The challenges to the Church today
Well it’s a bit of mess isn’t it?
We must try not to be too distracted by this week’s news and I am of course conscious that quite apart from the personal tragedy for the victims of abuse, for the Archbishop himself, the situation now facing the Church of England and the Anglican Communion, members of this parish have lost your own bishop, your own chief pastor. All that is bound to overshadow our morning together and may well affect our discussion later on.
I shall however stick to my last and begin by addressing the wider subject Fr Rodney has set me: The challenges to the Church today
Even just within the Church of England, we might mention in many places, shrinking congregations, crumbling buildings without the resources to maintain them, the disillusionment engendered by the horrors of two world wars, the holocaust and a sorry record of abuse and abuse badly handled, intellectual challenges to the whole idea of rational faith, the continuing scandal of divisions between Christians, the mockery of the cultured despisers of the faith, and the difficulty of even finding the right words to explain our faith, or at least words that will mean anything to most of our contemporaries. Part of our contemporary problem is that many people don’t even feel it’s worth arguing against the Church – it’s simply an irrelevance. These are challenges enough! It’s quite an agenda.
In the words of Samuel Stone’s great hymn:
……[men] with a scornful wonder,
see her sore oppressed,
by schisms rent asunder,
by heresies distressed,
And from the next verse, not often sung,
……. there be those that hate her,
and false sons in her pale.
In other words, the Church is assailed by internal enemies, doctrinal and and others, by unfaithful members and by external hostility.
The hymn The Church’s one foundation was written in the 1860s in the middle of one of the doctrinal crises dividing the Anglican world. Our difficulties may not be as original as we think.
Also from the nineteenth century we have Matthew Arnold’s reflective poem On Dover Beach in which he bewails the decline of Christianity in Victorian England
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Even earlier, and not from this country at all, we have Schleiermacher’s speeches on religion to its cultured despisers.
From of old faith has not been every man’s affair. At all times but few have discerned religion itself, while millions, in various ways, have been satisfied to juggle with its trappings. Now especially the life of cultivated people is far from anything that might have even a resemblance to religion. Just as little, I know, do you worship the Deity in sacred retirement, as you visit the forsaken temples. In your ornamented dwellings, the only sacred things to be met with are the sage maxims of our wise men, and the splendid compositions of our poets. Suavity and sociability, art and science have so fully taken possession of your minds, that no room remains for the eternal and holy Being that lies beyond the world. I know how well you have succeeded in making your earthly life so rich and varied, that you no longer stand in need of an eternity. Having made a universe for yourselves, you are above the need of thinking of the Universe that made you.
I could of course have chosen illustrations from much further back, but enough to say that challenges to the Church and her faith are no new thing, even though they appear in a new form in every generation and culture. outset.
Well, that will surely have depressed you all mightily. It may or may not get better from now on!
Although I hope what I say may make you think, my aim in these reflections is spiritual and pastoral rather than intellectual or philosophical.
I shall only succeed in my aim if at least some of you go away strengthened in your Christian discipleship. (That’s “pulpit talk” for “be better and more confident Christians.) I am saying this partly because the title I have been given sounds rather objective – out there as it were, something we could discuss in a seminar or over a pint. If this morning’s topic matters at all it is because it touches on things that change lives. Intellectual debate is all very well, but as a medieval mystic pointed out it is fire, not the philosophy of fire that gives warmth. So I hope that throughout our time together you will be asking yourself how these questions impinge on your own Christian life.
As I imagine you are all members of the parish here or visitors from other parishes, I am assuming I am among Christian friends and that we are meeting today within the household of faith.
That is an important assumption, because there is a language, a grammar, of faith that can only be learned and used within what linguists call a speech community. The particular speech community within which I am speaking is one whose language has been shaped and continues to develop in the ongoing story of a people whose lives are rooted in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and our experience of his Spirit.
This story goes far back, right into the experience of Israel in the Old Testament, to Moses, the Exodus and the giving of the Law; but even further than that, to Abraham whose call was a promise to all the nations of the earth and to Adam, the common ancestor of every human being.
