Exploring Ecumenism

Elements of Mission 4: Obedience

Elements of Mission is a term used by Timothy Radcliffe at the CTE Forum a few weeks ago.  I have previously discussed his thoughts on doctrine and morality and added my own about community.  Before I finish I will add one more of my own; obedience.

Why?  I suppose Radcliffe's reference to Sachs on obedience brought this to mind.  In my last post I briefly mentioned the word obey does not feature in Biblical Hebrew.  This means the concept only appears in Aramaic and common Greek scriptures.

Elements of Mission 1: Community

Over the next few posts I will comment upon the three elements of mission Timothy Radcliffe suggested at the CTE Forum recently.  Here they are:

1. Community
2. Doctrine
3. Morality

Radcliffe had a great deal to say about the second two and virtually nothing to say about the first because it presents no problem for our culture.  So, that is where I will start.

Praying Together

Someone mentioned the other day that an appetite for united prayer has taken Christians by surprise.  I'm not quite sure what was meant by this but I thought it would be worth exploring the theme and to see what I could find.

The obvious place to start is the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.  This is an international movement and started in 1908.  It is an octave (8 days) towards the end of January in the northern hemisphere (the southern hemisphere are usually on vacation at that time and so choose other dates).  Since 1968 the World Council of Churches has produced an annual booklet for churches.  The 2010 booklet is available and covers the centenary of the 1910 Edinburgh Missionary Conference, usually seen as the start of modern ecumenism.

On the Ecumenical Nature of Trees

Timothy Radcliffe at the CTE Forum last week likened the Christian faith to a Whitebeam, outside his window.  As always I develop the points he made and so not all that follows is Radcliffe's.

Churches Together in England Forum 2009

Yesterday I returned from Churches Together in England's Forum.  This body of about 300 people meets every three years and provides guidance to CTE about the state of the churches.  The theme this year was Changing World: Changing Church? 

I attended the last Forum in 2006 and dipped into the Forum in 2003; this time I noticed a change in mood.  I was not the only person to feel this and I will try to write a few lines about my take on what was happening.

Arguments For and Against Ecumenism

I received a comment the other day which asked for positives and negatives about ecumenism to enable the reader to come to a conclusion.  I'm not sure I can achieve the last part because ecumenism is in its nature something we all have to make a decision about.  The aim of this post is simply to suggest some things you may wish to consider if you are unsure about ecumenism.

Using the Pastoral Cycle

I first encountered the pastoral cycle during my study year, 1981-2, at the Urban Theology Unit.  In those days theology was still seen as something studied at university and the idea of 'doing theology', as an activity available to all, was new and exciting.  Central to this was the idea of praxis, that interaction  between action and reflection at the heart of the pastoral cycle.

Ecumenism and Science 2: Telling Stories in a New Cosmos

Newtonian Cosmology underlies modernism and also modern theology.  This context for ecumenism may account for the drift since the 1910 Edinburgh Mission Conference (which linked mission and ecumenism) to a strong emphasis on structural unity, culminating in the 1982 failure of the English Covenant.  The Newtonian view sees ecumenism as a problem to be solved rather than as a way of life.

Life on the Knife-Edge: Organisations

To be honest I've misplaced my notes, hence a couple of days respite from Christ's Body in Corinth.  But I think it is worth pausing for a while over this idea of 'life on the knife edge'.  In every age there are Christians who choose to live there and so are to some degree estranged from the mainstream churches. 

Fresh expressions and some house churches are examples.  Some still see themselves as part of a traditional church.  Others position themselves outside of any tradition.  In the Bible we see phrases such as 'new wine, new wineskins; or the image of the seed dying to bring forth new life.

The bonds between members of established congregations can be very stable.  Social capital theory calls this bonding capital.  Much of this is not exactly factional but will appear to be a close-knit community, difficult to access from outside.  Bridging capital happens where bonded communities begin to form relationships with other bonded communities.  This is what we tend to think of as typical local ecumenism.  I think life on the knife-edge happens where Christians choose to take a step further and make a commitment to reach out to the marginalised. 

