Does Church Stifle Spiritual Growth? (2)

In the last post we linked to an article written a few years ago by John Wilks called ‘A Spiritual Evangelical Church?’ (EVANGEL, 26.3, AUTUMN 2008). To the question whether church life can actually become an obstacle to spiritual growth his answer is YES, it often can. And the evidence says that many people struggling with or walking away from church are mature, committed believers. Their church experience is one of feeling stifled or constricted. This post surveys his argument and his proposals.

Wilks engages with the research of two authors in the 1980s and late 1990s.

Alan Jamieson: A Churchless Faith

The first is Alan Jamieson, A Churchless Faith: faith journeys beyond the churches (2000). Based on interviews with over 150 people from evangelical, Pentecostal and Charismatic churches (EPC churches) mostly in their 30s and 40s, this New Zealand pastor developed several categories to describe their journeys.

1. Displaced Followers

About 18% of leavers. Left due to frustration and negativity towards a particular local church and/or its leadership. Not a rejection of faith per se, these remain committed believers. Only about a quarter return to church life somewhere else, most work out their faith apart from a church community but linked in with wider resources of relationships, teaching, books etc.

2. Reflective Exiles

These leavers exit around questions and issues primarily concerning foundations of Christianity itself. It may be questions concerning the love and justice of God, or perhaps these days we can imagine it being around Christian teaching on sex and gender. Regardless of the precise reason, few of such leavers return to church, but few leave Christian faith altogether.

Jamieson talks of these are ‘counter-dependent’ – they find faith expression outside EPC communities. This can be a destabilising process of deconstruction since their faith has been integral to self-identity. They are in unknown new territory with all the uncertainty that brings.

3. Transitional Explorers

This group can be seen as having moved on from Reflective Exiles towards a place of integration – through deconstruction towards reconstruction. This typically has involved a lot of indepth questioning and debate and/or a personal following of intuition of what feels most right. Most remain believers, a small number become agnostic.

4. Integrated Wayfinders

Jamieson came up with this description to try to capture a sense of completion – a new place of integration. Further on from the previous group to a point of finding a clear way forward – a new expression of faith that works. Their leaving of the church is symptomatic of an exploration where they have found more freedom and depth, often with others, outside the confines of church.

The point to note of these 4 groups is that very few are rejecting Christian faith. They leave church because they feel it has become an obstacle to spiritual growth.

James Fowler: Stages of Faith

The second author Wilks discusses is James Fowler and his examination of stages of faith (Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning (1981). These go from birth to death so Wilks just talks of stages 2-5. Fowler’s work is dated now and has been critiqued but is still useful.

The key idea here is of a linear progression, linked with age and experience, with later stages associated with older believers.

Stage 2: The Literalist

This is what Fowler calls a straight-forward, even simplistic faith (he puts 20% of adults here). Characterised by a belief in literal interpretations, this faith is largely unexamined.

Stage 3: The Loyalist

Most church members are at this stage. Fowler describes it as an uncritical acceptance of the values and beliefs of the church. Questions like ‘Why do we do this?’ tend not to be asked. A strong sense of belonging, identity and purpose are all connected with church life.

Stage 4: The Critic

This stage sees a shift towards questioning beliefs and practice. Answers that just appeal to tradition (this is the way we do things) or authority (accept what you have been told) do not satisfy. Critics want to work things out for themselves. Values and beliefs are reassessed, uncertainty about cherished positions can bring turmoil but also new discovery and growth.

Stage 5: The Seer

Fowler sees this as a place of peace and resolution – the believer has reached a place of integration – even if that means accepting ambiguity and a lack of easy black and white answers. (I don’t like the term ‘seer’ – it carries too many gnostic associations of arrival at a higher spiritual level). What Fowler is trying to capture is a sense of being beyond the turmoil and disruption of the critic.

Wilks’ Analysis

Wilks sees the two separate pieces of research mapping on to one another with leavers overlapping primarily with stages 4 and 5.

He outlines a few implications:

• There tends to be a linear progression of faith development

• There tends to be a gradual order of progress that comes with experience and reflection – people do not jump from the first to the last stage

• Moving from one stage to another is far from easy – it often involves much angst. It is only when remaining within a stage becomes impossible that someone will transition. But such a shift may well mean leaving behind previous certainties and embracing new uncertainties.

• Wilks argues that the research suggests that faith development cannot be reduced down to learning more information. Of course it includes this, but it also embraces feelings – around meaning, purpose, questioning, and working out things for oneself.

• Neither Fowler or Jamieson are arguing that one stage of faith is superior to another. This is not some gnostic ladder of ascent to a higher plane of faith. Movement through the stages is not inevitable.

• Very few people leave churches due to loss of faith. For Jamieson it was 1%. 81% left because they felt unable to develop spiritually within an EPC church.

Implications for Evangelical / Pentecostal / Charismatic Churches

Wilks is honest in saying there is a temptation to avoid the realities of this discussion within evangelically minded churches. It is difficult, he says, to ask these questions. He says he tried writing the article doing this but couldn’t do it. Obviously what he concludes is not necessarily true of every church, they are general trends. What follows is a summary of three questions and his answers.

QUESTION 1: “Is Evangelicalism a movement which caters for people in a small number of these stages? [His answer ‘Yes it is’]

Jamieson concluded that EPC churches shaped worship, teaching and role models around Stage 3 (loyalists) to encourage and reinforce belief but leaving little space for exploration, questioning and doubt. Wilks agrees with this. It does not tend to welcome self-criticism. Those who ask critical questions can often be seen as disloyal, divisive and ‘un-sound’ and are therefore not listened to or are dismissed. (My comment – this can be true within a local church or a broader denomination. Religious institutions can be incredibly effective at silencing or marginalising dissenters).