As Christians today we are part of that story. But even if someone here doesn’t feel they are part of that faith story, I want you to know that you too are very welcome, although you will to some extent be listening in on a family conversation.
So, I am talking about the Church and its challenges with members of the Church. You may remember the words of St Paul to the Corinthians (1C12.27)
Ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular.
The Church is the Body of Christ – the earthly Church, his earthly body – and what one member suffers, all suffer. Of that body, the risen, exalted Christ is the head, and he continues to suffer in his members throughout the ages. Don’t think of this as a bit of poetic imagery. According to Christian faith, Jesus Christ is not merely the historic founder of the Church and now her remote and heavenly Lord. He is rather the living source of the Church’s life, present and active in us, suffering when we suffer and what we suffer. It’s important to keep this union between head and members in mind as we consider the challenges to the Church today. In other words when we talk about challenges to the Church we are talking about challenges to Jesus Christ in his Body.
We had an early witness to this in the famous story of the conversion of Saul, St Paul, on the Damascus road. Do you remember how Paul, the devoted servant of God, the persecutor of the Christians in Jerusalem, the willing and active witness to the martyrdom of St Stephen, was on a mission to destroy the early Christian community in Damascus, when he was suddenly struck down, blinded even, and heard a voice from heaven Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?
When questioned, the voice answered, “I am Jesus and you are persecuting me.”
Jesus identifies himself with his persecuted disciples. The gospels record many occasions on which Jesus warned the Twelve that they would be rejected and hated just as he himself was rejected and hated. If anyone wants to be my disciple, he said, let him take up his cross and follow me.
The fundamental challenge before the Church and every Christian today – as in every age – is precisely that. How to be faithful to Jesus in the face of the opposition and hostility of the world?
For the basic pattern of the challenges facing the Church we need look no further than the gospel accounts of the Temptations of Jesus. Bear in mind that in the Bible, temptations are not sensory tripwires enticing us to satisfy our physical tastes – more chocolate, more alcohol, more sex. They are rather challenges to test whether we will be faithful to God or not.
Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan, and was led by the Spirit for forty days in the wilderness, tempted by the devil. And he ate nothing in those days; and when they were ended, he was hungry. The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread.” And Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone.’ ”
And the devil took him up, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and said to him, “To you I will give all this authority and their glory; for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. If you, then, will worship me, it shall all be yours.” And Jesus answered him, “It is written, You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.’”
And he took him to Jerusalem, and set him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here; for it is written, ‘He will give his angels charge of you, to guard you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.’” And Jesus answered him, “It is said, ‘You shall not tempt the Lord your God.’” (Lk 4.1-12)
In all three temptations, I shall call them “challenges” to underline their relevance to our theme, Jesus is tested to see whether he will conduct his mission in God’s way and according to God’s timetable or whether he will take shortcuts. All three challenges are seductive precisely because they offer Jesus a direct path to success.
As a wonder worker, Jesus could manipulate the natural order of things to feed himself and, presumably, by extension, to court popularity by feeding the hungry. Well, there may come a time for that, but Jesus knows that his mission is to feed God’s people with God’s own word which will mean they never hunger again. By abusing his power in self-interest at the outset, he would undermine his ultimate task.
The second challenge is particularly seductive (and has proved so throughout Christian history). The prospect of universal power brings with it the capacity to solve the world’s problems at a stroke. What could be better than that? So what if it involves kowtowing to the lesser God who currently holds sway? No, says Jesus, the way to God’s realm of prosperity and peace cannot lie that way. God’s domination will not come by even temporary partnership with earthly political power, and certainly not by claiming that kind of power for himself. God alone should be worshipped and it is God alone who will grant success.
And finally, the challenge to Jesus to disclose his identity by a spectacular miracle was an invitation to test God and in the process win instant acclaim. What a fantastic launch of a public campaign that would be! Perhaps, but at the price of abandoning the character of God himself. Instead Jesus must enter completely into the normal human lot of suffering and death. What he will experience in Jerusalem will not be glory and public acclaim but rejection shame and humiliation. He will win salvation by waving a magic wand miraculously over the ills of humankind but by entering fully into the pain and evil of the world and transform it from within.