Complexity theory is the study of what happens at the interface between order and chaos.  I will be exploring this further in a future post but I think it may help us understand the knife-edge to be at the interface between the ordered life of mainstream churches and the world of the marginalised. 

So, John Wesley brought together the first Methodists at the interface between Tory Anglicanism and the new industrialised poor.  These people were beyond the margins of the church and Wesley provided them the organisations they needed to engage with wider society.  Wesley was so successful he expressed fears that the Methodists would become too middle class.

Note this was never intended to be some sort of developmental process, moving the industrial poor over the knife-edge (into societies, classes and bands) and on into the middle classes.  Wesley saw his organisations as the main activity for his movement; they were meant as an end in themselves, not as stepping stones to affluence.

There is a tendency for such movements to gravitate to some absolute version of truth.  As they do so they always begin to marginalise groups who in some way embody the antithesis of what they see as the demands of truth.  Truth on the knife-edge between fragile alliances of people always comes across as some sort of compromise.  The Kara Project in South Bank, near Middlesbrough, is based explicitly on unconditional love; however people live, whatever they have done, they are loved without judgement. 

The demand that Christians be perfect would kill a project like this stone dead.  For marginalised people, in all their diversity, to be included a path has to be found around the demands made by a chaotic array of lives and moralities.  But note absolute truth is a world away from Wesley's understanding of Christian Perfection.  That post and the one following are worth reading because they describe perfection not as an endpoint but as a process.  Through sanctification we become more perfect but never perfect.  The knack is to stay on the knife-edge because it is there that perfection happens.

For marginalised people life on the knife-edge can be seen as the route to affluence.  But for many it is a congenial place to continue to be.  The Dark Holy Ground experience for example led people to say that now they understood long term unemployment to be the best thing that had happened to them.  They experienced no change to their material circumstances but a complete transformation of their lives.

Unity and Exclusion

Kim's message is that the type of unity we seek is what is important.  By seeking a unity based upon one way of being Christian we will end up with factions bolstered by an ideology of perfection.  On page 6, Kim writes:

People of the same culture flock together for worship and social cohesion and often remain in their comfort zones and build walls that exclude others.  The poor and the unfortunate become estranged and hopelessly marginalised because the dominant conception of the community is too narrow to embrace them. 

To be fair, mainstream churches have strategies to avoid this.  The dilemma for ecumenists is that they tend to be drawn into seeking a reconciliation of structures, rather than a reconciliation of practice.  Paradoxically, the larger churches have to accommodate a variety of approaches, and they do this in a variety of ways.  It is unarguable the Roman Catholic Church is an extremely diverse church.  It is local churches that tend to be monocultural. 

One problem for Methodists in Britain can be found in debates around fresh expressions.  They are needed because many people find mainstream Methodism too narrow.  They cannot find a place to fit in.  So, fresh expressions selects certain groups, of usually younger people, and develops new congregations (and later churches) for these groups. 

This seems to work reasonably well until the transition from congregation to church takes place.  To become a church poses the question, which church?  To be Methodist implies being a part of the circuit system and on paper this could be a solution to the tendency for fresh expressions to draw on only one culture.  By being part of the circuit with churches from other cultures, the church is made more diverse.  The problem is most fresh expressions do not want to be a part of a circuit.

And yet fresh expressions can overcome the trend to single culture churches and become something inclusive.  A good example is Somewhere Else in Liverpool City Centre.  This is a Methodist Church and part of a circuit.  It meets on Tuesday and Thursday mornings in rooms above a feminist bookshop.  It is Methodist but draws Christians from other traditions and is based around baking bread.  Over the time they have been joined by homeless people and have developed work with victims of sexual abuse.  Some years ago when they asked for funding they said they did not want too much because being on a knife edge kept them radical. 

Perhaps there is a clue here that the constant battle to keep going is sustained for so long as those involved are committed to keeping going.  It is impossible for anything to be perfect under these circumstances and so a real diversity can flourish.  I will explore this further over the next few days before returning to Kim's book.