1. SCRIPTURE – KEY TO THE FUTURE

Chapter 9: What do we have to do?

The Hebrew and Apostolic Testaments carry in them the key to the salvation of humanity. If this is true, what needs to happen for that key to become freely available? -- because, clearly and currently it is not freely available. We cannot lay the responsibility for this at the door of the 'world'. It may well be true that, even if and when the key would be freely available, the offer would not be taken up. That is a responsibility that rests upon those who reject the word. But unless that word is spoken it cannot be heard and the responsibility then rests upon those charged with the message.

What the ministry of the first great preacher, Paul, makes clear is that the message must be cast in a way that makes it accessible to the world. To make the message accessible to the non-Jewish world, Paul had to completely recast the way the message was presented. The gospel to the Jews and the gospel to the gentiles did not, could not, be expressed in the same form and language.

The question, ‘what must we do?’ needs to arise first from the community of faith itself. Clearly, the way that this question is answered is one that will arise out of the mind of the community corporately. What I have to offer is a contribution to the development of corporate mind. There will be much reflection, debate and theological examination to come before the answer is fully clear.

First, then, in my view, is the rediscovery of a focus on the memory of God's acts of grace in the Hebrew people and in the apostolic church, in the event of the cross. In doing this, though, it needs to be a focus with a clear relationship to our real and present situation and predicament, personal or global. In other words, our remembering cannot be in a vacuum. If, for example, I said that today we remember the death of Tom Jones in the village of Southend, Cornhill in 1342 that would be a memory in a vacuum, a pointless act. So it is that unless we are able to make a connection between the death of Jesus and our real situation, in a way that we not only see the connection but we see the vital, 'saving' connection, the memory exists in a vacuum.

For generations, that connection was made to "getting to heaven when we die" and, during the time that this issue was of paramount importance to people in general society, the act of remembering created a vital connection. What we see now is that the entire focus on a life beyond the grave is a cultural phenomenon, linked to a particular model of God. That model has passed into history and culture has changed. 'Salvation' to a life beyond the grave means nothing to anyone any more -- even within the community of faith. In over 40 years of ministry, irrespective of theological tradition or denomination, I have never met anyone for whom life beyond the grave had any genuine significance beyond being an article of belief they felt obliged to affirm. Although the 'successful' churches of the modern era play lip-service to 'old-time religion' and still will use the language of salvation to an afterlife, their success in numerical growth does not relate to this in any way but to the fact that they have found ways of connecting the biblical memory to the concrete life-issues confronting people. Furthermore, in making these connections, they have enabled people to find power and grace in the connections that effectively transform their situations.

It will be obvious to anyone reading my writing that I consider these churches, born of the Conservative reaction of the late 20th century, as being way off-track in providing the shape of Christian community in the present age, that they prophesy falsely and create deceptive expectations that will only lead to disillusionment and eventual loss of faith. For all that, I affirm at the same time that they are a work of God, of grace.

It is a consistent experience of the church throughout its history that the rise of heresy and distorted spirituality had been a call to the church by the Spirit to attend to areas of pastoral need the church was neglecting, to distortions or corruptions of the life of the Church it was failing to address, or theological perceptions it was failing to see. Reformation Protestantism is a prime example of this, as was the rise of Pentecostalism in the 20th century. In my country of New Zealand, the rise of Mormonism, proselytising among Maori in the 1950s, exposed the church’s shameful neglect of its Maori membership and created a new era -- that in turn played a large part in a remarkable renaissance of the Maori people that has occurred over the last generation. I have no shadow of doubt that Mormonism is a completely false religion, founded on a lie, yet equally it has been a servant of God, in this respect the least.

Liberalism, although as a movement it too was a servant of God, had threatened to lead the Christian community into the morass of abstractions and ideas. The reaction of the last part of the 20th century called us back to the fundamentals of memory. Now, as the energy runs out of that reaction, and disillusionment with its solutions sets in, there is a danger and opportunity for the community. The danger lies in the widespread abandonment of faith that will inevitably follow the disillusionment. So strong has been the dominance of the voice of reaction over the past three decades that its implosion will leave the church seemingly voiceless and all the media stories will be about failing churches.

The opportunity is that the fundamentals of the memory have been laid down and the perception created that there is a link between the memory and the nature of our present life. Disillusionment itself creates the opportunity for rediscovery of a new reality. But before the church can make the opportunity work for it and its mission, it must first rediscover for itself the indissoluble link between its memory and the real-life cry for salvation, not to 'another world to' and/or an illusionary alternative life but to a renewed, transformed life in the concrete existence of this world.

The second thing we have to address seriously within our community is the issue of the shape of human life and community in a global culture. The role of the church is to pioneer a new way of living for humanity, which means that it must always be ahead of where the community is at large. Part of the tragedy of the conservative reaction of the past generation is that large sections of the Christian community has been trying to be behind the world, not at its forefront and has, deservedly, been judged harshly by the world for its failure to grasp changes that have been occurring positively in human society. The evangelical rise to power and influence from the 1970s was driven by the effort to suppress the move by women and gain equality with males. It was sustained during the 1990s and early years of the 21st century by the attempt to suppress the drive by gays to gain equal recognition with heterosexuals. The Catholic Church has used the abortion issue to maintain energy levels among its adherents. The conservative reaction has been like a hot-air balloon kept aloft by a flaming gas-burner -- but the gas is running low which is why we are witnessing rapid deflation of this particular balloon. It is sheer illusion to think that the church can be kept 'inflated' permanently on the heat of negative reaction -- especially when the reaction is to developments delivering positive results to society in general.

The core of the problem has been the obsession in recent times with 'church growth' and the influence of the so-called church growth movement. A numerically growing church is being seen as a sign of spiritual vitality whereas it is more often than not a product of skill in social manipulation and of the power of populist appeal to the lowest common denominator, fuelled by negative sentiment about 'the world'. The reality is that as the community seeks to hear the Spirit genuinely and change and develop under the Spirit's leadership, numbers become fewer rather than greater. The role of the pioneer is always painful and costly and few are prepared to accept the role. This may have been never so true since the first Good Friday as it is and will be in this age.

The third thing we must do is to learn to see and discern the action of grace in our present life -- and this itself becomes part of our memory. In my own discipline of prayer, my first action every day is to review the previous 24 hours and name all the instances I can identify of grace. The context of this for me is a clear sense of the ministry role to which I am called. I know (because I have tried) that this ministry does not proceed by means of my plans and programmes. It proceeds by grace and every single day I can look back to the way in which grace has taken this ministry one or more steps forward. What I have learned is that nothing ever works out as I planned it – but always -- always -- much better than anything I may have planned.

Unless we take this third step, the challenge of the second would be totally beyond us and would crush us. What our transformed community will be like, not all of us alive today have any idea. We can only follow the leadership of the Spirit. Implicit in this is the recognition that in grace we lack nothing of the resources needed for being the transformed community and carrying out what we are called to do and be.

The fourth thing we are to do is to be intensely and immediately aware of the crisis that we are in as global humanity. Spirituality does not mean withdrawal from the 'world' but engagement with the world. Salvation is not ‘from this world to a next’ but within this world in fulfilment of God's purpose for this world. There are many dimensions to this awareness, which will be explored in a further book.

The fifth response is that we live under the imperative to be bearers of the message of salvation to the world. Unless we do this, we are useless vessels.

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