My thesis is rather simple. It is that the challenges facing the Church today are the same as faced Jesus in the Judaean wilderness and have faced his Church throughout the ages, although as I have already said the forms they take are constantly changing.
At this point I need to take a moment to think through what is meant by “the Church” in this context.
We mean of course the Church on earth, the earthly part or form of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church we confess in the Creed, never forgetting however that, to quote the hymn again,
she on earth hath union
with God the Three in One,
and mystic sweet communion
with those whose rest is won;
Jesus may well, as he himself said, have overcome the world and be the source of our joy, but in the world we his disciples will undoubtedly have trouble. I suppose one of the constant challenges is to try to avoid trouble.
There is only one Church throughout the ages and throughout the world. It’s a community that obviously has an earthly, an institutional, a sociological, form, but that doesn’t tell you everything about it; indeed it doesn’t tell you the most important thing about it. The particular communities we often describe as “churches” – our parishes, dioceses and denominations – are only really churches, churches in the strict sense, to the extent that the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church is concretely and really expressed in them.
So when I think about the challenges facing the Church today I am trying to identify some of the ways in which Christ is being threatened in the myriad different human environments in which his disciples live.
As a spoiler alert, I warn you that I am not going to tell you what I think about some of the obvious issues facing the C of E today – whether the situation following the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, bishops in the House of Lords, assisted dying, same sex marriage or anything else. Nor shall I be speaking directly about the vastly increased persecution of Christians in the world today, about the synodality struggles in the Roman Catholic Church, the tension between Christians in the West and those in the Global South – you can continue the list for yourselves!
We can try to engage with those issues afterwards if you like and want to have some discussion about them, but for the time being I want to stick to the basic question of what disagreements between Christians mean for the life of the Church and how we should face them.
One of the great temptations for the Church has always been to politicise divisive issues and try to replicate secular ways of handling them. St Paul had to face this issue in the Church at Corinth. You may remember:
I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree and that there be no dissensions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment. For it has been reported to me …… that there is quarrelling among you, my brethren. What I mean is that each one of you says, “I belong to Paul,” or “I belong to Apollos,” or “I belong to Cephas,” or “I belong to Christ”. He goes on to ask the stinging question, Is Christ divided?
Without speculating on precisely what distinguished these groups from each other, it is clear that members of the Corinthian church divided themselves into factions, each claiming the authority of an apostle – except of course the non-denominational group who simply said “We are the real Christians”.
To some extent these tensions may have been between different house churches within the wider Christian family in Corinth. That is not true of the “splits” Paul criticises later in the letter when he is condemning divisions within the church gathered for the Eucharist. It’s a famous passage:
When you assemble as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you; and I partly believe it, for there must be factions among you in order that those who are genuine among you may be recognized. When you meet together, it is not the Lord’s supper that you eat. For in eating, each one goes ahead with his own meal, and one is hungry and another is drunk. What! Do you not have houses to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I commend you in this? No, I will not.
For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.
Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a man examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For any one who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself. ….
So then, my brethren, when you come together to eat, wait for one another – if any one is hungry, let him eat at home – lest you come together to be condemned.
Paul argues from the egalitarian unity of the Eucharist to condemn divisions within the Church based on wealth or other social distinctions.
It seems that whatever immediate effect Paul’s arguments had, did not last. Only about forty years later, Clement of Rome wrote to the Corinthians in much the same vein: Why must there be all this squabbling and bad blood, these feuds and dissensions among you? Have we not all the same God and the same Christ? Is not the same Spirit of grace shed upon us all? Have we not all the same calling in Christ? Then why are we rending and tearing asunder the limbs of Christ and fomenting discord against our own body? Why are we so lost to all sense and reason that we have forgotten our membership of one another?
Paul and Clement both appeal to a bond that not only unites Christians but imposes a way of thinking and a way of life on them which is very different from the way the world works. Be united in the same mind and the same judgment. Of course there is plenty of room for different emphases and interpretations, but these must not lead to a partisan spirit and a rejection of others. They must not touch the fundamentals of the faith. Nor should they lead us to make judgments based on partial or sectarian perspectives, but only according to the mind of the whole.
