While I was away in Kazakhstan last week a fire took the lives of six people (inlcuding three children) in Camberwell. Camberwell is in my diocese, but not in my Episcopal Area. I had followed the awful news in the media coverage, but only last night got some human detail.
The business of the Southwark Diocesan Synod (which meets three times each year in Waterloo) begins with a Presidential Address by the Bishop of Southwark, Dr Tom Butler. In last night’s address he noted questions arising from the launch of the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans before going on to describe the tragic fire in Camberwell. Would the FCA be a (yet another) ‘fellowship’ of like-minded Christians within the Anglican Communion or would it really be the root of a different church?
When Tom went down to Camberwell in the aftermath of the fire he met Anglican clergy of different complexions who were working hard and long to provide facilities for evacuated and traumatised residents, checking names against lists in order to reassure separated residents that their relatives were OK, offering counselling and other support, opening buildings for very practical purposes and ‘being there’ for whoever needed them. Tom’s point was that nobody asked if these clergy were Forward in Faith, FCA, New Wine, Anglican, Baptist or anything else – they were simply Christians doing what the Christian Church is there for. Without spelling it out, Tom celebrated clergy by name who occupy very different positions in relation to some of the dividing issues of the day and who wear very different labels.
The point is that we need to keep our perspective clear, recognising that internal arguments might be important to those engaged in them; but, to those for whom the church exists (that is, those who do not necessarily belong) these are an irrelevance in the face of life’s serious challenges in complex communities. Sometimes being simply Christian is what we are called to be, with the other stuff put to one side for a while.
This reminded me of a quotation by Timothy Garton-Ash on Monday’s Start the Week discussion on BBC Radio 4 (although I don’t remember who he was quoting). He defined a nation as:
a group of people united by a shared hatred of their neighbours and a common misunderstanding of their own past.
I will be interested (when I get the head space to do so) to think through whether this phenomenon could be explored in relation to understanding the contemporary church. Comments welcome…
July 8, 2009 at 6:02 pm
Recently, when a member of my church told a friend of his recent return to church-going their response was this:
“Really, gosh, do people really still go to church?”
It was a reminder to me how easy it is to forget that so many are completely disconnected from the church as a body of people and its activities. It is so easy for our efforts to be irrelevant to the person of Jesus, and his commission and purpose for the church. A good question I often ask myself and others is ‘”What is the purpose of the church?”. Do give it a go-you may like me receive a variety of answers.
Bishop Tom’s point, and I think yours too, is that there is something uniting when the church becomes missional. If we found our missional intent on Jesus then the power of such activity would seem to be limitless.
I was challenged recently reading this which you might enjoy:
http://www.shapevine.com/pg/blog/alanhirsch/read/17328/a-jesus-manifesto
Thanks for a thoughtful post.