First post of the year... Let's just say that 2013 has got off to a frenetic start. Anyway, as is my custom, here's my piece from the church magazine that will be hitting the chairs on Sunday. Although it is focused on Bromley, I think it applies more widely.
We were sitting downstairs in Costa on a cold Tuesday
morning, warming our hands on Americanos: a retired catholic layman, a
Pentecostal woman who works for the council, an Anglican priest and me. We’d
met to pray for the night shelter and having done that we were chatting.
Ann said something along the lines of Bromley being unlike
anywhere she’d lived in that the churches were so up for working together. We
all raised our eyebrows. Others asked why and we fell into a conversation about
cooperation and being able to put aside the issues that divide us and focus on
what we can do together.
It reminded me of a conversation I’d had right at the start
of my ministry. It was with my director of training at what was then called
London Bible College. Nick Mercer, a Baptist minister who has since become an
Anglican priest and now serves as a Bishop’s chaplain in central London,
remarked that it was interesting that I was going to Peckham because it was
‘the networking capital of the Christian world’ by which he meant churches and
Christian leaders worked well together.
Following Ann’s comment in Costa’s basement, I fell to
thinking about what it is that leads to some places being better than others in
this matter of Christians working together. I’m not sure I’ve arrived at any
great insights but I think what we have in Bromley is worth celebrating – as we
did recently at the joint service at the start of the week of prayer for
Christian unity. But more than that, I think it might be worth asking what God
is saying to us at Bromley Baptist Church about how we see the future shape of
our mission here.
We highlighted five ministries at the joint service at the start of the week of prayer for Christian unity – night shelter,
Foodbank, JusB, street pastors and the chaplaincy – that were started by
individuals who wanted to see the local churches mobilised in response to a
specific need. Each of these – of which Foodbank is the most recent – work
because Christians from across the churches come together and work to achieve
specific goals in our community.
What is remarkable about these projects is that Christians
from a whole range of traditions and denominations are able to come together
and focus on the task in hand without feeling the need to agree a theological
agenda beforehand. In many ways that agenda has already been given to us
clearly in scripture; in Titus 3:14, for example: ‘let people learn to devote
themselves to good works in order to meet urgent needs, so that they may not be
unproductive.’ Paul has already outlined in Titus 2:11-16 that the goal of our
being brought to faith in Christ is that we become a people who are zealous for
good works. Doing demonstrates that our faith has a distinctive contribution to
make to our neighbourhood.
What many of us have found as we have worked together with
people from other churches is that what we have in common is so much more
important than what might divide us. Now I don’t want to downplay doctrinal
difference and emphasis. I am a Baptist, after all, by conviction, not by
accident; I have chosen this form of churchmanship after prayer and study and
in response to what I know to be the leading of God.
But I can work with Christians who do not share my
convictions because we recognise that Jesus calls us to action on behalf of
others. For too long Christians have lived in silos, doing their own thing in
their own way and the losers have been our neighbours in need whose needs have
gone unmet.
As Paul reminds us, those needs are urgent, whereas dotting
doctrinal ‘i’s’ and crossing theological ‘t’s’ isn’t. What has been brilliant
about churches together is that we have been able to create opportunities for
those needs to be met in ways that have enabled countless Christians from all
our churches to lead productive, fruitful and fulfilling lives.
So, I wonder what this says to us about the decisions we
need to be making this year about the future direction of our own church. One
obvious thing is that we need to redouble our efforts to support those projects
that are already up and running and are showing God’s love to our neighbours in
practical and tangible ways. But can we go further?
Are there ministries that would be better done across
churches rather than within individual communities? Can we offer programmes for
our young people, our senior citizens and others that span more than one
church? This would be a way of pooling resources at a time when they are tight
for every church; it could also be a way of responding more creatively and
imaginatively to the needs of these groups both within and beyond our churches.
It seems that there is an open door for effective and
cooperative mission ion our town. Let’s all be praying about how we can most
usefully walk through that door and make our contribution to seeing God’s love
shared with our neighbours and his Kingdom take ever more intriguing shape in
our midst.
