Reform January 2010

RefoRmnews, COMMenT, inspiraTiOn, debaTe

Rob Bellon mega-church and minimalism

Janet Leeson the practiceof prayer

CubaNew freedoms,new fears

Transformationamid the ordinary

januaRy 2010 £1.80

• January 2010 • REFORM10 • December 2009 • REFORM10

I don’t belIeve communIty Is

created – I belIeve It Is dIscovered

Justin Brierley meets US “mega-pastor” and author Rob Bell, whose congregation has grown from scratch to 10,000 in less than 10 years

• January 2010 • REFORM10

REFORM • January 2010 • 11

IntervIew

If you’ve travelled just a bit, you’re less impressed with American altars to spiritual achievement. If someone wants to build a really nice building then that’s fine. The problem for us is that we have a lot of people in our congregation who are having trouble paying the rent and their food bill. We’ve been trying to help out with a microfinance bank in Burundi and we’ve engaged with people who are living on less than a couple of dollars a day.

It becomes hard to justify expenditures when the world is suffering like it is.

In fact, what we have here is extravagant on a global scale. I was in Costa Rica and saw a church where they don’t have any walls because they can’t afford them. It’s all a matter of perspective.

I spent some time in Texas – all the churches had big signs with large advertisements for the senior pastor. Is that the model in the US? Is it a danger?

Well you were in Texas, so in some ways you landed on a different planet! I think what you find you will look for. If you look for excess and ostentatious displays of wealth and flamboyant spirituality then you can find that. But if you want to look down the street and round the corner in a basement or in the back of a club then you will find

all sorts of fresh expressions that don’t look anything like that.

My experience is that “church” is a pretty dangerous word to use because people have all sorts of understandings of what that means. We may think we are talking about the same things when in fact we might be talking about very different things. The spectrum is quite wide.

So the “successful mega-church” model isn’t the only game in town?

You can find places where it’s all show, and you will also find places where they realise it’s about people and taking care of each

’My experience is that “church” is a pretty dangerous word to use because people have all sorts of understandings of what that means’

Finding Mars Hill Bible Church wasn’t easy. There’s not a single sign for it, despite it being one of the largest churches in Michigan. Why is that?

It’s not a church, it’s a building. And church is people. So to put a sign out in front would be theologically incorrect. Perhaps it could say “the occasional meeting place of Mars Hill Bible Church” but that would be a bit of a long sign. Did you find it?

We did – if you seek then you will find…

Well then, I rest my case. Its church for those who want it bad enough!

Plenty of people do seem to want it bad enough. Why do so many attend Mars Hill?

I think we are far less interested in “attend”, and far more interested in the stories that are being told. Numbers were never the driving impulse; it was always just an interest in pursuing the question: “What does the Jesus

movement look like in the world we find ourselves in?”

Secondly, attending a large gathering is just “attending a large gathering”. That’s a different thing to confession, repentance, generosity, reconciliation and acts of compassion, justice, love and mercy. Anybody can just “attend an event”. So in some senses we have a very high view of what’s possible in a public worship gathering. But we also have a very low view, because it’s a gathering where you can come and just sit. We live in that tension.

Why the very simple décor and plastic chairs? Lakewood Church in Houston spent $95 million dollars refurbishing their sanctuary. This is very different.

Ours is probably as nice as their storage closet!

So you’re purposely steering away from associating church with the building?

Driving into the parking lot of Mars Hill Bible Church felt strangely familiar. It looks just like a shopping centre – and that’s because until recently, it was. Only when you come to the entrance doors is there a clue that you are entering a church building. There are no directions on the way, no flashing neon sign to greet you – just a very plain, brown, former retail outlet. For a church with 10,000 people in attendance each week, this was

not what I had expected. Rob Bell is signing copies of his latest book when I meet him during the break between

morning services at Mars Hill. Dressed casually and wearing his trademark thick, black-rimmed spectacles, he represents one of the most successful examples of what has been branded the “emerging” church in the US. It’s 10 years since Bell launched Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan with the philosophy to “keep things as simple as they could possibly be”. “Minimalist” is the word that springs to mind when seated in the large auditorium. Plastic chairs surrounding a central bare stage and the grey walls of the gutted shopping mall prove that the church remains true to its original vision of simplicity.