If this is often (not always) the case then Wilks concludes that it’s not surprising people feel increasingly marginalised and eventually leave when they enter Stage 4.

QUESTION 2: Is it possible to make a faith journey and remain an Evangelical at all stages of the process? [His answer ‘Only just – but it is not easy]

Fear of questioning is understandable. It may be seen as undermining the leadership, or leading others astray. This can include questions about science and the Genesis creation accounts for example. Or same-sex marriage, or sex before marriage, or the role of women in leadership or penal substitutionary atonement or the exclusiveness of Christian salvation, or the trustworthiness of the Bible, or the historical reliability of the resurrection or the deity of Jesus etc etc

And sure the New Testament does reveal a need to teach truth and reject both doctrinal error and un-Christian behaviour.

But here’s the paradox.

The more questions are either shut down to ‘protect’ the church and its leadership, or are never seriously addressed in the preaching and teaching, the more likely it is those in Stage 4 on will be unwillingly squeezed out.

Jamieson’s work shows that they don’t want to go. They aren’t leaving because they don’t believe any more. They are leaving because who they are – what they think and feel, what is important to their faith and life – has no place in their church community.

So Wilks argues church leadership needs to respond with

“‘Bring it on’ … bring your questions, doubts, uncertainties and let us debate them vigorously and robustly, with respect and rigorous deliberation. Let us reject all half explanations and simplifications, let us look at the difficulties with all their complexity and confusion”

QUESTION 3: Is there something about Evangelicalism that means it deliberately prevents people from attempting to make a faith journey?” [His answer ‘There shouldn’t be, but I think there is.’]

Linked to that last quote, Wilks argues that there is nothing inherent within evangelical faith that means its members can or should remain in Stages 2 or 3. Quite the opposite should be true. There should be nothing to fear from questioning.

But it’s one thing saying this and another facing up to Jamieson’s findings. Wilks challenges leaders to respond, not by avoiding the issue or seeing people who question as problems, but rather actively to encourage believers to “investigate this for yourself.”

“We need not reject our stage 4 disciples and eject them from our churches …. none of us should need to reject the desire to question and investigate.”

“Are we willing to change our perception of stage 4 as a crisis of faith most likely to lead to a loss of faith to one where we view it as a positive period from which we can expect growth?”

My Comments

Recall that Jamieson did his research c. 2000. Wilks wrote in 2008. Today every Christian with access to the internet has access to information and teaching on pretty well anything you can think of. Leaving aside the fact that it’s hard to sift the wheat from vast amounts of chaff, this has two consequences.

One is that long gone are the days when it was actually quite difficult for someone to do even basic biblical and theological research for themselves. Only leaders/clergy were trained and were generally recognised as experts. Now at a few clicks there are excellent teaching, preaching and written biblical and theological resources are available.

Trying to close down questions locally reminds me of a lovely wedding our family watched on Zoom the other day. Due to the pandemic It was outside and the bride ‘entered’ the ‘aisle’ via double doors, built into a frame in the middle of a field. It was a nice image of a church wedding but with no building in site. You’ll get my point – what works as an image in an outdoor wedding won’t work with questions in modern church life. Shutting the doors in the middle of a field means that people will just walk around them.

In other words, not giving space for critics to be listened to, respected and heard, and for their questions to be addressed means that they will most likely continue seeking answers somewhere else. Wilks puts it this way:

“Let us face honestly and seriously the consequences of ignoring this problem. There is a leakage of people through the back doors of Evangelical churches. They are not peripheral people, people who were not converted properly or who have lost their faith. To the contrary, they are often key people, people who put years of hard work into making the church happen and work, and who feel that their spiritual needs simply are not being met. As they move from a stage faith to one in stage 4, where they are now questioning and evaluating everything, they discover that they are no longer welcome in the typical Evangelical church. After gradually sliding out of their areas of responsibility they slip away.”

Another is that, for good or ill, authority has been radically decentered. I say for ‘for ill’ because I happen to believe that authority matters. Church tradition and doctrine has historical and theological weight and should be respected. Theological and biblical expertise matters. Church is not an individualist ‘free for all’ where every half-baked Bible interpretation has equal merit.

But it is ‘for good’ in that faith should never be ‘second hand’ – just accepted unquestioningly on someone else’s authority. Such faith has thin foundations, especially in a secular, pluralist, post-Christendom culture like ours. It is not good enough today – if it ever was – for leaders or denominations just to appeal to authority in the face of critical questioning. It is, in effect, saying ‘the church is not the place for you’. Leadership that has confidence in God and his Word trusts him, it welcomes questions, especially from experienced committed believers who want to grow and develop in their faith and worship of God.

Does church stifle spiritual growth? (1)

In our local church we are in the process of a ‘Listening’ exercise. It is linked to coming out of lockdown – Ireland had the longest amount of time in lockdown I think in Europe. As a church we have not been able to meet physically since March 2020, mainly because we do not have our own building.

The Presbyterian Church in Ireland, of which we are a part, provided resources to churches to help them hear what their people are thinking and feeling as we emerge from lockdown.

We adapted these into a questionnaire, answered via a google form, around 5 questions. The first asked about personal faith and sense of connection to the church community.

The next four followed this traffic light system suggested by PCI. Here’s a clip of the form. This was all public domain so no problem sharing here:

We gave three avenues for feedback to be collected. Via written individual submissions, by group discussion and notes taken at Bible study groups, and a community ‘Townhall’ event on Zoom.

The idea here was to give people different ways to communicate, and also the option to hear from others in the process.

A couple of things stand out to me so far.

