Mistakes make perfect...

Ah Wulf - who is the finest bass player I know, a man with dexterous fingers and great musical sensitivity - asks the right question: will mistakes be part of our new song?

Well, I think possibly they will. It opens up a whole theological discussion about the relationship between mistakes and sin - they can't be the same, can they? And so there must have been mistakes before there was disobedience in the garden...

Even more heretical(?) Jesus must have made mistakes as he learned to be a carpenter. You can just see Joseph's exasperated expression as Jesus messed up a mitre joint (whatever one of those is!) and his patient retelling of his apprentice son how it's done.

So, in the jam session I hope to have with Wulf after the resurrection - when I will have had time to sit and perfect my guitar technique - I've no doubt we'll make lots of mistakes. But the music we make by the end of that session will be sublime!

Living with longing

The reason Gulag Orkestar is such wonderful music is because it is suffused with a deep longing. It's straining for something that will complete life but which, though in view on the distant horizon, is completely out of reach.

Which raises the question: will we still have this feeling when the Kingdom comes in all its fulness and we know as we are known. Will that happen in an instant or will part of the adventure of living on the new earth be about exploring the height and depth and breadth and length of the mind of the God expressed in this fabulous creation?

I don't know.

Part of me hopes that the longing doesn't die at the resurrection. Part of me thinks that being human is asking questions, probing what we don't know. In the resurrection we will still be finite beings and thus limited in our knowledge and able to learn.

We find all our answers in God. The trouble is that we haven't yet learned all the questions and I assume we won't even after the resurrection.

Am I being dangerously heretical? Please don't tell me if I am because in some areas, ignorance really is bliss!

Dreaming of new worlds

I'm preparing for Thursday break listening to Beirut's Gulag Orchestar - and dreaming of new worlds.

Thursday Break is our lunch time service for mainly older people - though it does attract a couple of local office workers. This term, we're doing a series on encouragement and I'm speaking this week on encouraging one another with talk of our eternal destiny. I'm using 1 Thessalonians 4:13-5:11 as my launch pad.

At the same time I'm listening to Zach condon's wonderful music. He records under the name Beirut and is a riotous mixture of indie sensibility and east european soundscapes - gypsy guitars, violins, trumpets, accordions, ukuleles and farfisa organs.

It set me thinking, no dreaming, of new worlds. When the Kingdom comes in all its fullness, will I be able to explore and interact with all the music of this world? When I hear an album like Gulag orchestar it makes me want to set off in search of its roots, the music that inspired it. I'm an indie pop and rock man but I love African, middle eastern and eastern european sounds. I listen to Tinariwen and Amadou & Mariam and ache with a longing to know about where this amazing music comes from. But I don't have time because I've people to see, sermons to write, projects to organise and lots of other things to do.

When Jesus returns and the world is renewed and all the glories of the nations are brought into the Holy City - as Isaiah saw it would - I hope I get the chance to explore it all. What a new world that will be. I'd also love to be able to play some of these strange instruments and jam with musicians of all cultures.

A flight of fancy? I hope not.

Quality service

Well, I have to sing the praises of Amazon. It took all of five minutes to produce return labels, fix up for DHL to come and collect my faulty item and re-order it. A couple of hours later confirmation arrived that a (hopefully) pristine version of Jewett's book will be with me very early in the New Year - a wonderful post-Christmas pick-me-up!

I have to say, that as I was preparing a sermon on Romans 8 for Sunday as part of a day looking at lessons in prayer, so I sneaked a peak at what Robert had to say about the passage. His prose is gorgeous, the layout is clear and the quality of commentary is exceptionally high.

This evening we're out street pastoring, so the forecast of gales around midnight in the South east is not greatly encouraging!

Waiting for a scholar

Well, after weeks of waiting since I ordered it and a decade of anticipation before then that it was coming, I finally took delivery of my copy of Robert Jewett's Hermeneia commentary on Romans, 1140 pages distilling the scholarship of a lifetime on the apostle and this letter. It looks fabulous, except...

Except my copy was mangled in the post and it's got to go back! I was gutted - sad boy that I am! Still, I suppose having waited so long, I can wait another month or two....

I'll have to read the festschrift edited by Sheila McGinn published ahead of the commentary to continue to whet my appetite.

Stuff happens

Lots of meetings this week - joint assembly planning (a Baptist thing), training sessions for our housing project and the JusB annual bash - the latter two are back-to-back repeated sessions, one in the afternoon and one in the evening.

So, I'm having to a fair amount of prep and then present the material twice. Going ok so far - I'm about half-way through!

This coming Sunday I'm going to be talking about membership issues with our young families home group. I hope to air some of the things I've blogged about over recent weeks and see how they react to them.