The colour comes in the form of Bell himself, who bounds onto the stage to deliver a 40-minute sermon that is energetic and captivating throughout. That same communication ability abounds in his “NOOMA” films. These short features fuse cinematic professionalism with Bell’s theological take on everything from the problem of suffering to the feminine qualities of God. They have sold in the millions and made Bell a familiar figure to many in the Christian world. Hundreds of thousands have downloaded his weekly preaching and invitations to international events are never in short supply (he was a headline speaker at the UK’s Greenbelt festival in 2009).

Inevitably there are detractors. “Just type my name and the word ‘heretic’ into Google,” Bell quips when asked about those who view his theology as too liberal. He preaches a “narrative” theology that is more open-ended than most evangelical American pastors would allow. Those who accuse the emerging church of selling out biblical truth will often point to the Mars Hill pastor as its hippest purveyor.

For Bell however, the message of the Gospel can only be understood when it is applied. The church has been instrumental in setting up local development projects and creating a microfinance project in Burundi. The focus on peace and social justice in word and deed is refreshingly different to the personal prosperity message that seems rife in other American mega-churches. At Mars Hill they are bucking the trend in more ways than one.

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Calvin, “did as much as anyone to shape the modern world: his legacy has been traced to everything from modern marriage and modern science to modern liberal government and modern capitalism.” Essentially he did this from study and

pulpit. Calvin was simply one of the most brilliant, if not the most brilliant, intellects of his age. In a new biography, Yale’s Bruce Gordon says: “Calvin felt as if he had never met his intellectual equal and he was probably right” (Calvin, Preface). He was the intellectual engine of the Reformation. He moved the world by giving it ideas and he motivated Protestantism by giving it powerful, coherent, challenging theology.

Calvin was never ordained, seeing himself as a teacher. He lectured daily, wrote commentaries on most of the books of the Bible, wrote essays, letters to kings and emperors, bishops and scholars. Above all he produced The Institutes of the Christian Religion – one of the great intellectual achievements in Christian history. It is very typical of him that in its opening words he draws on Cicero’s definition of philosophy.

‘The Reformed tradition commits us to a renewed search for a dynamic and self-critical theology, asking always what reform and renewal mean today’

Scripture was basic but he believed: “We are at liberty to borrow from any source anything that has come from God.” Calvin’s is an open search for truth.

Out of this intellectual ferment came a new concept of the Church – with authority coming from the bottom not the top and with people having the right to elect their leaders both as Church and State. Out of it came the idea that religion belongs not just inside the church but in the marketplace, the halls of government, the city streets, in the way people live in society. Out of it, above all, came the gospel of grace – that we are loved by God because of his amazing grace, not because of anything we do or deserve. All this came from a man in his study in love with ideas. You can still see his legacy in the ideal of the learned

Can we have 1200 words on the future of the United Reformed Church by next Tuesday?” asked the message on my answer-machine when I got back from my

summer break in Umbria two years ago. Ever eager to help, I dashed off an article suggesting our fundamental dilemma as a Church centres on a weak sense of identity and a theology deficit:

Unless there is a theological renaissance in the URC it will never grasp the riches of its tradition or offer a generation of seekers anything that they need. As Douglas John Hall argues: “Our churches do not need managers, they need thinkers!”

The way forward, I suggested, must include a serious engagement with Reformed theology.

And that, I thought, was that. But it seems you never know what might happen when you write in Reform. Next thing was a call from Highworth United Reformed Church in Wiltshire, who had an educational trust. If they funded it, could I suggest some kind of scheme to move this agenda forward? My first thought was an ever longer holiday in Umbria. But once I got serious I suggested a conference on Renewing Reformed Theology.

