Posts Tagged ‘Missional church’

The media this week carried the news of the arrival of a delegation of Muslim scholars at the Vatican for a serious dialogue designed to deepen mutual understanding in the hope that the tension and hostility between Christianity and Islam can be lessened. It’s a worthy aim and behind it stands some longer-term developments. For some 100 years, Islam has been experiencing a deep-seated renewal of its life and witness after several centuries of decline and self doubt.

That renewal is complex and contains many competing schools, ideas and ideologies. Those who have come to the Vatican represent a more mainstream opinion as compared with the radical streams that have given rise to terrorist ideologies. There is a competition within Islam for the minds and hearts of Muslims.

This 20th century development within Islam raises many broader questions for Christianity. Not the least of these is whether Christianity, so vibrant in many parts of the world, can be renewed in its western expressions. In asking this question we are bound to ask, what is it that causes major faiths of any kind to be renewed and how would we begin to recognise such developments?

The answer to the second question about how we would recognise renewal, is not in the first instance about numbers. Certainly, at a later stage, growth in numbers follows renewal but it is not what we would look for initially.

I would suggest that the early signs that we should look for would be anything that is redolent of deep intellectual and spiritual renewal – not one of these but both working together in a symbiotic relationship. So, looking at Christianity in the west, can we see the stirrings of spiritual and intellectual renewal?

A further question flows from these considerations. Callum Brown in his book The Death of Christian Britain, suggests that the 1960’s witnessed a decisive break in the pattern of western Christianity. He describes in a fairly convincing manner the failure of Christianity to transmit its faith from one generation to another. He takes this as an indication of the final and possibly permanent death of Christianity in Britain.

If one is talking about the continuation of denominational life in a rather unchanged format then Brown is almost certainly penetratingly accurate. However, we do need to ask the deeper question, how is religious faith actually communicated and how do religious institutions renew themselves?

John Finney’s groundbreaking research into how people become Christians reveals that the role of family in the transmission of faith may not be as crucial as Callum Brown seems to suggest. Finney’s work is a helpful start but we need much more work to help us understand the complexity of the renewal of faith. Such work might help us in the delicate task of interpreting the complexity of what we see around us.

According to press reports over Christmas the UK became a Catholic country recently.  A combination of a census of sorts, a desire for a headline and the formal admission of Tony Blair into the Catholic church produced a news item worthy of the silly season.  What the headline alluded to was the contentious claim that more people worshipped in a Catholic church on one particular Sunday than worshipped in an Anglican church on the same Sunday (a statistic contested by the Anglican church). The rise in Catholic participation at Mass was less to do with the rush of the English to convert and much more to do with the presence of large numbers of Eastern European migrants (mostly Poles) in church.

Harmless enough you might think and at one level its on a par with a poor Christmas cracker joke but at another level this kind of headline carries with it a huge amount of mis-information that can be distinctly dangerous.  The more significant figure is that 1.7 million Anglicans attended church as an average over a single month – a fascinating figure – and that the Catholic Church is in freefall as far as the indigenous population’s attendance at Mass is concerned.

And that is why the attempt for a cheap headline is dangerous – it actually conveys the exact opposite of the truth in terms of mission trends.  The broader measurements suggest that something very interesting is going on under the surface.  There are some signs that the Anglican church is coming to grips with the challenge of mission in the UK and equally there is a huge danger that the Catholic church – so important in the long term for mission in Europe – is in danger of being lulled into a sense of false security over the temporary rise in attendance produced my migrant workers.

This short piece is part of a much longer article to be available on the Together in Mission web site at the end of January.

Over the last few years I have been hearing rumours about Portsmouth football club and the high number of Christians in the first team. As Portsmouth have done better and better in the league these stories have been getting more attention. On Friday of last week the Daily Telegraph carried a story in their sports section. They describe a pre-match meeting:

“Harry Redknapp has just given his pre-match talk and then something happens that would be alien to most football clubs, amateur or professional, in Britain. Much of the first team, as well as several of the backroom staff, crowd together and begin to pray. A peaceful calm comes over them, the overwhelming pressure has been eased and they feel ready for their match.”

The article goes on to identify this development with one particular player who became a Christian a few years ago—Linvoy Primus. He hopes that in the future, he will become a full time worker in mission both overseas and in this country. Linvoy’s decision to become a Christian began when a former player and two other Christians (one of whom now plays for Derby), offered to pray for his persistent knee injury. Not only was he healed but he felt the power of their prayer both in a tingling sensation in his knee and in the fact that he fell over and could not get up.

The fact that ordinary Christians, not clergy or the chaplain to the club, prayed for him made an impact. The demonstration of power also spoke loudly. Its fascinating to see what happens when mission gets out of the pulpit and into everyday life. Linvoy’s story is published in a book called Transformed, Legendary Publishing, £18.99.