One is how welcomed the process has been. Most people participated in one way or another. We are a small community, but the amount of feedback is significant. An overwhelming sense, made in verbal and written comments, is of appreciation of the process. Appreciation of the chance, given by the extraordinary circumstances of a pandemic, as a church to pause, review and reflect what we are about as a community.

It is this openness to ask the questions (and hopefully to listen well to the answers, especially when what is said is difficult to hear) that people have appreciated. It will take some time for us as leaders to process and act on.

Another is how rarely these sorts of questions tend to get asked in churches (at least in my experience, maybe yours is different).

Asking questions is risky. We may not expect the answers we get. We may not like the answers we get. But without giving space for people honestly to express their views we will never really know what is going on.

But here’s my theory – it is actually the answers we find most troubling, or disagree with the most, that we need to be listening to the hardest because they are likely challenging our own perceptions and assumptions of what is going on. That’s why we find them threatening or unreasonable.

But rather than finding them a threat or dismissing them, we should be welcoming them as answers which can help us see things differently. It’s the temptation to close down critical voices that should be resisted because to do so is a form of not listening.

This all reminded me of an article written a good while ago by Dr John Wilks in the journal Evangel which made quite an impression on me when I first read it and which I have kept to hand. I had the pleasure of corresponding now and then with John when he was book review editor of Evangelical Quarterly.

The title of the article is ‘A Spiritual Evangelical Church?’ (EVANGEL, 26.3, AUTUMN 2008)

The question mark is significant. He’s exploring the question of whether there is an innate conflict between growing spiritually as a Christian and being in an evangelical church community.

In other words, does church stifle spiritual growth?

His answer is, a lot of the time, ‘YES’

Now that should be a troubling and perhaps puzzling answer for most of us in church leadership of one sort of another. It’s an answer that we may not want to hear, or a question that we have never really thought about. After all, doesn’t active participation in church life – worship, Bible studies, mission, service, teaching, various ministries – show in itself that someone is doing Ok spiritually?

Wilks says actually things are a lot more complicated than that. And that for many Christians, despite appearances of active church involvement, church is a place of frustration, alienation and boredom.

And here’s the key thing – such Christians are NOT young believers or half-hearted disciples. They tend to be committed, long-serving and mature Christians who are not ‘losing their faith’ or ‘falling away’. But they are walking away from church.

So what is going on? Come back for part 2 to find out !

Love in Paul (10) love for one another

We’re continuing a series about the apostle Paul’s theology of love. To recap, there are three great strands of love in the OT that also continue, now Christologically framed, into the NT (and Paul in particular).

1) The elective and saving love of Yahweh for his chosen people.

2) The responsive love of Israel (God’s people) to God’s prior redemptive action.

3) Inter-communal love: the love God’s people are to have for one another

This is the first post in strand 3. If strands 1 and 2 were ‘vertical love’ (love of God for humanity; human love for God in response), this strand is ‘horizontal love’ – at a human to human level. It is also the strand about which the Apostle Paul has by far the most to say.

Indeed, he has so much to say about love for one another that I call him the ‘apostle of love’. He’s right up there with John in the frequency and importance of love within the community of God’s people. The love believers are to have for one another is to be THE distingushing mark of these fledging churches, reflecting their new-found identity in Christ and marking them as belonging to a different story and ethic to that of the surrounding nations.

We’ve mentioned earlier how Douglas Campbell calls this ‘agapeism’ – that love captures all that is important about Pauline ethics. And I agree, it does. Let’s take two broad themes in this post, and we’ll continue with others in the next post

The Missional Focus of Pauline Love

Here’s a sweeping generalisation – there is a strange lack of attention paid to the importance of love within Christian mission. There can be much discussion of context, strategy, culture, vision, leadership, apologetics and so on, but, rarely a sustained focus on the most important element of all – the integrity and attractiveness of the Christian community. (happy to be corrected here)

Paul, it seems to me, has a razor sharp awareness that love is essential for the health and witness of his Christian communities. There was nothing like them in the ancient world. No other communities embraced individuals across the profound religious, gender, socio-economic status and ethnic divisions of the ancient world. Believers now have a new primary identity in Christ as brothers and sisters (adelphoi) within God’s household. Previous identity – whether Jew, Gentile, male, female, slave or free – are relativised, not erased they are – radically – now of no spiritual significance.

In this vein, coming from a social-scientific angle, David Horrell (2016) makes the argument that Paul is primarily concerned with the construction of a corporate solidarity that acts to heal inner-communal conflict and draws strength from a vocation to holiness within an immoral world.

So, in Paul, love is not an end in itself. Rather, it is the defining characteristic of the first Christian communities in their new vocation to live lives worthy of the gospel under the Lordship of Jesus Christ within a world that is ‘passing away’ (1 Cor 7:31).

Love is only thing that could possibly hold such ‘households’ together. Love is essential to the life and witness of the church. Without love no church and no family can survive – and that’s as true today as it was then.

Love as following the paradoxical way of Jesus

For Paul, Christian love is cruciform love. God’s love is demonstrated and experienced through the cross of Christ. Cruciform love is costly, it acts for the good of others at the expense of the self.

This is the paradoxical way of Jesus.

Sometimes this can be misunderstood. Christianity does not call believers to be ‘doormats’ – walked over by others at every turn. Nor does it call for self-abnegation or self-hatred. Rather, it proclaims that real flourishing, happiness and purpose is found in loving others. Loving another means acting for their good, even at cost to the self. Christianity is a corporate faith, which is another way of saying it is orientated around living well with others within a network of mutually loving relationships.

