‘If it is teaching, then teach!’ (Romans 12:7): ministry, big issues and grown-up discipleship

If I am honest, and at the risk of losing a great deal of you in the opening section of this paper, as a theologian in the twenty-first century, in terms of most of the conversations I have (especially in relation to people from the Church and the vocation I feel called to), I sometimes feel a little bit akin to one of the violin players who chose to play on while the Titanic sank. We live in an age in which the Church (and particularly perhaps our own and other Nonconformist traditions) finds itself sidelined. We do not enjoy the status we once had. Churches are closing. Our large preaching houses are emptying. Focus is often on the management of decline. Cultures have shifted towards relativism and pluralism. Book shops now stock more books on New Age medicine than Bibles.

There are potentially two implications of this in terms of theology. The first is that theology (public or otherwise) may well seem to be a luxury that we cannot afford in The Methodist Church in Britain at this moment of ecclesial austerity: priorities have to be ordered elsewhere. The second is that even if we do afford ourselves time to focus on theology, it is very easy for us in the context in which we live (a context which is complexly secular and pluralist) to lose confidence in the message we are called to proclaim; it is easy to feel we cannot have confidence in the gospel. Either way, the circumstance for us can feel somewhat desperate, and the context in which we might think of public theology as existing is one in which we can feel as though there is no public interested and, even if there were, we would be unsure about what it is we should say to them.

Remembering the context in which we worship, live and speak is, however, important. It is important for us in terms of the priorities we set ourselves; in terms of differentiating between that which is central and that which is peripheral to our purpose. But it is in this context that the words of St Paul in the title of this paper need to resound loud and clear: if our calling is to teach, then let us teach. There is, it seems to me, no theology which is not public theology: there is no theology without a public, without the context of teaching and learning. Doctrine after all comes from the Latin doceo, meaning ‘I teach’; and disciple from the Latin discere, meaning ‘to learn’. To be a disciple is to be a learner; just as to engage in doctrine, in theology, is to engage with teaching. Theology is not about playing some intellectual chess game in our heads, nor is it an exercise between some small esoteric gnostic group; theology is, instead, about teaching the faith publicly in order to foster grown-up disciples (grown-up learners) who live in a context of pressing big questions. We are at a moment when we need to learn again to put our fiddles down and to speak calmly and meaningfully, speaking the way to go so that others may learn: rather than to play our fiddles while the Titanic sinks, we are to instruct people calmly into the lifeboats and aid people in a time of difficulty.

It is of vital importance that we realise that, as the Church, we do not exist for ourselves. Our life is not to be focused or ordered primarily inwardly upon our own polity and order. It is to be focused outwards to the world. Any church which seeks to be the true Church by ordering itself internally as such is sure to fail to become the true Church: the true Church exists for the world. This means we are to have a voice not only ordered to ourselves but to those many for whom Jesus Christ lived, died and was raised, who as yet do not know the good news.

Martin Luther (drawing upon Augustine) speaks of sin as the cor incurvatum in se (the heart turned in upon itself). In the Church, we not only turn our individual hearts towards one another as part of salvation; but we also turn our corporate heart as the Church outwards towards the world. Our purpose is not for ourselves and our self-preservation: our purpose is for the world. Let me explain what I mean.

In Acts 1:12 we get what seems to be the beginnings of the Church. a little bit like the way in which each year the superintendent minister reads out the list of preachers at the Preachers’ Meeting, we get something similar with the list of the disciples in v. 13. We then get a description of worship (v.14). We have count of membership in v. 15 (obviously to work out what the circuit assessment would be!). Then a sermon and readings led by Peter is offered – a service. After that, there is even a church council meeting, with an election of officers (vv. 23–26), and Matthias taking the new position.

The description of what is going on in Acts 1 looks to me as though what we are dealing with is a church. However, and this is crucial, it is not; what we get in Acts 1 has only a semblance of the Church. The Church begins in chapter 2:

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

The Church begins at Pentecost with the coming of the Holy Spirit. The foundational condition of the Church is not ecclesial propriety or having officers appropriately in place. The foundational condition of the Church is simply the presence of the Holy Spirit who is present within the variety and plurality of the community in all its variety and diversity.

We live in an age today in which we are rightly nervous about the lack of the impact of the Church on a broader society, which is at once marked by secularism and pluralism. It is perhaps right that as people we have asked the question that Dietrich Bonhoeffer poses to his own (somewhat different) situation of de-christianisation: ‘What does a church, a congregation, a sermon, a liturgy, a Christian life, mean in a religionless world?’,

Bonhoeffer 2010, p. 364.

