This is part of a series of posts based on the Churches Together in England publication one light: one world. If you click on the link you will find the biblical texts. This post of the same name covers the purpose of this series.
Psalm 95: 1 - 7
This and three previous texts are meant to illustrate, as far as CTE is concerned, 'The Unity of God's People'. I find these texts rather unconvincing. I don't find nationhood theologically helpful and the last two, whilst moving onto more helpful ground, don't really lead me anywhere meaningful.
This last text in the sequence presumably invites us to see Christians worshipping the same God together. The (Jewish) community for whom this was written will have found this helpful, they were a real, not metaphorical, nation.
When I read this in the context of unity, it reminds me of our divisions. This is one kind of worship for one kind of people. It is not my worship or any other Christian's. The ways in which we worship tend to divide us. From disagreement about what constitutes a good hymn (or song) through to the politics surrounding the eucharist, worship divides.
The frog croaks, the bird sings. We don't believe their prayers are devalued because we like the noise of one but not of the other. We worship according to our dispositions. Genuine worship is accepted by God, whatever it is. The problem is where we find we cannot enter whole-heartedly into another's worship. But is it so difficult to find at least a little common ground?
This is the example promised in my last post. I write as a Methodist looking into a troubled sister communion. It is time I addressed this issue because it has profound implications for English ecumenism.
The Church of England, and indeed the worldwide Anglican communion, has made a tremendous contribution to ecumenism. This is largely due to their catholicity. It is hard to imagine (or at least it used to be) Anglicanism without their brand of catholicity. For many decades, if not centuries, Anglicanism has functioned as a compromise between Catholics (outside the Roman Catholic Church), evangelicals (who can be traced back to the seventeenth century Puritans) and a liberal tradition which seems to have arisen through eighteenth century latitudinarianism, although it may go further back than that.
These traditions were held together by an ingenious system which included the Book of Common Prayer and was embedded in the structures of the church. From time to time, groups could not be contained and, around the start of the nineteenth century, perhaps the most serious split was with the Methodists.
To me, as an outsider, the loss of this catholicity amounts to the loss of Anglicanism. Some might respond with 'good riddance' but I think this response needs to be examined carefully. I have written about how my own Methodist tradition contributed its organisational approach to the rising working classes from the impoverished industrial poor in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
In a similar way, the Church of England, has had an immense influence on a state which has itself been a compromise between many traditions. Secularism in England is based upon the historic Anglican compromise. Different Christian traditions and indeed other faiths today, co-exist and their coexistence is based upon the Anglican catholic compromise.
This is what the Anglican Covenant debate is about. If the Anglican communion were to disintegrate, the implications in Britain and all over the world would be profound. In my next post I will write about what I understand is happening.
Towards the end of a recent post, I suggested we need to add formation to mission and unity, in order to comprehend the three legs of the ministry of the churches.
Without mission, the Gospel will not be experienced.
Without formation, Christians are ill-equipped for mission and people who hear and respond will find little or no support and are likely to fall away.
Why is unity also essential? The traditions are nothing if they are not lived. I realised only recently the extent to which I have been formed by singing traditional hymns. Hymns I remember finding incomprehensible a few decades ago make sense today. I don't remember this happening; they have grown into my consciousness over many years. This is why Methodist hymn books are important to my tradition, they are approved by conference after a long process to ensure they reflect Methodist doctrinal standards.
Christianity is an incarnational faith, known not through words on a page (scripture, hymns, prayer books, creeds, etc) but through life experience. As we live, we unpack and learn to use the contents of the Christian storehouse as presented to us through our own tradition and others.
So, when we consider unity, we consider relationships between several expressions of the same faith.
We tend to make mistakes of two types. One is to make absolute claims for my own tradition and the other is to insist all traditions should be the same. Indeed, upon analysis these are almost the same mistake. The former cuts itself off from the others and the latter claims all should join together on negotiated terms. Both tend to impose a single approach.
These two tendencies have been identified by Yung Suk Kim's boundary protected and boundary overcoming communities; he suggests a third approach, apocalytic community, that seeks reconciliation rather than structural unity. I have visited these themes several times.
So, why is unity essential? I will address this in my next post.
Contextual theology considers every tradition to be formed through a conversation between a particular time and place and the Christian faith. It does not cover solely those faith traditions, eg black, feminist, liberation, Asian, etc that differ from those of Western Europe. The growth of new traditions is natural for a living faith. Faith is not just words on paper but lives lived in many contexts and the insights shared are a small part of what is experienced on the ground.