This conflicts head on with Western individualism that says fulfilment is found in self-realisation, finding yourself, loving yourself, expressing yourself and so on. This sort of ‘expressive individualism’ is centered on the self rather than on loving others. It has no place for community and its ‘eschatology’ is consumerist – short-term individual pleasure or achievement. There is nothing ‘bigger’ or more significant than the self.

We see other-focused Jesus-type love applied by Paul to a multiplicity of situations and contexts. Here are some examples and we could keep going at length here:

• Other-focused love is seen in his repeated appeals to maintain unity (Rom 12:16; 14:1-15:7; 1 Cor 1:10; 12:21-27; 14:12; Gal 6:10; Eph 4:1-3; Phil 2:1-2; Col 3:12-13; 1 Thes 5:12-15; Titus 3:1-2, 8)
• In his many warnings against divisive attitudes or behaviour (1 Cor 3:1-4, 16-17; 6:1-11; 8:9-13; 10:24, 31-33; 11:17-34; 2 Cor 12:19-20; Gal 5:15; 6:3-4; Eph 4:25-32; Phil 2:3, 14-15; Col 3:5-9; 1 Thes 4:3-6; 1 Tim 6:2b-10; 2 Tim 2:23, 3:1-5; Titus 3:9-11).
• Converts to Christ are to act in love for each other (1 Thes 4:9; Rom 12:9-10; 14:15; 1 Cor.8:1; Eph 4:2, 15-16; Phil 2:1-2; Col 2:2).
• Famously, in 1 Corinthians 13:1-3, all Christian life and ministry is of no value at all if it is not done in love.
• The Colossians are encouraged to clothe themselves with love on top of a list of other virtues (Col.3:14)
• In 1 Thessalonians 5:8 all believers are to put on the breastplate of faith and love.
• Paul prays that believers’ love would grow as they await the coming of the Lord (1 Thes 3:12; Phil 1:9) and is glad to hear of a church’s love (e.g., 1 Thes 3:6; 2 Thes 1:3).
• In Philippians he is thankful when Christ is preached ‘out of love’ (Phil 1:16) – regardless of who the preachers are.
• He rejoices when he hears of believers’ love for God’s people (Col 1:4, Philem 1:5, 7)
• He encourages the Corinthians to show the ‘genuineness’’ of their love by giving financial help for brothers and sisters in need (2 Cor 8:8, 24).
• Rather than use apostolic authority, he prefers to appeal to Philemon about Onesimus ‘on the basis of love’ (Philem.1.9).
• And, as a pastor, it is significant how often Paul expresses his deep love for the communities to whom he ministers (e.g., 1 Thes 2:8; 3:12; 1 Cor 4:21; 16:24; 2 Cor 2:4; 8:7; 11:11; Phil.4:1).

That’s a pretty strong case for ‘agapeism’ right there. More to come in the next post.

Love in Paul (9) Love, Faith, the Spirit and Union with Christ

We’re continuing a series about the apostle Paul’s theology of love. To recap, there are three great strands of love in the OT that also continue, now Christologically framed, into the NT (and Paul in particular).

1) The elective and saving love of Yahweh for his chosen people.

2) The responsive love of Israel (God’s people) to God’s prior redemptive action.

3) Inter-communal love: the love God’s people are to have for one another

This is the last post within strand 2 – the responsive love of God’s people to God’s prior love. In this post I want to sketch the connections between faith (pistis) and union with Christ. The role of the Spirit is critical here. And the ‘outworking’, or we may even say ‘purpose’, of being united in Christ through faith alone is seen in a life of love.

The gospel calls for a response of faith which results in believers being joined together ‘in Christ’. This is a remarkable image when you think about it. It speaks of Paul’s high christology that is some cosmic / spiritual sense all believers are united together within the ‘body of Christ’ – the church.

To be ‘in Christ’ is therefore an eschatological concept – believers ‘in Christ’ belong to God’s new creation (Gal 6:14-15; 2 Cor 5:14, 17). Elsewhere Paul talks about them being baptised into Christ’s death and resurrection.

A tight connection between faith, the Spirit and love is typically Pauline. It is the Spirit through whom God’s love is poured out into believers’ hearts (Rom 5:5) and through whom God is known (1 Cor 8:3; Eph 3:19). Indeed, faith and love are often mentioned alongside one another (Eph 6:23; 1 Thess 1:3; 3:6; 5:8; 1 Tim 1:14). The primary evidence of the empowering presence of the Spirit is love (Gal 5:6, 13).

It is important we see the apostle’s pastoral concerns here. So often we get lost in technical theological debates about justification and soteriology that we miss how Paul’s priorities are primarily ethical – that believers would be living lives of love and holiness pleasing to God. This is his heartfelt plea to the believers to whom he writes.

Paul leaves some things unsaid – he doesn’t really explain how someone ‘in Christ’ is transformed by the Spirit into a person of love. The NT scholar Michael Gorman lists different biblical images or ideas that various scholars have argued captures how union and moral transformation ‘work’ in Paul: participation, incorporation, identification, (mutual) indwelling and even (Christ-) mysticism (Gorman, 2019). Volker Rabens (2014) has done outstanding work on unpacking the relational role of the Spirit within the community of the church.

Most recently, Douglas Campbell’s Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God’s Love (2020) gives five chapters to love within the theme of ‘Formation’. For Campbell love explains everything important about Pauline ethics – he calls this ‘agapeism’. And I’m inclined to agree with him on that point.

Two points to note – and these are absolutely crucial for understanding the theology and pastoral mission of the apostle Paul. Both, I think, are too often missed or marginalised in teaching and preaching today

1) Christianity is a Communal Faith

Or, to put it negatively, Paul knows nothing of individualism. The idea that a believer would or could try to follow Jesus apart from a community of believers would be incomprehensible to the apostle. Faith, the Spirit, and union in Christ brings a Christian into a new community – and it is within that new community that he / she is live and love and forgive and serve and teach and care. And it is in doing so that the Spirit works to effect moral transformation. That doesn’t happen on your own.

