general

I am the Director of the Windermere Centre, the United Reformed Church’s residential training centre in the English Lake District. The Centre exists to help the Church discover its life-in-mission. Mission is about the Church becoming more faithful rather than successful. It is about discerning where God is at world in the world and joining in. In other words, its focus is the Kingdom of God, rather than the Christian Church. The greatest challenge facing the Christian Church in the western world at present is how to connect meaningfully with the increasing millions who find Christian faith and the Church an anachronism and irrelevance. They do not hear the Gospel as Good News. Discipleship of Jesus Christ has neither meaning nor attraction for them. This has as much to do with the way in which the Church has believed and acted historically as with any peculiar postmodern resistance to faith.
The journey to reconnecting with society challenges the Church at its core. The path of least resistance is to buy into the challenge to become more “effective” churches. What that usually means in practice is becoming better skilled at attracting a greater share of disaffected Christians from other denominations. That is a vision we need consciously to avoid. Instead, we must grasp the nettle of making the Gospel relevant to a society that has grown tired of old formulations, old answers to redundant questions, and old forms of connections to God. That journey will be a source of re-evangelising the Church. It will discover new and more faithful ways of being Church. These changes will be the mustard seeds of a new Tomorrow under God, not only for the world but for the Church too.

A theologian by training, I was born and brought up in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia). As a deeply committed young Christian, I spent 2 years as a detective in the Rhodesian Special Branch during the Independence Chimurenga in the late 1970s, specialising in political and military intelligence. It was not until pursuing doctoral studies in South African political theology in Cambridge form 1987 onwards that I came face to face with all that this had meant. During the long journey to reappropriate my faith, I had to come to terms with the fact that my society, friends, family, church, and even the God with whom I communed daily had not prevented me from being involved in something radically unchristlike, all the time believing it to be my Christian duty!
I came to learn that Christians believe in different Christs. The Jesus who blesses white supremacy, repression and torture, colonialism and the haves at the expense of the have-nots is a different Jesus from the one whose gospel was Good News to the poor, the dispossessed, the oppressed and the marginalised. It is not just that Christians have to discover how to communicate Jesus to those who have nothing to do with him: they have also to discover for themselves who the true Jesus is in the midst of competing Christs, and in so doing, learn who their God is.
I was fortunate to study missiology under David Bosch in South Africa, and New Testament under James Dunn in Durham. My supervisor in Cambridge, Chris Rowland, taught me the subversive power of biblical texts (both for good an ill) and the necessity of taking sides with those on the margins truly to understand the liberative power of the Gospel. But it is Walter Brueggemann who has put into words what I had experienced for myself in reading the Bible: the power of the texts lies in their ability to disclose a new world – not some other world to which we can escape, but this world, disclosed as filled with God’s presence and saving activity.
That is the task facing today's Church.   It is to reconfigure our world in the light of God’s presence and saving activity, so that the seemingly intractable and impregnable powers of death and despair which imprison this world are temporary, awaiting transformation by God whose Kingdom we pray for daily. It is to disclose the new possibilities that were previously unthought or unimagined because we did not know of God’s nearness. When that happens, the converting and transforming power of the Good News is unleashed and the hearers of the Word can never be the same again.

Skype’s the way that the whole world can talk for free - or at least, the online world! It turns your computer into a telephone, and the quality is superb! I was talking to the minister from Australia who’s coming to Carver Church on an exchange, and we could hear each other as clear as a bell. Much better than my home phone. And of course, it’s free. So why aren’t we all downloading it? It’s a great way to follow up some conversations. Go to skype and download the software. Then go to “share skype” and you’ll find buttons for your blog (you’ll see mine on the sidebar). Go on - what’s to lose?

It’s one of the great things about living in the Lake District - after working today on the service tomorrow, I was down on the beach at Miller Ground, swimming. The water was like a warm bath - at least for the first 12″ or so. Cold after that! But a quick drive, or a visit to the lake, or a river, and it feels as though you’re on holiday! And I get paid to be here … eat your hearts out, fellow bloggers!

I’m the Director of the Windermere Centre, the United Reformed Church’s residential training centre set in the Lake District. I cut my theological teeth in South Africa. I began a BTh with Unisa, and one of the first compulsory courses was something called Missiology. The lecturer was a guy named David Bosch. I was singularly unimpressed at having to waste my valuable time being diverted away from the real stuff - Old Testament, New Testament and Systematic Theology. Two hours into my first reading, I was more excited than I’d ever been in my life! Here was someone who was saying something that really mattered - and it began to change my whole understanding of what faith was all about. God was a missionary God - with an ongoing mission of salvation for the world. And the Church, if it is truly to be the Church, exists to serve that mission. Some years later, reading Theology at Durham, I wrote an undergraduate dissertation on Bosch’s work. The research involved travelling to South Africa in 1986, where I landed in the midst of the Kairos Document furore. It became a different trip altogether.

Fast forward to Cambridge, 1987. A doctoral student, working on South African political theology, I was reading the story of Beyers Naude and the Christian Institute. Now what I haven’t mentioned so far is that I grew up in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia). As a keen young Christian, I left school and spent nearly 3 years in Ian Smith’s Special Branch, working in political and military intelligence. My job was extracting information from people. As I read Beyer’s story, my blood boiled. Here was a man who was doing what he was because of his faith. And the people who were persecuting him were supposed to be Christians! How could this be? Suddenly, the penny dropped: Lawrence, in Rhodesia, you were on the other side!

Life fell apart in an instant. How could I have been involved in something so profoundly anti-Christian? How come my parents - or school - or church didn’t tell me it was wrong? Worse, why did they encourage me in my “god-given duty” to protect Christian civilisation from the march of godless, atheistic Communism? And, when they had all failed me, how come God (to whom I spoke at length every day and listened to through reading the Bible) didn’t let me in on the fact?

My slow, painful quest to rebuild my faith and theology began. And the question that hammered at me with agonising insistence was, “How can it be that so often the Church is part of that from which the world needs saving?” How do we live and build a world that is a sign of God’s grace and God’s kingdom, rather than one which leads people to believe that resurrection has never happened? Who is the real Jesus? And what would the Church look like and be like if it was the institution God intends it to be?

When the disciples asked Jesus how to pray, he taught them to pray, “Your kingdom come - which means, ‘Your will be done on earth’”. What that means in our contemporary world is what this blog’s about.