ASHBURNHAM SESSION 1 - PHILIP MOUNSTEPHEN
Ashburnham Session 1: Rediscovering the Church
Please note that this introductory session was delivered with an accompanying power point presentation. Due to temporary technical difficulties, this presentation cannot be displayed on this blog at this time. We are working on it and will post it as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.
Back in AD 313 the Emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, which officially removed all obstacles to the practice of Christian faith within the Roman Empire. It was only a few years later that Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire – and what had a been a religion of a minority – often oppressed and persecuted - became the religion of the majority, enjoying eventually a position of tremendous privilege, prestige and power.
That made a profound difference to the way the church practiced its ministry in Europe and the West. A difference of the most fundamental kind. It ushered in a period which we know today as Christendom – a period which lasted well into the lifetimes of many of us – though the cracks appeared long before that. It was a period in which the law was founded on explicitly Christian principles, in which the values and the story of the Christian faith had a profound influence on people at all levels of society. It was a period in which people were essentially assumed to be Christians unless they very deliberately opted out – in which case they could expect to find themselves up before powerful courts for heresy or treason. It was a period marked by a remarkable consensus about what was good and right and true. It was also a period in which despite major social change, the ministry of the church changed very little. Mission was something that happened in other countries. The ministry the church exercised in the west was essentially a pastoral ministry, bringing care to those it considered to be its members even if it actually saw them very rarely.
But things have changed, fundamentally and radically. Not every church has caught up with that fact yet, but I hope it’s not news to us. We live in a fundamentally different world. We live in a Western world that intellectually and morally has largely turned its back on the Christian faith. That is fundamentally not true in many parts of the world, and in many ways you can say that Europe is out of step with the rest of the world. But it is certainly true of Europe – of the UK, of Australia, of France, if less so of the States, that the Christian faith, and Christendom, is by and large a thing of the past, that the church is an irrelevancy.
I have the great privilege of living just a few hundred yards from the Place de la Concorde in Paris – the place that was once called the Place de la Revolution where both Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, along with thousands of others were guillotined. The great Chinese communist leader Chou En Lai was once asked what he thought the impact of the French revolution had been, and he replied that it was too early to say. But the radical secularism that drove the revolution undoubtedly now holds sway in the west. And it is often militantly anti-Christian – witness the recent writing of Richard Dawkins.
And that is the world in which we go about our business as the church; that is the world in which we are called to share the Christian faith; that is the world we are called to witness too. And it is a fundamentally different world to the one in which many of us grew up. But unless we understand this world, how it is, how it thinks and how it works, we cannot hope to exercise effective ministry and mission in it.
Perhaps for the first time since the Edict of Milan we are beginning to live in a world not all that different to the one the early church lived in. It’s a world the little church in Ephesus would have been very familiar with. It was probably from Ephesus that the apostle John was sent to Patmos because, as he says in Revelation, of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus. In other words, John was exiled from Ephesus for being a Christian and for exercising Christian ministry. We’re not there yet, but maybe not too far away we might be.
So the world of the church in Ephesus and the world we live in might not be that dissimilar. They may well have much more in common that the centuries of Christendom that lie between them.
Now there are two possible ways of reacting to such a changed situation. We can become angry of Herne Hill (or Paris) and write letters to the Times (or Le Monde). We can simply decry things, and wish sentimentally for a past that is just that – in the past. Or we can get to know this new world we’re living in, and re-examine what it means to be the people of God in such a situation. And that is much the better thing to do. In this context we can have the humility to question some – maybe even many – of the ways we’ve had of being church. We can rediscover what it means to be Church. And because we’re that much closer to the world of the NT than maybe our grandparents world was, we can re-engage with the scriptures to discover afresh just what it means to be the people of God – and we’re going to use the first half of the letter to the Ephesians to do just that this weekend.