If you are reading this it’s likely that like me, you are a Western individualist – shaped and formed by an individualist culture that says follow your own dream, do your own thing, be yourself, you’re worth it etc etc. It is easy to frame the gospel around this sort of narrative – it’s about me and my happiness, or my experience of God’s love, or my assurance about the future and so on. Of course the gospel is personal and individual – it has to be real for each person. It requires personal faith and repentance and a turning around to follow the Lord. But it’s a reduced and distorted Christianity that makes it all about individual experience or individual salvation.

Yes, church can be the hardest place to be a Christian. Yes, churches can be toxic. Yes, any community is going to be difficult. But this was nothing new to Paul – just read 1 Corinthians! His passion is to see renewal and reform – the idea of opting out to go my own way was inconceivable.

2) Every Christian is in a spiritual battle – and love is God’s weapon in the war

Second, love lies at the heart of an eschatological conflict between forces belonging to the old age and the new.

In 1 Corinthians 13:8-13 love is both the goal of God’s salvation and an eschatological foretaste of God’s new creation in the present. Within the present believers are to ‘pursue love’ (1 Cor 14:1) and are later exhorted ‘Let all that you do be done in love’ (1 Cor. 16:14).

In Galatians love grows and matures in opposition to attitudes, desires and actions that belong to the ‘present evil age’ (Gal 1:4) or ‘kosmos’ (world). It is only the empowering presence of the Spirit which can transform uncontrolled ‘desires of the flesh’ (Gal 5:16, epithymia, ‘desire’) that lead to destructive ‘works of the flesh’ (Gal 5:19). In contrast, ‘those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions (pathēma, ‘passion’) and desires’(Gal 5:24).

In the ancient world it was not unusual for the passions to be seen as obstacles to a virtuous life. What is of profound importance in Paul is how the Spirit and love is the means by which the battle is fought and won. Love in this eschatological perspective is God’s ‘weapon’ in a cosmic battle against destructive forces opposed to his good purposes.

Think about this for a moment. This is the heartbeat of the Christian faith. It takes us back to the previous post on Stanley Hauerwas and the way of Jesus being love and non-violence. The radical core of Christian faith is love – not force, not selfish power, not exclusion, not human reason, not Torah obedience. It is the way of the cross. And this all flows from God’s own loving nature – Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Relentless Love: Trócaire, Tearfund Ireland and Integral Mission

In chapter 11 of Relentless Love I compare and contrast how the Bible is used within two approaches to social justice in Ireland – that of Trócaire and of Tearfund Ireland. Trócaire (established 1973) is the overseas development agency of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland. Tearfund Ireland was launched in 2008 and is a sister organisation of Tearfund UK, a global relief and development agency operating within an evangelical ethos.

The chapter was originally published in Anderson and Kearney Ireland and the Reception of the Bible (2018). The broad theme was the Bible and social justice in Ireland. As I was trying to figure out what angle to take I knew it needed to engage with Catholic thinking and practice and not just the ‘minority report’ of Protestant/evangelical thinking and action on social justice. And so a comparative analysis of how the main relief agencies of those two communities approached social justice seemed a good way in to the subject.

In terms of budget Trócaire dwarfs Tearfund Ireland. It takes in c. €30 million each year in donations alone during its annual Lenten appeal. But my interest was more in the two organisations theology and practice of social justice.

On the surface, they have much in common: Both:

• are professional and experienced faith-based development organisation which depends to a significant degree on support from local churches across Ireland,
• prioritise aid to the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world
• offer resources and training for churches in Ireland to engage with issues of social justice.
• recognise that the causes of poverty are complex and that bringing justice involves both aid to relieve suffering and action to address the root causes of injustice.
• place significant emphasis on sustainability and empowerment at a local level.
• root their call to action in God’s love for all people and the God-given worth of each individual

But under the surface some significant differences emerge. Below is a summary of the argument.

Trócaire

From its beginning Trócaire was focused on global economic justice – ‘no nation has a right to build its own prosperity on the misery of others.’ What emerged in the analysis is a tension running through Trócaire’s work between its identity as a Catholic relief organisation set up by the Irish Bishops and informed by Catholic Social Teaching (CST), and its largely secular approach to establishing justice through human rights legislation within a firmly ‘this worldly’ political framework.

To illustrate: the organisation’s six core themes (sustainable livelihoods; human rights; gender equality; HIV; climate change; emergency relief) are framed within a general theme of justice rather than being developed around specific biblical themes.

So there is little talk in Trócaire’s many publications, as far as I found, of themes such as the kingdom of God; future hope; the New Testament’s eschatological structure for Christian ethics; themes of sin; forgiveness, the uniqueness of Christ; new life in the Spirit; the church as the people of God and so on.

The three elements of CST that Trócaire highlight are dignity (all people are created in God’s image and are therefore due respect); option for the poor (putting the poor and vulnerable first); and the common good (everyone is included with a right and responsibility to promote the community’s good and benefit from it). These are applied in ways to support (good and valuable) development objectives of helping practically those in need.

The same can be said in general for how the Bible is used. Verses used include classic “justice” texts such as Isa 58:6, 10 (fasting as loosing the bonds of injustice), Mic 6:8 (do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with your God), Prov 31:8-9 (speak out for those who cannot), Luke 4:18-19 (good news to the poor), and Luke 10:25-37 (parable of the Good Samaritan). These texts are applied within a broad creational framework to support general rights-based teaching on the value of all human life which compels those with resources to help those without.

