A visit to inspire...

Old Street roundabout from the air

My stepson, Ben, was baptised on Sunday. His church meets in a hotel in the Old Street area of London. The style is contemporary, with two young  church leaders, a band with a lot of kit (the church owns no property, but an impressive trailer!) and a cosmopolitan, professional and mainly early-twenties congregation. This is as you might expect in that neighbourhood - students and Silicon Roundabout Techies are dominant. It is happy, though not especially clappy, but hands are raised, the vibe is laid-back, the coffee is good, and the expectation is that time spent lingering over it and cup cakes later will last at least as long as the service itself. 

Westminster Abbey

The surprise for some may be that the church is Anglican. Its ministers are both ordained in the CofE. Some leadership team members are even called "wardens". One of the pastors splits his time, with part time work with Christians in Sport.  The other is a house husband every Monday while his wife fulfils a role as Director of Counselling at a big parish church up the road. This job-splitting explains the strength in depth - two ordained ministers, and there are other part-time workers too. A small church seems amazingly well-served through the use of part-timers - which I'm sure means sacrificial living, actually. 

Can the church speak
to the modern city?

And the service is CoE. It is contemporary, but the overall shape of it, the liturgy surrounding baptism and the Lord's Supper - all of it is actually faithful to a great river of tradition going back through the centuries. It is in the stream of Anglicanism's perpetually persistent Puritan wing - shorn of the outward symbols like vestments or candles, true to the classic theology of a Stott, a Moule, a Ryle or even a Cranmer for that matter - this is actually reformation faith re-formed for post-modern twenty-somethings. 

If all of that sounds potentially bumptious and cloying, or pressuring and naggy, or triumphalist and ecclesiastically snobbish, please think again. Evangelicalism has a specific subculture which can be cringeworthy. Remember the ghastly evangelical with his smile and his sofa and his gaggle of lovelies who wanted to take over and "bless" the church in the BBC's excellent Rev? There is none of that here. Everything comes across as sane, non-manipulative, not artificial, not fake, straightforward, honest, real. The preaching doesn't shy away from big issues - we were in Ephesians 1, of all places! - but deals with them in a way which is winsome and kind. What is impressive is the quiet respect for people and their complicated stories in the whole service, and in the manner the sermon comes over especially. 

And the stories are complicated and diverse. Here was the surprise for me. I knew the place was Anglican - but I confess to slightly dreading a sense of cloned testimonies, and everyone being bright young things from the tech industry. 

Three men are baptised. My stepson is an art student from a Christian home, who had a patch a while ago of saying he definitely wasn't a Christian, and then more recently that he very definitely is. One baptisee is a little older than me, converted recently from a background in Chinese Buddhism. The third man is in his twenties, with, by his own account, a deeply troubled past which had involved beating people up and a fair number of police stations. I am not sure I have ever seen three more different men, all confessing Christ as Lord and Saviour at the same time. 

The Word that Lasts:
Door at St Helen's, Bishopsgate

A short while ago I wrote a piece about the need for Conmen in the Salvation Army.  What we saw on Sunday is precisely the kind of thing I had in mind. Our crying need is not to move from the theology of our founders. The constant cry that the doctrines are a hindrance to people in this day and age is simply wrong. Our contemporaries need the old doctrines put in a contemporary way - just that. That may mean, in some contexts, planting churches which are not about bands and uniforms, still less about cartridges and specialing and other bits of awful in-house jargon. It means going back to our roots in gospel-driven cultural relevance. 

The great pragmatists, William and Catherine, would, I think, have been pretty impressed by what we saw on Sunday. Here was gospel work being done. One of those baptised comes from exactly what they would have seen as the prime harvest field for their Christian Mission. In an area like Old Street, and given the general demographic of the church, he was perhaps exception rather than rule. So that leaves me with the challenge - how are we to do that "conservative but contemporary" thing among those who the Army has traditionally seen as "our people"?

