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!

A call to prayer

I feel God is impressing on me more and more the need to pray for a revival along the lines of the Wesleyan Revival of the 18th Century. In so many way we are at a similar point: there is deep distrust of Government - a sense of kakistocracy, government by the worst and least suitable people; a distrust of the Police and the armed forces (seen very clearly in the reaction to the G20 demos); moral decline; addiction; a weakening, or at least the appearance of weakening, in the traditional churches; rampant atheism; unrest overseas, with consequent commitment of home troops abroad... it goes on and on.

Now, I'm not in the least concerned here about the rights and wrongs of different political parties, different attitudes to things like civil liberties, policing and immigration, and so forth. Justice must always be at the heart of our prayer, as Isaiah 61 was at the heart of Jesus' prayer - in fact, his entire ministry. What concerns me is the unrest, the public cynicism and distrust, that these things engender. We are in danger as a society as 18th Century society was from the Jacobite Risings, the French Revolution, even in some ways the American Revolution and the Enlightenment - all of which were ideas which clearly appealed to the British public in view of the rottenness of the state in which they lived. We have only to look at the appeal of the BNP on the one hand, and radical Islam on the other, to see how we are flirting with similar ideas in our own time.

I've been looking into the Wesleyan Revival, and I'm really encouraged to see that God rescued the British people, and saved others throughout the world, and eventually revived the poor old broken CofE, as well as helping to alleviate the former persecution of Baptists, Presbyterians and other "non-conformists" by means of the rise of Methodism, without there necessarily needing to be freedom from strife within the leadership. See Wesley's falling out with Whitefield over the former's Arminianism vs. the latter's Calvinism - they mended their friendship, but never did agree theologically. But the Revival went ahead nonetheless.

God is just filling my heart with longing for his glory, his grace, his mercy, on our land in this time, our own time, and in our grandchildren's time. We must pray. I know that I'm no one to lead anything, but I know I have to pray for those who might. I'm sure the Prayer House movement is crucial to this, as well as a revival of prayer in local churches even deeper and greater than that which began in the 1990s. We must truly "pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying..." (Eph 6:18) until God's fire falls. I've never been so sure of anything.

Disclaimer: this is a call to prayer, not to political debate. I am not a politician, and I don't want to enter into that arena, as it would be a distraction from the purpose of this post, and I'll moderate any comments to avoid it. However, if anyone is genuinely curious about any of the issues I've raised, I'll do my best to point them to things I've read / heard / seen that have informed my response to what I feel is God's call, to me at least, in all this.

This post is likely to make more sense if you also read my recent Letting ourselves go...