However, in seeking to answer this question, as a church we have very often descended, in the words of the American theologian Michael Jinkins, into ‘the hyperactivity of panic. This manifests itself in clutching for any and every programmatic solution and structural reorganization in the desperate hope that survival is just another project or organizational chart away.’

Jinkins 1999, p. 9.

I want to propose to you today that the Church is simply and singularly a dynamic community of the Holy Spirit of God, and that we need to attend to the Spirit’s sovereignty over the Church if we are to have any hope of being a church which is meaningful to the world, because it is the Holy Spirit who makes God present in the contingent situations, in the contexts of big questions, in which we find ourselves. Calvin writes that there is no reason ‘to pretend . . . that God is so bound to persons and places, and attached to external observances, that he has to remain among those who have only the title and appearance of a church [Rom 9:6].’

Calvin [1559] 1960, 4.2.3, p. 1044. These discussions concern Roman Catholicism polemically. However, outside of that polemic, the dogmatic content remains helpful and can usefully be redirected back to the Protestant Church as itself an ecclesia semper reformanda.

How we are a true Church rather than something with the semblance of a church is related to the presence of the Spirit, who is the Spirit of Christ and who makes the Word known to us in the present and in all of our messiness and contingency. Not having the semblance of a church is not under any circumstances about one form of church practice or liturgy or worship trumping another. The issue at stake is, instead, one which involves a recognition simply that the Church is made the Church by an act and event of God the Holy Spirit; and the Church is made simply, completely and fully to serve the world of which it is a part. To find the concrete condition of the Church in the world, we have to ask the following question: does the Church display the Spirit’s fruits?

None of this is to say that the Holy Spirit is only confined to the Church. As I’ve said on numerous occasions before: while the Holy Spirit is the sine qua non of the Church, the Church is not the sine qua non of the Holy Spirit. The condition for the existence of the Church is the presence of the Spirit; but the condition for the presence of the Spirit (who blows wherever God wills) is not the Church.

But what does this mean in terms of our speech to the world, our public theology?

Lots of the imagery surrounding the Holy Spirit in Scripture is imagery that we might think of as being ‘intense’. In Acts, we have a picture of deep intensity. Think about the language that is used to describe the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost:

And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered. . .

This is maximal metaphorical language here: violent winds, heaven, filling, tongues of fire. And this is only what the event is like! Luke struggles to find the words that do justice to this description of the event. The imagery here is thick, deep, wildly intense.

Worship and holiness are in many ways like that. We find ourselves wonderfully lost in God. Think of the way in which congregations sing in our Methodist tradition – voices and tongues crying out in praise of God, ‘cathedrals of sound’ calling for a thousand tongues to sing our Great Redeemer’s praise. There is an intensity about what we do. Feeling God’s presence deep within is a fundamental part of this – what John Wesley called having our hearts ‘strangely warmed’. The palpable presence of the Spirit in this worship brings with it a degree of assurance: the knowledge of the presence of God who, although not seen, feels as real to us by the power of the Spirit as the presence of a mighty wind blowing through us.

One of the dangers of this intensity is that it can easily transform itself into interiority. Worship can become about my getting that particular feeling; what I get out of it. Even in its best forms, all too easily (and of this I am more than culpable) worship can become about my relationship with God. We often respond to this by pointing out the need for community, for ecclesiality. Certainly the story of Pentecost is not an occurrence that happens to only one person. Luke tells us (Acts 2:1): ‘When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.’ a focus on the Church is certainly better than a focus on the self. However, I wonder whether that really goes far enough. While lots of worship and devotion in our tradition is about personal relationship with God, I think we do quite a good job of building community internally. We celebrate communion; we emphasise small groups; and (let’s be frank) we’re friendly enough; Methodists are nice folk – and we do a good line in puddings. My fear is rather that our communities can become about collective egos rather than individual ones: we can move too easily from thinking about ‘me’ to think about ‘people like me’, with whom I like to be. We can refocus our concern on our church, preserving or building it up, making sure it doesn’t fall apart on our watch.

There is nothing wrong in that in and of itself. But I want to ask this: what is the purpose of that intensity? Certainly, worship of God; yes. That comes before all else. But we are not in heaven yet, and we should be patient with the world which God has created and patiently sustains as the cosmos awaits redemption. Instead, I want to say that the purpose of this intensity is for the extensity of the world: it is for the public. This intensity is one that leads, nay throws, us outwards: it leads us to the world, to our publics. The disciples move from being gathered in their upper room (selecting their officers, being orientated on one another, and on God), to in the event of Pentecost being orientated on God and the world.