Inspire London is by no means unique. As it happens, my youngest stepson Sam also attends a new Anglican church - planted this month, in fact, the second plant of a church which is itself less than a decade old. The young Anglican evangelicals have the ball at their feet. I knew these guys, or their spiritual predecessors, back in the nineties. They were talking about large-scale church planting then. And they have done it and are doing it.  It can be done - by God's help it will be done. The Salvation Army in the UK is doing some planting, for which we should be thankful and prayerful - but we are closing corps faster than we are opening. How can that tide be turned? 

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For more information about Inspire Church see here.

 

For my previous blog about Conmen in TSA see here.

 

Wanted: Conmen for the Salvation Army

The Salvation Army in the UK is facing huge challenges. Numbers are down, Corps are closing – I am just a new boy and I have already become accustomed to the litany of gloom. Thankfully there are many pockets of hope, with some great examples of church plants and re-plants that should encourage anyone who loves this quirky and lovely denomination. 

What is the need of the hour, though? For me, it is more Conmen, and Conwomen, for that matter. Specifically, practitioners of the Double Con. Unless we get them, I can see no cause for generalised encouragement. In fact, so far as I can see, the pockets of hope are precisely where the Conmen and women are doing their stuff. 

For the first Con we need Conservatives. And I absolutely don’t mean Tories. We need people – adherents, soldiers and officers – who understand, believe and know how to communicate the old gospel. If the Sally Army is seen by many members of the public as simply “a charity” that is not only due to the profile of our social work, it is because there is a significant tendency to communicate a vague and socially acceptable message. We haven’t been good at conserving the faith. A gospel of watery niceness, of interfaith cuddliness, of absolutized inclusiveness, is not the message of our Founders; it is not the message of the church down the centuries, nor of the apostles and prophets, nor of Jesus himself. We need to recover our confidence in the authority of Scripture, in the message of the Cross, in the power of the Spirit to change lives. 

But it has to be a double Con. Because we need Conservatives who are also Contemporary. It's all there in the phrase “know how to communicate the old gospel”. There is value in believing the old gospel for yourself, of course, but getting it out and into the minds, hearts and lives of the people around us – that is quite another thing. We need to know how to reframe, or rephrase, old truths in ways that resonate in our own generation. We need to find new metaphors, new illustrations, and new arguments. We need to be able to deal with new objections… and new sources of spiritual apathy.

And more: preservation of the doctrinal tradition of TSA is of no use if it is shackled by an unthinking preservation of every other tradition that comes from the 19th century. All of us tend to find a certain security in the outward trappings of our religion, of course, and we become very easily blind to the impact of those trappings on the outside world. But we need to question hard. What does a timbrel display actually say in the age of Diversity?? Did William Booth really expect and desire the maintenance of brass bands for ever, even as tastes changed? He actually said the opposite! 

There is a tendency to see the preservation of TSA as consisting precisely in the preservation of such traditions. But without the Double Con this would be embalming a corpse! We don't want to go Army Barmy (or Balmy!) in that sense. Seeing what should be altered or dropped is as much a part of the preservation of the church as is holding on to the good. 

Actually, the most fatal of conditions for a church is where the preservation of tradition and its imposition in diverse contexts has taken precedence over the maintenance of doctrine. A friend recently wrote that the “recipe for good denominational health ... is cultural diversity centred around confessional unity.” So often the opposite situation pertains – maintenance of an imposed or dated culture takes priority over unity in the truth, with sad consequences. Such a situation is the precise inversion of the Double Con. You know the kind of thing: Where a totally vague or erroneous sermon is hardly commented on, but woe betide the bass player if his buttons aren't polished... Where you would be pulled up for sitting on the mercy seat but not for querying the Deity of Christ. Where denying Doctrine 11 is a far greater possibility than drinking a pint of bitter. When that kind of illogic has crept in, a cancer, sprung from the church's own subculture, has started to eat away at its heart, and death cannot be far away. 

We need to be Conservative and Contemporary. Holding to the gospel, and getting it across, today. And doing so with love. For love to broken people around us, for love of the Salvation Army, above all, for love of God, Father, Son and Spirit, we need to be Conmen and Conwomen. 

Double Conners all.