It'll be interesting to see what kind of discussion we have. I'll let you know. In particular, I want to talk about baptism and membership and how they feel about our way of doing things. I'll wait until I hear their views before I share my own - with them and you!

Otherwise, I'm reading Rodney stark's new book Cities of God: the real story of how Christianity became an urban movement and conquered Rome. Stark is a sociologist who writes a lot about religious movements, an agnostic who believes that Christianity is responsible for the rise of science and the flowering of democracy. He's written about Christian origins before in a book called The Rise of Christianity which is readable and fascinating.

He is prone to make sweeping statements - which could be why I really like his stuff - and he is very dismissive of people who don't take the New Testament (especially Acts) seriously as a historical record. So, he's hugely stimulating and I have to say that 80 effortless pages in, this new book is proving hugely entertaining and informative (it's also pretty cheap from Amazon!)

Celebrating arrivals

We had a great day yesterday inducting our new minister for youth and young adults. Our prayer is that Jonathan will become a key part of our team here helping us imagine new ways of being and doing church - especially amongst most alienated from our inherited forms of church.

I've also been listening to the new Magic Numbers album, those the brokes. Yet more West coast harmonies, liquid guitar playing and some nifty bass lines. It's music that makes you smile. Yet there is a lyrical edge that belies the breezy tunes making the album an increasingly rewarding listen.

And I took delivery in the week of Alan Jamieson's new book, Church Leavers: Faith journeys five years on. Alan is a New Zealand baptist minister who five years ago produced a book called The Churchless Faith, based on his PhD research among people leaving evangelical, charismatic and pentecostal churches. Now he's revisited many of those interviews to see where people are in their faith and their engagement with church or post-church groups. Should be fascinating.

I keep telling myself that this week will be less frantic than last - fat chance!

Serving one another

We were looking at Galatians 5:13-15 in church this morning.

It's simple stuff - Christ has set us free (from sin, religion and the Law) so that we can serve (actually the word is 'be slaves of') one another. So that's simple, then!

The context is interesting, however. He urges us not to devour one another - something he says in 5:15 and repeats in 5:26 at the end of his discussion of living in the Spirit, so it clearly matters to him. But he's also concerned that we aren't led astray by people who ought to know better.

And Paul is not polite about them - if they're so keen on circumcision, he says, let them go the whole hog and lop off their private parts altogether (5:12). In what sense isn't this Paul devouring his enemies?

Good question.

The answer lies in whether we've grasped how important it is to serve one another. The point of our freedom is not that we serve God but that we serve one another (which is the evidence that we are relatring properly to God). Paul's rivals were not serving the interests of the Galatians, but their own desire to exercise power, have followers. They were devouring the Galatians' freedom by their desire to control their behaviour. So Paul gives them short shrift.

Part of being family, being church together is that we will serve one another, help one another grow in freedom and understanding of the good news about Jesus, support one another as we live our Christian lives in the world.

This makes Galatians 5:13-15 a key membership text - because whatever words we use to describe our belonging together, our belonging should be marked by mutual service.

Making church family-shaped

I've been putting together the winter issue of Talk - the magazine of the Mainstream movement - this week. It's on the conference theme of intentional discipleship. One of the key components is examining LifeShapes - Mike Breen is one of the speakers and Paul Maconochie is leading a seminar strand.

I've begun to think about how some components of LifeShapes can begin to mould the basic relationship life of our church - helping people to support and be accountable to one another in small groups (threes and fours). If this happens I think it would have a profound impact on how we do membership.

In conversations - as well as comments on this blog - the issue of how we relate to one another has been bubbling around. Certainly over a great Sunday lunch last week, we had quite an animated discussion about how unhelpful membership language was - it tended to create barriers between Christian people (namely those who were 'in' and those who were 'out') and it suggested the church was more of a business than a family.

If people are in supportive and mutually accountable relationships because that's basic to the shape of our church, regardless of whether they're members, maybe it'll help us to be more inclusive in the way we treat one another. Maybe we'll begin to know better how each other sees things, so charting direction and making decisions becomes more intuitive.

I certainly think that Mike Breen and Walt Kallestad are right when they say 'High control/low accountability church leadership systems are not working. The preoccupation with programmes, property and products is missing the mark.'

