For the Parish

Andrew Davison

Description

Fresh Expressions of Church are most significant development in the Church of England. Parishes are the mainstay of the 'inherited church'. The authors demonstrate that the traditions of the parish church represent ways in which time, space, community are ordered in relation to God and the gospel.

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern
• Date de parution: 15 avril 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780334047629
• Langue: English

Extrait

For the Parish
For the Parish
A Critique of Fresh Expressions
Andrew Davison and Alison Milbank
© Andrew Davison and Alison Milbank 2010
Published in 2010 by SCM Press Editorial office 13 – 17 Long Lane, London, ec 1 a 9 pn, UK
SCM Press is an imprint of Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd (a registered charity) 13a Hellesdon Park Road Norwich, NR 6 5DR www.scm-canterburypress.co.uk
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, SCM Press.
The Authors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 , to be identified as the Authors of this Work
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA.
Extracts from Common Worship: Services and Prayers for the Church of England are copyright © The Archbishops’ Council 2000 and reproduced by permission.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
978 - 0 - 334 - 04365 - 2
Originated by The Manila Typesetting Company Printed and bound by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham SN 14 6 LH
Contents
Introduction
1 The Union of Form and Content
2 Theology and Mediation
3 The Church in Fresh Expressions: Mistakes in Soteriology and Ecclesiology
4 Fresh Expressions: The Flight to Segregation
5 Fresh Expressions: The Flight from Tradition
6 Recovering a Theology of Mission and Mediation
7 The Parish
8 Rebuilding a Christian Imaginary in the Parish
9 Mediating Faith in the Parish: a Liturgical Ethics
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Introduction
This book is written in the belief that an important choice is offered to the Church of England: to embrace her historic mission to evangelize and serve the whole people of this country, or to decline into a sect. We are responding to the most significant development in the Church of England in recent years: the 2004 report, Mission-shaped Church , and the subsequent encouragement of extra-parochial congregations, called ‘Fresh Expressions of Church’. [1] The report and the initiatives launched at its prompting are an attempt to respond to what is perceived to be the near-complete secularization of Britain and the hegemony of market values. While the aim of engaging with our contemporary context is admirable, it is done, we argue, on the basis of a defective methodology, an inadequate theology, and by accepting the very choice-led individualism from which Christianity should seek to liberate us. It is a capitulation to market values rather than a critique where it is most needed or a counter-cultural vision of the kingdom.
What is new about these Fresh Expressions initiatives as officially conceived is that they are not intended to be out-workings of the mission of the local church but independent entities without any relation to the parish in which they operate. They are not the sorts of Christian communities modelled by the parish, open to all. They are special interest groups: ‘church’ whether of bikers, book-group members or participants in any other leisure activity or demographic that defines the consumerist criterion for membership. On the frail foundation of only nineteen pages devoted to theology in the Mission-shaped Church report, a massive redirection of mission and ecclesiology has been effected. A new orthodoxy, with cultural, financial and legal implications for the whole Church, has taken hold, but with little discussion about the biblical and theological foundations on which it is based. On the surface, it may appear that the inherited parochial system can carry on as before, but if it does, the older understanding no longer defines the Church of England’s ecclesiology. If Fresh Expressions is as equally valid a form of life for the Anglican Church as the parish, then what is common to both forms, the defining minimum of our identity, is greatly contracted. Since one is forbidden from suggesting that there is anything lacking from the vision of the Church embodied in Fresh Expressions , its attenuated ecclesiology thereby becomes the new contracted norm. This has implications not only for the Church’s self-understanding but also our conception of salvation, as we explore in Chapter 3 of the present volume.
In what follows, we offer a thoroughgoing critique of Fresh Expressions on theological and philosophical grounds. In particular, we deprecate the way in which the movement seeks to separate form and content, with the assumption that the essence of the Church exists separately from its living forms of expression. On the basis of this assumption: adherents of Fresh Expressions believe that the Church can be divested of her inherited practices, structures and disciplines and go on to be ‘re-expressed’ in new ways, with little or no sense of loss. In Chapter 1 we draw upon a wide range of theological and philosophical sources to argue for the inextricability of form and content, Wittgenstein among them–for whom values, meanings and convictions do not so much lie beneath our communal behaviour and ‘forms of life’ as in them. The separation of form and content is one aspect of a further theological error: a profound unease with mediation. Chapter 2 demonstrates the centrality of mediation to any Christian account of redemption, and Chapter 3 uses St Paul’s Epistles to show how unbiblical the Mission-shaped Church account of the Church has become in its desire to underplay the corporeal and participatory aspects of ecclesiology.
The Fresh Expressions model of the sector, choice-led worshipping group represents a flight away from the mixed community of the parish and towards segregation, as we argue in Chapter 4 . The network of consumer choice is privileged over the parish as a site of difference and reconciliation, following the ‘Homogeneous Unit Principle’ of American Protestantism. It is also a flight from the value of tradition, common worship and the embodied self. The abandonment of stability for novelty and given liturgy for ‘choice’, results in banality and pastiche, as well as a frail and atomized subjectivity, as we demonstrate in Chapter 5 .
In Chapters 6 – 9 , we turn to a defence of the inherited parish system, which is routinely belittled and cast as unhelpful and irrelevant in Fresh Expressions writing. We argue the opposite: that the parish, nested in deanery and diocese, is poised to be a vital resource for mission in the future. We begin by sketching the theology of mission implicit in the parish vision of salvation in Chapter 6 , with an examination of the value of locality, placement and inclusiveness represented by the parish church in Chapter 7 . In Chapter 8 the task of rebuilding the Christian imaginary of time, place and narrative is described in detail, while Chapter 9 shows how our engagement in liturgy as a form of life develops the Christian virtues as much by gesture, space and movement as by what we say. These practical chapters aim to show how form and content work together to our human flourishing within the mediating structure of the local church.
This book is the fruit of a conference, ‘Returning to the Church’, held by St Stephen’s House in Oxford in collaboration with the Centre of Theology and Philosophy at the University of Nottingham in January 2009, at which a fruitful mixture of lay people, students, bishops, curates and academics came together to explore the traditions and future mission of the Church of England. Our two papers, on the importance of the parish and on the value of mediation struck such a chord with the delegates that we were commissioned to go away and unite them into a pamphlet, which has become this book. The conference was energetic and positive, and people visibly unfurled as we were able to speak about and value the ordinary practices, disciplines and ministries of Anglican life. There was also, however, a strong feeling of disenfranchisement, of a disconnect between classic Anglicanism and the growing orthodoxy of Fresh Expressions, and, in particular, of the way in which the ‘mixed economy’ idea sanctions part of the Church floating free from Anglican norms.
In what follows, we have no desire to criticize the valuable work of reaching out to the unchurched in mission and service. As priests ourselves, we see this as part of our own vocation and the natural outflowing of the parochial system’s cure of souls. Lynda Barley reported to the General Synod in 2007 that over 50 percent of parishes had launched or were about to embark on a Fresh Expression. [2] Where we take issue is the way in which first, the group centred around the extra-liturgical activity of football or the book-group is to stand on its own as a church, and second, in the marketing model of the Faith as a commodity, which is cheerfully embraced by synod members such as Michael Streeter, for whom the church ‘is a consumer product’, and which is implicit in the terminology of Fresh Expressions (which as we discovered, is already a commodity in the American supermarket: a brand of scented cat litter) [3] .
This is unapologetically a work of theology, which is the subject least valued in recent reallocation of resources and in the literature surrounding the Fresh Expressions developments. It is wholly Anglican in seeing a direct link between the lex orandi and the