Reflections on Scripture as I Indaba and other thoughts that need refining

These thoughts are my thoughts alone and do not represent my diocesan team or the Indaba project. 

(Continuing Indaba Encounter Social network and Blog Policy)

“On that day every prophet will be ashamed of their prophetic vision. They will not put on a prophet’s garment of hair in order to deceive. Each will say, ‘I am not a prophet. I am a farmer; the land has been my livelihood since my youth.’ If someone asks, ‘What are these wounds on your body?’ they will answer, ‘The wounds I was given at the house of my friends.’


This was in my Old Testament reading when I led morning prayer for the Continuing indaba team. I could have offered a reflection or stayed silent so I chose the latter but the passage will not leave me and has to come out somewhere.


Eisegesis rather than exegesis perhaps but here are a few reflections in a very splurge and share style.


...the whole indaba process is suring up a few things for me and shaking me at the very core of my foundation. The first thing that resonates for me with this passage is that I am receiving wounds in the house of my friends.


'This house of friends' is the Anglican Communion - this historic institution by invitation only, non-confessional, with the Chicago-Lambeth quadilateral holding it all together. The four instruments of the communion exercise a power that is, at best, and worst, illusory but appropriate. The Anglican covenant threatening this was never going to work because it was not of the essence of this delicate thing.


The Virginia Report describes how, 'Anglicans are held together by the characteristic way in which they use Scripture, tradition and reason in discerning afresh the mind of Christ for the Church in each generation,' (The Virginia Report, p. 15). We sit on either a three or three-and-a-half-legged stool - Scripture, Tradition and Reason - we tentatively wonder about Experience so I give it half-a-leg because it is where we are appropriately wobbly and being wobbly does exactly that, it threatens any stability.


I continue to enter this House of Friends because I believe in it and my friends are generous with their hospitality - they have invited me and I accept the invitation. But it is also a place of incredible wounding.


I have cried lots since returning home for the weekend as a host to one of the delegates, just privately and quietly, of course. The wounds feel very tender and raw and as I sure up things about my own identity, theological conviction and spirituality, I have a sense of what I must go on to do and be, should the invitation continue to be extended my way.

I am very much an evangelical. I appreciate that proclamation lies at the top of the five marks of mission (To proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom). If I return to a previous analogy, in New York, I visited the migrant farmers' patch in Orange County where I learnt that onions are produced by the dark, richly nutritious soil, but that there is oil below, far, far down and further still, even, diamonds!


Last night I went with my delegate to dinner with six girl-friends of mine: independent, intelligent and generous people, self-sufficient and driven each in their own way, each also caring for families and impacting their communities. They support causes and care about their neighbourhoods, many of them involved in or contributing to social justice projects of a variety of natures. Though they do not proclaim the faith I proclaim and are not members of churches, rather representing the 'closed dechurched' and the 'open dechurched,' God is working his purposes out through them. Onions abound. Onions feed. Lives are improved.


I believe that regardless of the lack of proclamation, the Anglican Communion, is in many ways too, a provider of onions. The Episcopal church's social justice progams and feeding programs had a huge impact upon me. The church is a welfare provider, caring for humanity's well-being, paraclete-like, getting alongside people, right where they are at and responding to human need by loving service. This church is transforming the unjust structures of society. (Five Marks of mission)

In the last post I wrote using this analogy I wrote about seeing the onions. These onions were feeding people and nourishing them in very pragmatic ways but I was failing to find the burning oil, in terms of that fire whose embers I have felt in charismatic expressions of evangelical worship, that something/someone who gently warmed the heart of Wesley. I was wondering at all where the diamonds were in terms of the mining of scripture in community for the light that it sheds on a situation. I continue to see a socially engaged church with a heart for the social gospel, with people's lives being transformed. There is hospitality, invitation, dialogue, conversation, inclusion, generosity. But finding so many aspects of Christ's revelation, there is still an unsatisfied hunger and the need to keep going in search of oil and diamonds.

In the UK our biggest challenge is New Atheism and growing secularism.

Do we not need to discover a New Theism or at least proclaim as loudly this presence and existence of God as those proclaiming his non-existence?