And why not an essay competition on the same subject? And we could publish the talks and papers. And, of course, get Reform involved. Before I knew it we had created a Renewing Reformed Theology programme.

The Reformed tradition is committed to the power of ideas. Unmistakably its central figure is John Calvin. Calvin changed the direction of European history. The New York Times’ Peter Steinfels says that

Martin Camroux announces the launch of a URC-sponsored theology conference and national essay competition – two parts of a programme to help breathe new life into theological thinking in the Reformed tradition

RenewingReformed Theology

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I was in my early 20's when I had a conversation about prayer with one of the elders in the church where I grew up. He was in his 70s, a retired missionary who had served in China. He told me: “Prayer changes: it changes you, it changes situations and it changes during your lifetime.” A

quarter of a century later, at the beginning of the United Reformed Church’s Vision4life Prayer Year, it’s good to think back to Ted’s words and see if he was right.

In doing so I hope this doesn’t sound mega-holy or slightly improbable. I would want to emphasise how I pray in down-to-earth language: when I pray for Huddersfield I pray for the streets and the sewers. Although my prayers are shaped by a very old tradition, the prayers themselves are usually in the sort of speech I use everyday.

Growing up in a Christian family, I am aware that no-one taught me how to pray in the sense that one teaches table manners or the times table. I just starting doing it and my memories of prayer myself go back to when I was about six years old at least. I remember one conversation with my mother about prayer, and that was about the Lord’s Prayer when I was about 10.

She was not teaching it to me: at that point she assumed I knew it, which I did. She was reminding me how central it was to our faith and life and how old it was. I am now 50 and have probably said it over 4,000 times since then. During that time my praying habits have changed, for example I almost always pray with my eyes open now unlike when a child (hands together, eyes closed), but the Lord’s Prayer is still in my prayer toolkit.

Probably the most important thing I have added to the many other things in that toolkit over the years is my way of praying “the hours”. For a while in my 20s I used to visit a Benedictine House in West Malling in Kent that provided some of my most valued experiences about prayer. I gained an appreciation of the monastic day and how it was marked by prayers at certain times. These prayer times were called, in Latin: lauds, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers and compline and I still use them as guideposts for prayer during the day.

I get up for lauds at 6am, because that’s when Hannah gets up for school. I listen to the news and this informs my first prayers of the day. At 7.15 I go back to bed. This may seem odd but it is possible, even likely, that the same thing happened in some monastic

houses: not everyone stayed up all night. I get up again an hour or so later and my prime is whilst I bath or shower. It seems to me that this is a good time to remember your baptism, and so I often recall mine, the promises made and confirmed.

Terce, sext and none (that is the third, the sixth and the ninth hour) were short times for prayer during the main part of the working day. The idea was to come away from work to prayer and return to work in a seamless way. Since my days of working as a speech therapist I have tried to find short times for this kind of prayer. Often the prayer is simply about the task just completed or the one that lies ahead, or the conversation that happened earlier or planned for later. I was acutely aware, in the days I worked in a service for children with epilepsy, that we would see some very distressed and broken families and that we needed much more than our individual skills as medics or therapists or psychologists to make a place where healing could begin. So I would pray for the families and colleagues I worked alongside, and I still do.

Vespers is around tea-time, when the news comes on again and I can review the concerns of the day.

As the Prayer Year gets underway in United Reformed churches, Janet Lees shares details of the personal prayer routine she has developed – a routine based around the monastic day – and what it means to her

Prayer changes

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Orthodox Churches made their own strong response in 1920 with a now famous letter from the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, lamenting the terrible carnage of the First World War and pleading with the “churches of Christ everywhere” to form a League of Churches, similar to the newly formed League of Nations, to work for peace and reconciliation.

There then followed various international conferences in which Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Churches of Christ were well represented, culminating in the formation of the World Council of Churches in 1948 and the Vatican Ecumenical Council in 1962-5.

We reap the benefit Sunday by Sunday,

but probably do not notice how much we now owe in our worship to sisters and brothers in other traditions. Take hymns for example.