The universality of that extensity is emphatically repeated in Acts 2 (vv. 5–11):

Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, ‘Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs – in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.’

The orientation outwards onto the world and for the world is an extensity which is the purpose and simultaneous effect of the coming intensity of the Holy Spirit.

Should we be remotely surprised by this, however? Is that not God’s way throughout the Bible? God appears in a burning bush and Moses takes off his shoes because he is on holy ground and speaks with God. And Moses experiences that deep intensity of God not so that he can think ‘Oh, that was a nice thing to happen?’ or ‘aren’t I special?’ or ‘Haven’t I got worship right?’; but so that he rescue a people from slavery, and lead them to freedom. As Gregory of Nyssa reminds us in his Life of Moses, the result of the intensity of God’s presence on Sinai (the thunder claps, the sound of the shofar, the cloud) in Exodus 19 is the giving of the Law, is relations with people and the world. Deep intensity with God leads us out to the world. In fact the Ten Commandments themselves even work that way – a focus on God followed by a focus on others. I could go on: Isaiah 6, or the Greatest Commandment. An orientation towards God leads us to an orientation towards the other; the two belong together. The intense coming of God’s Spirit leads us to the extensity of the world around us. The Spirit, who leads us into deep worship and love of God, leads us simultaneously outwards to the world.

Karl Barth, to my mind the greatest theologian of the twentieth century, once wrote this:

The work of the Holy Spirit in the gathering and upbuilding of the community . . . cannot merely lead to the blind alley of a new qualification, enhancement, deepening and enrichment of this being of the community as such. Wonderful and glorious as this is, it is not an end in itself even in what it includes for its individual members. The enlightening power of the Holy Spirit draws and impels and presses beyond its being as such, beyond all the reception and experience of its members, beyond all that is promised to them personally. And only as it follows this drawing and impelling is it the real community of Jesus Christ.

Barth 2004, § 72, p. 764.

The Spirit who leads us ever deeper into God, whose Spirit testifies to our spirit, leads us at once ever deeper into the world, for the world. To be theological, to engage with God, is simultaneously to be led out towards the public, towards the world. These two cannot be prised apart. The Spirit is, after all, God’s coming to the world in the time between the times. A church with a singularly inwards concern for itself, even if a good community of praise and of love of God, with Scripture and preaching as central, can never be the church of Pentecost; it will only ever be the church of Acts 1. My other great theological hero, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, put it thus:

The space of the church does not, therefore, exist just for itself, but its existence is already always something that reaches far beyond it. This is because it is not the space of a cult that would have to fight for its own existence in the world. Rather, the space of the church is the place where witness is given to the foundation of all reality in Jesus Christ . . . The space of the church is not there in order to fight with the world for a piece of territory, but precisely to testify to the world that it is still the world, namely the world that is loved and reconciled by God.

Bonhoeffer 2005, p. 63.

The Church receives the Spirit of God in deep and intense ways to enable it to exist for the world in all its extensity, plurality and diversity – to exist for its public. It is, after all, the nature of the Spirit to be freely and extensively present in the world; and the Church is a place where that extensive presence intensely dwells – not for the Church’s own sake but for the world. The intensity is like that of a light on a lampstand, which burns brightly not for its own sake but for the sake of the room it lights up; and the more intensely and brighter it burns, the more the light cannot but fill the room. It is impossible to have an intense light without its extensive effects: the two belong together.

If all of this is true, what does this mean for the theology that the Church engages in? What should this theology look like?

Here, I want to identify seven motifs, seven principles if you like, for the Church to observe in relation to its theology, which cannot be anything but public, since it is engaged in by the Church and since the Church exists only for the world.

However tempted we may be as a church in a context which is complexly religious and secular in the UK, and in which the Methodist tradition seems particularly to be in decline, to see theology as an unnecessary ecclesial luxury; however tempted we may be to lose confidence in the proclamation of the gospel and our own capacity to relate it to our context; however tempted we may be to attend to the polity and form of the Church at the expense of its God-created life and nature (the church of acts 1 and not the church of Acts 2), let us never as a church forget the absolutely central role of theology to our ministry, discipleship and public life. Theology is an act in which we love God and through loving God are enabled to love those others around us more. We should not arrive at theological quandaries and questions with formulae in place or with a sense that the rich wisdom of the past might not offer guidance and hope in the present. We are called to teach the gospel of Christ, and whatever answers we feel in our theological wrestling we may come to, if we are called to teach, then let us teach.