A Sermon Preached by David Peel at the
Formation of the Tees-Swale Mission Pastorate on the 14th July 2012
at Keld United Reformed Church
2
Samuel 7: 1-12; 14-17* 1
Peter 2: 4-10
Thank you for inviting me to share in this occasion with you. I have memories of times spent with some of you in the old Teesside District Council (1981-88), and I greatly valued the support and encouragement I received then from ministerial colleagues who served the churches represented here this afternoon. There were four ministers then, but the passage of thirty years will have whittled them down to two. That induces in me a note of sadness infiltrated by concern: sadness that during the life-time of my ministry the decline in Nonconformity, which started slowly in the late 19th century and gradually accelerated during the 20th century, has not been abated; and concern that we persist with policies which it can be argued fuel our decline.
During research for a recent book, I
noted that, from their inception in Congregationalism in 1919, the Moderators
in one way or another were working against the back-cloth of church decline
from day one. There are many references
in their early reports of the need for churches to be more open to “sharing
ministry” and coming together in “joint pastorates”. Such arrangements were difficult to set up
given the rugged individualism which permeated Congregational polity. But in 1981 the Moderators openly stated
their view that “it seems to us that the rationalization of pastorates made
necessary by the decrease in the numbers of ministers available has gone as far
as it can without seriously damaging the leadership which ministers can
give”. I wrote in response to that
revealing observation:
But their words went
unheeded; the practice continued. No one
has invented a better way of encouraging the demise of churches than spreading
the ministerial butter ever more thinly over the ecclesiastical bread. A more focussed deployment strategy was
desperately needed but it was not forthcoming.
I
cannot with integrity stand here today without drawing attention to a danger
you now face: the calling of ministers
to serve among you without there being in place a radically different
expectation concerning what they should be doing. They will not be in a position to do the work
of the church in the manner in which you may have become accustomed. But, if they are allowed, through their
teaching, guidance, facilitation and empowerment, they could be encouraged to
put your churches to work in fresh and faithful ways. What concerns me is the way in which we have
gone on wasting our primary human resources through deploying ministers in ways
which are almost guaranteed to diffuse their effectiveness. We now find ministers increasingly keeping
the institutional framework of the church going at the expense of having the
time for equipping and motivating the Christian movement which that framework
is supposed to serve. At times it seems
that ministers are akin to plumbers who have been summoned to attend to a gas
leak and then are asked to paint the pipes.
You could today be embarking upon a failed way of being the church. Or, by looking at your ministry and mission
with fresh eyes, you may find a springboard for a new adventure in faith: a
strategic mechanism to help you rescue the Christian movement from the
institutional framework that I sense is choking it.
What I invite you to engage with is
the problem found by King David, in the second book of Samuel. Is it appropriate to build God a temple in
which we can then be assured of God’s presence at the heart of our
community? There’s an established
tradition in the Hebrew Scriptures, centred upon Solomon and again appearing
later in the post-exilic period during the erection of the Second Temple in
Jerusalem, which answers that question unequivocally in the affirmative. And in the heyday of Nonconformity with its
mammoth enterprise of church building and church extension our tradition also
answered in the affirmative. The problem
is that what may start as a genuine act of piety ends up being somewhat
self-serving. What happened to the two
Jewish temples? Go to Jerusalem and
guides will show you what remains of them.
Meanwhile the bequest to us of all the results of “building churches to
the glory of God” has been felt by most of us, as we have spent hours
deliberating over how to cope with our institutional building legacy, and as we
have pumped human and financial
resources into maintaining what has been bequeathed to us. Is it any surprise that we have not had the
time to attend to the major affairs the legacy was meant to promote in the
first place?
Our age has been victim of another
age’s success; or, to put it less kindly, we are having to pick up the pieces
of past ecclesial hubris. Did we really
need three Congregational chapels in Heckmondwyke, with a collective seating
capacity greater than the number of residents in the town? Choose any northern city and town and
without too much research you will find similar examples of the competitive
chapel building which, like a millstone around our necks, has subsequently
sapped so much of our time and energy.
And unless we remove the Solomonic culture from the control it continues
to hold over us we will not be able to address the issues surrounding being the
faithful Christian movement called to
make a kingdom-based difference in the world, and recruit others to the Jesus
cause.
At first, David thought it
appropriate “to build a . . . house” for God “to live in”. But kings, like churches, need prophets. Enter centre stage, Nathan. “Go and tell my
servant David”, God says to him: “Thus says the Lord: Are you the one to build
me a house to live in? I have not lived
in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt, but I
have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle”. The God of David, and indeed Solomon, as well
as the Lord Jesus Christ, is not one to be held in a fixed position by any
religious arrangement. Yahweh is a free
agent, not one to be pinned down by his worshippers. What God wants from us is not a grand
institutional gesture but a total commitment to engage in the hard slog of
being a people which keeps our side of the covenant arrangement. David is given a promise, so gracious that it
is utterly breathtaking:
. . . I will make
for you a great name, like the name of the great ones of the earth . . .