Given this natural diversity, catholicity is essential for Christian unity. However, it does not imply all traditions are equally valid. The point is (1) all traditions are lacking, and (2) no-one knows for certain the frailties of either their own or anyone else's tradition. Receptive ecumenism addresses this in its exploration of exchanges of gifts between traditions, where each tradition seeks from others what is lacking from its own.
The mainstream traditions are compromises between a variety of traditions who determine to collaborate despite their differences. Their purpose is threefold (at least) - mission and unity, of course, and also spiritual direction. In the Roman Catholic traditions this is known as formation; in the Wesleyan traditions as sanctification.
John Wesley was not only the greatest evangelist since St Paul but also a skilled spiritual director. He saw the need for spiritual direction amongst the new urban poor and he set up the structures (Methodist societies) whereby the poor could be spiritual directors for each other. Formation was at the core of the early Methodist movement.
And I would maintain it is just as essential today as it ever was. When the evangelicals of the 1970s found Methodism wanting, they took the wrong road. They separated themselves into purist groups and focused on evangelism. It had disappointing results because it failed to form its converts. It failed to form its converts because it did not trust the wider Methodist Church. Today, Methodism's evangelicals seem to have recognised the importance of formation within the church.
Evidence of the importance of formation can be seen in the work of Father Christopher Jamieson of Worth Abbey. I have written before of his BBC TV programme 'The Monastery' in 2005 and the book that followed it, 'Finding Sanctuary'. Recently, he has fronted another BBC programme, 'The Big Silence' which once again demonstrated the hunger people have for God, even some who do not recognise God exists.
We need therefore to recognise three legs to the churches' ministry; mission, unity and formation.
I've taken the excursion into evangelicalism in my last two posts because the problem I identified towards the end of the last, is common to all aspects of mission. Perhaps evangelism is most prone to making absolute truth claims as it is a means of proclamation of the Word of God. There are dangers associated with being right and this is something we all need to acknowledge.
Whilst all Christians bear witness to the cross and resurrection, there is no single evangelical message, but many traditions who all carry an element of the truth only known fully to God.
I am not advocating relativism. I'm not arguing evangelists or others involved in mission should in any way water down their message. Our witness is distinctive in all its varieties and no point is served by watering it down.
Perhaps I can best approach the problem by returning to the theme of mission and unity. It is quite difficult to get hold of why unity is essential to mission. I can make this claim but many independent churches, who brook no contradiction to their message and so do not seek to collaborate or perhaps even recognise other Christians, can point to their evident success. 'You say unity is essential to mission, well we don't water down our message through collaboration with other (so-called) Christians and look at how fast our church is growing'.
I might argue radical atheists point to divisions between the churches (especially divisions which led to war) and so if we were united, their argument would be baseless. Unfortunately, this argument doesn't stack up.
Let's look at it another way. Absolute truth claims cause disunity. A casual exploration of blog posts about ecumenism will reveal how many Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox Christians reject ecumenism on the grounds their own version of the faith is the right one. Given there are several absolute claims, it is difficult to see how anyone unfamiliar with the Christian faith is meant to choose between them. Of course, they don't choose. They encounter one tradition and join it, discovering the others later.
The major traditions are catholic. I've written about this before and it is important to understand how each tradition has its own version of catholicity to offer to the others. Catholicity happens when a tradition no longer finds it needs to be absolute. Catholicity enables each tradition to put down its own roots, whilst at the same time being open to stimuli from other traditions. The rooted tradition deepens the faith of its followers but is not closed to being enriched thorugh encounters with others. This allows an element of accountability, as traditions both support and challenge each other.
Mission is not a competition between traditions. The Edinburgh 1910 conference delegates recognised the need to rationalise the competition taking place between traditions in the mission field.
Diversity happens when the Christian faith is incarnated in particular times and places. (The map shows worldwide distribution of Catholic (yellow), protestant and Anglican (purple) and Orthodox (cyan) churches.) We can choose to proclaim our own tradition as the one true version or we can see our tradition as one version of the same faith amongst many others. If faith is genuine, it will always grow into something new because the Christian faith is not words on paper but many living traditions.
This leads me to think mission and unity belong together but there is a third element we rarely seem to consider. I'll describe it in my next post.
A recent issue of the New Statesman (19 July 2010) has led me to think about the relationship between secularism and ecumenism. This special issue of the New Statesman was about 'Godless Britain'. (It seems the New Statesman has found that issues fly off the shelf when the cover is about religion. The Labour Party leadership contest never generated quite so much excitement!)
Here is a quote from an article by Terry Sanderson, President of the National Secular Society, on page 25:
... these [secular] constitutions [US, Turkey, India] have a common aim: to protect religion. By not permitting the establishment of any particular faith, secularism seeks to ensure that the state cannot be used as an instrument to persecute minority religious communities, and that no religion can be imposed by law on an unwilling populace.
