by Lawrence on November 25, 2006
What’s the difference between a vision, wish-fulfilment, blind optimism, hallucination and derangement? I ask because I’ve run “vision days” for churches in which I know what they’ll come up with: a church full of children, with people dropping in and wanting to join, full rotas, full bible study and prayer meetings … in other words, “Bring back the glory days!” And why is that wrong - if it’s wrong? I think it is. I think that is a case of nostaligia and wish-fulfilment. It’s driven by an inability to cope with the radical changes in society that have seen the Christian Church plummet not only in public affection but in the sense that the Church matters or is valuable. What most church people can’t cope with is that the Church has simply become irrelevant. Oh - and the other thing that makes me doubt it’s a vision is that I know exactly what they’ll come up with beforehand! There’s nothing new, surprising or difficult about it.
So what makes a vision a vision? It seems to me that it is about new possibilities under God. Now of course, that opens up the sense that anything is possible - cos it’s God we’re dealing with! But vision is not the same as “blue sky thinking”. We don’t start with a blank sheet of paper. We start with a particular group of people within a particular context. A vision, then, has to do with possibilities for us - for the people we are. If we’re all over 70, it’s no good having a vision of us starting an enormously successful “camp for Jesus” campaign by having a week’s retreat on a snow-capped mountain! A vision takes account of our limitations. The possiblities that we discover under God may be deeply surprising - but they won’t be outlandish.
For instance, we can’t have a vision of the URC suddenly becoming an Emerging Church. It ain’t gonna happen! People who have been Christians and church members most of their lives aren’t going to be turned on by new, very different forms of worship and spirituality. But the URC might become a place that facilitates emerging forms of church - that funds, resources, encourages and nurtures them. That’s one thing I hope and pray for, anyway.
So what are the possibilities for the URC - or indeed, any mainline churches?
by Lawrence on November 20, 2006
If you had one vision - just one - with which you’d like to infect the church, what would it be? A group of us are meeting at the Windermere Centre from Monday 20 November - Thursday 23 November to brainstorm our vision for the United Reformed Church. We’re doing it in the conviction that the URC has reached a kairos. We’ve got to get this right now, because if we miss the boat this time, there ain’t gonna be a next time. It’ll be an exciting and important time.
The point is that we can’t carry on as we are. If we do, we will simply die - quite literally of old age! We’ll be about half the size we are now in 5 years’ time. It’s noticeable, too, that with an ageing church comes associated issues about energy, physical abilities and capacities for communicating across the gap between church and non-church people.
That’s what we will be doing. So what’s your vision for the church?
by Lawrence on June 7, 2006
Here's something to read: the Archbishop of York's letter to The Guardian, and an article by Fran Beckett about the Church and social exclusion. One of the things we're bad at as churches is blowing our own trumpets. Now, that's an obvious virtue. But what's the balance between blowing our own trumpets (hiss! boo!) and proclamation (hooray!)? We are in the business of proclaiming Good News. Good News in a Christian sense doesn't exist as some sort of free-floating message. It is Good News - Gospel - to a world governed by Bad News. It has to become incarnate, which means that it needs to take shape on the ground. The Good News about Jesus is not about escaping to heaven but about heaven coming down to earth. It is about our reality being transformed - our world becoming the kingdom of God.
There's a direct relationship, in other words, between our disciplehip of and faith in Jesus and our actions in the world - between proclamation and mission. To be a disciple of Jesus Christ is to be involved in God's story of salvation for the world. That is why we do what we do. We cannot neglect either aspect of it. The missiologist, David Bosch, distinguishes helpfully between evangelical dimension and evangelical intention. Not everything we do is explicitly aimed at calling people to faith in Christ (intention). But everything has an evangelical dimension because it is intimately connected to the story of God in Christ.
A vital part of mission is therefore always to make explicit the connection between what we do and our faith. The task of proclamation is to establish the congruence between our living and acting in the world in the light of the kingdom, on the one hand, and our faith that God has acted in Christ to save the world. That is when our actions to combat social exclusion, feed the hungry, clothe naked, comfort the suffering and liberate the oppressed truly become the Good News of Jesus Christ.
by Lawrence on July 10, 2005
Too many discussions of Emerging Church are still underpinned by a desire to be successful. If "success" means growth, then the hard facts are that most churches grow at the expense of others, because we are not so much conecting with people who have nothing to do with Christian faith as competing for a market share of people who are already Christians. Church as it is is getting to the point where we are exhausting the list of people "on the outside" who are interested in "joining" Church.
If the vision to be caught is of a Church that is simply more successful than before in wooing disaffected Christians, it's one we ought to avoid assiduously! There are enough churches presently catering for "already Christians". If we have a justifiable reason for existing beyond our existing shelf life, it must be because we are finding ways of connecting with the vast majority of those for whom the Gospel is clearly not Good News. When we create spaces for them to find faith and join the community of faith, we will find ourselves changing organically. That's when we start to become the Church of Tomorrow!
