Holiness and Mission. Morna D. Hooker
Holiness and Mission
Holiness and Mission
Learning from the Early Church about Mission in the City
Morna Hooker and Frances Young
© Morna Hooker and Frances Young 2010
Appendix © Roger Cotterrell 2010
Published in 2010 by SCM Press
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Contents
Morna Hooker
Morna Hooker
3 Being Holy in the Cities of the Roman Empire
Frances Young
4 The Challenge of Establishment – Did a Christian Empire Help or Hinder?
Frances Young
5 Reflections for Today’s Church
Morna Hooker and Frances Young
Appendix: Voices in the City (Roger Cotterrell)
Index of Scriptural References
Preface
It is our hope that those people presently exercised about mission and the spread of the Christian gospel in our post-Christian society will find these studies of scripture and the early Church pertinent to their thinking. Although the main chapters focus on biblical and historical material, the final chapter makes some attempt to draw out conclusions for the Church today; but the work is offered in the spirit of provoking reflection on potential parallels rather than offering ready-made answers. Insofar as we have any expertise, it lies in providing insight into the early history and the fundamental texts of the Christian faith, but in selecting the material we have been influenced by an awareness of the contemporary context within which the Church now needs to pursue its calling to participate in God’s mission.
In particular we focus on mission in the city. This is because the book began life as the Hugh Price Hughes lectures in 2010, delivered at Hinde Street Methodist Church in London during Lent, the context being the celebration of 250 years of Methodism in the West End and 200 years on the present site. The subject of ‘mission’ and in particular ‘mission in the city’ commended itself because Hinde Street is now the headquarters of the West London Mission Circuit, inheriting the work of notable leaders such as Hugh Price Hughes and Donald Soper at Kingsway Hall. We are pleased that the enthusiastic response to the lectures led Roger Cotterrell (a member of Hinde Street Church, Anniversary Professor of Legal Theory at Queen Mary University of London and a Fellow of the British Academy) to compile an appendix gathering together diverse voices from the audience, who spoke out of the experience of trying to live as Christians in the urban environment. However, the theological and practical issues we discuss are hopefully of far wider relevance.
Yet that original context is important, not least because it was the invitation to the two of us from Hinde Street which occasioned our first, much appreciated opportunity to collaborate with one another. We have enjoyed working together, and we hope that our readers will discern something of the interest generated by this project.
Morna Hooker and Frances Young
April 2010
Introduction
In his book, on Cities and People, the architectural historian Mark Girouard begins by referring to big cities as romantic places ‘in the sense in which William Morris used the word: “By romantic I mean looking as if something was going on”’. 1 He goes on to write about the way in which the roar and throb of a great city can be exciting or frightening. ‘The rumble seems to become the inhuman sound of a mill which is remorselessly chewing up human beings.’ But getting to know a city dissolves this ‘impersonality’, as one ‘begins to distinguish the endless elements of which it is made up, different societies, different groups, different races, different religions, different family nexuses . . . all of which are constantly overlapping and interacting’. It is access to some of these groups and their interactions which ‘makes human life endurable or enjoyable’, he suggests.
City contexts of that kind were the locations in which Christianity spread, and what holds together the chapters of this book is a search for the kind of thing it has meant to embody the gospel and engage in mission in such places. In the first two chapters, Morna Hooker mines the biblical material for insight into the fundamental call and commission of the apostles, focusing first on the charge to ‘Be holy as I am holy’, what this implied for Israel and how it informed the apostolic mission to follow Jesus in doing the words and works of God. She then explores the adverse image of the city found in much of the biblical material, cities often figuring as places of oppression and injustice, and shows how Jesus and his followers presented a challenge to cities like Jerusalem and Rome. Yet in Acts these cities are identified as strategic centres, and cities facilitated the spread of the gospel. Rome appears as a force for good, as well as being the evil Babylon of the book