The overall impression is of a highly professional aid organisation, but one in which its Christian identity is largely in the background. The approach is primarily political and legal and sits comfortably within the values and goals of secular aid agencies. On the ground, Trócaire is a non-missionary organisation, its primary focus is a rights-based approach to global development.

Tearfund’s theology of integral mission

The critical difference between the approaches of the two organisations, in my view, is Tearfund’s commitment to integral mission. I’m not commenting here on the merits of either – just observing that it is Tearfund’s explicit attempt to integrate mission and social justice that distingushes it from Trócaire.

Within integral mission, mission is framed within the biblical narrative of creation, fall, redemption and consummation. The church exists ‘between the times’ of Christ’s incarnation, life, death, resurrection, Pentecost and the consummation of all things when Christ returns.

This means that the call of the church is to declare the good news (gospel) of forgiveness of sins but also new life under his lordship in the power of the Spirit for all aspects of life.

This leads to the most significant different between the two organisations. Integral mission has the church “as a caring, inclusive and distinctive community of reconciliation reaching out in love to the world” (Dewi Hughes) at the centre of Christian mission. Hughes argues that

“[t]he church is not the means by which Tearfund can deliver ‘development’ to the poor but the most convincing evidence that we now have of the outworking of God’s purpose to redeem his creation.” While churches are frequently broken and imperfect, it is Tearfund’s “privilege to be continually looking for such churches within the worldwide evangelical community that we may encourage them in their integral mission” since “showing mercy and acting on behalf of the poor belongs to the essence of the church. . . . a church that does not care for its poor is not a true church. (Dewi Hughes, ‘Theology of Integral Mission”)

And so an integral vision for mission is to knit together Christian mission, development and the local church into a coherent rationale for praxis. This means that integral mission embraces practical needs being met, increasing participation and empowerment of the poor, advocacy to challenge structural injustice, personal understanding of individuals as made in the image of God, local church engagement in service to the poor alongside worship and witness.

This sits very much within the Micah Network’s Declaration on Integral Mission

If we ignore the world we betray the word of God which sends us out to serve the world. If we ignore the word of God we have nothing to bring to the world. Justice and justification by faith, worship and political action, the spiritual and the material, personal change and structural change belong together. As in the life of Jesus, being, doing and saying are at the heart of our integral task.[1]

From the Micah Declaration on Integral Mission: http://www.micahnetwork.org/integral-mission.

And this issues in a different perspective on human rights and the goal of a Christian relief agency. Tearfund say human rights legislation needs to be viewed through a Christian lens. It may be the calling of Christians to accept injustice and violation of their rights, but simultaneously be committed to seeking justice for other people’s rights. A motivation of love rather than law.

Reflections

First, the comparison between Trócaire and Tearfund revealed some fascinating distinctives in their theology and praxis. Perhaps this is best summarised in Trócaire having more of a ‘top-down’ rights-based approach to development and Tearfund having more of a ‘bottom-up’ emphasis of change at a local level in partnership with local communities of Christians.

Second, more broadly, given the negative legacy of so much of ‘Catholic Ireland’, the work of Trócaire, and many other Catholic organisations committed to serving the poor, is a reminder of a ‘thread of grace’ woven into the fabric of Christianity to serve those in need.

Third, the motive for engaging in social justice is crucial. Within Ireland, (some) Protestant relief work during the Famine fatally tainted an astonishing range of aid by multiple organisation. Within Catholicism, the enormous contribution of the Church to social action in Ireland has tended to be lost today. Not only because of scandals, but because it tended to be pragmatic – as a means to an end (the dissemination of the Catholic faith) rather than out of a ‘no strings attached’ love or desire to reform embedded injustices in Irish society. All churches today – of whatever hue – need to love and care for people as people rather than ‘care for the poor’ becoming, however subtly, a means to an end, whether church growth, praise from others or as a means of attracting funding.

Fourth, in an era of unrestrained capitalism that is wrecking havoc on the world’s ecosystems and harming the poor most of all, the call for Christians is to reflect the character of God. He is a God of the poor in whom there is no partiality. His church is called to loving action in his name.

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Why go back to (physical) church?

The local church I belong to has not met physically together since March. Since we don’t have our own building and there will likely be further lockdowns, we don’t really know when we will meet face-to-face again.

Since these are musings, allow me to explore a question:

‘Why not keep doing church from home?’

Let’s be honest, there’s a lot going for it.

First, hasn’t it been an unexpected blessing actually to have Sunday as a day of rest rather than another day of frenetic activity? Church leaders have a Sabbath too – the preaching is recorded during the week. Isn’t it a pleasure to curl up on the sofa, cuppa in hand, to watch church online? It’s also so much more flexible given how many people’s work commitments include weekends. If you can’t make ‘live church’, you can always tune in at a more suitable time.  

Second, isn’t online church still ‘real church’? There is worship, prayer, preaching and even communion. Community is built as people connect over video before or after the service. There can be virtual Bible studies and youth events during the week. The calling of all Christians to witness, to serve and to love God and neighbour isn’t changed by how they meet on Sundays. Indeed, maybe online church can help to free us from equating ‘church’ with a couple of hours per week on a Sunday morning.  

Third, online church seems much more cost-effective and environmentally friendly than traditional church. Just think of all those car journeys saved. Just think of the millions spent on church buildings and the cost of construction, heating, insuring, equipping and maintaining them. Might online church help us to re-evaluate our expensive attachment to bricks and mortar?

So, what do you think? Is the Coronavirus pandemic a time for a radical reimagining of church? Are we better off staying virtual?

I think my answers to those two questions are ‘Yes’ and ‘No’.

