August 2008

Dear friends

What it means to be “Church”

As I write, Lambeth, the decadal conference of Archbishops and Bishops from around the world, is in the second week of meeting at Kent University in the UK. A major focus of their time together is grappling with the definition of “Church” and “Christian Community”, highlighted by the ongoing concern for many that The Episcopal Church (TEC) of the USA may have stepped beyond the boundaries by electing a Bishop (Gene Robinson) who is in an active Gay relationship. In many parts of Africa and Asia homosexual relationships are considered a criminal act, while in the USA and other parts of the world it is recognised as just another way humans celebrate relationships. It seems over two-hundred Bishop’s may have boycotted the conference due to the perceived “permissiveness” of TEC in particular. An Anglican Covenant is under discussion to try to address “orthodoxy” (sound doctrine and practice), but whether or not this will help bridge the large gap in both doctrine and practice around the issue of sexual orientation is yet to be tested. This is not the only issue under discussion, and our Archbishop’s Blog (http://archbishop.anglicanchurchsa.org/) is instructive, as is a UK site called “Thinking Anglicans” (http://www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk/).

The Nature of “Church”

In a lecture given on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Ripon College, Cuddesdon (UK) in 2004, Archbishop Rowan Williams had the following to say about the nature of the Church: “… the Church is first of all a kind of space cleared by God through Jesus in which people may become what God made them to be (God’s sons and daughters), and that what we have to do about the Church is not first to organise it as a society but to inhabit it as a climate or landscape.” This brings to mind our parish slogan: “Our lives: a place where others meet Christ.” It is a call not just to live out our faith in life, but to live IN our Faith: to immerse ourselves in God.

Archbishop Williams’ thought is a radical one for many of us who possibly prescribe to the view that, “… the Church is essentially a lot of people who have something in common called Christian faith and get together to share it with each other and communicate it to other people ‘outside’.” Williams’ comments that this view is “… harmless enough … but a good way from what the New Testament encourages us to think about the Church.”

The perspective that Church primarily constitutes a place to be inhabited, not organised, shines a fresh light on what it means to be involved with the Church, with the people of God, and again Williams comments, “When Christ calls, he calls, we are told, into a community with diverse roles and tasks, not into a mass of individuals vaguely looking for things to do …”

This beggars each one of us to ask the question: what role, what task, am I fulfilling? Or am I just vaguely passing through?

[The full text of this lecture can be found at: http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/1185].

Gifting

The above brings us back to my comment in my last communication that Hilary Davis, in the Stewardship portfolio, has worked hard to distil questions that will prompt us to acknowledge our individual God-given gifts. The second set of questions is available elsewhere in this magazine – please look at them, and perhaps revisit last month’s magazine for the first set of questions. I am always willing to make time to discuss issues of faith and calling with you, and will be happy to include discussion around how and where you are encountering God and the myriad of gifts he places into our lives. Please feel free to phone and book some time with me.

Thank You

Thank you to everyone who made a special effort to make Dawn and I feel special this month as we celebrated our birthdays: we received FOUR birthday cakes (!); we much appreciated spending time with those who could make it around the Braai on Sunday 6 July; we are most thankful for the cards, gifts and fellowship given to us in such abundance!

Web Presence

We are still planning a parish web page, but this seems to be taking a while! In the meantime previous editions of “… from the Rector’s Desk” can be found at

http://fromtherectorsdesk.blogspot.com/

where there is also a link to our parish Picture Gallery, which can also be accessed at

http://picasaweb.google.com/garsfontein.acsa.

Please feel free to browse!

Blessings

Mark

April 2007

Dear Friends

Church Growth

I attended a two day Church Growth seminar last week. Substantial input was given by Eddie Gibbs, presently outgoing professor of Church Growth at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California. Eddie has been an Anglican Priest for over 44 years (longer than I have been alive!) and spoke with great excitement for where the Church finds itself today. There are many challenges as the “landscape” has changed as society moves into a post-modern and increasingly post-Christian mode. Two key characteristics of church ministry in this emerging paradigm are that the context is increasingly multi-cultural and mission becomes increasingly effective when it has an ecumenical base. This, however, requires that we become more centred and aware of our own denominational and faith base, and become more radical within our own denominational environment. I asked Eddie Gibbs how he would define a “Radical Anglicanism” – his reply:

By “radical” I mean someone who is living in conformity with the radical message of Jesus – i.e. The Gospel of the Kingdom. This is helpfully and fully spelt out by Bp. N.T. Wright, bishop of Durham in a series of books on Jesus. I hope this helps.

Our Lent course, for the few who attended, has been helpful in this regard by helping us to understand the breadth of Christian Spirituality, both in giving us clearer understanding of those aspects that shape our more traditional Anglican outlook and in giving us a better understanding of what shapes Christians in other denominational environments. It is important that we develop confidence in who we are as Christians and as Anglicans.

Values, Morality and Ethics

As I write this I am attending our Diocesan Clergy School, hosted and directed by UNISA. We have had some outstanding input from various high-calibre academics, including our Anglican sub-Dean Prof. Barney Pityana (also vice-Chancellor of UNISA). We have been exploring what the church’s role is in helping our society rebuild its value base, while exploring the diversity of our call in dealing with the various moral challenges all South Africans face, asking how we reclaim our prophetic voice. Again, the importance of good ecumenical relationships has been raised so that the church speaks with “one voice”, rather than with a fragmented denominationalism. There is a call to re-explore the message of Jesus, to regain a radical commitment to the Kingdom of God as put forward by Jesus, and as experienced in the early church, to be relational rather than legalistic in our interpretation both of Scripture and Tradition.

We have been reminded that poverty should remain one of the church’s main preoccupations, that an “option for the poor” is preferential and not exclusive (i.e. not an “option against the rich”), and that transforming the plight of the poor includes the transformation of the wealthy. Sadly, excessive accumulation of monetary and material wealth is mostly at the expense of the poor. We were asked, “Is inequality ordained by God?” because our lifestyles as Christian people often suggest that it is! Interestingly, while the USA Constitution enshrines “Freedom” as an inalienable human right, our South African Constitution enshrines “Equality”.

In considering the value-crisis in our society within the context of our Constitution and our Constitutional Democracy, we have been asked as Church to consider three important questions:

What is it that undermines our Christian values in the communities in which we live?

How do we “hold the centre” as a faith community, individually and collectively?

How do we become effective moral agents?

The crisis we face, both as Christians and as South Africans, is that our Constitutional Democracy is deliberately misinterpreted for personal (and financial?) gain. Twelve years into our new democratic society there is no consensus or collective commitment to definitive values, even though key values are enshrined in the preamble to the Constitution that include human dignity, human rights and social justice. In South Africa the centre is falling apart as we as a struggle to maintain the consensus gained in 1994, and this is visible in the corruption, crime and other indicators of moral collapse. As Church, we need to exercise authority in bringing people back to the values of the Gospel and values as defined in the Constitution.

Do we have the courage, as Christians and as Anglicans, to regain our prophetic voice?

Blessings
Mark