All modern hymn books draw hymns from all traditions. Aquinas, Luther, Watts, Wesley, Gaunt, Kaan, Wren and Micklem provide the words; great and not so great composers supply the music. Though the United Reformed Church is not bound to a Prayer Book, we benefit from a host of people who have found words that express our own concerns – and from prayerful communities like Iona or Taizé, both it should be noted Reformed and now ecumenical foundations.

And if you are really ecumenical, you will occasionally have gone with Catholic friends to Mass and noted how simple, similar, yet probably more participatory is the communion service in a church that 40 years ago you might have passed by on the other side.

So much has changed, and for that, thank God. But so much more needs to change and for that, pray on. 18 to 25 January is once again the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. And surprise, surprise, this year’s prayer leaflet comes from Edinburgh as well as from the World Council of Churches and the Roman Catholic Church. It is our opportunity to be partners in prayer with Christians all round the world, praying for the world.

And in case you didn’t know, the big event in Jamaica, in May 2011, will be the International Ecumenical Peace Convocation – a culmination of the WCC-sponsored Decade to Overcome Violence. A peace declaration will be signed at this assembly following consultations among all WCC member churches including the URC. During the Decade to Overcome Violence, participating churches have worked in many different ways to tackle violence in family and gender relations, to address the traditions of Christian peace theology and Christianity’s violent history, and to get to grips with the ecological and economic aspects of just peace. Never let anyone tell you that nothing is happening. Log on, tune in, pray on! Dr Donald W Norwood and his wife Margaret recently returned from working with the World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Institute at Bossey near Geneva

For further reading, please visit:www.oikoumene.orgwww.edinburgh2010.orgwww.lutheranworld.orgwww.overcomingviolence.org

ots of good things are happening in the big worldwide Church we all belong to, but we hardly ever hear about them. Why? Because most of us in most of our

congregations are too congregational. We are more or less happy with what goes on in our own church and parish. Occasionally what the Pope says hits the headlines but only for a week or so. It’s rare for us to hear news of the World Council of Churches, to which we and some 600 million other Christians belong. There will be little media coverage of big events in Edinburgh this coming year, or Jamaica next year. As for the Reformation Jubilee in 2017, who cares?

At Edinburgh in June we will be celebrating the Centenary of the International Missionary Conference, which first met there in 1910. Though mainly Protestant and Anglican, and dominated by Churches of the North, it marked for many the birth of the worldwide ecumenical movement – which has put the vast majority of the world’s churches in serious conversation and partnership with each other.

A hAppening ChurCh?As this year’s Week of Prayer for Christian Unity approaches, Donald Norwood argues we should all be more aware of the positive action and cooperation underway among different parts of the 600-million strong Church worldwide

’This is our opportunity to be partners in prayer with Christians all around the world, praying for the world’

worldwide ChurCh

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ike many subjects in Cuba, religious liberty is not a black and white issue. On a Sunday morning, visitors to the island will see churches full to the point of overflowing onto the streets, where Cubans appear to be able to gather together and worship

in complete freedom. What a casual visitor or tourist will not necessarily be aware of, however, are the more subtle restrictions on churches, and their leaders, and unseen pressures placed on Cuban Christians in their everyday lives.

Since the Revolution in 1959, the government’s policies have shifted and evolved in some significant ways. Over the past 50 years however, control has been a constant theme and the authorities have always viewed religious groups – which are the only real manifestation of officially tolerated independent civil society in the country – with some concern and suspicion. The resignation of Fidel Castro, almost two years ago, and some positive signals initially sent by his brother Raul who took over, led many to hope there would be a further loosening of restrictions.

In fact, the government did take some positive initial steps, signing the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Cultural, Economic and Social Rights (ICESR) for example. The Catholic Church has also received permission for the first time in years to build and open a new monastery and also received licenses for around 10 vehicles for religious use. An announcement in Autumn 2009 that religious services would now be permitted in Cuban prisons came as something of a surprise, but was welcomed by the Protestant and Catholic leaderships.

