Witness

The Faith and Order Commission

• Publisher: Church House Publishing
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780715111734
• eBook ISBN: 9780715111741
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

This report from the Faith and Order Commission explores the idea of 'witness' in the life of the church. It is intended as a theological resource to encourage Christians to think of themselves as witnesses, ready to speak of what they have seen and heard, but also to listen with humility.With practical case studies from church communities around England, it offers examples to inspire readers to go further, imagining how they and their churches might witness more richly, as well as put their dreams into action.Designed for churches and small groups to study together, it also includes reflections on the case studies and questions to help readers put their thinking into practice.

Part 1: WHAT IS WITNESS?

Seeing, hearing and saying

The webpage mentioned above says that ‘A witness is someone who simply says … what they have seen and heard for themselves.’ The first thing to note about this definition is that, for witnesses, the seeing and hearing come before the saying.

‘Seeing and hearing’ aren’t restricted to our literal eyes and ears. They involve all of our senses, and all of our understanding – the whole process by which we notice what God is doing, and are captivated by it. ‘Hear, O Israel!’, ‘O taste and see that the Lord is good!’ ‘We declare to you … what we have … touched with our hands, concerning the word of life’; ‘thanks be to God, who … spreads in every place the fragrance that comes from knowing him’, ‘so that … all may consider and understand, that the hand of the Lord has done this’.3

Whether they are literal or metaphorical, however, this seeing and hearing come first. Before we say or do anything, becoming a witness is something that happens to us.

Think of Moses in the desert, tending his father-in-law’s flock:

There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, ‘I must turn aside and look at this great sight.4

His attention is caught by something, his curiosity aroused, and so he turns aside to look more closely. It is then that he is given the role of speaking about God in the world, and of accompanying that speaking with action. That role is based on what he has seen, and on his turning aside to look more closely.

Or think of the women who went early on the first Easter morning to Jesus’ tomb, to tend to his dead body.

They found the stone rolled away from the body, but when they went in, they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, ‘Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.’5

The women were made witnesses because of what they unexpectedly found – and what they still more unexpectedly did not find. And on that basis they were commissioned to spread the good news. They were asked to bear witness. The whole Christian church through history is the gathering of those added to the community of these women: the community of witnesses.

To focus on witness means placing our own action in second place. Our action emerges from what we have seen and heard – from what we have been shown and told; what we have found.

The message of the women at the tomb, and of the other witnesses whom God has added to their number, reaches us through Scripture. It reaches us through the worship in which we learn to inhabit the story they passed on. It reaches us through experiences of the Spirit working in the life of the church to lead us deeper into the truth of this story.

All the stories of witness that we tell in the case studies below are stories that involve people who have been shown something in this way: who have been fed by Scripture, shaped by worship, and led by the Spirit.

There is a second sense, though, in which they are stories of seeing and hearing before they are stories of doing. In different ways, each of them is a story of people who pay attention to the world around them. With ears and eyes shaped by all that they have been learning about God, they look closely at the people and situations around them. They look for the opportunities, the resources, the gifts, the challenges that God has placed in their path. They listen out for the sound of God already at work in the lives of those they meet. They see the work of God, blazing unexpectedly beside their path.

The work of witness is never simply our own initiative. It is always a response. It depends completely on what we have received and go on receiving, on what we have been shown and told and go on being shown and told, and on what we have learnt and go on learning.

Pointing away

When the Archbishop of Canterbury’s ‘Evangelism and Witness’ webpage expands on its initial definition (‘A witness is someone who simply says … what they have seen and heard for themselves’), it doesn’t offer a description of Christian activity. Instead, it focuses our attention on God. It says that ‘Every follower of Christ has witnessed for themselves the abundant love that God has for them.’6

Our activity as witnesses is not meant to draw people’s attention to ourselves, but to point people to God, to what God has done, to God’s work in their lives, and to God’s work in the world around them.

Christian witness could be thought of as joining in the song described in Psalm 96. In words and deeds, we ‘tell of God’s salvation from day to day’ and ‘Declare God’s glory among the nations, God’s marvellous works among all the peoples.’ If we want to ask how successful our witness is, its success will be measured by how well it sings that song – how richly, how fully, how compellingly it points people to God and God’s work.

