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The Ecology of the Faith Community

By Tim Marks.

During July this year, I have been working with the Diocese of Chelmsford to help them evaluate their clergy leadership training programmes. A question naturally arises: What is Christian leadership for?

Some clergy were derailed by the question. Others said that it was to create a new community. This is important. It means more than an increased congregation. It means more than church growth or the more tentative gatherings we call ‘emergent church’. There is a permanence, a stability about a community. Something earthed, something rooted.

So how is Christian faith community built? What are the tell tale signs that would indicate that this faith community is in a healthy place? Why is belonging to, being formed by and contributing to faith community essential rather than optional. This seems increasingly important to me to answer, as one who, after moving from the front of the church in 1996, found being a congregational member at the back of the church suffocatingly boring, and left for a while in favour of a more individual journey.

I remember the impact of two faith communities on me, after being brought up in both the non conformist and Anglican traditions, but seeing no more than church going. I remember the close knit, curious, praying and supportive missionary community in the CharlesJohnsonMemorialHospital in Nqutu, Zululand in the late 1960s. I had not encountered this solidarity, this demand and this seriousness before. It was profoundly shaking. I understood that I did not understand the Christian faith.

And I remember as a BibleCollege student standing to sing “Eternal light, eternal light” in a small chapel in Birkenhead and being caught up by 100 Christians seeing what they sang. I knew they did because I saw it too. I had not known that believing and faithful singing could create an internal landscape, vast and joyful.

I understand more and more that trying to live a life of faithful trust in Jesus Christ today, almost smothered by the capacity of post modernity to stifle most serious questions, is almost unbearably difficult. I feel I hardly know what it means to be a Christian. It’s like forgetting the sun during those endless days of low cloud. Sometimes, when mist hangs low in Malvern, we climb through it on the great hill and burst out into sunshine at the top of the Beacon.

According to Walsh and Middleton, “Christianity as lived in faithfulness always requires discernment of and serious struggle with our particular cultural context” (Truth Is Stranger than It Used to Be).

For those of us at the point of ministry where the faith journey has been over many decades, the context has changed enormously: Post Christendom; postmodernity; affluenza; climate change.

As a theological tutor in the 80s, I remember being passionate about exploring the vast range of thought and experience in Christian spirituality. Some of us tried to pioneer retreats, courses, experiments of lived depth. An ex-student of MoorlandsBibleCollege introduced himself to me as having been at my ‘Catholic appreciation classes’. Now it all seems rather common place. Vast outpourings of literature on prayer and silence and learning to be spiritual have occurred. Now I worry about narcissism: me and my precious soul; me and my MBTI and my Enneagram number and my signal strengths; me and my personal narrative so ephemeral I need to stick self defining buttons all over my personal journal. Yes, I sound like a grumpy old man, even a cranky cleric, but I don’t deride all this. I’m just scared it all gets subverted into something slightly different from hearing the voice that says, “Choose you this day whom you will serve”.

I have started to think once more about the necessity of being formed as a Christian by a community. What is Christian leadership for, both ordained and non-ordained? It is to create a Christian faith community that has the power to enable to us to live thankfully, with faith and hope and love, subversively, tellingly, in a spiritual wasteland, in which, as we offer the wholeness of our lives to God regularly, we do so together with those who make a similar high risk gamble and we are shaped by their testimony.

Now a critic might say, “No big deal, Tim. You started off a Congregationalist, wandered away amongst the Anglicans and have latterly rediscovered the congregational principle again. Congratulations, but no big deal.”

Well, there is a bit more. Brueggemann warned us all in the 1980s that, in postmodernity, all church belonging would be ‘intentional’. Jackson Carrol, in God’s Potters, says that throughout the States there is a convergence in all denominations towards a de facto congregationalism based not on church polity, but consumerism. This is not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about ministry being a job, blue collar stuff (as Eugene Peterson calls it). The job is to build communities who raise questions, live different, look odd maybe and don’t care. If that is the case, then much that passes for ministerial formation is worse than useless. We clearly don’t know much about doing this within the Anglican community. The point is that, within postmodernity, having a personal spiritual journey, practising meditation, believing in angels, hoping for miracles, going on a retreat with a personal spiritual trainer or a life skills coach, spending huge sums on going to Toronto or Dharamsala, simply doesn’t raise more than a mild ripple of interest. Hey, it’s healthier than smoking weed, man. It’s your choice.

The point about all this for a Christian is not that it is necessarily trivial or wrong or mistaken. There are two dangers for us. The first is that a scary and wonderful exploration has been turned into a risk averse commodity, compliant to Health and Safety regulations. The second is that all this stuff is a means, not a end. The end, as I understand it, is the witness to and obedient service of the dangerous and amazing resurrected Christ in a living faith community. Individual lives make a difference, but not the difference faithful, earthed community makes. Faithful community is like marram grass. Once rooted, and the restless, sterile sand stops blowing around, dunes build, birds, frogs, insects begin to move in. Life happens. A new ecology starts.

So here’s a cheer for the team of writers who put together Practising Our Faith (www.practisingourfaith.org), published by Jossey Bass. The writers took up a thought that Craig Dystra lays out in Growing in the Life of Faith”. The challenge is that the fullness of what it means to be Christian, to be formed and shaped and honed into Christ-likeness, happens best and for the most part, in community. More than that, it is that in such a community there will be certain practices. Dystra suggests fourteen distinct practices, but the team of writers hone them down to twelve.

“Christian practices are things Christian people do together over time in response to and in the light of God’s active presence for the life of the world” (Dorothy Bass, p.5).

They address fundamental needs and conditions through concrete human acts. They show us how our daily lives are tangled up with the things God is doing in the world. They are beautiful and non-esoteric. In healthy Christian faith communities, we honour the body and reverence the physical. We share hospitality and learn to welcome the stranger. We are ecologically sensitive, treating the planet as our home, our household. We are different - we say yes and also no. We keep Sabbath, protecting times of being, thanking, receiving the amazing YES of God. We are people who bear and share a testimony to the covenant love of God. We strive to discern the will of the Lord as well as make strategic plans. We work at community building, shaping life together. We are people of extra-ordinary forgiveness. We bring our wounds to God and each other that together we may find healing of body and mind and soul. It takes a community of faith to help you to die well. And we sing, we sing our lives back to God in praise and delight and joy.

The UK churches are, in general terms, in dreadful shape, often - at least statistically - living on borrowed time. In these conditions, sometimes standing still with courage and faith is heroic. But we cannot live without hope and a clear sense of what competent ministry strives for. Dystra quotes Edward Farley about the nasty doubts that surround the efficacy of the texts and practices of faith. “Are Christian theologians like stockbrokers who distribute stock certificates on a non-existent corporation? In this situation, the reality of the corporation, its size, type, power and promise, turns out to be simply the broker itself”. The question, he says, is whether in our heart of hearts, we are thinking of the church as a tomb or a path.

We need hope. We need intellectual and spiritual clarity. Peter Drucker said “Nothing is more useless than to do efficiently that which should not be done at all”. I am coming to the opinion that when the multitudinous activities of the clergy are weighed out, the gold dust will be the time spent building community, teaching the practices that form and shape the faith community and the people who live it. A writer described the Blessed Margery Kempe as one who combined the twin occupations of being a saint and a public nuisance. Maybe she should become the new patron saint of the clergy who want to build faithful communities who rock the boat, disturb the peace and live the presence of Jesus in these narcotic times

Tim Marks

Malvern

August 2007

Books referred to in the article

Walsh and Middleton:"Truth Is Stranger Than It Used To Be"

Jackson Carroll: "God’s Potters"

Craig Dystra: "Growing in the Life of Faith"

Ed. Dorothy Bass: "Practising Our Faith"