‘Yes’, this is a good time to think hard about traditional church – to ask why we were doing what we were doing. What lessons can we learn for doing church differently in the future? It would be interesting to hear your answers to that question.

‘No’, despite what I’ve said so far, online church feels second-best. Theologically there is an essential physicality to the Christian faith. The Word became flesh and came to live among us. We are embodied people made by God to relate to one another, and that happens best in person. A central thread of the Bible story is that of God’s people, together as a body called to worship, love and follow their God. Jesus’ command to break bread and drink wine in his memory is best obeyed sharing the communion meal together around the Lord’s table. If love includes caring for others, it’s hard to do that well via a screen. Young children, I suspect, come off worst from the shift online – they need physical relationships, play and learning with friends.

But there are other problems with online church. It all too easily ends up being a product designed to fit the personal preferences of its ‘customers’. It encourages individualism and erodes the difficult calling of genuine community. We can choose whom we hang out with and when. It generally suits those with comfortable homes, internet access and who are relatively self-sufficient and makes invisible those who don’t. My guess is it will weaken a church’s commitment to mission. And it also enforces an already powerful trend where worship, teaching and even Bible reading is all mediated via a screen. This tech take-over of church is now almost complete and, I think, has profoundly dehumanising results – it narrows further our worship of God to listening passively to a screen.

So, while I’m grateful we have been able to continue to ‘meet’ as a church, my hope and prayer is that we will be able to worship together again ‘in the flesh’ once more – as Christians have done from the very beginning of the church.   

[These ‘Musings’ are from the latest edition of Vox]

The pandemic is exposing the myths of Western individualism

This post is sparked by reading Douglas Campbell’s marvellous Pauline Dogmatics.

If asked to diagram social relations, very likely most of us would typically use a number of circles to represent individuals.

Each person is imagined as a self-contained ‘unit’, a discrete individual, separated off from other individuals by a social space.

This is a picture of the person as a self-sufficient person, with clear boundaries delineating them from other individuals. Others exist in their own spheres, perhaps bouncing off each other now and then, but essentially each of us are our own island.

Margaret Thatcher famously took this to its logical conclusion in stating that there is ‘no such thing as society’. Or, in Campbell’s words;

Personhood exists in isolation and society is a game of marbles

p.50

But with even a little analysis we soon realise this is a myth. All of us are incomplete, indeed we are crippled, without a network of social relationships. Our very identity and sense of personhood depends on interaction with, and recognition of, others.

This simple diagram begins to hint at how who we are is bound up with with relationships. The self cannot exist in splendid isolation.

^{By Wykis – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1618169}

This is why the pandemic is so hard to bear – we are being forced to actually live like the isolated individuals of Western consumerism / capitalism. And it shrivels the soul and breaks the heart. There is something deeply alien to our humanity to be in enforced lockdown.

For those us locked away with family members that we actually like and get on with this is just about survivable! But we still miss 1001 things about everyday life – its vibrancy, life, and delicious complexity, not to mention hugs, food with friends, and endless fascination of meeting new people.

For those trapped in spaces characterised by toxic relationships, it is unimagineably difficult. For those living on their own it is a lonely wilderness experience, unsustainable in the long term.

Douglas Campbell wrote his book long before Covid-19 was known about. So his words have perhaps attained extra prophetic weight in the meantime. He speaks of the connection between our social identity and the nature of God – Father, Son and Spirit.

We must let this revelation concerning the true nature of personhood sink down into out theologial bones, since it will pervade all that follows. People are relational beings because the personal God that is the Trinity is a relational communion, and we are made in the image of God …

At the heart of all reality lies an interpersonal and hence fundamental familial God. We are involved with a divinity that is interpersonal in the most committed and relational fashion.

p.52

Lockdown is necessary. But it comes at great cost – and I am NOT talking money here. It’s an issue of love. I say this because Christians believe, as Campbell says that

At the heart of the universe is a play of love between the Father, the Son and the Spirit.

p. 55

We are embodied beings, made by a relational God of love to be in relationships of love with him and with each other. Of course we can still love others we can only see on a computer screen, but it is a pale imitation of a fully functioning relationship.

And so, from a theological perspective, we long for the ending of lockdown, NOT so we can save the economy (although we need it to work in order to live) but so that we can love – for that is what we have been created to do.

And, even more remarkably, as God’s children love they ‘witness’ to the truth of who God is. God takes the ‘risk’ of choosing people like you and me to reveal or demonstrate his love to the world.

So in this pandemic, let us be asking ourselves, how can we as individuals and as church communities mediate something of the love of the triune God to a coronavirus world.

Comments welcome

A Dialogue with Ben Witherington on The Message of Love (27) Marriage and singleness

This is a dialogue with Professor Ben Witherington about my book The Message of Love

336 pages $12.49 paperback on Amazon or £12.99 paperback IVP UK  or £9.99 ebook 

BEN: On p. 248 you stress that Christian marriage is not a private relationship in which you have all your love concentrated and all your love needs met.  As you say, Paul sees marriage as exhibit A of the larger relationship Christ has with his body, his bride, the church. “The primary location for love is not the nuclear family but the community of the church.” I agree, but this is not what most people mean by a family church (that usually means a church that nurtures nuclear family units, or worse still a church run by a singular nuclear family). Help us to better understand how in an individualistic age we get across that the church is the primary family.

PATRICK:  I say to students sometimes that there’s a ‘weirdness’ to Christianity that we need to feel otherwise we’ve probably domesticated the gospel. I mean by that that Christianity is profoundly ‘out of step’ with many assumed norms of Western culture – and marriage is one example. Conservatives tend to idealise a 1960s version of the nuclear family – a phrase that probably conjures up in our minds images of 2 parents and 2.5 children living in a detached home on a suburban street. Conservatives tend to want to ‘recover’ this lost ideal as a way of promoting social stability. Western liberalism tends to prize love, sex and the option of marriage all belonging to the private domain of the individual lovers, regardless of gender.