I wonder in what sense our watering down of the message and failure to proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom and To teach, baptise and nurture new believers (Five Marks of mission) is adding to our problems. 

Do not get me wrong, I am seeing oil too and every now and then the flash of diamonds but I am also understanding more the reasons for those who have broken away, the reason why some seek to 'reform' the Church of England.

I never thought I would respond, as one thirsty in the desert, to the words of the Book of Common Prayer, quite as thankfully as I did the other evening of one of the Indaba visits. The BCP also represents an entity for me to be carefully handled with those wanting to know Jesus for the first time - language of sin abounds and is not in today's common parlance and in itself can become a barrier to the unchurched particularly, but the BCP is BIBLE.

As I sit on the stool (Hooker's three-legged), I extend my hands back and project my weight onto the leg that represents scripture. I believe that Hooker did this too, that Reason, that other leg, was a godly wisdom, the charism of wisdom, it was necessary against a Puritan biblicism and literalism which I believe can exist in some of the expressions of the faith held by many of our Anglican brothers and sisters who have indeed broken away, I do not go with them because I believe in the Communion, accept its invitation and find no welcome from those outside because my gender and vocation causes them difficulties of conscience, but they are my very close cousins because we both take this Hookerarian approach to Scripture. I also believe that Hooker articulated Scripture's priority over the other leg: Tradition (in reaction to the Catholic influence).  

As I say, I do believe in Anglicanism:

“Anglicanism does indeed attempt to hold together elements that are opposed in other traditions – though not without strains. It defines itself as catholic and reformed; orthodox in doctrine yet open to change in its application. Its polity is both episcopal (and its bishops have real authority) and synodical – an unusual combination in a church that has maintained the historic episcopate. It acknowledges an ecumenical council as the highest authority in the Church, but is not opposed in principle to a universal primacy and virtually never has been. It confesses the paramount authority of Scripture, but reveres tradition and harkens to the voice of culture and science. It tries to be neither centralized nor fragmented, neither authoritarian nor anarchic. It is comprehensive without being relativistic. This interesting experiment has endured and evolved for nearly five centuries; in spite of the present difficulties, I believe it is worth persevering with.” [Paul Avis,The Identity of Anglicanism: Essentials of Anglican Ecclesiology(London: T&T Clark, 2007), pp. 168-169.]

What I am left looking for, and suspecting I will see in India, are the diamonds.

I see them here in the more evangelical of our churches.

I see them in the work that we are doing in the diocese I serve to bring the message of the gospel to 14,000 children in our Church of England schools.

I see them in the ways in which people are planting churches in communities that are breaking down and in the way we are working with God in his Missio dei to open up the gospel in Fresh Expressions so that people can own the historic and often inaccessible faith for themselves.

What I suspect I will go on to find in India and why I have such deep connection and resonance with my Indian brothers and sisters through this entire process are the  bright flashes, 'that bright metal on a sullen ground (that dark soil of Orange County), where reformation glittering o'er my fault shall show more goodly and attract more eyes' (to quote Hal in Henry IV part One) to JESUS, proclamation for a spiritual people who are following so many other gods.

Because of the competition, I suspect to see free worship, empowered ministry in the Holy Spirit, vibrant proclamation of the gospel, sermons that teach and open up scripture and a church in revival whose people are engaged in the five marks of mission, whether they articulate them in that way or not but where proclamation and teaching and baptising are not compromised by political correctness and the thought that somehow the loving thing to do is to just keep on listening and including everybody - I expect to see that more frightening and exhilarating Jesus who brought challenge and not peace, who disturbed and threatened to break up families because the water (of baptism) is thicker than blood. I wonder if I will really find these things but I look forward to finding out....

...and in the meantime I continue, as a charismatic evangelical to receive wounds in the house of my friends but the wounds are becoming testimony to this journey that I am on and my changing shape as I explore in this blog our 'reformation in response to changing times in the Anglican Communion' (this blog's purpose). 

To return to my Old Testament reading, as a 'Tiller of the soil' over a 'prophet', I am very much looking forward to getting my spade out next week as I settle back into my local context and turn the soil over with all of the other people with whom I work as we seek to discern what God might be saying to the people of our neighbourhood.

Perspective is everything.