Evangelistic
Previously I have referred to an impressive and detailed survey of faith in our land. Our Anglican Taonga offers a report on it here.
Being evangelistic anywhere in the world today is challenging but for those of us living here (called the Shaky Isles today because there has been yet another significant earthquake, widely felt) we must embrace the specific challenges of our cultural contexts.
As a sign of the challenge, yesterday we had further confirmation that our representative parliament has no particular collective allegiance to Christianity as it was confirmed that "Jesus Christ" would disappear from the daily prayer which begins parliamentary sessions.
Is there "good news" in the report? Yes. I cite the Taonga reflection:
"The survey findings confirmed that the most effective form of evangelism in Aotearoa today comes from Christians who demonstrate Christian actions first, before sharing their faith in words.
59% of New Zealanders filling out the survey thought they would most likely be influenced to investigate faith by seeing others live out their faith. And if that faith was lived out while caring for people suffering from a personal trauma or life change, the impact of that Christian love and care went up. The survey also found that 54% of Kiwis were open to changing their religious views or exploring other beliefs."
The onus, in our practical Kiwi culture, is on people seeing our good works and glorifying our Father who is in heaven!
Evangelical
Being evangelical in ACANZP is, I think, measurably more challenging as we are now at the end of October 2018. Locally that means that from tomorrow, five new evangelical congregations will have been formed from Anglican parishes in the Diocese of Christchurch. I understand that in December, two more congregations will be added, and through these works an eighth is emerging and establishing itself. All of which means there are evangelical Anglicans who believe they must of necessity be evangelical and Anglican outside of the historical, well-established Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia. The move to disaffiliate is driven - if I may say so - by evangelical convictions more than Anglican convictions.
In turn, that raises a question for evangelicals who remain in ACANZP. Are we now somewhat less than evangelical? Have we blunted the edge of our evangelical convictions in order to remain secure in our familiar environments?
Cue attention to a letter a group of evangelical Anglican bishops has written to GAFCON - bishops in the Church of England taking up a GAFCON challenge to explain what it means to be "faithful Anglicans".
I like what they say.
While not every phrase would be adopted by me (because some phrases are specific to the experience of being evangelical in the Church of England), I agree with much of what the letter says. In particular, the Jerusalem Declaration is a document I have never been happy about as a statement of Anglican conviction which somehow ought to be easy for "any evangelical" to sign; the affirmation of the Communion Partner bishops within TEC is welcome; and their commitment to a specific mission within the CofE is encouraging.
As an evangelical Anglican about to become a bishop, I am encouraged by this letter.
22 comments:
"The survey findings confirmed that the most effective form of evangelism in Aotearoa today comes from Christians who demonstrate Christian actions first, before sharing their faith in words."
This statement from Anglican Taonga linked by you, Peter, certainly echoes my experience of dealing with outsiders of the Church (some in my own extended family), who are alert to how the Church deals with public issues that affect them and other people who are not necessarily Church members.
This totally chimes with the words of Jesus that: "They will know you're my disciples by your love" - (not necessarily what you say about love!).
To my mind, we ought all to be intentionally 'evangelical' - in its very broadest meaning - conveying the Good News of Jesus Christ to our neighbours in the world. (not merely an in-house dialogue).
I do think that the organisers of GAFCON and FOCA have been reminded by the English Bishops that traditional Anglicanism is something MORE Gospel-like, not less, than the 'Jerusalem Statement of Faith', which may just be deficient in Holy Charity.
If ACANZP listens more to Duke and less to Moore, it will be more evangelical with respect to Bible, Cross, Conversion, and Action (Bebbington Quadrilateral). With all respect, the secession of Reformed-ish evangelicals from ACANZP may be clearing the way for a better sort of evangelicalism.
BW
Postscript. I have mentioned schools only as a shorthand for some well-known differences among Anglican evangelicals. I might as easily have contrasted the CoE's Reform and Fulcrum. Doing so enables one to recognize that several provinces of the Communion are tugged in, not two, but three directions. The arguments that matter most for the future are the ones between Duke and Chicago, Fulcrum and Modern Church, Communion Partners and TEC, etc.
BW
How to be evangelical in the Anglican Church is an interesting point of discussion. As is the question ‘what is an evangelical?’ We are a broad church in the Anglican Communion, and indeed a broad church under the umbrella of ‘evangelical’.