It seems to me that Christian marriage challenges both social conservatism and radical individualism. While it is an exclusive relationship between a man and a woman, it is not a a private relationship.

In Ephesians 5 the couple’s love is to exist within the wider network of relationships that is the church (ekklēsia appears multiple times in this text). They are first and foremost members of Christ’s body called, like any other disciples, to love brothers and sisters across deep divides around religious and ethnic background, gender and social status. This relativises marriage – it is not an end in itself. It is not the place the couple’s love rules supreme and which might perhaps ‘overflow’ to others. It’s the other way around – as disciples they learn to love within the community and take that Christian love into marriage.

As Hauerwas says,

‘Love is a characteristic of the church, not the family per se.’ 

This means that Christian marriages ‘belong’ within community – they are to be ‘porous’ (places of hospitality and welcome) not impermeable (the self-sufficient nuclear family).

This perspective gives space to recover a proper theology of celibacy and singleness as an equally (if not higher) calling than marriage – which is also a radical challenge to idolisation of the nuclear family.

A Dialogue with Ben Witherington on The Message of Love (23)

This is a repost of a dialogue on Professor Ben Witherington’s blog about my book The Message of Love

336 pages $12.49 paperback on Amazon or £12.99 paperback IVP UK  or £9.99 ebook 

BEN: We are called to love self-sacrificially, as Christ loved. That seems a very high standard indeed which we can only approximate at times. But it does make clear that Christ expects a lot of us. ‘To whom more is given….’. I have grown tired of the mistranslation of the famous verse in Philippians which actually reads ‘I am able…… all things in Him who strengthens me’. It seems clearly, in light of Paul just saying he has learned contentment in good times and bad, with and without material well being that the appropriate way to read that verse is not ‘I can DO all things…’ but rather ‘I am able to endure with contentment all things… etc. Comments??

PATRICK: Yes, in John’s Gospel disciples are commanded to love one another as Jesus has loved them. Indeed loving one another is the only duty that is commanded in the whole Gospel. What that means is spelt out – Jesus lays down his life for his friends. This is love orientated to the good of others at cost to the self. It’s the very heart of Christianity. Of course all of this is much easier to understand in theory than do in practice! In the book I quote Francis Moloney, ‘Words about love can come easily enough; lives that demonstrate love are harder to come by.’ I happen to be married to someone who lives such a life but I agree with you that it’s a tough calling. It’s a long way from the sort of naïve positive thinking that you mention. I fail to be loving every day to the people I like, let alone to the ones I don’t! This is why life in Christian community is where the rubber really hits the road. Love hangs in there. It’s open-eyed about human failure – including our own. It seeks forgiveness and reconciliation. It’s honest. Churches are made up of all sorts of people and love is the only thing that’s going to hold it together if it’s going to flourish and grow. Perhaps it’s only such authentic communities of love that are going to make an impact on a (often rightly) sceptical world.

 

Dialogue with Ben Witherington on The Message of Love (13)

This is a repost of a dialogue on Professor Ben Witherington’s blog about my book The Message of Love

336 pages $12.49 paperback on Amazon or £12.99 paperback IVP UK  or £9.99 ebook 

BEN: P. 114 is one of the more important diagnoses in the book of what is wrong with the way Western culture views love. Love as a legal right, non-traditional marriage arrangements as a legal right. But the Bible says love is a gift, not a right. It’s not something owed to us by society or the world. I like the quote from Simon May

“Whereas becoming even a fairly competent artists or gardener or editor or plumber or banker or singer is dearly purchased with long effort and then only by the few with sufficient talent, love is [thought to be] a democracy of salvation open to all.”

And you are right that modern notions that love itself can save us without need for repentance, or humility or obedience to God, are over-confident about the power of merely human love. Without our sounding like the Grinch who Stole Christmas, how do we explain to people that real love is costly, is not free, and demands all that we are and have if is to be really transformative, and while we are at it— it needs to be God’s love that is the ultimate change agent of human personality???

PATRICK: I think it’s about where you start. Christians believe in the gospel (good news) of God’s victory over sin and death through the life, atoning death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the living Lord. It’s this message that the great gospel sermons in Acts tell, they don’t begin with bad news. Similarly, when it comes to very different understandings of love, I think the best tack is to focus on how the Bible’s ‘Message of Love’ is packed with good news. That’s the message we have been given to witness to.

In the conclusion of the book I try to draw the three strands of love in the Bible together. Strand 1 is God’s relentless love unfolding through the OT and NT. Theologically it’s the identity of Jesus as God’s beloved Son who dies for us that marks a revolution in the understanding of divine love. Strand 2 is the call for a whole-hearted response of human love for God. Strand 3 is resultant communities of God’s people loving one another and their neighbors with Jesus-like love. As your late friend Larry Hurtado says, Christianity’s love-ethic marked it out as unique in the ancient world. We need to teach and inspire people with these truths – ultimately that’s why I wrote the book.

But words count for only so much. The challenge for us as individual Christians and churches is to ‘explain’ what love is by our lives and communities. It is our lives and churches that are the ultimate hermeneutic of the gospel. People are rightly sceptical of the church and its hypocrisy which says, in effect, ‘Don’t mind our broken relationships and toxic communities, believe our message of love anyway!’ John put it pretty bluntly didn’t he? He who claims to love God but does not love his brother shows himself to be a liar. Honesty and truth-telling is all we have (Hauerwas).