Now in many ways the church in recent days has been doing a lot of that self-examination. The Mission Shaped report that came out a couple of years ago has been a modest best seller – and certainly outstripped any other General Synod report (not that it’s had much competition). Rediscovering mission is back on the churches agenda – and that’s great. In an increasingly hostile intolerant world, we need to be about the business of the Kingdom, announcing the reign of God: we need to re-orientate ourselves for mission. The world around us doesn’t want us to pastor it any more. Just like the Church in Ephesus we need to be in business of bringing the good news of Jesus to a world to whom it makes very little sense. Evangelism was once upon a time a question of calling people back to a faith they fundamentally knew about. But now we are sowing in very different soil. But we must be sowers of the seed. Once upon a time mission was a subset of Christian ministry, an occasional activity of the church. But it’s the other way round now. Christian ministry is a subset of the great mission of God to a lost world, a mission that he calls us to participate in. So part of our urgent agenda for the future needs to be to rediscover our cutting edge in mission. The church exists for the mission of God.
And yet at the same time I wonder if there isn’t another aspect of the life of the church that we have to come to terms with, and take with the utmost seriousness – recognising that if we don’t we’re likely to be very ineffective in mission. And to illustrate what that aspect is, I’m going to tell you a story….
[ppt]
About 8 years ago = took over residential activity hol. – some trepidation – how could it get any better?
1st year – thought: that was really good! Why? Many ingredients…
But seemed to be more than the sum of its parts. Then it struck me – what we had done, unwittingly- was to build community. That’s why it was so hard for kids and leaders to leave. Breaking bonds of community.
Next year, we set out to be much more intentional about building community.
It struck me – two specific dynamics which govern community [click].
External constraints – on a res. hol – timetable, rules and regs, health and safety, child prot policy. [click x 4]
And they are important constraints. No community can do without them. But not whole story
There’s another important dynamic which governs community [click] – not just those things which control it from without, but the things that shape it from within.
And for us, seeking to build Xn community these were values such as accountability, care, support, justice, compassion and above all love [click x5]. These are internal dynamics which are much more powerful than the external ones in hold community together – they are the real glue that keep us together.
And these are the internal dynamics [click] – stand in contrast to the external constraints In any human society you cannot do without laws and rules – boundaries are always necessary. But external constraints are never enough – and the best example of a society that is simply controlled by the constraints of law is a prison – and we didn’t want to be that. So we on our holiday set about consciously relying less and less on the external constraints – on the rules and regulations - and sought to rely more and more on the internal dynamics instead.
And the real challenge for Christian communities is to allow themselves to be shaped by the dynamics of the gospel: really and genuinely to be gospel communities. And that’s the challenge we’ve sought to meet on our holiday over the years.
And s’thing really signif happens when we focus less on the external constraints of law [click x2] and more on the internal dynamics of love [click x2]
We find that the boundary becomes less and less important. It’s in a prison that the boundary is of supreme importance. In communities shaped by grace the boundary matters less. It’s not the boundary that defines the community so much as what’s going on at its heart.
So we find that the boundary becomes increasingly porous, the edges become fuzzy. [click x 4]. And that shouldn’t surprise us. The more the community is shaped by the gospel, the more missionary the community becomes. Not only is it easier to go out from the community with the good news, but it’s also easier to come into. We find that the boundary between the Christian community and the host community becomes blurred – and that shouldn’t worry us because it’s these internal dynamics which give the Christian community its identity and integrity. Communities that sit light to law but major on grace and love are warm welcoming and attractive places to belong to, easy places to join, missional communities we can expect to grow.
Year after year at the end of our holiday – yp ask – why can’t church be more like this?
Year after year – fobbed them off with excuses. Until I decided not to do that any more. Perfectly reasonable question. Churches should be more like this: churches should be shaped by the dynamics of grace; churches should be all that the gospel is – warm welcoming and attractive places, places of love and places of grace: gospel communities not just in name, but in reality. It’s my passion that they should be such places – that’s certainly what we’re seeking to do in Paris.
Let me just give you another little illustration using of the church – Robert Warren – Building Missionary Congregations… three circles in balance
George Lings – reality: circles out of balance.
Challenge to bring them back into balance – and we do that I believe by rediscovering the joy and wonder of Christian community – by rediscovering the Church.
Three quotes that express the excitement of being Christian community, apassage that gets me out of bed in the morning and that captures something of the joy of Christian community. The joy of Christian community I hope we can recapture not just in our learning but in every aspect of what we do this weekend.
