Lawrence
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. That is something I explore in my other blog.
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.
It is the preacher’s task to break open the new worlds of the biblical texts. The purpose of preaching is to announce the Good News of Immanuel – that God is with us, saving and transforming this world into the Kingdom of God. 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.