Church – what, why, where, when, who?

Once upon a time, in fact when I was sixteen and being prepared, in a somewhat perfunctory fashion, for church membership, I asked a question, quite a big question: What is the church for? 

At the time, this was perhaps somewhat bound up with a corrolarative question: What has the church got to offer me? I think I now know the answer to the second question (which is yet another story!) but the first one remained hanging unanswered in the airy spaces of my mind, despite some perambulations into the realms of religious-politcal thought a few years ago while studying for an MA in Applied Theology – what else does one do in one's mid-50s after all!

Even long ago in my teenage years, the overt power and influence of the church was withering away, leaving behind a very mixed legacy, and churches have struggled to develop a renewed identity (or should that be renewable?!). At such a time as ours, with beleaguered politicians, institutional decline, and disillusioned, often apathetic, sometimes enraged, citizens, should the church return to a philanthropic role of community needs provider? Should it adopt the 'if you can't beat them, join them' approach of entrepreneurial partnership? Should it focus on a public, quasi-civic role as participant in state ceremonial? Should it strive against the odds to be a counter-cultural prophet? Should it focus on the populist appeal of simplistic evangelical rhetoric? Should it withdraw from 'the world'? And when I say 'it' I should of course say 'we'.

There is precedent for all of these, certainly, but for me none of them sit very easily with the image of a man who called people to him and talked to them about shepherds, flowers in the field, travellers along dangerous roads – not an entrepreneur, a social activist, a hermit, an academic theologian, nor, unlike our political leaders, a socio-political strategist, imposing top-down agendas of political cant and paternalism masquerading as bottom-up vision. Jesus, as far as we can tell, was a man who engaged with people wherever and whoever they were, a man who did not give straight answers to questions but told stories, stories which for the last two thousand years have somehow had the power to transform lives, to mobilise people into action, and to weave together very human self-interest with responsible altruism.

Story-telling is believed to be one of our oldest human activities. Stories are ways of making sense of experience and ideas, expressing concepts and beliefs, shaping our identity, binding people together, and enabling conversations and associations which go beyond the political jargon of 'community cohesion' and 'connectedness'. More importantly still, mutually reinforcing stories become story-fields, that is, fields of influence, creating ideas of how life is or could be, and influencing people's behaviour, acting like magnets, with a powerful pull toward seeing and behaving in one certain way rather than another.

I have written elsewhere, and at length, about such meta-narratives, and won't inflict that on you here! Suffice it to say that stories and story-fields matter more than we often give them credit for: they possess the dynamic, contextualised, motivating power which enables the process of paradigm shift, the metamorphosis from one way of thinking to another. To put it simply, to change the future, first change the story. And to change the story, what do we need but narrative leadership – in our churches as much as in our political society.

As a cleric, I am of course concerned both that we tell our story and how we tell it, and of course this evokes Jesus' particular use of parables. These were vivid, brief, powerful, and open-ended, drawing his listeners into real life, familiar, yet timeless and universal situations, and confronting them and us with the demand for a decision or a response. There are some good contemporary examples of this innovative, 'parabolic' approach: the thoughtful, provocative songs and prose writings of Sydney Carter, the often over-used, but on-the-button poems of T.S. Eliot and John Betjeman, the unconventional paintings of Stanley Spencer, the hymns of Brian Wren, and the excellent if controversial Martin Scorsese film The Last Temptation of Christ. All of these tell the Christian story in ways that, without diminishing the original, nonetheless strip layers away to reveal a core that can resonate today; and they are accessible, comprehensible, without requiring the listener or viewer to sign up for anything, least of all propositional doctrine.

And there is also an example – perhaps one of many, but the only one known to and experienced by me - of an experiment not simply in telling the story but in living it out, namely the Iona Community, founded in the 1930s by a friend of my uncle Boris, the Church of Scotland minister, George McLeod. McLeod recognised that there was a deep and urgent need for clergy to find new ways of communicating and living the gospel, resulting in a scattered community which crosses the boundaries of race, gender, sexual orientation, and denominational affiliation, and which brings together work and worship, prayer and politics, the 'sacred' and the 'secular' in ways that reflect a strongly incarnational theology.

For me, the Iona Community is a model of how the Christian story can be both communicated and lived in the here and now, rather than the various no doubt well-intentioned efforts to create 'church' in new styles, or to dress it in supposedly modern clothes, aiming to reach the un-churched. Perhaps, indeed, the concept of 'church' needs if not to be thrown away, then certainly recast. What is important is not the institution it once was, nor the resources represented by church buildings, nor the documented numbers of church members, but trust in God and in each other, so that we can 'sing the Lord's song', albeit in the strange land of today, and to join in the telling of a story which can help any and all people both to heal and to enable their optimum health – physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual – regardless of who they are or what they have been. The community of faith, the household of God, is not for the favoured few, nor for those who attach this label or that to themselves or others, but for everyone who is touched by God's grace, and all those who seek to be.

My question is answered, not just in terms of a 'what' but also a 'who', and a little bit of 'how' and 'why'. To 'where' and 'when' the answer is always the same: here and now. And it only took forty-five years!