Anglo-Catholic Mission
Oct. 29th, 2005 04:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yrieithyddI drafted this post on the train going down to London for the memorial service for Br Roger, in the week after the 13th Sunday after Trinity. I then typed some of it up, but never posted it. I think for now I'll leave the question hanging at the end, but there should be a follow on. The thing that amused me was just after I wrote this, I was working back through my journal entries and came across this post from the 13th Sunday after Trinity last year! I suppose it means I'm consistent!
Almighty God,
who called your Church to bear witness
that you were in Christ reconciling the world to yourself:
help us to proclaim the good news of your love,
that all who hear it may be drawn to you;
through him who was lifted up on the cross,
and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
It is (part of) the Church's vocation, her calling, to bear witness to God's reconciling work. This involves proclaiming the Good News of his love. Of late, it seems to me the Anglo-Catholic wing of the CofE in particular, and non-evangelicals in general, have been rather week in this.
There are exceptions to this; one that springs to mind is the Taizé community. There young people from all over Europe are drawn in to a life of worship, prayer, Bible study and manual work and on into an encounter with the Risen Lord.
Another exception was shown by the recent BBC2 TV programme The Monastery where four very different men spent forty days at Worth Abbey, a Benedictine Monastery, and again through prayer, work and silence, with the aid of a monastic guide, learnt to confront questions about God, themselves and living with others.
But, those are notable exceptions and too many of us seem prepared to sit back and moan about the way in which evanglicals approach evangelism which puts us off, let alone non-Christians we think, without knowing how to go about this proclaiming of God's reconciling love.
One thing which struck me about the monks of Worth Abbey was thei confidence. The question posed at the start of the series was whether this milennium-old rule of life had anything to offer in this modern day and age. It seemed to me that the monks were confident that it did -- and if the Gospel is true and the Rule is true to it as Benedict intended, then yes it does! Because they were confident and trusted in God to meet each man where he ws, the space was created for this meeting. There were no pat answeres and conflict was not shied away from but rather confronted and worked through. It was an impressive piece of television; all the more so because the producer wasn't afraid of silence either.
That confidence is something which seems to be lacking from much of our Chrsitian witness today. Even the evangelicals, for all their emphasis on evangelism seem to lack it. The noise and black and white/right and wrong answers seem to be a veener over a faith which is desparate to believe but does not quite trust God to be there, to be true, to be bigger than our words about him. That same lack of confidence appears elsewhere and at least the evangelicals have the confidence to speak out.
We have the liturgy, the litugical year and a long tradition of hymnody which tell the story of God's reconcilng, redeeming work but we shy away from it, worrying that people find it boring and try and entertain them and the priest becomes more of a stand up comic than a preist offering the Mass. We shift from hymns and music the congregation knows and can sing to modern stuff which we might not like but we feel might appeal to young people. The result is badly sung music which appeals to no-one. I still think that a congregation singing music it knows well and enjoys is more powerful than them trying to sing something alien.
Trying to be relevant doesn't work! If you have to try then you aren't! But that doesn't mean that we have nothing to offer. But The Monastery showed how Christianity is relevant, does have something to offer to people today.
We're apologetic about faith. We don't want to offend or imply others might be wrong. But eith Jesus Christ died ont he corsss and rose again and put and end to death by dying for us, or he didn't and our faith has been in vain and we of all people are most to be pitied.
Our world is broken and God acted to healt it and calls us to co-operate in that healing.
Yes, the Church has a times been too dogmatic, too ready to pin God down and say `believe or burn' (indeed there are still parts which are like this) but we musn't throw the baby out with the bath water.
`God was in Christ reconciling himself to the world' He loves us and accepts us. We can be healed, saved, made whole. This is Good News!
Well ranting here is all very well, but how do we do this? How do we change the negativity, stop merely managing decline and co-operate with God in his reconciling work?
Prayer has to be at the heart of it, but we have to let that prayer change us and listen to what God is calling us to do and learn how to discern that! We also have to trust God to act and not try and constrain him to do what we want, to act as we think he should. The wind blows where it will after all.
But what can we do?
who called your Church to bear witness
that you were in Christ reconciling the world to yourself:
help us to proclaim the good news of your love,
that all who hear it may be drawn to you;
through him who was lifted up on the cross,
and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
It is (part of) the Church's vocation, her calling, to bear witness to God's reconciling work. This involves proclaiming the Good News of his love. Of late, it seems to me the Anglo-Catholic wing of the CofE in particular, and non-evangelicals in general, have been rather week in this.
There are exceptions to this; one that springs to mind is the Taizé community. There young people from all over Europe are drawn in to a life of worship, prayer, Bible study and manual work and on into an encounter with the Risen Lord.
Another exception was shown by the recent BBC2 TV programme The Monastery where four very different men spent forty days at Worth Abbey, a Benedictine Monastery, and again through prayer, work and silence, with the aid of a monastic guide, learnt to confront questions about God, themselves and living with others.
