A Future That's Bigger Than The Past

Samuel Wells

Description

Samuel Wells shares his vision for the Church as imagined by HeartEdge, the growing network of churches established by St Martin-in-the-Fields, with its fourfold focus for renewing the mission activity of the church: commerce, culture, congregation and compassion.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• State
• Politics
• Religion

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern
• Date de parution: 30 septembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781786221797
• Langue: English

Extrait

© The Contributors 2019
First published in 2019 by the Canterbury Press Norwich
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Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Anglicized Edition, copyright © 1989, 1995 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Where indicated, scriptures are quoted from the Good News Translation published by The Bible Societies/HarperCollins Publishers Ltd UK © American Bible Society, 1966, 1971, 1976, 1992.
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978 1 78622 177 3
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For Geoffrey Brown
‘Those who believe in me will do what I do – yes, they will do even greater things.’ John 14.12, Good News Translation


Contents
Preface
Introduction: A Vision for Church Renewal
1 For Such a Time as This: The Church’s Opportunity
2 Investing in the Kingdom: The Divine Economy
3 Minding God’s Business: Becoming a Parable
4 Entertaining Angels Unawares: It is More Blessed to Receive
5 Making our Hearts Sing: Let All the People Praise Thee
6 Realizing God’s Presence: On Earth as it is in Heaven
Appendix: Measuring the Kingdom
Bibliography
Index of Names and Subjects


Preface
A book like this shouldn’t really have a single author, and so the business of these introductory remarks is to highlight those without whom there would have been no St Martin-in-the-Fields, no HeartEdge movement, no imagination of a future that’s bigger than the past.
I am grateful to the Most Revd Derek Browning, Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland 2017–18, and the Revd Dr George Whyte, Principal Clerk, and their committee for the invitation to give the Chalmers Lectures at Greyfriars Kirk, Edinburgh, in September and October 2019, and for their explicit request that the lectures should concern the theology and methods of HeartEdge, and the confidence in the movement that this request shows. I am indebted also to Richard Frazer and his team at Greyfriars for their warm welcome.
I want to give credit to Jonathan Evens and Andy Turner, who established HeartEdge, and to Neville Black and Martin Sergeant, who in different ways played crucial roles in envisioning and resourcing the idea. I am grateful for early adopters, too many to name, but including Richard Frazer, Lucy Winkett, Mike Branscombe, Giles Goddard, Christopher Woods, Andy Goodliff, David Mayne, Erica Wooff, Dan Tyndall, Hilary Oakley, Ruth Gouldbourne, Simon Woodman, Jo Loveridge, Jonathan Sedgwick, Bob Lawrie, Mark Kinder, Tim Vreugdenhil and James Hughesden, and for the steering group, which has included several of the early adopters but also Duncan McCall, Andrew Caspari, Ali Lyon and Peter Keegan.
Special thanks go to Katy Shaw and her team in generating resources and developing strategy, to Andrew Earis, Richard Carter, Allyson Hargreaves and Tim Bissett, whose work has pioneered much of the energy behind HeartEdge, and to the wider team at St Martin-in-the-Fields, including Pam Orchard, Katherine Hedderly, Chris Franklin, Chris Braganza, Catherine Jackson, Chris Burford, Cathy Reid Jones, the PCC and the company board, and all who, as lay volunteers, staff and clergy, have made St Martin’s a place where beautiful things happen every day.
The work of St Martin’s today stands on the shoulders of countless committed, talented and faithful people over many decades, back to 1914 and beyond. We may say with the letter to the Hebrews, ‘All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them’ (11.13). If two names were to be singled out as representatives of them all, they might be Geoffrey Brown, whose courage and enterprise, together with that of those who worked alongside him, saved St Martin’s from a financial precipice in the late 1980s, and for whom the St Martin’s of today is perhaps the best memorial; and Nicholas Holtam, under whose leadership the whole site was completely renovated and upgraded, and whose team’s work set the stage for the next chapter in this remarkable story.
I want to mention those not already named who have guided, inspired, refined, enriched or contributed to parts of the book or argument, including Ched Myers, Greg Jones, Jonathan Kearney, Giles Goddard, Peterson Feital, Walter Brueggemann, Maureen Knudsen Langdoc, Kelly Johnson and Russell Rook. Particular thanks to Rebekah Eklund for detailed comments on the manuscript and to Georgie Illingworth who, as well as assisting Jonathan and Andy, was a great help with the appendix and with turning the written word into audio-visual lectures.
I first used the phrase ‘a future that’s bigger than the past’ in 1994 in Wallsend, North Tyneside, when presiding at a service of prayer and dedication after a civil marriage. It struck me that for this particular couple to enter marriage again, having vividly seen its more challenging dimensions, was the triumph of hope over experience in a rather inspiring way, and promised a future unclouded by the storms previously known. It occurred to me at the time that the phrase alluded to the way, for Christians, what God has in store is always more than we have already known.
But when it came to establishing an ecumenical movement for church renewal in this generation, the phrase struck me again, because the one thing I felt the need to set aside was a widespread, almost universal, lament that the church had lost its hold on the imagination of the public at large, and that something vital, irreplaceable and glorious had been irretrievably lost, such that what lay ahead was its inevitable demise. To me this assumed an unjustifiably rose-tinted view of the living-memory past and an unnecessary yet self-fulfilling perspective on the foreseeable future. The word ‘bigger’ may be clumsy, but it’s designed to be provocative. It’s the phrase I most associate with the distinctive quality of St Martin-in-the-Fields – an institution, fundamentally a church, which, unusually in our time, truly believes that in Christ the future is always bigger than the past. Long may it be so.


Introduction:
A Vision for Church Renewal
The church is getting smaller; and the church is becoming narrower. Those who regularly attend worship are fewer; and the church’s reputation and energy are becoming associated with initiatives that are introverted and often lack the full breadth of the gospel. The two questions this situation evokes are, ‘How do you feel about this?’ and ‘What are you doing about it?’ This book is written to address this situation and answer those questions. It does so by placing the situation in a larger social and economic context and by offering a carefully thought-through and assiduously tested answer to the questions. This introduction offers a beginning to addressing the situation and to answering the questions.
What this book is about
Reforming church
The ideas that permeate this book emerged in reflecting on the five-hundredth anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. ‘Reformation’ refers to the process by which (1) a new idea (2) takes revolutionary hold on the imagination of a generation, resulting (3) in a transformation in political, social or religious institutions. The key to the sixteenth-century Reformation was the uncovering of a new and exhilarating understanding of salvation, namely justification by grace through faith. Martin Luther believed this doctrine had always been there, being embedded in Ephesians 2, and maintained that it had been obscured by the church, which, through its accretions over the centuries, had more or less replaced it with a notion of salvation through works – of which the sale of indulgences was but the most egregious symptom. For Luther, the doctrinal changes were primary, whereas for the Reformed theologians John Calvin and Huldrych Zwingli, and even more so for the Radical Reformers, institutional realignment was essential; thus under their authority the threefold order of bishops, priests and deacons was swept away. But for all Protestants, the key social development was the putting of the Bible in the vernacular in the hands of ordinary lay Christians for devotional and ethical use, and no longer keeping it solely in Latin and restricting it to the liturgical use of the clergy.
If we are to mean anything in our generation by invoking the term ‘reformation’, I think it makes sense to do so if we follow that threefold pattern, beginning with (1) the new idea, perceiving how it (2) changes assum