There continue to be questions, however, about the Cuban government’s true commitment to allowing real religious freedom on the island. Although it signed the two covenants almost two years ago, the government has yet to ratify either the ICCPR or the ICESR. More

Despite being promised new religious freedoms, Christians in Cuba are entering the New Year amid a climate of heightened repression involving the arrest

and intimidation of church leaders, church closures and the confiscation of property, as Tina Lambert reports

New Freedoms,New Fears

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Confession and repentance are part of our personal relationship with God and they belong in a whole family of concepts – guilt,

penitence, responsibility, sorrow; but also affirmation, testimony, profession.

To me, what lies at the heart of all this is truth-telling. Confession is the time when we speak the truth of what we believe, and a time when we speak only the truth to God – which God knew anyway, so why is that important? It is important because, without that truth-telling, we erect barriers of pretence in the presence of which no relationship can flourish, let alone our relationship with God. So, although there is an element of guilt and responsibility to be thought and prayed through, confession isn’t about breast-beating but about complete honesty. In that sense, our confessions are part of a wider pattern of prayer in which we tell God the truth about our love for God, our concerns for others and ourselves and so on.

I read with interest Lawrence Moore’s recent Bible study about repentance (Reform, November 2009) and discovered I am a Lutheran; I believe repentance is a response to God’s gracious forgiveness. Reading Romans chapter 6, I sense Paul’s wonder at the graciousness of what God has done for us in Christ and I learn about the lives we turn around and lead after we have confessed and been forgiven. That study has helped my reflections.

One reason I want to say something about confession arises from the way some people have responded to a recently published report, Hope in God’s Future, which was written by a working group I was part of, made up of representatives of the Baptist, Methodist and United Reformed Churches. Reacting to the recommendation

that confession and repentance were necessary steps in our response to the reality of climate change, many seemed to think we were focusing on sack cloth and ashes! That is certainly not the case; the report is saying, rather, that we should, in honesty, accept the seriousness of climate change and the fact that all bear some responsibility for it, and then repent – turn around and live in new ways more closely attuned to God’s will for us.

There is an aspect of the Lord’s Prayer that moves me deeply, namely that it is offered

in the first person plural – “Our Father…”, “forgive us our trespasses…” Not only are these the words Jesus gave, but they are the words of the whole Body of Christ. This is the other aspect of confession, the “us”.

We need to confess our part in institutional sin as well as turning to God in our individual erring. However careful we are with recycling, using public transport and replacing light bulbs; however much we covenant not to fly or upgrade boilers and work to reduce our individual or local church carbon footprints, we all benefit from a standard of living freighted with the high emissions of carbon dioxide already affecting the lives of our global neighbours to their detriment. To say we all need to confess and repent our part in this

institutionalised damaging of the earth is to encourage truth-telling and then a seeking to live differently, in God’s strength and with God’s guidance.

Many of us make New Year resolutions – and most of us fail to keep them. January 1st is another ordinary day but it represents an opportunity for a fresh start as we reflect upon changing our lives for the better. Like our response to God’s gracious forgiveness in Christ and our repentance which turns our lives around, keeping resolutions is very hard to do in our own strength. Repentance

which is only about resting in our own strength cannot be sustained. But, to borrow Lawrence Moore’s closing thought, it is God who is changing the world and it is in God’s strength that we change.

It is by God’s grace that we are encouraged and inspired, as the exiles in faraway Babylon were encouraged, to sing a new song in the unknown land of the future (Psalm 137) – be that in 2010 or in the longer-term future in which we honestly contemplate the reality of climate change and the way we need to respond to that.

Rosalind Selby was chair of the Ecumenical Theology of Climate Change working group and is minister of Wanstead and Gants Hill URC in London

Comment

‘To say we all need to confess and repent our part in this institutionalised damaging of the earth is to encourage truth-telling and then a seeking to live differently, in God’s strength and with God’s guidance’

How we can face an uncertain futureLooking ahead to the new year, Rosalind Selby argues that each of us needs to embrace confession and repentance in our walk with God – and in order to realise new hope for the future of our planet

confession and repentance


notes from america

the Afghan government and people how to design, build and re-build many of these institutions.