Welcoming communities

I came upon an interesting US blog (doing my usual morning trawl of my favourite blogsites and links from them) by a US southern baptist minister called Michael Bryant. He can be found at http://thepastorastheologian.blogspot.com/

apropos of nothing as far as I could tell, he blogged this quote last Thursday:

'[C]entral to the Baptist vision of the church is the insistence that the church
must be composed of believers only. That is the distinctive mark of the church
for Baptists and others who fall within the stream of those who advocate what is
sometimes called the gathered church, or more often today, the believers'
church. This mark may also be called the principle of regenerate church
membership.' (Hammett, Biblical Foundations for Baptist Churches, 81-82)

This has always been the distinction between the gathered church and the parish model. The latter argues the church in a neighbourhood if for everyone who lives there, the former that the church is really for believers who covenant to worship together and live lives that are accountable to one another.

In some senses, the gathered model is more New Testament than the parish one. Church was for believers - indeed by the second century when following Jesus was illegal and punishable by death, the key role of deacons was to keep outsiders out.

But in our day, this model is less easy to follow and less attractive. People are more mobile, they choose church from a wide menu of options on the basis of preference (worship style, quality of Sunday School, emphasis in teaching, etc). On top of that, as churches we want to be open so that people who drop in are not only welcomed but drawn in by what we do.

This in turn feeds into any conversation we have about membership. If we make everyone who comes feel welcome, go out of our way to include them as fully as possible in the life of the church (inviting them to home groups, asking them to share in the financial upkeep of the fellowship, enabling them to volunteer in exercising ministry in some way through the church), how can we restrict 'membership' to a close inner circle of people who've jumped through a set of hoops we've erected for the purpose?

I want to run as open a fellowship as possible. I hold firmly to the view that people need to belong before they believe (and believe before they behave) and I hold firmly to the view that our fellowship is enriched by Christians with a variety of backgrounds.

So how do I make membership work in the light of this? Answers on a postcard, please...

Catching an exhibition

Went to see the Rodin exhibition at the Royal Academy today. I don't know much about him - except the kiss and the thinker - but was impressed by his ability to breathe life into stone. I went with a delightful member of my congregation who made the trip a real joy.

Picked up Philip Jenkins' new book. He wrote The Next Christendom a couple of years ago which is a compelling analysis of the rise of the church in the south. His new one is more of the same, looking at the use of the Bible in the Christianity of the southern hemisphere and coming to some surprising conclusions (apparently). I'm looking forward to it. It's in the qua after I've finished Horrell and a book by Paul McKechnie, a New Zealand-based ancient historian, called The First Three Centuries: perspectives on the Early Church. It's very readable.

We'll be experimenting with new ways of doing members meetings in the new year - following last night's leaders' meeting - in as much as we're going to try having one on a Sunday over lunch.

Reading and viewing

I've been listening to David Bowie's recent Heathen - an excellent return to form after a decade or so of indifferent output. I'm also reading CJ Samson's Dissolution, a thriller set in the days of the Henrician Reformation. It's wonderful.

I am also working my way through David Horrell's Solidarity and Difference: a contemporary reading of Paul's Ethics. This is an accessible yet scholarly investigation of Paul's moral teaching. At base Horrell argues that Paul's ethics were rooted in community and therefore much of what wrote was about the creation and maintenance of Christian community. Further, he demonstrates that for Paul Christian living is impossible without the support of a community of fellow-believers. It has much to say about our current discussion on membership.

Not sure what to make of Torchwood which started on BBC3 on Sunday evening. A Dr Who spin-off with weird creatures and adult content. Good one-liners couldn't quite fill the gaps in the script - but it was hugely entertaining. It's like a cross between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the X Files.

Levels of language

Sharp as ever, Wulf quotes 2 Peter to suggest that Paul's language isn't always clear or simple. And having recently completed a short commentary on Galatians (due out in the Crossway Bible Guide series in mid-November), I'd have to agree.

My point in the previous post was a slightly different one. It is that Paul chose words to describe the gatherings and leadership of the groups he was planting around the Mediterranean rim that were not 'religious' but were drawn from the business and social world of his day.

After all, the message (euanggelion another case in point, as Philip notes) was in places hard enough. So Paul appears to have been keen to put no stumbling blocks in the way of people hearing and having the chance to respond to that message.

Sometimes I think there's a danger that we do the opposite: our language about membership gives the impression that the good news about Jesus is for a special group of enthusiasts who know what the words mean and we use those words to exclude rather than include.

More on language

When Paul wanted a language to talk about the gatherings of the followers of Jesus, he didn't mine his religious heritage for it. Rather he used the vocabulary of the market place.

The word ekklesia (which we translate 'church') was a word used to describe gatherings of all kinds - especially political ones. Famously in Acts 19, the magistrates in Ephesus use the word to describe the riot of the silversmiths (v32, 40) and the gathering of the people in council (v39) - where both times 'assembly' (in the NRSV) is a translation of ekklesia.