Please note that this introductory session was delivered with an accompanying power point presentation. Due to temporary technical difficulties, this presentation cannot be displayed on this blog at this time. We are working on it and will post it as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.
Back in AD 313 the Emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, which officially removed all obstacles to the practice of Christian faith within the Roman Empire. It was only a few years later that Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire – and what had a been a religion of a minority – often oppressed and persecuted - became the religion of the majority, enjoying eventually a position of tremendous privilege, prestige and power.
That made a profound difference to the way the church practiced its ministry in Europe and the West. A difference of the most fundamental kind. It ushered in a period which we know today as Christendom – a period which lasted well into the lifetimes of many of us – though the cracks appeared long before that. It was a period in which the law was founded on explicitly Christian principles, in which the values and the story of the Christian faith had a profound influence on people at all levels of society. It was a period in which people were essentially assumed to be Christians unless they very deliberately opted out – in which case they could expect to find themselves up before powerful courts for heresy or treason. It was a period marked by a remarkable consensus about what was good and right and true. It was also a period in which despite major social change, the ministry of the church changed very little. Mission was something that happened in other countries. The ministry the church exercised in the west was essentially a pastoral ministry, bringing care to those it considered to be its members even if it actually saw them very rarely.
But things have changed, fundamentally and radically. Not every church has caught up with that fact yet, but I hope it’s not news to us. We live in a fundamentally different world. We live in a Western world that intellectually and morally has largely turned its back on the Christian faith. That is fundamentally not true in many parts of the world, and in many ways you can say that Europe is out of step with the rest of the world. But it is certainly true of Europe – of the UK, of Australia, of France, if less so of the States, that the Christian faith, and Christendom, is by and large a thing of the past, that the church is an irrelevancy.
I have the great privilege of living just a few hundred yards from the Place de la Concorde in Paris – the place that was once called the Place de la Revolution where both Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, along with thousands of others were guillotined. The great Chinese communist leader Chou En Lai was once asked what he thought the impact of the French revolution had been, and he replied that it was too early to say. But the radical secularism that drove the revolution undoubtedly now holds sway in the west. And it is often militantly anti-Christian – witness the recent writing of Richard Dawkins.
And that is the world in which we go about our business as the church; that is the world in which we are called to share the Christian faith; that is the world we are called to witness too. And it is a fundamentally different world to the one in which many of us grew up. But unless we understand this world, how it is, how it thinks and how it works, we cannot hope to exercise effective ministry and mission in it.
Perhaps for the first time since the Edict of Milan we are beginning to live in a world not all that different to the one the early church lived in. It’s a world the little church in Ephesus would have been very familiar with. It was probably from Ephesus that the apostle John was sent to Patmos because, as he says in Revelation, of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus. In other words, John was exiled from Ephesus for being a Christian and for exercising Christian ministry. We’re not there yet, but maybe not too far away we might be.
So the world of the church in Ephesus and the world we live in might not be that dissimilar. They may well have much more in common that the centuries of Christendom that lie between them.
Now there are two possible ways of reacting to such a changed situation. We can become angry of Herne Hill (or Paris) and write letters to the Times (or Le Monde). We can simply decry things, and wish sentimentally for a past that is just that – in the past. Or we can get to know this new world we’re living in, and re-examine what it means to be the people of God in such a situation. And that is much the better thing to do. In this context we can have the humility to question some – maybe even many – of the ways we’ve had of being church. We can rediscover what it means to be Church. And because we’re that much closer to the world of the NT than maybe our grandparents world was, we can re-engage with the scriptures to discover afresh just what it means to be the people of God – and we’re going to use the first half of the letter to the Ephesians to do just that this weekend.