At the height of WWII, could America justly have continued to do nothing from its secure distance? Could the African-American slave free himself had abolitionists not pushed America to war? And today, without help from the current world powers, can the Afghan people free themselves from religious extremists and close down the factories of terrorism that threaten the security of other countries?

Both domestically and abroad, an Obama Doctrine is forming. This is a doctrine that has a moral underpinning, that recognises the power of evil at work in the world in and among all people – and the hard choices such power forces upon each of us on a daily basis as individuals and nations.

Now facing this impossibly difficult decision regarding the war in Afghanistan, I believe Obama has shown the most courageous leadership in his presidency to date. Despite all the difficulty, danger and uncertainty inherent in the policy he has chosen to follow, I predict it will begin to change the balance of power in the world, in ways that will ultimately make dialogue seem a reasonable alternative for many Islamic extremists. Surrounded by so many complex religious, social, political and economic pressures, many of these are people who have forgotten, or are too young to know, that extremism is not something they have individually chosen, but something others have chosen for them. We have to hope that a better option will become clearer as a hard tactical strategy is coupled with appropriate invitation to dialogue, and foundations are laid for diverse Afghans to rebuild a new Afghanistan.

ron Buford is a preacher and consultant for the United church of christ of the Us and other non-profit organisations in the Us

merica and its allies are torn as President Obama leads America

and the world deeper into war in Afghanistan, sending an

additional 30,000 American soldiers, plus 10,000 more from NATO allies. Is this cause just? And are its aims achievable?

Church leaders and theologians are also divided about war – especially given the horrific roles of the Church in many past unjust wars, which the Church must acknowledge and repent. Thinking, praying, caring religious leaders of all faiths still ask, “Is there such a thing as a ‘just war’? Is Afghanistan such a war?”

Fundamentalism kills world peace – on both the right and the left. Right- wing fundamentalists seem to be clear and unquestioning in their march to war and terrorism in both developed and undeveloped worlds. Left-wing fundamentalism is similarly unquestioning of its own views and remains locked in a paradigm rather than exploring a full range of options – including war. On the American left we often fail to ask the hard pragmatic questions about what delivers liberation and hope to the suffering, most vulnerable people in the world. How do we avoid abandoning them into the hands of those acting mindlessly but decisively? The great Christian existentialist theologian Soren Kierkegaard said: “There are two types of men; men of thought and men of action. And the men of thought are often so conflicted by thinking that they can do nothing else.”

Two of the greatest theologians of the 20th century – both from the Reformed tradition and brothers – H Richard Niebuhr and Reinhold Niebuhr, debated this issue in 1932 during the slide towards the Second World War. One

brother, H Richard argued for Christian nonviolence or inaction, suggesting that to do otherwise is failure to trust in God and God’s promises. And one could also reasonably argue that non-violence is action.

But Reinhold believed: “We always use evil to prevent greater evil.” He recognised the inescapable grasp of sin and exempted no one, no nation, or the Church, from its collusion with evil. But he still found responsible action superior to doing nothing. In Reinhold’s icy gaze there was no sinless path but only a need for God’s grace.

As a presidential candidate Obama called Reinhold Niebuhr, “one of my favorite philosophers” and spoke of war, terrorism, poverty, and more as "moral problems rooted in societal indifference and individual callousness, in the imperfections of man, the cruelties of man towards man." Like Niebuhr, he does not see America as the world’s saviour but sees it as needing to use its influence and power, however imperfect, rather than do nothing.

This influence shows in Obama’s willingness to take up the distasteful and unpopular responsibility for disempowering Taliban and Al Qaeda bullies, using decisive military force among other means. His strategy also plans to strengthen institutions within the Afghan government to govern, using both troops and civilians to teach

‘Like Niebuhr, Obama does not see America as the world’s saviour but sees it as needing to use its influence and power, however imperfect’

Notes from AmericaRon Buford

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Reform January 2010