|
John Schofield 18th November 2007 I believe (in) the church |
| Everyday, as I climb the stairs to my office in Diocesan House, I pause, either physically or mentally, in front of one of the portraits hanging there. It shows a bishop, pensive, almost melancholy. And I think: Henry, is that the effect having my father as a curate and baptising me had on you? Because if so, what hope for me? I don’t want to come to the end of my ministry looking like that! |
| As you know, my birth certificate tells me that I was 60 yesterday. Which gives me a vantage point for looking backwards and forwards, both to review and to prospect some of the important landmarks of my life. |
| Don’t worry: my whole life isn’t going to be paraded before your eyes. But there is one thing in particular which has always been of great significance in my life: the church. |
| I have always been part of the church, ever since that one-time Bishop of Guildford baptised me John in St John’s Church on St John’s day aged six weeks. I grew up in the church, the son of a Rectory. As an adult, I gave myself to the church in ministerial service. That same church almost broke me, and yet I now spend my life preparing new ministers for it. Why? Because, despite everything, I believe in the church. |
| But now, with something approaching maturity, I am learning to look through the church to see more of the reality which lies beneath, behind and beyond the church, the reality which the church tries to reflect, to make real, to incarnate: the reality of God, Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer. |
| And as I still find myself able to say ‘I believe in the church’, I also note – and have you ever noticed this, particularly if you come to a traditional language Eucharist? – that the creed doesn’t ask us to believe ‘in’ the church in the same way as it asks us to believe ‘in’ God. Older translations simply say ‘I believe one, holy, catholic and apostolic church’. The difference is significant. This is second order faith, different in kind and substance from faith in God. And yet … |
| The creed tells us four things about the church. And frankly, there have been, and still are, times when it’s hard to believe any of these things. And yet … |
| The church is one. The church is holy. The church is catholic. The church is apostolic. |
| I can still remember the exciting days of Lent house groups in the early 60s when we met with Christians of other denominations – a thing we hadn’t done before – and studied courses together such as The People Next Door and No Small Change. What high hopes we had then. And even when we Anglicans jilted the Methodists and refused organic unity in 1969, those remained heady days with, on the one hand conversations with the Roman Catholic Church that produced agreed texts about the Eucharist and on the other a continuing hope that all the English churches (other than Rome) would be united by Easter Day 1980. But that date came and went unnoticed, because by then the steam had gone out of top down unity schemes. |
| And yet so much happens together, so many people are settling in to churches because the fit is right at the moment, that you can sense that God is using consumerism to good effect, to break down barriers in a new and different way, while quietly laughing up her sleeve. We’ve moved from the structural to the relational in terms of ecumenism, mirroring the revitalised interest in our God as Trinity, that is God as relational community not as mathematical formula. |
| On the other hand the present state of the Anglican Communion causes me to despair as something akin to reverse imperialism cuts in and a fundamentalism that was foreign not just to Anglicanism but to most branches of Christianity until the nineteenth century marches on headlong, seeming to have a greater concern with what people say they believe than interest in how they behave (unless it’s to do with sex). |
| And yet I can still believe in the church, because the church isn’t, never has been and never will be, the institutions we know. The church is one because it is the body of Christ. |
| Then the church is holy. The church is set apart, distinctively Godly. That’s you and me. The church is the company of people who strive, through grace, to be loving and ‘perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.’ And because none of us can be that, because we are always failing, always turning, always trying, we learn that holiness begets forgiveness, we learn that we are a sign to the world and not a sect set apart from the world. |
| The church is holy because it holds itself together in love. It is a body that holds up through prayer, as I can testify from those days when I have felt myself to be nothing more than a glittering façade through which you could put your hand to find nothing. How wrong: always behind are the holy people of God, propping you up. The church is holy because it is the body of Christ. |
| The church is catholic. That’s a word that doesn’t appeal to many today because it has been usurped by one denomination. And it’s a word used to excoriate all that bigots hate in a falsely read application of apocalyptic writings to the Roman communion. |
| ‘A catholic church,’ says Stephen Bevans, a theologian I’ve been reading recently, ‘is a church that believes passionately in God’s revelation in the incarnation and has a heightened sense of creation’s sacramentality.’ The older I get, the more profoundly true I find that to be. |
| The word catholic points to the all-embracing, all-inclusive, all-accepting nature of the Christian community in which narrowness and particularism have no place. And that is because the church reflects the nature of God, who in Jesus became as we are, who in the church continues to live not just amongst us, but in us, rejoicing in the idiosyncratic individuality and the common humanity of those whom he calls to follow him. The church is catholic because it is the body of Christ. |
| The church is apostolic. |
| When I was first ordained (35 years ago) we talked a lot about the mission of the church. Since then we have come to see a deeper truth, that the mission is not ours but God’s. An apostolic church is one sent by God to share God’s mission, God’s activity, reflecting the presence of our Incarnate Lord in the world, affirming human culture, but recognizing that it requires both blessing and challenge. Mission is an expression God’s loving concern for liberation for all from whatever chains them. Mission demands ministry by the whole people of God. This is at the heart of the life of the church in which I believe, the body of Christ in the world. |
| And the Church of England is part of this. But though I am a cradle Anglican, and though, with tearful despair at times, I still love it, I am also aware of the ultimate unimportance of the Church of England and the Anglican Communion. |
| Throughout my life I’ve kept stumbling over that great German, Dietrich Bonhoeffer – theologian both traditional and radical, resister of tyranny, and martyr. And it was Bonhoeffer who spelt out the difference between things of ultimate concern and things of penultimate concern. The Kingdom of God, which the church serves and seeks to bring into being, is our ultimate concern. Any institutional expression is not of ultimate concern. But for the moment I am constrained to work for that imperfect branch of it called the Church of England, hoping, believing, praying the possibility that the Church of England itself will grow in oneness, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity as I have come to see them and share them with you today. |
| Samuel Taylor Coleridge once wrote this fearful warning: “He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.” Church, or Church of England? |
| The truth of the church is that we are the body of Christ – we are Christ in us. For the world, to which we are sent, we – the church – are instantiations of God, of God who in Christ became one of us, to bring reconciliation between the world and God, God and the world. And I believe that God believes in this fraught, tense body that I believe in, and which I will continue, in good days and bad, to try to love and serve, so that we, as one, as holy, as inclusive, as sent, may share in God’s saving, reconciling work in God’s lovely but broken world. |
|
|