Bearing Witness in Hope: Christian Engagement in Challenging Times

By SCM Press

Leading thinkers offer theoretical, contextual and practical responses to encourage a renewed love for the church and renewed energy to bear witness appropriately and creatively.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SCM Press
• Release date: Feb 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9780334058700

Book preview

Bearing Witness in Hope

© Editors and Contributors 2020

Published in 2020 by SCM Press

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Contents

List of Contributors

Introduction

Part 1: Reflections

1 A Church in Crisis? New Testament Perspectives

Richard Bauckham

2 Renewal and Reform: Reflections on a Changing Landscape

Alister McGrath

3 De Profundis: Faithful Witness in the Context of Adversity

Humphrey Southern

The Big Free Jubilee Lunch

Tina Hodgett

Part 2: Responses

4 Incarnation and Translation: The Forgotten Heart of Anglicanism

Martyn Snow

5 Living a New Story: Why We Need Creative Witness

Cathy Ross

6 Could You be Loved? BAME Presence and the Witness of Diversity and Inclusion

Carlton Turner

7 Marginal Hope: Unsystematic Reflections through Holy Week and Easter

Susanna Snyder

8 Developing Resilience: Responses to Criticism, Challenge and Change

Justine Allain-Chapman

The Story of the Winter Night Shelter

Gill O’Neill

Part 3: Witnesses

9 Faithful Presence: Response to a Community in Crisis

Alan Everett

10 To Hillsborough and Beyond: Episcopal Witness in a Secularizing Nation: A Profile of Bishop James Jones

Christopher Landau

11 What Kind of Church Are We Called to Be? A Vision for a Diocese

Steven Croft

Listening for God in Community: The Story of Leesland Neighbourhood Church

Tim Watson

Index of Names and Subjects

List of Contributors

Professor Richard Bauckham is a biblical scholar and was until 2007 Professor of New Testament Studies and Bishop Wardlaw Professor in the University of St Andrews, Scotland. He is now Professor Emeritus at St Andrews. He was a member of the Doctrine Commission of the Church of England for some years. In 2009 he was awarded the Michael Ramsey Prize for his book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, and in 2010 the Franz Delitzsch Award for his volume of collected essays The Jewish World around the New Testament. 

Professor Alister McGrath is Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion, Oxford University. He was Gresham Professor of Divinity, 2015–18. He is the author of one of the world’s best-selling theology textbooks, Christian Theology: An Introduction, which has been translated into 15 languages. He also serves as Associate Priest, Shill Valley & Broadshire Benefice, Diocese of Oxford.

The Rt Revd Humphrey Southern has been Principal of Ripon College Cuddesdon since 2015, where he teaches Pastoral Theology and contributes to courses in Ecclesiology, Church History and Leadership. He was formerly suffragan bishop of Repton in Derbyshire and a parish priest in a number of settings.

The Rt Revd Martyn Snow has been Bishop of Leicester since 2016. He also chairs the Central Readers’ Council for the Church of England and the Archbishops’ College of Evangelists. He was born in Indonesia and he and his wife have worked in West Africa. He has a love of working with diverse cultures.

Canon Dr Cathy Ross is Head of Pioneer Training at CMS (Church Mission Society), Associate Tutor at Ripon College Cuddesdon and Tutor in Mission at Regent’s Park College, Oxford. She has previously worked in Rwanda, Congo and Uganda with NZCMS and was General Secretary of the International Association for Mission Studies for eight years. She publishes in the areas of mission, pioneering, hospitality, feminist theologies and World Christianity. Her most recent publications are Mission on the Road to Emmaus (with Steve Bevans, London: SCM Press, 2015), Pioneering Spirituality (with Jonny Baker, 2015), Missional Conversations: A Dialogue between Theory and Praxis in World Mission (with Colin Smith, London: SCM Press, 2018).

The Revd Dr Carlton Turner is an Anglican theological educator at the Queen’s Foundation, Birmingham, where he teaches Practical and Contextual Theology, Mission Studies, and supports the Centre for Black Theology. As a Caribbean Anglican priest from the Bahamas, he has spent some eight years serving as a priest in the Diocese of Lichfield before taking up the post at Queen’s. His PhD focused on identity dissonance within Church practices in the African Caribbean setting, looking particularly at the relationship between the Church and Junkanoo, a New World street festival in the Bahamas. 