That is why witness and worship are intimately knotted together. In worship, we turn our attention toward the God who meets us in Jesus. We face toward God in gratitude, adoration and delight, and in penitence, lament, and petition. In witness, we draw others’ attention in the same direction – calling them to look where we are looking. Worship makes witness possible; witness leads back to worship; and worship is itself a form of witness.

Witness therefore involves a balancing act. The people amongst whom we witness notice us – they see us and hear us – only in order to be pointed away from us. If our witnessing doesn’t attract any attention, it cannot be effective, but if it remains the focus of attention, it is not witness.

We see this balancing act in the interplay between witness’s multiple dimensions. The ‘Evangelism and Witness’ webpage says that ‘every one of us is sent in the power of the Holy Spirit to live lives and speak words’ which tell of what we have seen and heard – and witness is a matter of lives and words, working together.

Witness is a matter of showing the love of God to those around us. It is a matter of living in a way that shows that we believe the story of God’s gracious love to be true. It is a matter of living in a way that communicates something of that love to others.

It is also a matter of telling people of that love, which is always deeper and wider than anything we in our faltering love manage to show. We tell the story of a love greater than ours, a love on which we depend.

It is a matter of upholding the good news of God’s love in contexts where its existence and power are denied – of calling others (and ourselves) out of the unloving patterns of our lives.

It is a matter of celebrating all the places and the faces in which we find that love at work, all the occasions on which that love surprises us, appearing where we had least expected it.

It is a matter of acknowledging that all our witnessing fails to do justice to its source, and pointing people to the God upon whose gracious judgment, forgiveness, and teaching we depend.

It is a matter of learning to witness more fully, more truly – including from those amongst whom we witness, through whom God can show God’s gracious love to us in new ways.

It is a matter of trusting God to be God’s own witness, despite all our failures. God is at work by God’s Spirit, drawing people to Jesus, and though we are called to participate in that work, God’s loving grace is also at work before, apart from, and after anything we might do.

Our witness involves all these dimensions, interacting with one another and qualifying one another. It is not one simple activity, confined to one part of the lives we lead as followers of Jesus. It is one way of seeing the whole shape of those lives.

Learning to communicate

At the end of his life, Joshua erected a stone in the sanctuary at Shechem as a witness – a standing reminder of God’s covenant with God’s people.7 Witness can take the form of an event, an interruption, a cry: an intervention in a particular situation that calls attention to God’s gracious love and the demands that it makes. And witness can also take the form of a steady presence, a faithful persistence, like that of a standing stone.

Yet even when it takes the form of a surprising intervention, witness cannot be a hit-and-run affair. In John 6, we see a moment of misrecognition. A large crowd is following Jesus, ‘because they saw the signs that he was doing for the sick’, and they try to ‘take him by force to make him king’.8 They make sense of Jesus within their existing expectations, and so mistake the kind of king he is. That is perhaps why Jesus repeatedly instructed people not to spread the news that he was the Messiah.9 Anyone in his culture who was simply told that message was bound to get the wrong idea, because they would not yet have the language, the expectations, that would allow them to hear what it really meant. There was therefore, for most people, no quick way for Jesus to share this message with them. They needed to spend time with him, to hear his words and see his actions, to follow his story through, in order to make sense of him.

We can’t witness without developing together some kind of shared language that will allow us to communicate with one another. That is often a slow process, and one that requires attentiveness and sensitivity.

It can’t happen if we don’t pay close attention to the language, the patterns of life and understanding, of those amongst whom we are witnessing. And so we can’t truly witness to people without spending time with them, and being drawn deeply into relationship with them.

That might sometimes mean that we invite people into encounter and engagement with us. It will also sometimes mean that we accept invitation into encounter and engagement with them. Sometimes it will simply mean a development of the relationships in which we already find ourselves, and it won’t be clear who invited whom, or who is guest and who is host. We won’t always – perhaps we won’t even normally – ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Preface
• How to use this book
• Introduction
• Part 1 What is witness?
• Part 2 Case studies
• Part 3 Responses
• Notes
• Copyright