Church for Every Context. Michael Moynagh
is the world in which a successful businessman named Nicholas Ferrar felt a ‘holy calling’ to leave power and prestige behind, and be ordained a deacon and leader of a semi-monastic community called Little Gidding. He was possessed by the notion that the kingdom of God might best be sought outside the contentious human kingdoms of his day. So, according to a solemn vow, he ‘attend[ed] to the one thing necessary’: ‘to serve God in his holy calling, to be the Levite himself in his own house, and to make his own relations, which were many, his cure of souls’.9 Reminiscent of Benedict, he accomplished this through the adoption of a very practical rule of life in the context of Christian fellowship and service.
The community founded by Nicholas did not take monastic vows, though members of the community felt a keen sense of obligation to the pattern of life that quickly emerged. The rule of Little Gidding was actually quite unique in this regard. The chief concern was to live as a Christian family, extended in the direction of love to God and neighbour. It did, in fact, begin with the Ferrar family, but it welcomed others into the household of faith. Eventually, their remote country house north-west of Cambridge became what we might call a retreat centre, attracting the rich and poor, kings and bishops, scholars and ordinary people who sought physical and spiritual healing and renewal. The community also rehabilitated the local parish church as another mode of service to the wider world.
Little Gidding adopted a structured way of life that centred on cooperation and service in an atmosphere of friendship and humility. There were daily hours for communal worship, but also periods set aside for study and work, with particular regard for artistic expression and craftsmanship in the illustration of texts and the binding of large holy books containing Gospel ‘harmonies’ and the Psalter. Simple meals were prepared for the poor and hungry, and a wide range of other activities in the ‘Discipline’ of the community produced a rhythm of daily life. One observer noted that the members ‘were in the World, not of the World. All their Practice was heavenly . . .’10
Among the more interesting developments at Little Gidding was the practice of active reading. Nicholas thought that the gospel narrative should be the unifying story of Little Gidding, but he wanted the story to point to all the other parts of the Bible, especially the Old Testament’s prophecies and prefigurations of Christ. This was accomplished by compiling indexes, concordances, commentaries and so on – each a result of the collaborative efforts of the readers. The work was exacting and extensive, becoming something of a spiritual discipline for the community as a whole.
So while the gospel narrative defined the community, there was a simultaneous comprehension of the whole story of God. Each day, a new connection between one passage of Scripture and another might be discovered by a member of the community and recorded in the appropriate book. This attentiveness to the coherence and correlation of the biblical text was a persistent feature of study and devotion at Little Gidding, producing a storehouse of wisdom, especially in regards to the details of Christ’s life.
The reading community was, in a sense, read by the biblical text. The Bible had that much power and privileged status in its everyday life. This is why Nicholas and his friend, the poet and pastor George Herbert, saw all of the physical, mental and spiritual activities surrounding the Scriptures as transformative. This occurred, they thought, because the Holy Spirit was given ample opportunity to speak and act – revealing, pointing, stirring and nudging individuals and the community as a whole to respond in particular ways. The responses included the painstaking restoration of a nearby church, the launching of an elaborate programme of religious education for children, the distribution of free meals to the poor and medical care to the sick. Clearly, Little Gidding was not a sequestered community, this despite its quiet resolve to seek first the kingdom of God.
In an age of strong anti-Catholic and anti-monastic sentiment, the Little Gidding experiment met with stiff opposition in the Church of England. Rumours circulated about its ‘nuns’, prayer vigils and ‘canonical hours’, its richly decorated crosses – both outdoors and indoors – and altar. All of this was associated with the ‘adorations, genuflections, and geniculation’ of ‘superstition and popery’.11 There was also the charge that too much time was spent in praying, not preaching. Others thought the community’s interest in Christian education and the meticulous compilation of Bible study resources departed from more ‘orthodox’ modes of instruction.
If as a ‘Congregation of Saints’, Little Gidding was at times a bit ‘dutiful and severe’ in its manner of life, it remained a vital witness to the transforming power of Christian fellowship – well after the experiment came to an end in 1657 (Ferrar, 1855, p. 349). The community was intent on renewing the church and involving it in the world through attractional and incarnational mission. As often happens, this required a deep level of sharing in the community’s inner life even as it adopted new approaches and patterns that invigorated wider commitments to the world beyond.
Today the Little Gidding Trust has begun to revive some aspects of the spiritual vision of Nicholas Ferrar and a growing number of pilgrims are hoping for more Little Giddings to pop up in other places – following the ‘good old way’ in a fresh expression of gospel light and life.
Little Gidding
developed a strong communal life;
centred this life on Scripture, which was read in innovative ways;
served the surrounding people;
faced opposition from the existing church.
John Wesley’s mirror of God
Another ‘good old way’ that has been reborn in the Church today is the ministry of small-group fellowship. John Wesley, the great Anglican evangelist and admirer of Little Gidding, is a favourite source of inspiration. A century after Nicholas’s death, Wesley was busy with his own experiment, but he shared a common vision with his predecessor: ‘I saw a family full as much devoted to God, full as regular in all their exercises of devotion, and at last as exemplary in every branch of Christian holiness’ (Wesley, 1872, p. 333). Wesley is famous for turning this vision of the family of God into reality through his Methodist Societies.
In 1739, the city of Bristol was a rapidly growing commercial centre with a large population of new urban immigrants. It was a crowded and confusing place to live, with many neglected social and economic needs and little or no active church presence. John Wesley arrived on 2 April to share the ‘glad tidings of salvation’, and for the first time he would preach in the open-air, attracting as many as 3,000 people to his first public event. To preach out of doors was a new thing, and the Anglican establishment viewed it as a seditious act. But Wesley felt that the Spirit of the Lord was upon him – ‘to preach the gospel to the poor’ – and nothing could stop him.
Wesley’s legacy has as much to do with small groups as large crowds, however. His characteristic emphasis on ‘deliverance, recovery, and liberty’ was most effectively realized in more intimate gatherings. He was something of a celebrity preacher and enjoyed having a large audience, but he learned quickly enough that most people came to faith through close relationships with caring people. In fact, probably more than anyone before him in the modern era, Wesley appreciated that Christianity was essentially social in nature.
In one of his sermons, he described the Christian as a mirror of God – an image that reflects the social nature or Trinity of God. We reflect what we receive: the capacity to love and be loved by others. Just as the divine persons enjoy a bond of fellowship, so do we, especially through the indwelling Holy Spirit. For Wesley, this is what our participation in the divine nature meant. So it made sense to him that Christians would come to faith through the active love of others – through the ‘channels of grace’ uniquely found in one-to-one relationships and in a community of faith that was mobilized to continually