A Vision for St Mary Magdalen, Sheet

(from the APCM on Sunday 30th April 2006)

A Vision for St Mary Magdalen
As God’s people in Sheet we should be:

Encountering God
Encouraging one another
Engaging with the world

I have a dream
I have a dream of a church where people come to Church with excitement and a little trepidation because they expect to meet with God.

I have a dream of a church where people have moved well beyond being nice to one another but are able to share openly and honestly about their own journey of faith.

I have a dream of a church where God is spoken of easily – over coffee after the service as much as in the service.

I have a dream of a church where people of all ages know that they are valued and a part of the life of the church.

I have a dream of a church where we give sacrificially to meet the needs of others:
in our town
in our nation
in the world

Rob Dewing

Encountering God ~ Encouraging one another ~ Engaging with the world

Encountering God
The trouble with Worship
I remember once, during my days as a history teacher, having a conversation with a colleague about a sixth form girl she taught. This girl was a committed Christian and she was bright and articulate. But my colleague struggled to understand her. She could see that Christians did much good in the world, but couldn’t understand worship. It was so obviously a waste of time. Wouldn’t it be so much better to just get on with doing the good stuff, without wasting time indulging in telling God how wonderful he was?

This is a sentiment that I find echoed in conversations I have when I visit people who would like their child baptised. So often people will tell me that they are not religious, though they do believe in God. As often as not it is said, "anyway, you don’t have to go to church to be a Christian."

I think that this is a sentiment that those of us who are committed to being an active part of the Church often tacitly support. We are generous in our giving of time and money to the Church. We try to be as faithful in worship as we can, but we don’t really expect that to be a joyful or transforming experience. As James Torrance has put it: we sit in the pew watching the Minster ‘doing his thing’, exhorting us ‘to do our thing’, until we go home thinking that we have done our duty for another week! Two of the most familiar Eucharistic Prayers in our communion services remind us that ‘it is our duty and our joy… to give you thanks and praise’. The trouble is that it so often seems more duty than joy.

A Gift and an Offering
Let me suggest two things that I think we need to remember about worship.
Worship is a Gift.
It is easy to feel that this is true on those occasions when we sit in church and listen to the choir sing a glorious piece of music, when we stand in a full church and sing a great hymn or in a huge gathering at Spring Harvest and sing our favourite worship song. However, to say that worship is a gift is to say far more than that. When we come as Christians and proclaim Jesus is Lord or kneel before him in prayers it is God himself who prokokes our response to him (see 1 Corinthians 12:3 and Romans 8:26-27). That is one of the great tasks of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit within us shapes and inspires our response to God the Father and the Son, enabling us to join in the worship of heaven and to join in the intercessions of Christ himself.
Worship is an offering of our very selves
When we come to worship we tend to come looking for something that works for us. We know what we recognise to be beautiful or stirring and that is what we would like to be provided with. But worship is about much more than that.
In Romans St Paul writes one of his most powerful passages:
I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God – this is your spiritual act of worship.(Romans 12:1)
Paul is telling us that the whole of life is worship when we come to God, we offer ourselves to him. He is reminding us that when God calls us he calls us to come and to die. True worship begins when I am less concerned about getting what I want but rather focus on responding to God. True worship is not about getting it right, but about offering my very self to God.
I can’t help but wonder how our worship might be transformed if that was our prayer as we gathered together. I suspect it might make us less inclined to be picky over matters of style and taste.
An Encounter with God
Worship is above all about encountering God. As Christians we recognise that God came and lived among us in Jesus. We believe that the Holy Spirit continues to make Jesus present for us in word, sacrament and worship and provokes and enables our response to him. As we spend time on our own in prayer and as we meet for worship, that is what we are seeking. We do so in the recognition that all that we do in Jesus’ name must arise out of an encounter with the living God.

Is worship a waste of time? Is prayer? By no means! They are wonderful gifts from which we have just peeled away the corner of the wrapping paper and had a peep inside.

Encouraging one another

A Beautiful Church
When people talk to me about St Mary Magdalen they often say to me "isn’t it a beautiful church". When I feel I can get away with it I try to respond "yes they are aren’t they." I wish I felt I could answer that way more, but I hate being a smart Alec (really!). Behind the facetious nature of that answer there is a genuine truth. That the Church is a lot more than the buildings and that the community of faith is inseparable from whatever it is we think of when we speak of "Church".

The Place of Baptism
The first thing that you see when you come into St Mary Magdalen is the font. Practically this is not the ideal place for it. During a Baptism in a full church most people find it hard to see what is going on, as all the action occurs behind them. However, the physical position of the font is making an important point. Placed by the door of the church building it reminds us that just as we enter into the church building by the door, so we enter the church family by the font. And there is no question which is the most important of the two. In many ways to speak of "going to church" is a misnomer. We are the Church, wherever we are, and the challenge to us as Christians is to live in the light of that; to be the Church well.

Seeing Worship in a New Way
That is not to say that coming together is unimportant. As I wrote above, worshipping together is crucial. However there is more to it than this. The author of the letter to the Hebrews wrote: " let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another… " (Hebrews 10:24-25). Coming together to worship is important, but it is not the only, or even the principle reason for meeting together. We come together, according to this New Testament writer, to provoke and to encourage one another. Coffee after the Parish Communion is not an optional add-on. Meeting with others in midweek groups to explore faith together is not an activity for the real keenies. These are (or should be) at the heart of what we are about. We need to be sure that there is opportunity in our lives for deep and challenging conversation and prayer with other Christians – to allow each of us to grow. Jesus said to his disciples: " I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples." (John 13:34-35). We cannot begin to fulfil this command unless we know each other and share our lives with one another in some way.