Now in many ways the church in recent days has been doing a lot of that self-examination. The Mission Shaped report that came out a couple of years ago has been a modest best seller – and certainly outstripped any other General Synod report (not that it’s had much competition). Rediscovering mission is back on the churches agenda – and that’s great. In an increasingly hostile intolerant world, we need to be about the business of the Kingdom, announcing the reign of God: we need to re-orientate ourselves for mission. The world around us doesn’t want us to pastor it any more. Just like the Church in Ephesus we need to be in business of bringing the good news of Jesus to a world to whom it makes very little sense. Evangelism was once upon a time a question of calling people back to a faith they fundamentally knew about. But now we are sowing in very different soil. But we must be sowers of the seed. Once upon a time mission was a subset of Christian ministry, an occasional activity of the church. But it’s the other way round now. Christian ministry is a subset of the great mission of God to a lost world, a mission that he calls us to participate in. So part of our urgent agenda for the future needs to be to rediscover our cutting edge in mission. The church exists for the mission of God.
And yet at the same time I wonder if there isn’t another aspect of the life of the church that we have to come to terms with, and take with the utmost seriousness – recognising that if we don’t we’re likely to be very ineffective in mission. And to illustrate what that aspect is, I’m going to tell you a story….
[ppt]
About 8 years ago = took over residential activity hol. – some trepidation – how could it get any better?
1st year – thought: that was really good! Why? Many ingredients…
But seemed to be more than the sum of its parts. Then it struck me – what we had done, unwittingly- was to build community. That’s why it was so hard for kids and leaders to leave. Breaking bonds of community.
Next year, we set out to be much more intentional about building community.
It struck me – two specific dynamics which govern community [click].
External constraints – on a res. hol – timetable, rules and regs, health and safety, child prot policy. [click x 4]
And they are important constraints. No community can do without them. But not whole story
There’s another important dynamic which governs community [click] – not just those things which control it from without, but the things that shape it from within.
And for us, seeking to build Xn community these were values such as accountability, care, support, justice, compassion and above all love [click x5]. These are internal dynamics which are much more powerful than the external ones in hold community together – they are the real glue that keep us together.
And these are the internal dynamics [click] – stand in contrast to the external constraints In any human society you cannot do without laws and rules – boundaries are always necessary. But external constraints are never enough – and the best example of a society that is simply controlled by the constraints of law is a prison – and we didn’t want to be that. So we on our holiday set about consciously relying less and less on the external constraints – on the rules and regulations - and sought to rely more and more on the internal dynamics instead.
And the real challenge for Christian communities is to allow themselves to be shaped by the dynamics of the gospel: really and genuinely to be gospel communities. And that’s the challenge we’ve sought to meet on our holiday over the years.
And s’thing really signif happens when we focus less on the external constraints of law [click x2] and more on the internal dynamics of love [click x2]
We find that the boundary becomes less and less important. It’s in a prison that the boundary is of supreme importance. In communities shaped by grace the boundary matters less. It’s not the boundary that defines the community so much as what’s going on at its heart.
So we find that the boundary becomes increasingly porous, the edges become fuzzy. [click x 4]. And that shouldn’t surprise us. The more the community is shaped by the gospel, the more missionary the community becomes. Not only is it easier to go out from the community with the good news, but it’s also easier to come into. We find that the boundary between the Christian community and the host community becomes blurred – and that shouldn’t worry us because it’s these internal dynamics which give the Christian community its identity and integrity. Communities that sit light to law but major on grace and love are warm welcoming and attractive places to belong to, easy places to join, missional communities we can expect to grow.
Year after year at the end of our holiday – yp ask – why can’t church be more like this?
Year after year – fobbed them off with excuses. Until I decided not to do that any more. Perfectly reasonable question. Churches should be more like this: churches should be shaped by the dynamics of grace; churches should be all that the gospel is – warm welcoming and attractive places, places of love and places of grace: gospel communities not just in name, but in reality. It’s my passion that they should be such places – that’s certainly what we’re seeking to do in Paris.
Let me just give you another little illustration using of the church – Robert Warren – Building Missionary Congregations… three circles in balance
George Lings – reality: circles out of balance.
Challenge to bring them back into balance – and we do that I believe by rediscovering the joy and wonder of Christian community – by rediscovering the Church.
Three quotes that express the excitement of being Christian community, apassage that gets me out of bed in the morning and that captures something of the joy of Christian community. The joy of Christian community I hope we can recapture not just in our learning but in every aspect of what we do this weekend.
posted by Parish Administrator at 12:23 pm
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