The challenge to unity is addressed to every level of the Church, from the universal to the most local. We need to hear Paul’s question, Is Christ divided? and be judged by it. The imperative to unity – to live it; to yearn and strive for it when it is impaired – is entailed in being “in Christ”. In his so-called high-priestly prayer Jesus longs for the unity not only of his immediate disciples but also of those who would believe through their words It is both synchronic (that is with fellow believers throughout the world in each generation) and diachronic (that is with fellow believers throughout the ages.) And it is inseparable from the handing on (that is, the tradition) of the Apostles’ preaching and teaching. Unity is a given characteristic of the Church as Christ wills it, at every level, from the smallest domestic hearth to the Universal Church. It’s worth remembering in this context that Jesus did not actually pray for the unity of his disciples, but that they might be one.
This unity is both theological, ontological if you like (“that they may be one even as [thou, Father, and I] are one”), and instrumental, practical, missiological (“that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that thou hast sent me.”) This is therefore no theoretical or intellectual unity which must await the End, but a unity which can be known here and now by those who share it and can be observed by others. “See how these Christians love one another” was what pagans said of Christians towards the end of the second century. If unity commends the gospel, disunity is a counter-witness. We should not be surprised if our gospel of the reconciliation of all things in Christ rings rather hollow.
This remains an enduring challenge to Christians. It has a serious practical consequence that I do not have time to explore now, about how in a divided Church we can confidently face and decide about the many complex issues that passing ages and changing societies raise. Although it is facile to see science and faith as opposed, it is true that the way our faith is formulated, and certainly what all Christians have in common, comes to us from a pre-scientific age, and we are ill equipped to judge confidently how to respond to new questions as they arise. That is too big a question for this morning! But it does indicate a major task for our leaders and theologians, and one which they can only do together.
I suggested earlier that a common theme in the temptations of Christ was the challenge to use earthly means to attain heavenly ends.
This raises acutely the relationship between the Church and the world and the extent to which Christians should go along with or reject the ideas and values currently fashionable in the human societies where they find themselves.
Paul urged the Church in Rome not to be conformed to the world, but to be transformed, as he wrote, by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
The key to this injunction is the renewal of your mind. Unless we think Christianly, so to speak, we shall not know how to evaluate the age in which we live. All through history Christians have struggled with the issue. At one extreme have been those who have tried to sharpen the distinctiveness of the Church at every turn and turn the Church into a rival human society living by its own norms. At the other extreme have been those who think that we should never stand out but should conform to current values. We often hear that said when Church leaders speak out against this, that or the other aspect of Government policy or the moral positions society takes for granted. That is especially true of the Church of England in its capacity as the established church in England. “You are out of step with public opinion”, they say, which I always rather take as a badge of honour!
Pope Benedict XVI once wrote:
Christians render to Caesar only what belongs to Caesar, not what belongs to God. Christians have at times throughout history been unable to comply with demands made by Caesar. From the emperor cult of ancient Rome to the totalitarian regimes of the past century, Caesar has tried to take the place of God. When Christians refuse to bow down before the false gods proposed today, it is not because of an antiquated worldview. Rather, it is because they are free from the constraints of ideology and inspired by such a noble vision of human destiny that they cannot collude with anything that undermines it. (Pope Benedict XVI, article in the Financial Times 19/12/2012)
For an early approach to this theme, listen to these words from a second century letter.
Christians are not distinguished from other people by country, or language, or the customs which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity. The course of conduct which they follow has not been devised by any speculation or deliberation of inquisitive human beings; nor do they, like some, proclaim themselves the advocates of any merely human doctrines. But, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. They marry, as do all [others]; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table, but not a common bed. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven. They obey the prescribed laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives. They love all men, and are persecuted by all. They are unknown and condemned; they are put to death, and restored to life. They are poor, yet make many rich; they lack everything, and yet abound in all; they are dishonoured, and yet in their very dishonour are glorified. They are evil spoken of, and yet are justified; they are reviled, and bless; they are insulted, and repay the insult with honour; they do good, yet are punished as evil-doers. When punished, they rejoice as if quickened into life; they are assailed by the Jews as foreigners, and are persecuted by the Greeks; yet those who hate them are unable to assign any reason for their hatred.