Many of us who have for decades described ourselves as evangelical now find ourselves in the position that we are criticised for our understanding, questioning and seeking God in the way that we follow Jesus. Perhaps the label has been hijacked by certain parts of evangelical Christianity? Certainly in the current debate on sexuality, it does nothing but take us away from the grace of God and in its place provide an atmosphere of dissonance and distrust where people express a desire to understand different views are viewed negatively.
On a lighter note the debate on the nature of evangelical has been discussed for a few years, perhaps nowhere more succinctly than on this link, https://cyber-coenobites.blogspot.com/2014/04/what-sort-of-former-evangelical-are-you.html
https://theconversation.com/how-a-new-generation-is-changing-evangelical-christianity-67044
BW
What Anglican or evangelical or Anglican evangelical writes about interior change as helpfully as the Vietnamese Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh?
Evangelicals believe, no insist, that an absence of conversion is an absence of Christianity. All the rest of evo belief and practice supports that personal change. Anglican evangelicals believe that the body of practice in the BCP is especially helpful to the conversion of souls to God.
But without an art of conversion what does any of this mean? And if God-pleasing change happens elsewhere, what does that mean?
BW
Thanks for recent comments here and on other recent posts ... and Bowman, your recent comments have been very helpful to me, affirming a broad sense of being on a path which has potential for fruitfulness, despite critics from other pathways thinking otherwise!
Thank you, Bowman, for your interesting link to 'Conversation' I was especially interested in the emphasis on how younger Evangelicals in the U.S. are not interested in following the 'party line' of white republican politics. Rather, they are focussed on the need for the justice and truth imperatives of Jesus in the Gospels:
"But this time, a call to support Trump has exposed deep divisions within evangelicals that have gone unnoticed until now. The point is that Trump represents to many the very antithesis of the kind of moral probity that evangelical leaders have spent their lives defending."
This sounds very hopeful for a new generation of young Evangelical believers, whose moral values and understanding of human thriving are way beyond the old-fashioned mores of Trump and Jerry Falwell.
Dear Peter, Janet Fife's article on the 'T.A. website today, offers an Evangelical perspective on the need to keep up with the realities of today's world, in order to keep pace with the real needs of humanity as it exists in today's world. Here is a link to the article:
http://survivingchurch.org/2018/11/01/shibboleths-and-the-love-of-god/
Father Ron, *evangelical* is a single word that is chasing two or maybe three realities.
David Bebbington is a Baptist historian whose Quadrilateral has worked well as a description of evangelicalism as religion-- Bible, Cross, Conversion, Action. Theologically, this sort of religion is thriving.
The emphases on Bible, Conversion and Action lead evangelicals to organise and trust "parachurch" leadership and organisations. Indeed, the OT archetype of the *man of YHWH* is the norm for even institutional leaders. Jewish Hasidism and Islamic Sufism have cognate traditions of inspired but irregular leadership and organization.
So evangelicalism also has an historical affinity for populist poliitical movements that challenge elites far from God. This is similar, I think, to the affinity that traditionalist Orthodox and Roman Catholics have for authoritarian leaders who restore popular mores weakened by popular rule.
Few actual evangelicals care deeply about all three. For example, populist evangelicals like Franklin Graham seem perplexed by the criticism from activist evangelicals that they are following a pagan ruler rather than a man of YHWH. I doubt that many activists or populists could cogently describe eg the New Perspective on Paul.
BW
Dear Bowman. I have grown - through experience to respect and love evangelicals with a small 'e' which, I think, includes all who truly seek to follow and propagate the love of Jesus Christ in the Gospels.
I - at the age of 89 - have become aware of the fact that all labels (even that of 'Anglo-Catholic' which I have inherited in my tradition) can sadly become divisive. However, I am certain that, whatever we call ourselves, God has only one family - which includes every human being of whom I am only one - every member of which is loved by God.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2018/10/what-is-a-postconservative-evangelical/?
BW
I think we are all coming to grips with the possibility that God is doing a new thing. Father Ron's comment above points to it, when he refers to the limiting power of labels. Evangelical, Liberal, Anglo-Catholic - at their best these describe riches we can offer the common life of God's church. but all too often they have become tribal labels we use to snipe at each other.
