Is a Radical Church Possible?: Reshaping Its Life For Jesus' Sake

By Adrian Alker

Mainstream Christian denominations are facing critical decline in the United Kingdom. Church leaders call for new strategies for growth but will these be effective? In this book, Adrian Alker calls for an honest look at the life of Jesus and the faith of the Church and suggests a radical and more honest reshaping of the churches to enable them to face the challenges of the present day. The author has been ordained as an Anglican priest for over thirty years and recognises the important contributions which church congregations can and do make to their communities and the wider world. He passionately believes that the Church must become more Jesus shaped and less concerned with its own structures and beliefs in order to attract new members.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
• Release date: Mar 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9781785352515

Adrian Alker

Adrian Alker has served in four dioceses in the Church of England. He founded the St Mark's Centre for Radical Christianity in Sheffield and currently is Chair of the Progressive Christianity Network Britain. He was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Sheffield for his service to the community.

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Introduction

The Enemy Within?

Christmas morning arrives. A mild year, no snow in Sheffield and a large congregation able therefore to get to church. Like so many ministers, I asked the children to come to the front to show off their newly received presents. Gilbert was the first up, the bright six-year-old sporting a new wristwatch. ‘Can you tell me the time?’ I asked. The reply came quickly, ‘No, it never stops still. The junior research fellow in physics, sitting near the front, joined the rest of the congregation in applauding this erudite and insightful response! Time doesn’t stop still, although it often seems so with the Church. And time has brought to an end my paid ministry in the Church of England.

Some questions, like the one I asked of Gilbert, deserve a spirited response. ‘Are you looking forward to your retirement?’ I kept being asked a few months ago, as if the parole board had granted me an early release. I offered this rather limp reply, ‘I don’t know, I haven’t been retired before.’ I do know that many a retired cleric feels almost honour-bound to publish a selection of his or her sermons, which, even if they didn’t bore the listeners decades ago, might well do so in retrospect! There is also that temptation on retirement to draw an ecclesiastical timeline from the golden era of the 1950s to the barren uplands of the twenty-first century. I am not proposing to do either of these things in this book.

So why am I beginning my ‘Saga’ years (the lager and aga years have passed by) in front of the computer screen and producing yet another book for an overcrowded religious market? Well, only you the reader will judge whether or not I would have been better tending my plants at the bottom of the garden after thirty-five years of ministry. My reason for writing this book is the desire to share something of my joy at discovering a way of being Christian and being ‘Church’ which has led me not only to look back on a happy and fulfilled and, yes at times, frustrated ministry, but to look forward to the day when the Church can be reshaped more honestly and vigorously in the image of the God seen in Jesus of Nazareth.

Let me tell something of that discovery and about the content and purpose of this book.

Enjoying the subject of history at school and university led to the (rightful) assumption that all historical documents, including the Bible, must be subject to the rigours of scholarly critique. In my childhood and adolescence I also happened to attend a church whose vicar too refused to take many of the passages of the Bible literally; a cleric who was keen on silence in worship and some eastern practices of meditation. Shortly after my confirmation whilst in the second year of grammar school, a book called Honest to God was published and the world of the church seemed ablaze with controversy and argument. I am a child of that context and era.

In the 1970s this rather churchy young man left a career in education to train as an Anglican priest, returning to Oxford at the time of the ‘Myth of God Incarnate’ debates. The questioning of orthodox teachings concerning the doctrines of the church – the divinity of Jesus, the virgin birth, the nature of biblical truth – filled our days as men (in those days) preparing to enter parish ministry. We learned that as Anglicans we sat on that three-legged stool of honouring the Bible, tradition and reason. Wesley offered a fourth leg to that stool: experience, becoming the ‘Wesleyan Quadrilateral’. We ordinands in this liberal theological college at Cuddesdon considered ourselves balanced and reasonable, preparing to enter a world where we took seriously the advances in science and technology and the questions raised thereby for an historic faith. We embraced the modern world.

We were to serve in the Church of England, no membership sect, but a Church serving all the people of the parish, from cradle to grave, offering a hopeful view of humankind, conforming our lives with that of the master carpenter of Nazareth.

