Categories: uncategorized
Date: 02 June 2012 11:07:06
John Bell's Greenbelt 2008 talk Faith in a Failing Church is a challenging look at church in all its senses and at all levels but primarily focuses on local congregations and our relationships with them in a Post-Christian, increasingly secular world.
To anchor the talk he began by showing that the paradigm Alan Hirsch and others (whom he didn't name) have used which seeks to frame our current western situation positively in terms of a exiles wilderness experience is floored. (If you're not familiar with this view I would highly recommend Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post Christian Culture). The alternative wilderness paradigm which Bell promotes is based upon Numbers 13 and 14 where the spies who act as the advance party going into Canaan reject the land by a majority of 11:1 and end up making the people want to return to Egypt rather than face their fears of the future. In this case the wilderness experience comes as a result of God stopping people going back but also stopping them going forward until all the naysayers had died off. The question that is raised through this passage for Bell is "Are we failing to accept the future and wanting to retreat back into a mythical church of the past which existed only in our minds? Is this why we are currently in a wilderness?"
He then goes on to analyse secularisation. In doing this he looks firstly at the quantitative data and says if taken at face value - from an ethnocentric perspective -it does indicate the church is declining. However he then goes on using Adrian Hastings study on the North of England as an example to make a similar argument to that made by Gill and others in this area. That argument is that secularisation has occurred, but the even at the height of religious attendance in this country there were fewer people going to church than the buildings we have would lead us to believe. The statistics we base our assumptions on are unreliable and inaccurate.
He then moves on to identify groups who have been excluded from traditional church counting techniques. Whilst the most recent church census data has been amended in some ways to try and include more of these groups the point remains that some attenders will be invisible. After this he goes on to describe how our perceptions of church growth and decline are ethnocentric and based upon Western Christianity. He makes the point there are many countries in the global south where growth and change are occurring. Within this section he mentioned the country of Nepal and gave a positive story relating to movement. Looking on the Methodist Website they have a link to the current situation in Nepal where political instability is increasing and whilst it is not directly relevant to this discussion I am putting in a link as a prayer point. He then goes through a few stories which link quantitative church growth to qualitative growing in discipleship.
His overall argument in the above section appears to be yes secularisation within the UK and other countries in the global north is occurring but there are aspects of growth appearing within these countries and large scale growth elsewhere. His attention then turns to some of the arguments used about both the problem and the solution. His key theme here is relevance.
He begins by pointing out how when the church has appeared most relevant it has actually been compliant with the state and involved in atrocities. The two key examples he uses are the Spanish Inquisition and the churches condoning of the slave trade. He follows up by saying we don't worship a God of success or of relevance, we worship a God who sometimes calls his church to be counter-cultural and prophets speaking from the periphery.
Then he changed tack and said all churches are failures. To begin illustrating this he pointed out in some areas things now are not as bad as they were. He points out about racism and patriarchy being problems of the past - giving some examples of norms within our churches 30 odd years ago which we would now view as disturbing. He makes the point they were failures for our churches in terms of being against the gospel way of living and that we have now moved on from those. The key point is that we are communities of grace - we can make mistakes and be forgiven for them (or atleast that's the theory).
A key point he made is that Jesus never started the church, he foresaw it and charged an illiterate fisherman to do so - because he understood being filled with the spirit is more important than being able to play by the rules. Pentecost he points out was not about God giving rules, it was God causing confusion. The bible talks of diversity and building communities which are diverse - that's what Pentecost was about.
He then gets to the core of the problem about the churches problem with responding to secularisation - where there is church there is power and most of us get sucked into it all. People are lured by power but we don't talk about it much. Power can sometimes be a blessed thing, but often it has beleaguered us according to Bell. He then inserted a comment about the gay debate which whilst welcome was, I thought, not relevant to the talk.
He moved quickly from this onto worship styles and the fact alot of our worship traditions are based around the fact many worshippers in the 16th and 17th century were illiterate. He talks of the need for us to change some of our language use and worship style to make it appropriate to the time and culture we are in.
The final part of the talk is to recap on the key points and challenges which can be summed up as we need to allow ourselves to be led by the Spirit to think and act differently; to find the right church for us and stick for it - rather than becoming church hoppers. We have to be aware God and good experience are not synonymous and that prophetic witness will sometimes will involve blessing some whilst upsetting others.
In terms of critiquing this I'm reluctant to too much for the simple reason I think Bell is right in much - if not all that he says. Yes there are apparent paradoxes in parts of what he says particularly about the need to both be and reject being relevant but he is talking a message I really believe the church needs to hear - particularly at this time.
In many but not all denominations and churches in this country the fact is that the impact of secularisation and the demographic make up of our congregations hitting at the same time as the current recession is such that reviews of all sorts are taking place and changes are having to be made pretty quickly. We may not want to change but we have to - in this change we need to listen to God's Spirit and then we need the bravery to act on it. Something is happening in our country and God appears to be calling several parallel groups of people into ministry. There are the entrepreneurs who are breaking down alot of traditional boundaries. There are those who have been partnering existing ministers for some time and then there are the ? or wtf dysfunctionals. In terms of the last lot some fit into church but some of us don't. At the moment I think something is happening with people wrestling with what God's calling of the latter category means and wtf do you do with us? Being part of the latter category with the journey that some of you have been following this talk inspired and energised me and made me see a bit of what might be going on with God calling a bunch of people who are not natural polite, public and civic representatives but have a real calling to get on with it in communities - sometimes amongst the people who churches struggle with.