This raises three issues:
The contribution secularism has made to ecumenism needs to be acknowledged. It seems the groundwork that led to the 1989 new ecumenical instruments in Britain, was laid centuries ago as legislation slowly came round to protect the interests of all branches of Christian faith. It has been a slow path from the wars of religion to the point at which churches are, if not united, at least reconciled.
So, why have the churches allowed atheists to claim themselves protectors of secularism? They should embrace this commitment to protection of religions from the state. This allows the churches to live side by side and so be more credible.
Third, it leads us to look beyond the Christian faith and enable Christians to engage as equals with people of other faiths.
Some Christians might argue this is going too far. Who does the secular state think it is, to dictate policy to the churches? If this is a view some hold, it is our own fault for allowing the churches to lose touch with the benefits of secularism. Churches should lead the way, not fight against it.
I suspect another objection would be the secular state should not legislate on the agenda of the churches. Leaving aside whether there is in truth a Christian political agenda, the real question is whether the churches as churches should be able to legislate on behalf of all people. There is no bar to Christians joining political parties and contributing to planning legislation within them.
If Churches did have direct access to legislation, it would tend to divide the churches. There would be no consensus over Christian legislation and those churches that did not agree would walk away.
It seems upon reflection the modern accord between churches is still fragile. If that is so, it is interesting that it is the secular state that holds the churches together.
(The map shows secular states in red, states with state religions in yellow and the gray are undetermined for one reason or another.)
human nature makes us concoct explanations after the fact.
I haven't read his book but it certainly looks as if it might have something to say to the churches. Perhaps during the twentieth century, the churches were able, to some degree, to separate themselves from the catastrophes of church history. I suspect the third point still holds sway (the sign of the historic episcope being one example of explanations after the fact).
Taleb writes:
I explained in the book that the best teachers of wisdom are the eldest, because they have picked up invisible tricks that are absent from our epistemic routines and which help them survive in a world more complex than the one we think we understand.
He identifies three aspects of natural systems which make them robust:
redundancy - if there is a disaster, systems with redundancy are more likely to survive. They may be disadvantaged in normal times by the costs of carrying the redundancies but this is compensated when things become extraordinary.
diversification - the more complex things are the more likely they are to survive. So, a country that specialises in one commodity is more likely to go under in a crisis.
smallness - small things that are self-contained don't bring down everything else when they are in trouble. Lots of little things are inherently more robust.
The obvious question is whether the quest for unity is likely to be good for the church. It was the urge to tidy up financial systems, to introduce efficiencies, to ensure everyone subscribed to the same ideology that brought the system down. If all believe the same thing, where does accountability come from?
This is not a topic I know a great deal about and so I'm preparing this post as a request for help tracking down material for future exploration.
Usually we think of ecumenism as an exercise in ecclesiology. We seek unity between churches, denominations or traditions. This is a formal approach to unity. It involves negotiated agreements between traditions.
My question: does culture have a role creating divisions or supporting unity between Christians?
Inculturation is the process whereby cultures that pre-exist the arrival of the Christian message, take it on board. Traditional missionary activity perhaps tried to introduce western traditions into places. Today the focus is upon cultures interpreting the faith in their own way, although I suspect this is something of a generalisation.
Does culture simplify or complicate the quest for unity? If our major divisions are between the continents, so Anglicans on one shore have more in common with Catholics on the same shore than they have with Anglicans an ocean away, does this mean the quest for unity must be harder? I'm thinking for example of the differences between African and American Anglican churches over sexuality. This is a well known example but there must be others where Christian cultural traditions are growing further apart. To what extent, does culture account for the differences between African and American Anglicanism, rather than theological emphases or tradition?
Or perhaps as Roman Catholicism, a single tradition, can embrace cultures all over the world, unity between very different Christian cultures is possible. The success of this church, with its centralised Magisterium, may imply all Christians should be a part of it but this would deny the witness of many Christians who seek freedom to worship outside of a centralised authority.
And what about local cultural differences? Do inner city churches in Britain have more in common with each than with rural or suburban churches in the same city?
How does culture influence the ways we express our faith?
One further point. Unity or reconciliation? This topic resonates with the idea of a global church. Where are the voices who are not heard? Can Christians on the margins, whose voices are not heard, find solidarity with each other? Or do they face one another through veils of incomprehension?
Consultancy for Mission and Ministry This should take you to details of the Consultancy for Mission and Ministry course at the York Insititute. See my post about non-directive consuultancy around 9 September 2009.
Image by B A Bowen Photography via Flickr
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