A curacy in Liverpool, followed by parish and youth ministry in the Lake District, did nothing to diminish this liberal outlook on life and religion. Ordained by Bishop David Sheppard, I was impressed and enthused by his convictions that the Church, working ecumenically, was there to serve the poor and the disadvantaged as Christ had done. David Sheppard was and still is one of my ‘heroes of the faith’.

During my time in Cumbria there was an increasing awareness in the Church of England that it was about time that women be admitted to holy orders. From about the early 1980s, I began to see those underlying divisions in the church over matters such as women’s ordination, biblical interpretation and matters of sexual ethics come more to the surface and take on, in the years of Archbishop Carey, a harsh stridency. Controversy over many doctrinal issues knocked over that three-legged stool as argument raged over the Church’s traditions, the teachings of the Bible and the succumbing to the ‘fads and fashions’ of contemporary society.

Liberals began to take a hammering from the church establishment during the 1990s with the growth of evangelical and charismatic churches. Dr Carey in an address to a conference in Amsterdam in the year 2000 said:

The Christ we follow is one who allows people to think, argue, dispute and doubt. Authentic Christian faith is not afraid of scholarship or the critical study of the scriptures.

(Alleluia, Amen I thought!) Then the Archbishop continued:

But there is a radical liberalism denying the truths the Church has borne witness to down the centuries that is an enemy to us all. Such an approach denies or undermines the authority of the scriptures.

So there it was, in print, in the Church Times: I, like many others, was the ‘enemy’. At the time, as vicar of a large and ‘successful’ church in Sheffield it didn’t feel like that! Did the benchmark of Anglicanism need drawing in such a way that curtailed critical enquiry when it threatened the ‘truths’ of the Church? Were ‘liberals’ like myself offering nothing more than a pernicious reductionism, upsetting the faithful, denying the Bible, diminishing the Church of Christ? We didn’t agree with conservative evangelicals, we avoided Anglo-Catholics, we felt uncomfortable with charismatics. So what had we to say?

Here is where my personal journey of faith and my ministry in the Church began afresh and why this book has been written. At St Mark’s Church in Broomhill, Sheffield, I found a congregation unafraid to ask the really big questions about faith, rather than accept that which had been ‘handed down’. Does God exist and if so what is God like? How could Jesus be both human and divine? Was the wrath of God really satisfied through the crucifixion of God’s son? Why couldn’t my female deacon colleague preside at the Eucharist? Why couldn’t the gay couple in church have their relationship blessed?

In the same year as that Amsterdam conference, there was another, albeit smaller conference, taking place in my church in Broomhill. Over two hundred gathered to hear a gentle scholar who had come to us from the distant state of Oregon in the USA. That scholar was Marcus Borg, then the Hundere Distinguished Professor of Religion and Culture at Oregon State University. Marcus was already a renowned best-selling scholar, he had been a member of the Jesus Seminar in the USA; he urged his readers and listeners to meet Jesus, to read the Bible, to think about God afresh, ‘for the first time’. That conference in Sheffield and the conferences which followed resulted in the setting up of the St Mark’s Centre for Radical Christianity. Hundreds of people who were enthused by Marcus Borg and Dom Crossan and Jack Spong and Richard Holloway and David Jenkins and later by Diana Butler Bass and Gretta Vosper and Val Webb came to realise that they were part of a growing stream of searchers, inside and outside of the Church who wanted to be passionate followers of Jesus and not enemies of anybody.

Over the last fifteen years since that Borg conference, I have continued to minister as an Anglican priest and have been blessed in that ministry. I have a deep respect for churches of all traditions. At the same time I also journey into other circles and networks with people of different Christian traditions and of no church involvement but who seek to share and to speak of a progressive Christian faith, fit for this third millennium. This book is written in the humble attempt to encourage those on this journey and is dedicated to Marcus Borg, whose death in January 2015 came as a sad blow to all who owe him an enormous debt of gratitude.

In the following chapters, I hope to help discussion through posing questions about the subjects covered. In this sense the book could be used in a group, as a course, in stages and snatches. I have pointed to further reading and other resources to help the radical pilgrim. The book was conceived in my mind in 2013, the fiftieth anniversary year of Bishop John Robinson’s Honest to God and I hope the theme of honesty is recognisably present over the course of the book.