Moreover, the Lord declares to you that the Lord will make you a house. When your days are fulfilled and you lie down
with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring after you . . . and I will
establish his kingdom.
David
was not allowed to build God a house; rather God would build him one – not a
temple, but a community: a right royal dynasty.
God does not invest his future in the stones of religious buildings but
he takes the risk of entering a covenant with a set-apart people. All the predominant New Testament metaphors
for the church are concerned with people.
Even when structural metaphors are used, there is a twist: “Come to him,
a living stone . . . and like living stones, let yourself be built into a spiritual
house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God
through Jesus Christ”. First and
foremost, the church is a people. It is
a movement that, from time to time, for worship, nurture and fellowship needs
to gather together. But it becomes
twisted, warped and idolatrous when it gets over-institutionalized.
The institutional element though is
important. But it is always a means to
an end, namely, placing the claim of God in Christ before people. Alas, however, we have inherited a church
culture which shows evidence of being overtly church rather than Christ
serving. If we are to rediscover the
kernel of Christianity the institutional shell in which it has been handed down
will have to be cracked open. Otherwise
it will perish inside an institutional framework long passed its sell-by
date. To be the living church we will
have to move beyond the institutional church, along with much of its
leadership, which seems only able to give us more of the same, though in ever
more centralized forms, and which, whether by ignoring their presence or
through political manoeuvring, silences the prophets within our midst.
I am not offering you any hope of
ever acquiring a version of Christianity which is pure and spotless, free of
faults and failings, lacking in earthly contamination. But what I am saying is that, being “wise as
serpents and innocent as doves” you should recognize all institutional manifestations of Christianity as being but clay
jars in which God has risked placing the divine treasure, the people called out
of the world to be in the world as God’s kingdom people. I am now convinced
that sometimes the only way of releasing the treasure for the work of the
kingdom is to smash the pots. What is so
impressive about God’s confrontation with David through Nathan, regarding the
nature of God’s life and mission, is the way it subverts David’s institutional
plans: all the grand and glorious things he wanted to do for God. “Whose mission is this, David”, God points
out. “I’m not here to listen to your plans regarding what you will do for me.” David gets told: “What I want to do, if you
will just stop long enough to listen, is tell you about what I am going to do
for you”.
2 Samuel 7 is one of the Bible’s
most significant statements about God’s people being set in a healthy
relationship with God through God’s grace.
If only we had the theological common sense to step back from all that
we do in the church with such frenetic activity and create spaces which allow
God to do things to, with and for us. We
have no mission save that of entering into the company of those called to
engage in God’s mission. A church which
in due seriousness writes its mission statement has sold its soul to an
assertive world which believes rather more in the possibilities of human
achievement than all earthly evidence can support. Paul long ago saw such strategies as ways of
setting up people to fail, with all the ensuing guilt. We have no mission statement save that which
says “we are striving to engage with God in God’s mission”. We are essentially followers of another,
looking backwards to “the pioneer and perfector of our faith” in order to find
the correct direction to go forward, and consequently our foundational activity
is one of listening.
While listening is a skilled
activity in its own right, it leads to discovering the road map of God’s
mission in every time and place. I Peter
refers to the church as “a holy priesthood”, where the term “holy” reminds us
of our calling to stand out from the crowd with alternative gospel-rooted
standards and ethics, while “priesthood” directs us towards our sacramental
purpose to become a set-apart people, engagement with whom results in others
being put in touch with God and God being put in touch with them. And if we could but just strip out of our
church life all those things which do not directly equip us for this task . . .
and if we would re-direct all our energy into prayerful engagement with the
Scriptures to discover how to live out of the resources God provides for us to
contribute to God’s mission . . . and if we were to deflect all the manifold
calls to engage in this programme or that initiative . . . then we would be on track of re-inventing the church
so that it fulfils what it was called into being to be and do.
Amen.
* I share the view of some Old Testament scholars that 2
Samuel 7: 13 is a later insertion into the text. If we are right about this, we are reminded
of the extent to which institutionalized religion will go to suppress the
truth. Solomon’s people were embarrassed
by this text, so they added an ameliorating verse. All of which is disturbing evidence that the
Bible isn’t what it has been made out to be: its humanity, however, can still
be its glory!
David Peel
14th July 2012.
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