The ‘nones’ (those who when responding to surveys tick ‘none’
in the box marked ‘religion’ but who might possibly tick C of E if pressed)
need look no further for a home. Bishop David Jenkins, that prophet of our
time, once was heard to declare that God was not interested in the Church. God was
all about the Kingdom. It follows that if and when we stumble upon the Kingdom
in the context of the Church, we do not need to look very much further to find
God. The problem lies in defining the Kingdom, if such a thing is definable.
You could say the same thing about the Church. It is not easy to describe what
the Church is, still less what it ought to be, if it is to be true to its Kingdom
calling.
The original commission to go out and make disciples has acquired
a rather hollow tone, given the Church’s history of conquest and forced conversion,
not to mention prejudice and plain hatred. But the kernel of truth remains. If
the Church is called to be anything at all it is called to offer to the world
the peace which only God can bring, the peace of the Kingdom of Heaven. It is even
called to embody that peace. Peace is
its garment and peace is the substance of the body it clothes. It is called to
give that body to the world, as Christ gave his. The Church cannot simply talk
about peace in rather abstract terms overlaid with the clothing of pietism. We
need to tend the hurt and resistant body, lest we be accused, like the Emperor
who failed to realise that he had no clothes, of being completely naked.
It is the build-up of hurt and the resistance to healing
which makes it so difficult for the Church to truly embody peace. As with any physical
body, allowing wounds to fester without healing can make them life threatening.
Could it be that something like this is happening in the life of the
institutional Church? We keep knocking each other’s old wounds without pausing
to consider the damage. We are more concerned with allowing our buildings to
fall into disrepair than we are about healing the hurts which we have inflicted
on ourselves.
At the more traditional end of the Church, we hide
complacently behind beautiful but arcane (in the minds of many) liturgy,
clerical dress and the kind of managerialism which consists mainly of moving
the deckchairs on the Titanic. At the other end, as I have suggested in
previous posts, lies a mixture of naïveté and hubris. I do not think that either
of these scenarios provides a setting in which the ‘nones’ are likely to meet
God in his Christ.
What is needed, before it is too late, is for the Church
to take ‘time out’, a couple of year’s sabbatical perhaps, in order to focus
prayerfully and pastorally on its relationships, particularly on those which
relate to authority and the pastoral care of its people, clergy and laity alike.
If the present hierarchical system of governance is to endure, those with the
most authority must be subject to those with the least, as Christ was. It is the powerful who must begin this work of peace-making, because peace- making is both the
mandate and the sign of true leadership.
Peace-making in the Church will entail the hard practical work of seeking forgiveness
and the bridge-building which should follow; hard because it requires that
everything that is not of love be burned away. Love must do the burning. This,
incidentally, is about as close as it gets to the burning fires of hell. Hell is hell insofar as it is the ultimate conflagration of love vs.
hatred. In the life of the Church the gates of hell appear to be impregnable, though,
as Christ promised, they will not prevail. The fire of love will ultimately
destroy them, even if the Church as we know it is destroyed in the process. The
gates of hell are such that they bar human beings from the forgiveness which
brings peace, from facing into all the private and collective betrayals,
untruths and resistance to the goodness and giftedness in people which it has
allowed over the centuries, and still allows, leaving only a hard shell of fear
and mistrust, for those who experience the Church at close quarters. This makes
embodying the peace of God for the world very difficult for them.
Thankfully, this is not always and invariably the case.
There are acts of heroic self giving which pass unnoticed in the Church’s life.
Priests who minister in and for the love of Christ, and whose work is largely
ignored by the Church’s critics, embody the healing fires of love. Their work
endures in the hearts of those whose lives they have touched. Bishops who are
true to their calling as peace-makers and as pastors to their clergy do the
same.
All of this suggests that it will take time for the
Church to be transformed in such a way as to make the ‘nones’ tick a different
box, but I am convinced that it will happen. Such is the nature of the faith we
proclaim, that we will be changed ‘in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye’ and
that we shall all belong together in Christ.
