in our own time, that shapes his argument. This leads Healy to develop his own approach using a reading of von Balthasar’s theology in which the ‘theodramatic horizon’ enables a way of thinking theologically, which encourages connectivity and the integration of divine and human.²¹

Some of the most influential observations of Healy’s work come at the end of his book, when he speaks about the contributions that might be made to such an integrative, eschatologically conditioned ecclesiology from the disciplines of history, sociology and ethnography.²² Here, Healy’s work has been greeted as an encouragement to more practical theological ecclesiological approaches – approaches which, since the publication of Church, World and the Christian Life, have developed into a sizable body of literature, and a strong voice in the fields of both practical theology and ecclesiology.²³ It is, broadly speaking, a vision for a practice-based ecclesiology that is shared in this book’s argument and research processes. Certainly the work done in congregational studies and in ethnographic studies have produced pictures of the complexities, joys and challenges of lived church which are invaluable in holding before the systematic theologian certain unavoidable realities. The voices of the Church ‘on the ground’ are being heard and documented, and reflected upon, as the ‘ordinary theology’ that they might be.²⁴ However, it can also be seen that this productive period in what might be called ‘practical ecclesiology’ raises a new set of questions for us.

The response of practical theology: a new set of questions

The ecclesiological turn to the practical is closely related to the development of the field of practical theology more generally. Indeed, the research reflected in this book clearly locates itself in that field.²⁵ It is by turning to practical theological thinking here that we can begin to explore more clearly the specific challenges of doing a theology of church in a practice-based way.

Whilst some vivid and important work has been done in disclosing church practices through ethnographic approaches,²⁶ inspired, at least in part, by Healy’s critique of ‘blueprint ecclesiology’, there continues a struggle with the perennial question: what is the relation of the practices described to the theology or doctrine of church? The difficulty is one of how we are to speak theologically in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Acknowledgements 2
• 1 Disclosing church: attending to people, attending to the Spirit
• PART I The project: ‘Action Research – Church and Society’ (ARCS)
• PART II Contextual themes
• PART III Ecclesiological themes
• PART IV Conclusions
• Appendix: An outline of a (typical) cycle of theological action research
• Bibliography
• Index