But, those are notable exceptions and too many of us seem prepared to sit back and moan about the way in which evanglicals approach evangelism which puts us off, let alone non-Christians we think, without knowing how to go about this proclaiming of God's reconciling love.
One thing which struck me about the monks of Worth Abbey was thei confidence. The question posed at the start of the series was whether this milennium-old rule of life had anything to offer in this modern day and age. It seemed to me that the monks were confident that it did -- and if the Gospel is true and the Rule is true to it as Benedict intended, then yes it does! Because they were confident and trusted in God to meet each man where he ws, the space was created for this meeting. There were no pat answeres and conflict was not shied away from but rather confronted and worked through. It was an impressive piece of television; all the more so because the producer wasn't afraid of silence either.
That confidence is something which seems to be lacking from much of our Chrsitian witness today. Even the evangelicals, for all their emphasis on evangelism seem to lack it. The noise and black and white/right and wrong answers seem to be a veener over a faith which is desparate to believe but does not quite trust God to be there, to be true, to be bigger than our words about him. That same lack of confidence appears elsewhere and at least the evangelicals have the confidence to speak out.
We have the liturgy, the litugical year and a long tradition of hymnody which tell the story of God's reconcilng, redeeming work but we shy away from it, worrying that people find it boring and try and entertain them and the priest becomes more of a stand up comic than a preist offering the Mass. We shift from hymns and music the congregation knows and can sing to modern stuff which we might not like but we feel might appeal to young people. The result is badly sung music which appeals to no-one. I still think that a congregation singing music it knows well and enjoys is more powerful than them trying to sing something alien.
Trying to be relevant doesn't work! If you have to try then you aren't! But that doesn't mean that we have nothing to offer. But The Monastery showed how Christianity is relevant, does have something to offer to people today.
We're apologetic about faith. We don't want to offend or imply others might be wrong. But eith Jesus Christ died ont he corsss and rose again and put and end to death by dying for us, or he didn't and our faith has been in vain and we of all people are most to be pitied.
Our world is broken and God acted to healt it and calls us to co-operate in that healing.
Yes, the Church has a times been too dogmatic, too ready to pin God down and say `believe or burn' (indeed there are still parts which are like this) but we musn't throw the baby out with the bath water.
`God was in Christ reconciling himself to the world' He loves us and accepts us. We can be healed, saved, made whole. This is Good News!
Well ranting here is all very well, but how do we do this? How do we change the negativity, stop merely managing decline and co-operate with God in his reconciling work?
Prayer has to be at the heart of it, but we have to let that prayer change us and listen to what God is calling us to do and learn how to discern that! We also have to trust God to act and not try and constrain him to do what we want, to act as we think he should. The wind blows where it will after all.
But what can we do?
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no subject
Date: 2005-10-29 04:17 pm (UTC)There seems to be a general lack of confidence in this country in dealing with anything. I sometimes think churches should run the
Talk without Ceasingtime to talk of God, as a way of building confidence in the things that we have. We've got to the point that everybody is scared. And there's people like me that are scared to shut up, and people that are scared to open their mouths.no subject
Date: 2005-10-29 04:22 pm (UTC)Where did I say that it didn't?
no subject
Date: 2005-10-29 04:27 pm (UTC)Muswell Hill have done so as well.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-29 04:28 pm (UTC)Part of my feeling is that we should continue to do what we do. Relevance doesn't necessarily come from changing our worship styles. But we should also be continually listening. If the service time is impractical, or the people can't understand because they aren't given hymn books or Bibles or things like that, then we should address them. But everyone is different so different people are drawn to different forms of worship. That's the beauty of the diversity we have in the Church.
Personally I didn't find worship as what drew me into the Church. It was one thing I stuck at in order to find out more. Though hymnody was something that I found very important, that it gave me access to music that I'd never had before (I think I'm quite musical in a way but with no training have never had a chance to express it). In essence it's a bit difficult to worship a God you don't know about so you end up being something of a bystander.
On the church weekend away a few weeks ago I talked to L, someone who I'd never met before. It turned out that she hadn't been to church before, but had been invited on the weekend by someone else. I think the weekend affected her greatly - she was in tears a number of times. She's now coming to church regularly, not only as a result of that but also due to spending time with other members of the congregation.
It seems to me that it's what the church does during the rest of the week that's important, not what happens on Sundays. I was almost in tears earlier reading the liturgy for the Goth Eucharist - it seems to me that's a very powerful form of worship made relevant to a group of people who traditionally are a long way from the Church. And then maybe those people will come along to a Sunday morning service to see what the rest of the church is about.
In other words we have to meet people where they are. Sometimes we have to break down a whole bunch of barriers before they'll ever think of going near a church... but that's still progress. So the first thing we have to do is listen to what the needs are.
I'm always a little uncomfortable about missionary letters which say things like 'XX people confessed Christ'. Obviously that's a significant step forward and is a useful metric to put in a letter, but it's one tiny aspect of the bigger picture which is unmeasurable. So we shouldn't worry too much about the results of our work, but listen to God and listen to people to find out what He wants us to do.