Jesus' People. Steven Croft
idea of the Christian Church is absolutely inseparable from the person and the work of Christ. We are baptized into Christ, members of the Body of Christ and together we form the Bride of Christ. We are branches of the true vine, which is Jesus Christ, and part of the flock of which Christ is the good shepherd and for which he gave his life. We are fed and shaped in the Eucharist by the body and blood of our Lord. We are called like the disciples to live in a rhythm of being with Jesus in community and being sent out. We are called to live and proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ after the manner and the pattern of the Son of God until that same Christ returns as king.
Whatever our tradition, flavour, party or denomination, all Christians agree that the Church is the Body of Christ and needs to be centred upon Christ. Knowing Jesus and being centred on Christ will lead us inevitably deeper into the fellowship of God the Father and the life of the Holy Spirit and into a richer understanding of the Trinity. But our starting point for the Church and our compass must be Jesus.
A mission-shaped Church is not enough
For several decades now the Church in Britain has been gradually rediscovering what it means to share in and be shaped by God’s mission to our own culture and society. A kind of sketch map has emerged for the next part of the journey. We need to continue to grow traditional churches that welcome children and adults into faith and bless their communities. We need to plant many fresh expressions of church in all kinds of places and networks to reach those who cannot connect with traditional congregations and to bless different parts of our society. Since 2004, the Church of England and the Methodist Church have been seeking intentionally to grow a mixed economy Church: flourishing fresh expressions of church alongside flourishing traditional congregations. There is a short section at the very back of the book that gives an introduction to these terms (see here).
The desire to set the mission of God right at the heart of the life of the Church is absolutely right. But there are many questions it still doesn’t answer. We may all acknowledge that we will serve our society best by developing a mixed economy of fresh expressions of church and traditional churches. But even if we agree on that question (and most of us do), we then have to go deeper and ask the next question: but how precisely are these churches of all kinds to be shaped? How are we to build their life? How are we to guide them forward? What is our dream – our vision – for God’s Church in the midst of all of this change?
In this respect, the vicar of a traditional parish faces exactly the same question as a youth leader creating church in a skate park or the leader of a café church for young adults or church in a secondary school. The question is this. I am trying to grow and form a Christian community – a church. But what template am I working to? What pattern is in my head? What image do I have in my mind? What vision inspires my work? Unless I have that picture clear in my mind how can I form this community for the future?
One of the most profound effects of rapid change on clergy and congregations is that it takes away our default models for answering that key question of vision. Our default model is the recent past. What is our vision for the Church? To keep something going as we have known it from 10 years ago or 20 years ago or in our childhood or as we think it was in the nineteenth century? Change knocks away that model, that default answer, and makes us dig deeper and ask the question of vision again. There can, in the end, be only one answer to the question: what is the Church called to become? That answer is ‘more like Jesus’.
As I come to the end of this five-year period of travelling across the country I have been lost many times. But my vision for the Church has grown clearer. My prayer is that over the next 20 years we will become even more than mission shaped. To be mission shaped is vital and it is essential that we learn those lessons fully. But they only take us so far. My hope is that we will find our compass again and be shaped by and take on the character of Jesus Christ in our communities. It is being centred on this vision that will, I think, give us the capacity not only to navigate through the next two decades but to flourish and be fruitful within them.
The vision to be shaped around the character of Christ is a vision that can be pursued by a small group of Christians meeting in an upper room, by a parish church, by a mixed economy deanery in its mission and by a diocese in its pursuit of discipleship.
Back to the disciples, in danger of drowning in Lake Galilee – they don’t waste time and energy blaming one another; they do what they can from their own resources, but in the end that isn’t enough. At that point and only at that point they turn their attention to Jesus. Isn’t it time for us to do the same?
For reflection and discussion
Is the idea of the Church navigating change a more fruitful way of seeing the present situation, or do you want to hold on to the failure story? If so, why?
Do you agree that a sketch map for the Church is emerging around growing a mixed economy Church?
If the Church is meant to be like Jesus, where would you begin to explore what that might mean in practice?
2
Becoming like Jesus together (1)
It was in Antioch that the disciples were first called ‘Christians’. (Acts 11.26)
We often speak of communities or public institutions having a character. Their character is a shared ethos and nature, shaped by their self-understanding and their history and context, and which in turn shape subsequent generations. We speak sometimes of an institution of being demanding, volatile or anxious – at other times an institution might be described as having its tail up, feeling positive, being a good, stable place to be.
I have discovered that dioceses each have a particular ethos and character. Every time I visit one diocese, at least three people come up to me and repeat the old joke about this particular diocese being the Dead See. It’s not actually like that at all. It’s a diocese with many points of life. But that joke is a deep part of the people’s character and self-understanding. Another sees its permanent identity as ‘old fashioned’ or ‘low’, and so is closed to new ideas.
Just like a person, a local church or Christian community has a certain character formed by its experiences and history. A church that has known acute suffering or shared in the suffering of its community would bear that experience in different ways in its character. In the middle period of my time as Warden of Cranmer Hall, the life of the college was marked by a series of sudden and tragic deaths. The experience of grieving together and daily worship in the context of such suffering grew a particular character of tenderness and gentleness in the college in those years. People were good at looking out for one another. In a similar way, a church that has known nothing but prosperity will be marked by that experience. The seven short and sharp letters to different churches at the beginning of the Book of Revelation catch seven different ‘characters’ in the image of the angel of each church.
But what is the character of the Church as a whole and of each local community meant to be like? I want to argue in this and the next chapter that the Church is called to be a community that reflects the character and nature of Jesus Christ to our wider society. To bear the name of Christ is also to attempt to bear the nature of Christ. The idea of a ‘name’ in the Bible is a big idea and implies a character as well. This is a challenging and demanding calling. When Jesus says ‘Follow me!’ to each disciple and to the Church as a whole, he means first and foremost ‘Become like me’.
But what would that mean in practice? What would a cell group or a congregation or a circuit or a diocese (or the Church nationally) have to look like to reflect the character of Christ? We need to do some Bible study at this point.
There are many places we might explore in the Gospels to discover the character of Christ. It’s an inexhaustible theme. However, the place I want to begin is the eight short statements at the head of the Sermon on the Mount, which we call the beatitudes. What would happen if we attempted to set these key verses at the heart of our vision for the Church?
The beatitudes in brief
Matthew’s Gospel, as you may know, groups the teaching