Reflections and Photographs: Sabbatical

As my mini-Sabbatical draws to a close, what shall I take with me into the future?

It has been a joy for Mandy and I to be together so much over the past month.

We have made many new wonderful friends and met many wonderful people. These are just some...

I have seen the slums of Chennai and this challenges my lifestyle...

As I have learnt, many new agendas have opened up. The following are but initial thoughts to signpost further thinking.

1 A deepening conviction of the scandal of denominationalism. Disunity is, to use Newbigin's analogy, like a drunken meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. Our task is to point to Christ. If the church is divided, we point to a divided Christ. In Foolishness to the Greeks (145f) he states that denominationalism is the religious aspect of secularisation, the social form in which privatization of religion is expressed. A federation of denominations is not enough, if we are to confront the secularisation of society. Movements like 'Heart fro Harlow' are signposts to true unity. But the focus on relationalism is perhaps a foretaste of what that unity might consist of, as against formalities that in themselves undermine the church. I note that though CSI arose from a formal scheme, it arose out of close networking in mission over a prolonged period, and involved great flexibility, such that the wider church as not sure at the outset whether to recognise it. I perhaps need to reflect further on the basis of the CSI.

Lesslie Nebigin writes in Honest Religion for Secular Man, p 118

It is a very parody of mission when divided churches go to a new people or a new community and seek to reproduce there their own divided existence.

The CSI Cathedral in Chennai, where the CSI began

2 An ongoing desire to see our culture more and more though the eyes of others. I will seek to read more from theologians from outside the European / North American sphere. I have seen the value of this in my Sabbatical. I have come to value afresh and more deeply Newbigin's insights and can see how these have come about. I have a sense of UK Christianity as very parochial in the context of vibrant worldwide church.

3 A fresh commitment to evangelism. I see how this is something that must and can be addressed by the church at large. Individual churches are of course where most evangelism will be rooted, but resourcing and co-ordination by the wider church can have a massive impact, as I have seen.

The Chapter 'Being God's People' in his Honest Religion for Secular Man sees Newbigin addressing many of the issues I have been feeling my way towards in earlier blogs. This needs my further attention, not least his analysis of the Christendom model of church (which assumes a Christian society in a land where we meet one another less and less) as against the missionary model in the Indian village, as I observed. I note how his words are very relevant to 21st century Harlow though written well over 40 years ago.

I note the following at p105:

I have said that in the New Testament the Church is depicted as a body of people chosen by God and trained and empowered for a missionary task. It is a task force which exists not simply for the sake of its members, which would be absurd, but for the sake of the doing of God’s will in the world. The visible structures of church life which we have inherited from the corpus Christianum of mediaeval Europe do not correspond very obviously to that description.

p106: In the great majority of European towns and villages the church building is no longer the centre of a Christian society. It is a place to which a small minority of the people who desire these things may repair for worship, teaching and fellowship. It is not a place of training for the penetration and occupation of a foreign society. It is not an instrument of mission. It says ‘Come’, and there are some who accept the invitation; it does not say ‘Go’. It may conceivably support missions, but it is not itself a mission

p111: The Church is a congregation, set to draw all men of whatever kind into one family. But it is also a mission sent to the nations, that is to say, sent to men not as isolated individuals, but to men in the full reality of their cultural, social, economic life as men. For the fulfilment of that mission it is not enough to say ‘Come – all are welcome’. It is also necessary to go, to leave the establishment behind, to make daring experiments in seeking to learn what it means to live the life of Christ in every one of the idioms and patterns of the myriad human communities.

and at p120: There can be no final escape from the truth that the Church, if it is to be the faithful witness of man’s true end, must be recognizable in the world as one family, as a household in which men of every sort can be at home because it is the Father’s house. It must find the forms of unity flexible enough to allow for the freedom of missionary experiment in all the different sectors of the human community, and yet strong enough to make variety a source of enrichment and not of conflict. The more seriously we take the missionary principle that Christians must be ready to go into every human situation, accepting that kenosis without which there cannot be a true incarnation of the life of Christ in a new community, the more necessary will it be that the bonds of unity are strong enough and flexible enough to hold all together.

4 An affirmation of my conviction that deeds and words go hand in hand in the work of mission ('Soup, Soap and Salvation'). In mission we witness to Christ, in whom this was supremely true. This is rooted not in an ethical gospel (though the gospel is that) but in a Kingdom theology whereby we know that Christ has met and masted the powers that enslave this world and that the has been give. The real foretaste of this Kingdom in the gift of the mighty Spirit of God (Newbigin, The Gospel in Pluralist Society, 136).