Then when Paul uses words to describe leadership, he is infuriatingly fluid in his use of language. Sometimes he speaks of elders (a Jewish leadership word) and sometimes he uses episkopos (the Greek word we get bishop from but which was used in the first century to describe a leader in a voluntary association). Maybe his use is determined by who's reading his words - those of a Jewish background would recognise 'elder' as a leadership word, while those from Gentile background would know 'episkopos' was someone with a leadership role in the community.

Paul seems to have gone out of his way to find language to describe church that his readers would have found familiar from their context. New Testament scholar Andrew Clarke says: 'It is clear that these early Christians were already operating with the expectation that the characteristics of leadership within the Christian ekklesia should parallel those characteristics of leadership in the civic ekklesia'.

But while Paul used familiar language to describe his gatherings and the leadership in them, he spent a lot of time describing how those gatherings should function and how leaders would operate within them. In other words he used familiar words and then gave that language a Christian twist through how he talked of them.

I think the genius of this is that it helped people to feel unthreatened and at home as they came into churches because the words used to describe how things were done were familiar to them. Over time, the meaning of this language was filled out with a particular Christian take on it.

Perhaps we need to learn to use language to talk about membership in our churches today in a similar way.

The language we use

Much of the discussion on membership over the past few days has been about the language we use. How right our final correspondent is to say that so much of what we do in church is opaque and therefore unwelcoming; people come and go without really knowing what is going on.

We used to joke that some old fashioned Christians used the 'language of Zion' to describe their faith and explain it to baffled outsiders. But I fear that we still use language people don't get and assume knowledge that people don't have. And we don't realise how this excludes people.

If I come to church and find the experience baffling or feel that there's an in-group who gets what's going on and the rest - almost like spectators watching from outside - I'll struggle to connect.

The same is true of talk about membership business meetings. I might have felt included in the services I have come to, even the home group I've attended. But the language we use about membership and business meetings still leaves me feeling like an outsider. The danger with this is that it raises a question about the reality of the welcome I've received: if I'm not really a part of this central, decision-making activity, am I really a part of anything else?

The problem here is the language we use to answer the question 'why should I join? What difference to my sense of belonging and my contribution to the church would becoming a member make?'

Often we talk in terms of mutual accountability. And frequently, this is the first time we use this kind of language. Perhaps a way of bridging the gap would be to talk about mutual support for and accountability to one another from the moment people arrive in church.

We have begun to talk about the need for everyone who comes to our church, who wants to follow Jesus, needs to be in a mentoring relationship where they get support and are held accountable for the way they live their life in the world.

If everyone in our churches was in such a relationship, maybe the language of membership would not appear so opaque. However, if this kind of mentoring were on offer, what would it do to our understanding of membership?

Douglas McBain

I've just received the very sad news that my friend and mentor, Douglas McBain has died unexpectly. Please pray for Christine and the rest of the family.

Douglas was a phenomenon. He took me under his wing when I was new to ministry and he was London Superintendent and enabled to have a voice and a wider ministry as well as helping me to focus on what mattered in my ministry locally.

I'll miss him

In Christ and in membership

There have been really excellent comments posted recently in response to this discussion about membership. None more so than this one: 'it can at times appear that someone being in Christ is not as important as being in membership.'

The correspondent went on to share their feelings of being somehow second class because they were not a member, concluding 'the fact that I have a real and active life in my Lord Jesus didn't seem to give me permission to see myself as part of my new church family, it was membership that gave that which I found very sad and still do.' I have to say, so do I.

I have always believed that when people are baptised in a church they should automatically become members of that church. After all, we are baptising people into Christ, declaring that by their faith they are members of Christ's body, so surely by this act they are also members of this local expression of his body? Sadly we baptists have separated theology from practice and ended up with a system that can cause pain and misuderstanding.

But there is another point here too. And that concerns people attending our churches from other traditions, people who are 'in Christ' by virtue of their faith and yet are not 'in membership' and therefore can't participate in key areas of their new church's life. It's this area I'm keen to do something about in terms of how quickly and on what terms we include them fully in the life of the church.

Jane's comment about having a mentor is a key one too. I am about to preach on that and am keen to see some kind of mentoring system established in our church. It seems to me to be key to creating disciples whose lives make an impact. I'll be exploring what patterns are available out there - I'm quite interested in Lifeshapes, but there are others. What I'm keen to see is people in my church in mutually supportive and accountable relationships, growing in their walk with God, becoming intentionally missional.

Thoughts on this would be great.

Disciples and membership

I am enjoying this discussion - thanks to everyone's who's commented; plenty of room for more. I think the passion and intelligence of the comments suggests that this is a key issue facing our Baptist churches.

