Portishead Pilgrim

So George Osborne proved me wrong:  hallelujah!

Truthful with the economics, and forecasting lean times beyond the end of this parliament.  Although the news isn’t good, I feel strangely lightened by the freshness of his candour, and a sober prediction about the state of the economy that goes as far as 2017.

It seems as if the government has suddenly grown up and decided to treat us as people who can hear the truth – even hard truth – and accept that a strategy of long-term consistency is needed to sort out the nation’s financial problems.

I’ve been wondering what the church equivalent would look like.  In some areas of church life people are discussing the straitened spiritual circumstances of both church and society, but some are not.  Some are looking at new ways of generating spiritual wealth, others are entrenching themselves in attitudes and practices familiar from old.  There is great risk here.  As Peter Drucker (thinker and writer on management practice) said, ‘The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the danger, but to act with yesterday’s logic.’

I wonder what is the equivalent of George Osborne’s shocking honesty for the church today?  And what might be the breath-taking announcement of long-term strategy?  Suppose we wanted to grow a spiritually rich and Kingdom-oriented nation of people by 2050, what might our strategy be and how would it be in line with today’s or even tomorrow’s logic?  I’d really like to know your thoughts on this one, so please let me know here on the site or on Facebook.  Thanks!

When I was teaching I was struck by a claim that schools are always teaching young people about the world the teachers inhabited, preparing them for a world that won’t exist when the young people enter it as adults.  Unless they consciously try to do otherwise, teachers tend to teach from their own life perspective.  They forget their students inhabit a different time zone.

The background to this observation was the rapid pace of change:  the only thing you could be sure of tomorrow was that it would be different from today.  Facing ‘the permanent white water conditions’ of modern life, we had to find a way to counter the ‘cultural lag’ issue and prepare students for the society they would inhabit.

I remember thinking this was a massive issue for the church.  The rate of change is now so fast we won’t be able to keep pace unless we’re aware of the need to continually adapt and we’re intentional about doing it.

It’s not just the church as an organisation that needs to connect its institutional cog wheel with the cog wheel of social change, it’s that we’re called to ‘proclaim the gospel afresh in every generation’.   That means re-thinking our strategies for telling our story and serving our community every 20-25 years.  And to do that we have to be looking ahead, like experienced choristers looking ahead a few bars when the music is fast and furious.  If they don’t, they’re so busy concentrating on singing the current note the music moves on and leaves them a beat or two behind.  So music and song get painfully out of sync.

I don’t want church and society, gospel and society, to be forever out of sync.  Is anyone else excited at the thought of a church that’s continually looking ahead to anticipate the society of the future and discerning how to serve, critique, and meet it there with the love of Christ?

We don’t often think about the future of the church.  We talk about children in church as ‘the next generation’ when they’re a vital, hopefully integral part of today’s church, and we don’t seem able to think much further.  Why is that, do you think?

My own reflections say it’s because we’ve inherited a mindset of short-term-ism.  Our politics and economics are all short-term – we need to see results before the next election.  Football world is worst of all:  Chelsea fans baying at the heels of the new manager for not having popped the team on top of the Premier League after four months in post. Planning beyond the next twenty years doesn’t seem to occur to most people, with the possible exception of environmentalists.

Our church worldview has an effect too.  Some of us are infected with the idea that the end of the world is very near, so there’s no point planning for the future.  Others think the church has always been ‘like this’ and always will be;  others think it’s on the point of dying out and there’s little we can do to save it.  Personally I think God is unlikely to have spent billions of years creating the cosmos only to wrap it up after a few hundred thousand years of developed sentient life, and unlikely to pull the plug on the church only 2,000 years after he came to live among us in Christ.

If the world and the church are looking forward to another several millenia of life (and in Advent it would be daft to make any predictions about ‘the day or the hour’ when the whole enterprise will be wrapped up) then it’s inevitable we’re in for radical change.  We need a church that improvises an ongoing dance with God, shifting easily between the shuffled tracks of each new generation and era of history.  We need a flexible, bendy, shock-absorbing church, like a well-engineered tower block or bridge.  We need a speedy, easily deployable, rapid-response church like emergency response teams or fast attack craft.  Agree?  If so, what does this look like in real terms?

Obviously I can’t really sneak a peak over God’s shoulder – it’s an audacious thought and quite impossible given the immense scope and scale of the work.  But when Sainsburys sponsored a ‘Take your Daughter to Work’ day in the 1990s, intending to give girls an insight into some of the more male-dominated professions, I wanted to work-shadow God.  Sit with him at the control panel, in the operations room, and see things from a God’s-eye view.

The question ‘What is God up to?’  washes around in me continually.  What is he bringing about right now in the world, the church, the local community, in me?  In the church we so easily get focussed on the traditions and heritage of the past or the demands of the present.  But in the Scriptures God is always moving his purposes forward, always re-shaping and re-forming the world as we know it: ‘Behold, I am doing a new thing!’  (Isaiah 43:19,) ‘See, I am making everything new.’ (Rev 21:5). I want to be trying to keep pace with him, not being a drag anchor on his agenda, and that means interpreting past and present in terms of the possible future.  Do you fancy joining me?  Several heads are better than one.

I hope this blog is a new thing that is part of God’s purposes and through it we can be co-labourers with him – whatever he is up to.  Drop in here for thoughts on the future of the church, and a bit about what the Portishead Pilgrim gets up to on her travels.  Thanks for reading.  More soon.

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