A deepened valuing of church schools would be one particular result of this for me,

5 A clarity as to the value of a secular Public Square which affirms all religions and their contribution to debate etc (the Indian model; I am not sure how far this has ever been the English model which has tended to privatise religion) as against Secularism, which seeks to exclude issues of faith.

Newbigin in Honest Religion for Secular Man noted how secularisation in India was achieving things for which missionaries had fought. Indeed, he notes that the missionary has been the agent of secularisation. Thus in a brief period in India has occurred what has taken hundreds of years in Europe. The speed of change in India, amongst other things, means that the missionaries's legacy is still remembered and valued. He also suggests that the process of secularisation is a new phase in the movement by which the biblical prophetic engages with the total claims of a sacral society (p30), as I always has. This is part of our deliverance in Christ from the elemental powers. "It has often been said in India... that it needs Christians to keep the secular state truly secular. I think this is true." (p76).

This is of major interest in public debate at the moment in the UK. This quote from Julian Gaggini is of interest, favouring the model I suggest, though as I say above, I am not sure if he correctly represents UK secularism as it has been 'on the ground', historically...

It all goes back to how we understand the core secularist principle of neutrality in the public square. Neutrality means just that: neither standing for or against religion or any other comprehensive world-view. That is why in theory, if not in practice, the United States is both culturally the most religious country in the developed west and constitutionally the most secular. There, it is clearly understood that the value of secularism is that it allows all faiths to practise freely, without any enjoying a special place at the heart of power. That explains why when I once took part in a panel discussion with a Southern Baptist, one of the most conservative of denominations, he was as enthusiastic about secularism as I was.

Why then in Britain has secularism become seen to be hostile to religion? Because neutrality is too often assumed to require the bleaching out of all traces of faith, excluding religious belief and discourse from public life. But it doesn't, and we can see why by appeal to the notion of public reason, articulated most clearly by the late political philosopher John Rawls. Rawls was quite clear that the religious have no obligation at all to keep their faith entirely to themselves. "Reasonable comprehensive doctrines, religious or non-religious, may be introduced in public political discussion at any time," he wrote, "provided that in due course proper political reasons – and not reasons given solely by comprehensive doctrines – are presented that are sufficient to support whatever the comprehensive doctrines are said to support."

Incidentally, Newbigin notes that a prophetic spirit which denies its affirmation of the power of God is ultimately self-destructive. But the task is not to question secularisation but to bear witness in this new situation. He also notes how the process of secularisation helps the church rediscover its nature as a missionary community as the identification of church and state is stripped away

6. I want to reflect further on CS Lewis' insight as to paganism as against secularism. The pagan is aware of the sacred nature of creation; the secularist is focused on self. CS Lewis approach to paganism is helpful here. It is interesting to apply his words in the context of Harry Potter, and Christian discussion some years ago.

Some of the discussion in Lamin Sanneh's book, Whose Religion is Christianity,49ff, is of interest in this regard.

7. Teaching the valuing of the tradition of the church (not in the sense of modern traditions of worship, but rather a sense of being part of the ongoing history of the People of God in Christ.) "Christian discipleship, like all human activity, is embedded in a tradition and cannot be Iived apart from that tradition." - Proper Confidence, Lesslie Newbigin, 87

C.S Lewis' perspective that although new ideas are now always bad, we must always ask, 'How does modernity impact the human condition'? challenges the mood of our times, when new is, broadly, better. (See his poem, On a Vulgar Error).

He also writes of how the coming generation cuts itself off from the values of the past, anticipating the literary theory of deconstruction and the impossibility of meaning. See C.S.Lewis poem, Re-adjustment and C.S. Lewis: Fantasist, mythmaker, and poet, p 270, by Bruce L. Edwards.

I wonder: does evangelicalism add to this tendency through its stress on the converted heart. India showed me the importance and vitality that comes from distinctiveness, and this in turn comes from being part of a 'tradition'. Evangelicalism at the very least needs to recover or find a sense of the corporate, so that conversion is understood as being incorporated into Christ in all His fullness, including the Body of Christ in its historic sense. We need to discover that same sense of being part of a tradition which formed the Israelite and Jewish people, as evidenced for example in Psalm 106, and in many, many other places.