Skip to main content

A dynamic way of being Church

Matthew 10.40-42

Today congregations from all denominations are having to rethink what it means to be church. The old model is no longer working. Perhaps it never did, and perhaps our failure to adopt the right model helps to explain the gradual decline of organised Christianity in the West. 

The prevailing model for the last 150 years has been congregations gathering together primarily for worship. Whether worship means having a good sing, or sharing communal prayers, or gathering around the table to share Holy Communion, it’s been focused on honouring and praying to God. 

But does God need our songs of praise? Do we really need to gather together to draw God's attention to the world's problems? And what are we expecting to achieve by meeting Christ in bread and wine at the table of the Lord?

In chapter 10, as we’ve seen before, Matthew uses the way Jesus and his disciples engaged in mission to suggest another way of being church - an alternative model which might be more appropriate to small and struggling churches or to groups of churches - like Methodist circuits and clusters - when we’re trying to reinvigorate our mission.

Perhaps traditional church services, focused on worship, are no longer sustainable. Perhaps they never really were. Perhaps, in putting up all our church buildings our ancestors set us up to fail, to let them down, to be the ones who can’t keep the tradition going. 

So what is Matthew’s alternative model? He suggests a way of being church that’s based not on being, on coming together, on worshipping, but on doing - out in the community, on being welcomed by the people around us. Here disciples go out instead of coming together and Jesus goes with them to meet people where they are. The focus is on mission, on what each one is called to be and do in their own corner of the  world. If they're ordained they’re more like friars or travelling preachers than parish priests, and - if they're lay people - their calling is to live in and change their own community, whether it be their neighbourhood, their office, their factory, their shop or their school, not to build a church. And those who receive them, receive Jesus. 

When they come together their reason for meeting isn't for worship, although they may begin with worship, but instead - says the discipleship expert John Leach - it's to 'celebrate what they've seen God doing among them, to receive further [instruction] about how to do it better, and then to go out [again] to see what more God will do.[1] 

Verse 42 says enigmatically that even those who give a cup of cold water to one of Jesus’ apprentice missionaries in the name of a disciple will be rewarded. What does that mean - that the apprentices are calling themselves disciples? In his translation Nicholas King says it means that they're rewarded for helping someone ‘just because they’re a disciple.’[2]

This dynamic,'says Leach, 'of coming and going, learning and doing, sharing and receiving, is [the] prevalent [way in which] Jesus [discipled] his first followers. And if this was the model adopted by Jesus, shouldn’t it be our primary way of being Church today?

[1] Based on ideas by John Leach in Guidelines, July 2017, Bible Reading Fellowship

[2] The New Testament Freshly Translated, Nicholas King, 2004

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I don't believe in an interventionist God

Matthew 28.1-10, 1 Corinthians 15.1-11 I like Nick Cave’s song because of its audacious first line: ‘I don’t believe in an interventionist God’. What an unlikely way to begin a love song! He once explained that he wrote the song while sitting at the back of an Anglican church where he had gone with his wife Susie, who presumably does believe in an interventionist God - at least that’s what the song says. Actually Cave has always been very interested in religion. Sometimes he calls himself a Christian, sometimes he doesn’t, depending on how the mood takes him. He once said, ‘I believe in God in spite of religion, not because of it.’ But his lyrics often include religious themes and he has also said that any true love song is a song for God. So maybe it’s no coincidence that he began this song in such an unlikely way, although he says the inspiration came to him during the sermon. The vicar was droning on about something when the first line of the song just popped into his ...
14 comments
Read more

Giotto’s Nativity and Adoration of the Shepherds

John 1.10-18 In the week before Christmas the BBC broadcast a modern version of The Nativity which attempted to retell the story with as much psychological realism as possible. So, for instance, viewers saw how Mary, and Joseph especially, struggled with their feelings. But telling the story of Jesus with psychological realism is not a new idea. It has a long tradition going back seven hundred years to the time of the Italian artist Giotto di Bondone. This nativity scene was painted in a church in Padua in about 1305. Much imitated it is one of the first attempts at psychological realism in Christian art. And what a wonderful first attempt it is - a work of genius, in fact! Whereas previously Mary and the Baby Jesus had been depicted facing outwards, or looking at their visitors, with beatific expressions fixed on their faces, Giotto dares to show them staring intently into one another’s eyes, bonding like any mother and newborn baby. Joseph, in contrast, is not looking on with quiet a...
1 comment
Read more

Luther and Loyola

James 1:17-27 Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23 Within Christianity there has always been a tension between two poles. At one end of the spectrum stands Martin Luther, who said that Christian faith is about trusting in God to put us right - or make us righteous - through the saving death of Jesus. Luther came to this conclusion when he was a professor of New Testament studies in a little town in Germany called Wittenberg. One year he decided to teach his students about Paul’s letter to the Romans and that’s when it suddenly dawned upon him that Christian faith is all about trust. At the other end of the spectrum , stands someone like Ignatius Loyola the founder of the Society of Jesus. He spent a lot of his later life in crisis, first struggling to overcome severe wounds that he had suffered when he was a soldier and then during two short periods locked up in a cell by the Spanish Inquisition. He came to believe that the Christian life is a similar sort of struggle, a lifelon...
Post a Comment
Read more