One of the things that the whole fresh expressions story has, I think, helped many of us to see more clearly is that we need to push away the notion of church as simply something to which people sign up in one go and in one way. And we are discovering, sometimes discovering the hard way, just how complex, how varied, people’s journeys are towards the heart of church because those are journeys towards the heart of God’s purpose – if my starting point here is right. And journeying towards the heart of God’s purpose is really quite a long business; in fact it’s one you never come to the end of. Literally never.
But I think that helps us a little bit in looking at how the church does, as a matter of fact, take something of the shape we usually think about in the New Testament. And if we read the Gospels I’d want to say with some emphasis that the Church begins where Jesus is with others and exactly how it shapes up to be something more like what we usually mean is quite a story but it begins with that encounter.
And as we read the Gospels what we see of course is an extraordinary spectrum of different kinds of encounter….
Nice thought. This mixed ecclesial economy notion is not unlike (paraphrasing) what Mark Twain said of Christianity, “Christianity is a wonderful thing. Too bad no one’s tried it yet.” I prefer to call it an ecosystem, BTW.
I have heard of this notion of “walking alongside” before; it comes from Sweden, of course, where the Church of Sweden manifests and instantiates the future of the Church of England. See my interview of a conservative Swedish pastor (from 2000) here:
http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=13-06-035-i
and particularly Dr. Sandahl’s discussion of the views of the then Archbishop of Uppsala (from 1997 to 2006), Karl-Gustav Hammar:
WT: And what of those on the other side? What is their view of the future of the Church of Sweden? Do they have a collective view of what the Church of Sweden will stand for in its new circumstances, the role that it will fill in society?
DS: Yes. The Church will be “Mrs. Walker,†walking alongside the Swedish people, walking not so much with answers as with questions: “We will share their questions and we will discuss them, not prescribing the reality, but discussing what we can see.†That is the church as “co-walkerâ€â€”that is what the archbishop says about it.
WT: One can talk about being “co-walkers†with the people, but if the people suddenly decide to become racists, if they suddenly decide to become like the Austrians are now caricatured: anti-immigrant, hostile to outsiders, what then? A people can go in almost any direction. We were speaking about postmodernism earlier today, and about how it enables people to indulge their desires without too much concern for principles or consistency, so that anything becomes possible. Do they really mean what they say, and all that it implies, when they talk about “walking with the people†as the church’s role?
DS: Yes. The archbishop is a full-fledged Postmodernist, although that doesn’t go for all the bishops. There were four bishops on the Doctrinal Committee—all thirteen bishops are members of it—who made a quiet attempt in a very modest way to present an alternative view, at least as a way that the Church might develop in another direction, but they lost. I think it is significant that the other nine were of the same mind as the archbishop; it shows that even theology is fully controlled by the archbishop. His views are now proclaimed as the path for all.
Read more: http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=13-06-035-i#ixzz1N5XfmAjH
Rowan’s address is mainly mush, as usual. For many years he seems to have held the view that wooly language is a substitute for real theology.
He needs to sit down and learn at the feet of Jewel and Bunyan, rather than just dropping their names.