The Revd Dr Susanna Snyder is Lecturer in Ethics and Theology and Director of the Part-Time Pathway at Ripon College Cuddesdon. Following a curacy in north-east London, she moved to the US where she taught at Emory University, Episcopal Divinity School and the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on Christian social and political engagement – particularly on theological, ethical and practical responses to migration – and her publications include Asylum-Seeking, Migration and Church (Ashgate, 2012). Susanna is currently exploring contours and practices of hope in the face of global ethical challenges.

The Venerable Dr Justine Allain-Chapman is Archdeacon of Boston in the diocese of Lincoln. Ordained for over 25 years, she has ministered as a parish priest in south London and as vice principal and director of practical theology in theological education. Her doctoral research was in resilience, about which she regularly speaks and leads retreats. She has published two books on resilience, one for pastors and one a book of reflections for Lent. Justine has served on General Synod for the diocese of Southwark and for the diocese of Lincoln.

The Revd Alan Everett has ministered in London parishes for over 25 years: from July 2019 as vicar of All Saints West Dulwich; prior to that as vicar of St Clement Notting Dale and St James Norlands, in North Kensington (the Grenfell Tower parish); and for 17 years before that as vicar of St Michael and All Angels London Fields, in Hackney.

The Rt Revd James Jones was Bishop of Liverpool between 1998 and 2013, during which time he also served as Bishop to HM Prisons. He is the author of a number of books including Finding God (1987), Why Do People Suffer? (1993), The Power and the Glory (1994), A Faith that Touches the World (1994), The Moral Leader (2002) and Jesus and the Earth (2003). Following his work on the Hillsborough and Gosport War Memorial Hospital enquiries he was appointed KBE in 2017 for services to bereaved families and justice.

The Revd Dr Christopher Landau was BBC World Service religious affairs correspondent prior to ordination, and now works in postgraduate chaplaincy in Oxford, based at St Aldate’s Church. His DPhil explored the ethics of disagreement among Christians.

The Rt Revd Dr Steven Croft became Bishop of Oxford in 2016 and was previously Bishop of Sheffield. He has been a member of the House of Lords since 2013, is a member of the Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, the Board of the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation and of the Advisory Board of the Oxford Environmental Change Institute. He is co-author of Emmaus: The Way of Faith (1996–2003), and one of four lead authors of the Pilgrim resource to help adults explore faith. His published works include Ministry in Three Dimensions (1999, new edn 2008) and his most recent book, The Gift of Leadership according to the Scriptures: Ten Biblical Reflections on Leadership for People in Every Walk of Life (2016). His blog is at https://blogs.oxford.anglican.org. 

The Revd Gill O’Neill is the Vicar of an Anglican Church in south-east London. Previously she was a secondary RE teacher in an inner-city church. She has interests in theology and the arts, theological education and conflict resolution.

The Revd Tina Hodgett was Team Pilgrim (Pioneer Team Vicar) in Portishead and is now Evangelism and Pioneer Team Leader for the Diocese of Bath and Wells. She seeks ways of playfully engaging people with the gospel and demonstrating the values of the kingdom in the public space. Prior to ordination Tina taught German and Russian and was a leader and consultant in secondary education.

The Revd Tim Watson is a Church of England pioneer in Gosport and the minister of Leesland Neighbourhood Church which began in February 2018. He is a poet and liturgist and has various books published by Proost.

part 1

Reflections

1

A Church in Crisis?

New Testament Perspectives

richard bauckham

What actually is the church? What basically, essentially, is it? In a time when we are thinking about making changes, one problem we have is that over the centuries the Church of England, with its rich history and heritage, has gathered all kinds of aspects, functions and associations around it. So it has become very easy to identify the church with things that are not essential to its identity as church. I want to stress that all sorts of other things that are not of the essence of being church may be entirely appropriate, useful, valuable. Or they may not. Or they may be in certain historical or social contexts but not in others. My point is simply that they are not what the church essentially is. If we want to think biblically and theologically about church, rather than merely historically and sociologically, then we need to focus on what church essentially is. Any thinking about reform and renewal has to be able to identify what is essential, because only then can we judge whether the other things are appropriate or helpful or out-dated or a waste of the church’s time, or positively toxic.