The idea of rendering to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s did not of course begin with Jesus. Through Jeremiah God spoke to the exiles in Babylon:
“Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. (Jeremiah 29.4-7)
There certainly is a fine line to be drawn here, but it gives us a good guide as to how to understand our position in this world and how to behave within and towards it. We are, if you like, resident aliens. Our true homeland is in heaven and we must behave here as citizens of heaven. But we are also citizens of earthly societies and owe a definite, albeit limited and subordinate loyalty to the powers that be. As an aside, some of you will remember the famous moment a few years ago when Archbishop Rowan (as he then was) raised some eyebrows when he said that within strict limits Muslims in the UK should be able to appeal to sharia law. I am not commenting on whether he was right or even wise in saying this but want to draw your attention to the reaction to it. Many people, led by but not exclusively, the tabloid press expressed horror that anyone should profess loyalty to a higher authority than the home made laws of their own country. I can only say, how I wish more Christians would take a similar stance. Pope Benedict struck a similar note – although, come to think of it, it is only what Jesus himself had said. Caesar may have his due, but God lays claim to all – even what is due to Caesar is relative.
There is a well known phrase in Paul’s letter to the Philippians, sometimes translated: Our citizenship is in heaven (Phil 3.20). . One of the meanings of the word Paul used is what people do as citizens, what rights and obligations they have. Wherever they were in the Roman Empire, Roman citizens were entitled to imperial protection and were expected to conduct themselves accordingly. So here, Christian behaviour always means behaviour befitting members of a body, that is to say, the body of Christ – our primary loyalty.
In the same letter, at 1.27, Paul had written let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ. The translation conceals the fact that although in everyday speech the word the word Paul uses for “manner of life” had acquired the more general meaning of “appropriate behaviour”, its origins lay in the idea of how citizens should behave. Karl Barth commented that this recalls that Kingdom established in heaven, of which Christians here on earth, amid the homeless anarchy of this aeon, are secretly now already citizens. Their state, their ‘form’, their bearing must therefore here and now already be under the invisible discipline of that kingdom, must in fact be in accordance with the ‘state’ which is to be reflected in their conduct, ‘worthy’ of the gospel.
In a rather long-winded way I am simply trying to point out that the Church and her members are always confronted by the challenge of having two identities, one of which, when push comes to shove, must always take priority over the other.
Over the years there have been many attempts to clarify this question. A classic analysis was that of Richard Niebuhr who identified five models for the relationship between the Church and culture: 1) Christ against culture; 2) Christ of culture; 3) Christ above culture; 4) Christ and culture in paradox; and 5) Christ the transformer of culture.
Another contribution was made by the Second Vatican Council a quotation from whose pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes on the Church in the modern world will conclude my reflections
This council exhorts Christians, as citizens of two cities, to strive to discharge their earthly duties conscientiously and in response to the Gospel spirit. They are mistaken who, knowing that we have here no abiding city but seek one which is to come, think that they may therefore shirk their earthly responsibilities. For they are forgetting that by the faith itself they are more obliged than ever to measure up to these duties, each according to his proper vocation. Nor, on the contrary, are they any less wide of the mark who think that religion consists in acts of worship alone and in the discharge of certain moral obligations, and who imagine they can plunge themselves into earthly affairs in such a way as to imply that these are altogether divorced from the religious life. This split between the faith which many profess and their daily lives deserves to be counted among the more serious errors of our age. ……… Therefore, let there be no false opposition between professional and social activities on the one part, and religious life on the other. The Christian who neglects his temporal duties, neglects his duties toward his neighbour and even God, and jeopardises his eternal salvation. Christians should rather rejoice that, following the example of Christ Who worked as an artisan, they are free to give proper exercise to all their earthly activities and to their humane, domestic, professional, social and technical enterprises by gathering them into one vital synthesis with religious values, under whose supreme direction all things are harmonised unto God’s glory.