(Inklings One, Two , Four and Five)
To continue at last, to develop my ideas about the mission of the church in rural England. I write from a different place now, as one employed part time and very short term, as a parish priest. I began thinking about rural mission from the outside, watching the deanery clergy so overwhelmed by the demands of the church that they could hardly hang onto the vision which had brought they to this vocation. It is one thing to stand and see the wood, and another to walk in the gloom and darker beauty that is sustaining the institution. I hope that theory and practice can have some bearing one on the other
I began this series, as my own thinking, by asking what sort of God we present in our churches, a God of self revelation which humanity responds to with delight, and in an attempt to systematise so often encloses in green pasture, well fenced by boundaries of more or less rigid dogma. God in mercy redeems our attempts at enclosure and breaks forth time after time in new acts of self-disclosure which stretch our minds, our hearts and our compassion so that we continue as individuals and as church to be transformed into the likeness of Christ.
In my second thoughts I wondered about our buildings, and the nature and importance of sacred space and places. I raised questions about how our buildings offer a welcoming place to those who live in, and to visitors to the parish.
In this third and following few pieces I would like to explore four particular attributes which I have come to use as markers for the mission of the church. I have taken words which are fairly commonplace in Scripture and in Christian thinking, and used them as one might those summaries of revision notes, key words to be unpacked and carefully defined in conversation towards understanding. For me in this context the words have come to carry particular importance and meaning which I have become familiar with. You will forgive me I hope if my exploration of that meaning makes too many leaps into various assumptions that I have made, I will try to remember the process by which I came to these interpretations, and make it clear as I go along.
At the time of my research my relationship with God was central to the whole of my life: prayer was an ongoing conversation, reading the scriptures a regular habit, fellowship with believers a life giving practice. I was teaching our young children that every meal is eucharist, and every day an occasion for revelling in glory. All that I did and thought started from a relationship with God – not constant spoken prayers, or self conscious piety. It was more simple than that: I loved God, and all that he had become to me, and wanted to find ways to share the joys of living that I experienced. We lived in a village. I wasn’t going to have many friends as a constant preacher, or much understanding if I banged on about God all the time, especially in the light of the ordinariness of church life. It was a matter of living with the vicar’s wife label, and trying to make it a bit more human, and a lot less about how to slice a tomato. (A previous vicar’s wife was described to me as one who knew just how many ways to slice a tomato.)
It is not surprising then that my starting point for mission was and still is the nature of God, and the relationship between God and us, which is the only way we come to define the nature of God. We have a God who delights to make Himself known: the story line shows this: walking with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day, calling Noah to a task of salvation, meeting with Abraham in his tent, appearing to Moses in the burning bush, to the whole people of Israel on a Mount Sinai, filling the temple with glory so that the priests could not even minister, speaking through the prophets, through the life of a nation to other nations, and ultimately speaking to us in human language, through the life, death and resurrection of one man in one place at a particular time in history.
God is one in relationship in his own being as Creator, Sustainer and Redeemer. That relationship of love and self-giving first overflowed at the act of creation. The Big Bang is one thing, but the thought of God who filled all things and was complete in themselves, drawing back the skirts of his being to make a space for that which was not God: that is generosity in the extreme.
Then such a God would not only create, but go on to seek a relationship with that which is made in the image of God is fundamental to our faith.
My own moving from the practice of religion in daily school assemblies, and school Sunday services towards a personal faith was initiated by a fellow pupil at school who seemed to live at peace with herself, and then finding a group of people who not only had something to do on a Sunday morning between church and lunch, but had about themselves an attractive peaceableness. I don’t mean that they were quiet and polite and well behaved. It was more that their lives had a centre, a point of focus. Their way of living was attractive and so God became noticed as attractive too. Of course, now I come to think of it, there had been moments before when God had been attractive: in desperation praying for freedom from prep school, at sunrise glorying in life. Meeting these people, peers who were the same but different provided a point where previous experience and present longing could come together and be examined. In time I came to confirmation and to the start of my own more constant and living relationship with God.
Now to my horror and amazement people look to me and find something of God’s image. Others would testify in the same way. I heard it again only last week: People are often drawn to God by something centred about another follower of the way. (It is peculiar is it not, and bears thinking about another time that it is not only Christians who are attractive in this way.)
Relationship is key to our mission, to our reason for living. We all know of the awful state of those babies and children brought up without opportunity for a life giving relationship with another human being. They do not learn how to interact, or who they are, or how to communicate. We become ourselves in interaction with those around us as we grow.
We come then to our full selves by relationship with the one in whose image we are formed. This I have come to call holiness, which is my first attribute of the church in mission.
In this sense holiness is the demonstration by a church of living in relationship with the divine. In worship, and in fund raising (even coffee mornings), in regular and occasional offices, in being part of the community, and in prophetically challenging that community the church is called to demonstrate holiness: as a right relationship with God.
Before God we cannot be arrogant in our beliefs and suppositions. We are made in a space given by one who fills all in all. How can we then have the cheek to make ourselves important in anyway.
But we can be confident in who we are in Christ: dearly beloved, and valued beyond life itself.
Before God we cannot be sure that we have the only grasp of the whole truth: our experience is of one who breaks out beyond our understanding, not of one who is confined by doctrine. That is a movement towards not a summary of faith seeking understanding. Coming to the stark sentences of the creed after the eloquence of sermon is very good grounding.
Before God, before the cross, before an empty tomb we can only stand in thanksgiving and wonder, in praise and adoration, and moving on with one another in the light of such generosity gives rise to a love and unity which is the most eloquent testimony to the God to whom we bear witness.
Dan Hardy speaks, of a right dynamic of holiness, wisdom and polity. He rehearses the attraction of the holy far more eloquently than I can, and reminds us that our worship, even within the fragmentation of the human condition is that participating in the fire of holiness which energizes our living. Hardy’s writing with David Ford in Jubilate, as well as his subsequent books God’s Ways with the World and Finding the Church are inspiring ways to continue this exploration of the mission of the church, and the tension of living in holiness.
I hope that it won’t take me quite so long to get round to sharing my ideas of the other three marks of the mission of the church.
Sarah Cawdell lives in Shropshire with her husband and three teenage children.