Back to Basics

What a New Testament perspective should be able to give us is a renewal of our fundamental understanding of what the church is supposed, in the purpose of God, to be. In what follows I have selected four key ideas, four models of the church that the New Testament uses. There are several others that I could have included, but I think these will serve our purpose now very well. Each of them illustrates one absolutely basic point about the church: the church is defined by its relationship with God. If we try to think of the church without thinking of God or Jesus Christ, then it is not the church that we’re thinking of.

1 People of God

To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints . . . (1 Cor. 1.2)

Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people . . . (1 Pet. 2.10)

This is the most common way in which the New Testament envisages the church. Although the term ‘people of God’ is not used often, the idea is widespread. Like much of the New Testament’s thinking about the church this way of thinking is rooted in the Old Testament. It sees the church as the renewed Israel, the new people of God in the last days. The word ‘church’ itself embodies this idea (and that is what mainly justifies my calling this the most common way in which the New Testament envisages the church). ‘Church’ (ekklesia) is an assembly of people. The use of the word in the New Testament is short for ‘church of God’ as we can see from some instances of that full phrase, such as in 1 Corinthians 1.2. It means the assembly of God’s people, and as a term that envisages a group of people actually assembled together it is obviously most suited to use for a specific local church. Paul regularly talks about ‘the church in X’ or ‘the churches’. However, it does not necessarily refer to that group of believers actually assembled. It can refer to those believers as such. And so it also gets used for the universal church, though this is a rarer usage in the New Testament.

The key implication of this model for what the church essentially is seems to me to be this: The church is a body of people that would not exist had God not brought it into existence, creating it by the gospel, by baptism and by the Holy Spirit. ‘Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people’: an Old Testament quotation 1 Peter applies to the church. The church is a human society and so, of course, it shares features common to all human societies, but it is distinguished from all others by the fact that it is God’s people. It is the people that belongs to God, is dedicated to God, set aside for God’s service, as Israel was. Recall that Israel thought of itself as the people who would not even have existed had God not created them to be his own people, bringing them into existence as a nation by means of the exodus from Egypt.

The church is the people of God. That is primarily what is meant when the New Testament calls the church holy or when it refers to Christians as ‘the saints’, which means ‘the holy ones’. That terminology is taken from Daniel’s prophecy of the Son of Man, which speaks of ‘the people of the saints (holy ones) of the Most High’ (7.27). To be holy is to belong to God, to be dedicated to God. The church is a people created by God and belonging to God. If that is what the church essentially is, it is something we must not lose sight of when we think about such things as the parish system or the Church of England’s vocation to be a national church. The church cannot be the civil religion of a society defined in some other way.

2 Temple of God

Like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. (1 Pet. 2.5)

In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling-place for God. (Eph. 2.21‒2)

As the church is the new people of God, so it is also the new temple of God. Unlike the Jerusalem temple, the church is the temple God builds for himself, the temple ‘not made with hands’ (as the New Testament sometimes puts it), meaning that God himself builds it. In Israel the temple was the place where God was present. This did not mean that God was not present in other ways in other places, but the temple was where God promised to make himself accessible to his people. And so, secondarily, the temple was where God was worshipped. Where God is present he is to be worshipped. Conversely where God is truly worshipped, there God is to be found. A temple is where you go to meet God.

At this point, for many people it is difficult not to call to mind church buildings, but we have to remember that New Testament Christians did not have any. It is the people who are now the temple. God is present wherever they gather. They worship wherever they gather. God thus makes himself more accessible than he could have ever been in the Jerusalem temple.

So the church as temple is the people among whom God is present and where God is to be found. Of course, that does not mean that God cannot be found elsewhere. But among his people is where God promises he will be.

Here I am not meaning to imply anything negative about church buildings or the ways in which they can help people to find God and to worship. My point is just that they are not the essence of the matter. They are something we can think about only subsequently, after grasping the essence of the matter.

3 Body of Christ

We must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knitted together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love. (Eph. 4.15‒16)

In the New Testament this is a fresh image, not borrowed from Old Testament Israel. It occurs only in the Pauline letters and is used in rather different ways in various Pauline letters. It often conveys the idea of different members of the community playing different roles and thereby complementing each other in an interacting community. But at present we are concerned, not so much with the relationships among members of