I begin deliberately with an evaluation of the scholarly research about the historical Jesus. For many years this has been of particular interest, probably because of my undergraduate study but also because, as Dom Crossan has said, if we get the Jesus of history correct, we might get our Christianity correct. From writing about Jesus, I proceed in part two, to reflect upon the Church, which proclaims to be the body of Christ on earth. How can the Church be radically reshaped in the way of Jesus Christ which enables people of all backgrounds to be passionate followers of the Way?

My thanks to all those friends and colleagues who have shared and share this journey of critical enquiry and discovery, to the people of St Mary’s, West Derby in Liverpool, to those many church communities in the Diocese of Carlisle where I served as youth officer, to the people of St Mark’s, Broomhill in Sheffield, to members of St Mark’s CRC and the PCN Britain network, to colleagues in the Diocese of West Yorkshire and the Dales and above all to my dear wife Christine, my soul mate on life’s journey, without whom my ministry would have been all the poorer.

Part 1

Being Honest about Jesus

For me as a child, the story of Jesus was the most important story in the world. The conviction has remained with me. But as I have grown older, I have realized there is an equally important issue: how we tell the story of Jesus. There are many ways of telling his story, and how we tell it matters crucially.

Marcus Borg

Jesus, Uncovering the Life, Teachings and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary

Chapter One

Would the ‘Real’ Jesus Please Step Forward?

Whilst working in the Diocese of Ripon and Leeds, there were two images of Jesus which I deliberately kept next to each other on the windowsill of my office. One image was an iconic representation of Jesus in the arms of his mother Mary, a gift from Russian friends in St Petersburg. Jesus, with adult face, looks adoringly at the rather doleful Madonna. Such depictions of Jesus in the world’s art galleries must number millions. Madonna and child, nativity, crucifixion and resurrection portrayals understandably dominate the Christian art world. But the second image of Jesus on my window ledge was a postcard replica of a painting by Max Ernst. I saw the original whilst holidaying with a German friend in Cologne and just had to buy the postcard. In 1926 Ernst created ‘The Blessed Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus Before Three Witnesses: A.B., P.E., and the Artist’, to give the painting its full title. A muscular Mary is spanking the infant Jesus whilst the artists Breton, Eluard and Ernst look on. In stature, Jesus looks more like a seven-year-old; his halo is on the ground. The archbishop of Cologne at the time denounced this icon of surrealism as a ‘blasphemous narrative’. For how could a sinless Christ be spanked?

These two very different images of Jesus remind me of that search for the ‘real’ Jesus, which, in a way, began from the time when Jesus called his disciples to join with him in his mission. In the earliest of the canonical gospels, Mark has Jesus putting this question before his disciples, ‘Who do people say I am?’ (Mark 8.27) It’s a question which the New Testament writers and others sought to answer in those early decades after the death of Jesus.

But what do I mean by the ‘real Jesus’ and how might this differ from the historical Jesus? Most Christians today would claim that Jesus is ‘alive’ for them, that the ‘ascended and glorified Christ’ is a real living presence in their lives. In proclaiming the resurrection of Jesus, the Church sings that Jesus Christ is alive for evermore. A popular song opens with the line, ‘Jesus stand among us at the meeting of our lives.’ I have sung it many times. Nevertheless such statements of faith have not dulled the search for the Jesus of Nazareth who lived and died in Lower Galilee at a certain time in history. That search has been and is undertaken by scholars and theologians, many of whom profess no Christian faith and who would regard Jesus as an important and yet very dead man of history, certainly not one to stand among us except in the loosest of metaphorical senses.

Since the Church has always invited its followers to affirm the humanity of Jesus, it would seem obvious that the search for this historical Jesus would always be a part of Christian theology. So who is this Jesus? Is he the sinless Son of God, born of the Virgin Mary, risen from the dead and declared to be the world’s Saviour and Redeemer by the councils and creeds of the early Church? Or was he a human being, like you and me, whose halo could slip, a remarkable prophetic man of his time and for his time but whose bones lie somewhere in the dust of Palestine? Or could he indeed have been both human and divine? Or is Jesus whatever we want him