How to be a missionary church…

There is a tendency to think about poverty, suffering, and pain as realities that happen primarily or even exclusively at the bottom of our Church. We seldom think of our leaders as poor. Still, there is great poverty, deep loneliness, painful isolation, real depression, and much emotional suffering at the top of our Church.

We need the courage to acknowledge the suffering of the leaders of our Church—its ministers, priests, bishops, and popes—and include them in this fellowship of the weak. When we are not distracted by the power, wealth, and success of those who offer leadership, we will soon discover their powerlessness, poverty, and failures and feel free to reach out to them with the same compassion we want to give to those at the bottom. In God’s eyes there is no distance between bottom and top. There shouldn't be in our eyes either…

There are more people on this planet outside the Church than inside it. Millions have been baptised, millions have not. Millions participate in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, but millions do not.

The Church as the body of Christ, as Christ living in the world, has a larger task than to support, nurture, and guide its own members. It is also called to be a witness for the love of God made visible in Jesus. Before his death Jesus prayed for his followers, “As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world” (John 17:18). Part of the essence of being the Church is being a living witness for Christ in the world…

How does the Church witness to Christ in the world? First and foremost by giving visibility to Jesus’ love for the poor and the weak. In a world so hungry for healing, forgiveness, reconciliation, and most of all unconditional love, the Church must alleviate that hunger through its ministry. Wherever we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the lonely, listen to those who are rejected, and bring unity and peace to those who are divided, we proclaim the living Christ, whether we speak about him or not.

It is important that whatever we do and wherever we go, we remain in the Name of Jesus, who sent us. Outside his Name our ministry will lose its divine energy.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

Nouwen points out something here that was self-evident not only in Jesus’ own ministry, but also in St. Francis’. Jesus, whom the disciples rightly called Teacher and Lord (John 13:13) had nowhere to lay his head (Luke 9:58); Francis, the founder of arguably the best-known religious order in the history of the Christian church, died lying on the bare ground, covered only by a borrowed habit.

Church leaders who feel that wealth and power are somehow owed to them, in line with the leaders of secular pursuits, who take pride in comfortable houses and personalised number-plates, would do well to think this through. Equally, though, we in the laity who ask the impossible of our leaders, who expect to own a share in their every waking minute, would do well to remember that they too are “in this fellowship of the weak”.

It it only by ministering to the poor as the poor, as Jesus and Francis did, that we will ever be an effective witness to our Lord and Saviour. When we are prepared to be truly a “church without walls,” without the walls of privilege, social standing, comfortable wealth, then we will see the Kingdom come, on earth as it is in Heaven!

There’s something right happening…

When there’s something right happening between two, it invites life into it, and it expands. This is how both the natural family and the spiritual family grow. A man and a woman can put their two bodies together and bring a child into the world. But if it is not loved, guided, and taught, the child will fail to thrive. Likewise, we in the Church can gather people together and pour water over their heads, and church them. But there will be no spiritual life for them if no one is an actual family, sponsor, spiritual friend, confessor, teacher or mentor for them in the ways of Jesus.

Many of us have “failed to thrive” within the Church: We have been neither fathered nor mothered in any actual Christian experience. It is all words, but little or no inner awareness of God or grace. It’s nobody’s individual fault but the sin of all of us together. We have a Church that is largely held together by administrators, held offices, and programs. It’s not all bad. It’s just not enough. As many have said, “Faith is caught much more than it is taught.” It is caught from those who are already there, who have been transformed themselves; not just “Churchianity” but lived Christianity. We ourselves must be that “something right happening between two”!

Richard Rohr, adapted from Letting Go: A Spirituality of Subtraction

I think what Rohr is engaging with here is very much what I feel is happening in the Church of England at the moment, and it is a groundswell of potentially far greater significance than the attitudes of extremists at either end of the ecclesiological spectrum, far more important than rumours of schism, or incursions by alien bishops. Back to Church Sunday, new services like our Revive! here at Holy Rood, Wool, and the new services planned for the Wareham churches, are helping to build a “church without walls” where those who feel themselves outside the church community can feel welcomed and loved just as they are, without having to put on their "Sunday Best” and pretend to be something they are not in order to be accepted.

This seem to me a profoundly Franciscan thing: in his own day, St. Francis opened his arms to lepers, paupers, and outcasts, and drew them tenderly into the love of the church, leaving the Holy Spirit to do the long and careful work of penitence in each one’s heart. The Church itself he revered, and loved—but he knew that Christ’s mission, and his mercy, do not stop at the church porch…

Of course, all this work, whether it is these local and national initiatives, courses like The Y Course and Alpha, or anything else, will only bear fruit if the church can go on faithfully loving those it has wooed. But faithful loving is something the Anglican church is rather good at—and by preserving and nurturing all that is good in the practical ways that we are the way we are, we can do that, and more besides, just by being ourselves.

Sent...

Each of us has a mission in life. Jesus prays to his Father for his followers, saying: "As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world" (John 17:18).

We seldom realise fully that we are sent to fulfil God-given tasks. We act as if we have to choose how, where, and with whom to live. We act as if we were simply plopped down in creation and have to decide how to entertain ourselves until we die. But we were sent into the world by God, just as Jesus was. Once we start living our lives with that conviction, we will soon know what we were sent to do.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey