We need to finish Church Without Walls

In an earlier post I made some general comments on the Report of the Special Commission on Article 3 – here.

In this post I want to engage with the critical comments about the Church Without Walls reports made by the Special Commission in section 8.2 of their report. (Reports to GA 2010 page 25/15)

The CWW report was received by the General Assembly in 2001, read the report here.

Deriving their criticism of CWW from the 2005 report of the Panel on Doctrine this year’s Special Commission challenges the value of CWW’s emphasis on the local congregation, suggesting that CWW presents a vision of the church which is more congregational in polity than Presbyterian.

This criticism of CWW was flawed in 2005 and remains flawed in 2010 and needs to be robustly challenged.

The key to understanding CWW is the call of Jesus, ‘Follow me’. This call is not issued to churches, but to individuals to follow Jesus in the specific, local footsteps of his journeys in Galilee and Judea and today in the journey of faith in Stranraer or Lewis, Drumchapel or Drummnadrochit. CWW tells us
That calling is local rather than general. (Reports to GA 2001, page 36/9)
Faithful discipleship requires the call of Jesus to touch ground in locations.

On the shape of the church CWW offers us this vision:
Local church is the focus of action
Regional church is the focus of support
Central church is the focus of essential servicing and national role (Reports to GA 2001, page 36/16)

This is not congregationalism (I’m shouting this as I type).
The place within our church of mission, of questions, of initiative, of vision is, or should be the local church. When we try to take this away from local church we deskill the local church which learns to expect an expert to come along with all they need. When we try to take initiative, or build vision nationally or regionally no one in any location recognises it or shares it or is enthused by it.

The regional church is the context in which support, fellowship, encouragement, sharing happens. Except it doesn’t at present, hence the great tragedy of the failure of our church to renew and reshape Presbyteries. If there is a growing congregationalism within the Church of Scotland blame should not be laid at the door of CWW, but at the broken Presbyteries which leave local congregations with little option but to ‘go it alone’.

The central church, I would now prefer the term national church, should be restricted to a limited national role, carrying out essential services to ensure equity within the church and being a point of contact for national and international partners. The bigger the national church the harder it becomes for regional or local church to function properly – we need to make the centre smaller (shouting again!) By this I don’t mean a smaller number of committees doing the same amount of work, but less work!!

This is no kind of congregationalism, this is no kind of denial of fellowship between congregations, this in no kind of denial of the catholicity of the church. If the need for change were not so urgent such naïve criticisms would not merit a response, but the need is urgent, if change does not come in a planned way it will fall upon us as a catastrophe when the black-hole-like national church becomes too dense for the rest of the church to support and it collapses in upon itself.

The CWW process is at a crucial junction here. CWW can become a resource for a limited number of congregation who find it helpful, but if that is all then CWW will have failed in it’s big, comprehensive vision for a renewed church. CWW needs to be fully implemented at the national and regional levels of the church, but this is what is being resisted.

It’s been nine years but there is still time, just a little time, for the vision of CWW to be released into the national and regional church. But if it doesn’t happen soon it will be too late.

CWW friends

Last Friday at the CWW fringe event I had the chance to meet up with friends from the CWW commission. Here's a photo:

L to R - Peter Gardner, Mike Lyall, GK, Susan Clark, Ramsay Shields, Alison Jack, David Denniston, Iain Cunningham, Peter Neilson and Albert Bogle. It was a shame that Fyfe Blair, Susan Brown, Marjory MacLean, Alan Miller and Pat Munro weren't able to make it.

Let me share some lessons I learned on CWW

1. When you are interviewing someone, let them get a chance to speak.

2. Different ideas are good. If you only think the same ideas as you already hold you won't grow, I'm not saying you always need to change your ideas, but, you do need to think through what others think and believe.

3. Listen and speak. Sometimes we need to be quiet so that we can hear others. Listening is respecting and loving. But we don't only listen, we speak. When we speak we share with others, we are honoured by the respect and love they show us when we speak.

4. Unexpected friends are good friends. There are some we hear of and know about who we can well imagine being friends with, they can be good friends. But what a joy to meet others you didn't know, hadn't heard about, wouldn't have chosen to meet and find in them friends, sisters and brothers to trust and share with, living stones whom our one Father will use for his glory.

I'm not sure yet how much our God has done in our church through CWW, but I know how much he has done in me through my sharing in this work. Thank you all for sharing it with me.

Which culture?

At the CWW re-energise 4 conference a minor theme that came through was the enslavement of the gospel to a modern, rational culture. The challenge was given to free the gospel from this cultural slavery and re-engage with the gospel.

I've only got two problems with this.

1. Even the presentations asking us to free the gospel from a modern culture were at best asking us to locate the gospel in a different cultural expression. We are all creatures of our culture and it is difficult, if not impossible, to wholly step outside our culture. Perhaps the best we can do is be aware of our cultural preferences.

2. The Kingdom of Heaven, which is the theme of the preaching of the Lord Jesus, is counter-cultural. It is not counter one culture, e.g. a modern culture, and at home in another culture, whether ancient or post-modern. The Kingdom of Heaven is counter-every-human-culture. The life of a citizen of this Kingdom, as described in the Sermon on the Mount, cuts across every human cultural pattern and expectation.
The call of the Lord Jesus to live as citizens of his Kingdom is a call to a radical discipleship that will have us live against the grain of our received culture or any new culture we may adopt.

The way is narrow and the road is steep.

CWW Re energise 4

Since Sunday I've been at the CWW Re energise 4 conference at Aviemore. This was a wonderful time and I'll be blogging on my reflections on these days as I get round to reflecting upon them.

Thanks to Albert, David and all the planning group for this event.

'Sing it in your own vioce.'

This is one of the stand out quotes from the three days. A real encouragement to us that we don't need to sing our songs in a mid-West American accent, or any other kind of accent, just our own. Not only do we have a song to sing, we are allowed, encouraged to sing it in our own accent. Let's get singing!