As a North American I'm very aware of the negative connotations of the word 'evangelical' in the ears of many because of the widespread support for Trump among white evangelicals. I'm grateful for my nurture in the evangelical Anglican family, but more and more I'm also being enriched by strands outside that family - Anabaptist and Franciscan strands, for instance.
What is the new thing God is doing? Are our old tribal loyalties helping or hindering that new thing?
Hi Tim
I am all for moving beyond tribal loyalties but I make the following observations:
- I think "evangelical" or "Anglo-Catholic" etc can be not about tribes but about emphases and reminders of those emphases when they look like being lost to the church; (thus I will always be "evangelical" even if "Evangelical" is unhelpful in a Trumpian world etc).
- in some experiences of being Anglican I find there is an implicit assumption that to lose tribal loyalties, when all is said and done, is to lose evangelicalism in favour of a form which I shall call "lite Anglo-Catholicism": so my question is how we develop an evangelical, Catholic, liberal Anglicanism which honours all its prior tribal tributaries!
Peter, you said:
" so my question is how we develop an evangelical, Catholic, liberal Anglicanism which honours all its prior tribal tributaries!"
For me, Peter, this is the ultimate question: How do we submerge our confrontation on the basis of tribal loyalties?
The closest I have ever got to this in my own experience if from the mid-60s gatherings on the Palmerston North campus of fellow Christians meeting together to discover the power of the Holy Spirit at work in the Charismatic Movement. We mostly lived on campus and ALL met at the Daily Eucharist as a prelude to some very informative teaching on the work of the Holy Spirit in specific seminars - with teachers like Fr. Francis McNutt, and other (mostly American or English) lecturers from different Christian denominations.
Worship predominated over teaching - a basis that I think was fundamental to our unity in Christ, which bred lasting friendships that have survived until this day. We realised that our unity in Christ was a product of making Eucharist together - where no-one was denied their place at the Lord's Table. the Experience of Christ's presence was sufficient to ensure our fellowship as God's Family.
This is why, in my opinion, separating out on dogmatic principles is a serious hindrance to the Unity for which Jesus prayed.
I am always seeking deeper and more sustained adoration of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
When worship attains that focus, I am very happy. Usually this has been in richer services with a christological focus. But I have recently found some services too clogged with progressive messaging for me to connect with Christ anywhere but in the act of reception.
Some reading can open a way to adoration of God that is about as focused as I find in the right liturgies. Over time, much of the Bible has come to be reliable in that way. So too are some books and articles about passages in the Bible.
Theological texts, especially those which we have discussed here, are also an open way to the adoration of God. However, this is a much more active contemplation in which meditation chews on a thought in the reading (or writing). Many have a similar experience of a thought of God that unfolds in the heart in nature.
The integration that Peter rightly seeks requires an *education sentimentale* of the praying heart.
BW
Adoration is not the whole of being in Christ, but without that the rest is at best asleep. For many, adoration is even therapeutic insofar as it frees the soul from *instrumentalised religion* enmeshed with ideology, either social or political.
Of course, some fear that a faith with none of this ideology will be on the wrong side, an embarrassment, unproductive, irresponsible, invisible. Faith must have works, works must have vision, and vision is inevitably ideology.
Be all that as it may be, the apostles experienced their adoration of the Lord as transformative for persons. St Paul, for example, simply expects his readers to grow in wisdom as they are more in Christ. And he was startled to see this happen even in Gentiles. This inside-out change is what we should care about.
BW
Love your last comments, Bowman. For me, the experience of God is primarily found in sacramental worship. After all, Jesus did promise that: "As you eat my flesh and drink my blood so you remember (perhaps also re-member?) me until I come again". From the worship & reception of Jesus in the Eucharist comes our empowerment for ministry. We can then be assured that, by the Spirit's grace, we are representing Christ in the world. "O love that will not let me go....". True theology becomes earthed in experience, more than in the classroom.
Father Ron, some people experience theology as more weight to lift when they try to believe. They can barely lift GOD EXISTS, really hope that they can get out of having to lift GOD IS ONE BEING IN THREE PERSONS, and may lose hope altogether if they hear anything about say, THE DEFINITION OF CHALCEDON, to say nothing of the INFRA LUTHERANUM (Finitum capax infiniti). When they yearn for simple belief, they are often yearning for religion that does not disturb the world of common sense. They are usually lovely people, and preachers assume that they are the great majority of churchfolk.
