Anglican Down Under: Hear What the Spirit Is Saying To The Church

Saturday, July 17, 2010

Hear What the Spirit Is Saying To The Church

I promised some further reflection on Fresh Expressions. In part that can be found here and here.

Careful reading of both will show that I commit to nothing about future action more concrete than listening to the Spirit and discerning the signs of the (cultural) times. My mind tends to work in practical ways, so much of my thinking in the last week about Fresh Expressions has been 'what if we did this ... or this?' Of course the Spirit may be speaking to me, and through me, via such thoughts. But likely (on the basis of assessment of my life story) I am running ahead of the Spirit!

So, a week on from +Cray's two Christchurch conferences, the primary reflection I offer is to be serious about listening to the Spirit. Should not be hard, after all in modern liturgies we commit ourselves to doing that reading by reading.

One picture in my mind lends some urgency to this task. It matters not where or when the picture formed, and many readers will easily recognise the picture ... whether in NZ or other Western countries. It is a picture of a congregation at worship. Everything is done well. True devotion to God is expressed. Warm hospitality is shown to one another and to any strangers in their midst. The gospel is proclaimed and the sacrament administered. But apart from one family with children, the congregation is aged 60 years and above.

What is the Spirit saying to such congregations, and (speaking as an Anglican) to the dioceses in which such congregations live their inter-dependent lives?

Keep going ... eventually things will change (e.g. secularism will fade away) ...

Change the way things are being done. Doing what has always been done will always succeed in the same result. Thus ...

Keep going with what you have and start a new thing ...

Take the wider view. Celebrate what the Pentecostals/Catholics/New21stCenturyChurch are doing in the next street over ...

Install a webcam and feed services live on your new Facebook page (having first Tweeted news of this new development) ...

Ignore the above. That is me trying to second guess (again!) what the Spirit is saying to the church. But do not ignore the Spirit.

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Anglican Down Under

Welcome to this blog on Anglican, theological, biblical and other matters, mostly missional or liturgical (but I reserve the right to write about cricket and politics). It is grounded in some islands at the bottom of the world which, together with a large island to our west, constitute fabulous Down Under.

I have two related blogs which I post on less frequently:

Hermeneutics and Human Dignity

Resourcing Preaching and Worship Down Under

I am Bishop of the Diocese of Christchurch in the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia (ACANZP). I am trying to write in ways which contribute to the flourishing of the church of God - a church represented in the Anglican Communion, in the Anglican churches of these islands and, of course, in my Diocese. You will judge whether I am succeeding or not!

Pearls

Show us anything clearly set forth in Holy Scripture that we do not teach and we will teach it. Show us anything in our teaching or practice is clearly contrary to Holy Scripture, and we will abandon it.

Stephen Neill

For the glory of God is a human being fully alive, and the glory of humanity is the vision of God.

St Irenaeus

Fundamentally the Gospel is obsessed with the idea of the unity of human society.

Masure

We have returned to the Apostles and the old Catholic Fathers. We have planted no new religion, but only preserved the old that was undoubtedly founded and used by the Apostles of Christ and other holy Fathers of the Primitive Church.

Bishop Jewel

Preachers shall behave themselves modestly and soberly in every department of their life. But especially shall they see to it that they teach nothing in the way of a sermon, which they would have religiously held and believed by the people, save what is agreeable to the teaching of the Old or New Testament, and what the Catholic fathers and ancient bishops have collected from this selfsame doctrine.

Canon 6 from the 1571 Bishop’s Convocation

Kent: "See better, Lear, and let me still remain."

William Shakespeare

For the clarity that we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear.

Wittgenstein

Justice is eternal, and doesn't depend at all on human conventions.

Montesquieu

The real challenge of Islam to Western intellectual discourse is for us to ask ourselves whether our unprecedented modern experiment of conducting political life with no transcendent values is really working out as well as we once hoped.

Harvey Cox

The long-term happiness of a society depends on how individuals behave towards each other, how families hold together, and how leaders keep the trust of people.

William Hague

Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed.

John Neuhaus

To be an evangelical is not, first and foremost, about doctrinal correctness, but about a passion for the gospel of salvation from sin through Christ for eternity.

John Richardson

Neither may we ... lightly esteem what hath been allowed as fit in the judgement of antiquity, and by the long continued practice of the whole church; from which unnecessarily to swerve, experience hath never as yet found it safe.

Richard Hooker (Lawes, V.7.1)

The function of the Christian canon was to separate the apostolic witness from the ongoing tradition of the church, whose truth was continually in need of being tested by the apostolic faith.

Brevard S. Childs

Every word of God proves true. (Proverbs 30:5)

If the people of this religion are asked about the proof for the soundness of their religion, they flare up, get angry and spill the blood of whoever confronts them with this question. They forbid rational speculation, and strive to kill their adversaries. This is why truth became thoroughly silenced and concealed.

Muhammad ibn Zakariya Razi

Change comes through ordinary working people organising themselves to struggle for a better world day in, day out.

Morning Star newspaper editorial Tuesday 5 May 2015

"In the soft grey silence he could hear the bump of the balls: and from here and from there through the quiet air the sound of the cricket bats: pick, pack, pock, puck: like drops of water in a fountain falling softly in the brimming bowl."

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

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Saturday, July 17, 2010

Hear What the Spirit Is Saying To The Church

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