If we have spent any time within church fellowships we will know that as organisations based on relationships they are places where people fall out. As a church that holds together people from very different church traditions and even denominations this is no less true of St Mary Magdalen than of any other church. The issue, however, is not that this happens, but how we deal with it when it does. We will disagree with others in the church about styles of music, about flowers, about how things ought to be done, just as we will be naturally drawn to some people but find others difficult. This becomes a problem when we assume that we are right and they are wrong and act accordingly without listening to them and trying to understand their position. True worship does not occur when we sing the right songs or get the prayers just right or listen to a well-crafted and beautifully written sermon. There is a sense in which true worship takes place when I am able to sit next to somebody in church and ask "how would you best be able to worship God? Let’s try and do it like that then." In short it is possible to be technically right in our arguments and yet be very, very wrong.

The Greatest of these is Love
The clearest place in the Bible in which we see the importance of the Christian Community set down is in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. The church in Corinth was going through a torrid time, with believers falling out about which of the apostles they was the greatest, whether to eat meat that had been butchered in the pagan temples and how to exercise the gift of tongues in worship. There was inappropriate sexual behaviour, Christians were taking other Christians to court and the rich were eating their fill at "communion services" while the poor didn’t get a look in. It was into this context that Paul wrote that wonderful hymn of love in 1 Corinthians 13 which we so often hear read at weddings. He was telling them that none of the issues that mattered so much to the different groups in the church were as important as just getting on and loving one other.

The reality is that it is much easier to worry about whether or not the bits and pieces of Church life are done right than it is to work at my relationship with that person in the Church with whom I seem to disagree about everything that matters. It is then that we need to hear the words of Jesus echoing in our ears: " By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." (John 13:35)

Engaging with the world

One of the key messages of the incarnation, of God becoming human, is that it reminds us that He calls us to live in the world. There are religions, not to mention some very strong traditions within the Christian faith, where the highest calling is to retreat from the world. However, for most of us God’s calling upon us is to live in the world but not be of it. We are called to be a part of the world, to engage fully with it, but not to allow ourselves to be shaped by the things that so often shape it; to refuse to be squeezed into its mould.

Evangelism and the "Social Gospel"
Within my lifetime what it means for the church to engage with the world has developed considerably. There is certainly far more of a consensus than there was in the first part of the Twentieth Century. Then, in a rejection of a wonderful heritage of a deeper engagement with the world that produced Wilberforce and Shaftsbury, the evangelical wing of the church focused more or less entirely on Evangelism. For them what mattered above everything else was winning people to faith in Christ. On the other hand more liberal Christians embraced a "Social Gospel"; there was a tendency to declare that the kingdom of God was established through the transformation of society.

Since the 1970s the Church as a whole has begun to see that both conversion to faith in Christ and social action are important. The Decade of Evangelism did not see a reversal in the decline in Church attendance, but it did encourage Christians to see that Jesus’ "Great Commission" to go into all the world and make disciples of all nations was one that was intended for all of us, not just chosen few. Similarly as Christians have gone to their Bible and looked again at the life of Christ, they have seen that he met people’s physical needs out of pure compassion, but as he did that they put their faith in him and followed him. In short, social action and evangelism, meeting human need and seeing people come to faith in Christ go hand in hand.

So if God calls us to engage with the world how should we best do that?

The Music of Heaven
Hospitality
One of the things that people often say about St Mary Magdalen is that it is a very friendly and welcoming church I am glad that they do, and I want to nurture that reputation and make sure that it is remains justified. However, I long to see us be even more than friendly; may we also be hospitable. The difference between being welcoming and being hospitable lies fundamentally in upon whose terms it is that we accept people. If we are friendly then we accept them into our midst, on the understanding that they learn to behave as we do. If we are hospitable, we say ‘make yourself at home’ and mean it – even if that means that they put their feet up on the coffee table and invite their friends over. Being hospitable means being vulnerable and it means allowing ourselves to be changed by an encounter.

Vulnerability
Closely related to this is God’s call on us to be vulnerable in our involvement with others. This is what Jesus did, as St Paul reminds us in his letter to the Philippians; Jesus ‘though he was in the form of God did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself.’ Whether what we are doing is evangelism or social action, we need to approach it with this attitude of humility.

One of the reasons that many of us find evangelism so hard is because we wonder what we will say if somebody asks us a difficult question that we do not know the answer to. That really is where the opportunity to be Christ-like begins; to admit to not knowing the answer; to be interested in what the person you are speaking with thinks and to take their position seriously; to allow ourselves and our opinions to be changed by that encounter. This is not to say that we don’t believe that Christianity has the answers to life’s difficult questions. Rather we recognise that God is bigger than we are and he does not call us to set ourselves up as experts, rather as people who have had a glimpse of the truth. To put it another way, Christians are people who have heard something of the strains of the music of heaven, who long to be in tune with their creator and to allow his music to be heard more clearly on earth.

Looking for what God is doing
Let’s return to the doctrine of the incarnation with which we began. At the heart of what God calls us to be is people who recognise in one another the imprint of God – people made in God’s image. That is the starting point for engaging with the world. Recognising that those we see about us are people who are made by God and special in his sight. God does not call us to do things to others, but to see where he is at work in the world and to seek to join in. If we can do that then we cannot help but engage and our social action and our evangelism cannot help but be glorifying to Him.

Rob Dewing

last updated 18.05.2008