I agree with Stuart that we want to promote participation, that meeting is about more than just consultation. We need to unpack what the word 'congregation' means, I guess, so that we can put flesh of the bones of belonging and discerning the mind of Christ together.

I get nervous when I hear talk of leaders leading and churches being envisioned by them. I've met too many walking wounded from such situations to think that the model's basically ok providing it's properly managed. I think it's flawed. I just can't quite put my finger on why!

At the same time, I'm beginning to think that our decision making is a but thin when a two thirds majority of members present and voting actually represents only 10% of the church membership. Of course, I have reservations about 'voting' as such but rules and charity law mean that certain things have to be decided by a recordable consensus (a vote by any other word!)

We're planning to try the idea of meeting over lunch on a Sunday to see if we get more participation.

But my key concern is not so much about how we do 'business' (though that's important), it's about how we get participation so that our church becomes a place that makes disciples who in turn are disciple-makers. It seems to me that that is what church is for at a fundamental level and that membership and meetings of members are a way of organising things to make that central purpose happen.

So I agree with Wulf that we need to get back to talking about this so that we are able to reflect Jesus to our neighbours in a meaningful way. Everything we do as a church should aim for that - including how we organise belonging and how we make decisions as churches.

Members, meetings and ownership

Over a cuppa yesterday afternoon, a friend quipped that membership was really all about ownership. And I thought, 'yes, she's right.' However, she had meant the quip negatively, whereas I was looking at it as a positive thing. Wonderful thing the English language!

Her argument is that some members think they own the church and, more particularly, its ministers. She's right, of course. Many Baptists do think membership and church meetings are a way of exercising power and ensuring that the church and its ministers do exactly what they want - hence giving them ownership over the church. And this is what leads many people to throw their hands up in horror and exclaim their antipathy to church meetings and membership in all their forms.

My immediate thought when she said it was that ownership is a key word in this discussion about belonging and membership. How do we create a sense of 'ownership' among those who belong to our churches? Of what does such 'ownership' consist? It seems to me that people express their belonging to an organisation by feeling that in some way they own its programme - ownership often being expressed in a willingness to fund the programme.

So, where does this word fit in our thinking about membership?

Membership - what's at stake?

Membership and church meeting matters appear to be rising up the agenda of a number of groups within Baptist life at the moment. Some other bloggers - notably Andy Goodliff and Sean Winter - are addressing it and the mainstream network has raised it as one of the issues to be faced by an apostolically-focused movement.

For me the issues still boil to two big questions. Firstly, how can everyone who feels that they have a stake in a church be included in decision-making. And secondly, what decisions ought to be being made when the church gathers to talk 'business' (I don't like that term, but you hopefully know what I mean!)

I don't think that everyone who could be defined as a stakeholder should have a say in what the church does. For example, the parents of children who come to brigades could be said to be stakeholders in that they have a stake in brigades running well. But they do not have sufficient involvement in the rest of the life of the church to have a say in how it's run.

But there are people who join in church activities regularly - attending services, home groups - and give to the offering whenever they are there who, it could be argued, ought to be heard or consulted in some way about what we do. After all, something has attracted them to the church, something is keeping them - at the very least we should be having a conversation about what that is.

Perhaps their views can be represented by well-informed and in touch leaders who are mixing with those on the fringe and slightly further in.

Some suggest that churches are not democracies and argue that leaders should lead. After all, they say, God has anointed them for a task, they have been appointed to it by the church, so the church should let them get on and do it. The church meeting is then about vision-casting - the appointed leadership informing and enthusing the gathered church about where they feel God is taking them.

This is an attractive model and it clearly works in some groups. But it's not without problems. It's all very well casting vision but what do we do when the church throws it back at us and tells us it doesn't think we've listened hard enough to what God is saying?

The church is not a democracy - though I'm not sure democracy is such a dirty word, is it? After all, our Baptist forbears were among those who campaigned for greater political democracy during the English Revolution on the basis of their belief in the equality of all men (women tended not to be included!).

But vision needs to be owned by those who are expected to fund it and do at least half the work required to make it happen. At the very least common sense suggests we ask them beforehand if they think it's a good idea.

At a more theological level, of course, Paul's argument in 1 Corinthians 2 is that we have the mind of Christ between us, not in us individually. I never cease to be amazed that Paul in that letter never once tells the leaders to sort the church out. He tells them all to unite and come to a common mind about how they should live based on what he says.

Indeed I have a feeling that our views of leadership are out of step with the New Testament, based as they are on a reading back into those texts, of practices derived from much later times. I'll blog about this separately.