But I have never been one of them. A century ago, William James asked whether we could believe that there is More than the material world or not, and to my youthful self that was the single question that mattered. If there is not More, then religion matters only as an obstacle to be flattened on the way to something more sane; if there is More, then it is a vast, barely explored continent to which a simple map that is all square boxes and straight lines is surely no accurate guide. Why expect the supernatural to be less complex than nature? Why must God be simpler than a yeast cell?
Many of the lovely people wince when they hear about the company of angels and archangels who forever sing... None of their neighbours believe in angels-- whatever such believing would be-- and they are glad that nobody at church expects them to take angels seriously. They feel best when the preacher is explaining that Jesus was a social ethicist with views much like their own sturdy intuitions about the public ethos. Indeed, their preacher feels best when s/he believes that preaching is promoting the good of the local community.
But for me the divine cosmology of the rite-- angels and all-- is the oxygen in the room. No congregation is better than its society; no society is especially ethical; we excel the past in some things and fall behind it in others. Anyway, among those who believe there is More, the Buddhists are better at personal ethics, and the Jews nearly always have better communities. Of course, it does no more harm for a preacher to preach ethics than it would do for her/him to preach small engine repair or fly fishing, but it also does no more good. What does do good-- what intrinsically is good-- is to know that the Creator of all things is preparing for the descent of heaven to earth, and to gather with kindred souls for a foretaste of the marriage supper of the Lamb.
BW
Thanks, Bowman. Spot On. God's Holy Name be praised!
(Feastday of St.Leo The Great)
"A century ago, William James asked whether we could believe that there is More than the material world or not, and to my youthful self that was the single question that mattered. If there is not More, then religion matters only as an obstacle to be flattened on the way to something more sane; if there is More, then it is a vast, barely explored continent to which a simple map that is all square boxes and straight lines is surely no accurate guide. Why expect the supernatural to be less complex than nature?"
Which is what C. S. Lewis spent the first half or so of 'Miracles' exploring, that behind (under/over/beyond) nature is supernature, the vastly greater realm of reality which we are aware of simply because we can *think* and our thinking is never reducible without remainder to the movement of atoms in our cerebral cortex - or if it is, then we are in a dreadful bind because a purely material consciousness (whatever that means) can have no verifiable connection to the world outside our heads (if it exists). Here Lewis was developing a problem of epistemology raised by J. B. Haldane, and it is interesting to see that more than 50 years after Lewis developed this idea, it was taken up by Alvin Plantinga in a critique of the insufficiency of evolutionary naturalism. In the providence of God, I found myself trying to explain this idea to some senior high school students this week, covering the board with diagrams of 'nature' and 'supernature'.
It may be that our awareness of the supernatural is so slight because few of us really know what it is to be hungry and naked.
Lewis, of course, would have no trouble in believing in angels. His books are full of them in all their terrible glory. As an aside, I find that re-reading Lewis after 30 or 40 years that he anticipated so many of the features of our age as well as the remedy. In particular, the one who wrote so eloquently about 'shadowlands' and 'further up and further in' would remind us that 'we have no right to be happy' and 'joy' or 'Sehnsucht' points beyond our immediate projects and ambitions here and now.
William
"
Many of the lovely people wince when they hear about the company of angels and archangels who forever sing... None of their neighbours believe in angels-- whatever such believing would be-- and they are glad that nobody at church expects them to take angels seriously. "
- Bowman -
Well, Bowman, being on the honorary staff of 'Saint Michael and All Angels' here in Christchurch, one could not avoid the beneficence which belongs to the theology of 'Angelology', which, a bit like 'Mariology'seems to have disappeared from the con/evo lexicon. Both of these 'ologies' have a legitimate place in the more catholic lexicon of the Early Church Fathers and Mothers, whose experience of worship was nearer to the time of the emergence of the Incarnate Jesus than ours. Like you, my basic understanding of God is through active worship of the Triune God, whose presence, we are told in the Scriptures, is surrounded by angels and archangels - all intent on the activity of worship. This complies very closely with the reminder of Jesus that we are to Love God with all of our sense; before loving our neighbour as ourselves. If we get our priorities wrong in this important area of our lives, we may not always understand what, precisely, is how we are to love - either ourselves or our neighbour.
Sometimes, at a midweek Mass, one can FEEL the presence of the Heavenly Host around the Throne of God. Deo Gratias!
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