Secret Service Church: Faith Seeking Relatedness

By George Gammack

We all know what church is. Likewise we are provided with a supply of set notions for God, Christ and the Bible, which make up the stock-in trade equipment for both ‘believer’ and ‘non-believer.’ This study asks fundamental questions about all these from a relational perspective, attempting to illumine the faith quest by way of clues from the common realities of human interaction. In this it is the appropriate provisions of relationships, rather than the assent to doctrines, that forms the spiritual basis of community. Such a theology of relatedness is urgently needed. We must come out of our creedal closets to be part of a new diaspora. This demands a ‘secret discipline’ of servant relationship at work in that no-man’s-land where there is space for all manner of secular saints and doctrinal devils to discover the possibilities of their togetherness - the secret service church, in odd places and often strange company.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Aug 13, 2015
• ISBN: 9781326390587

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Secret Service Church: Faith Seeking Relatedness

SECRET SERVICE CHURCH

FAITH SEEKING RELATEDNESS

George Gammack

Copyright

Copyright © George Gammack 2015

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eBook ISBN:  978-1-326-39058-7

All rights reserved, Copyright under the Berne Copyright Convention and Pan American Convention. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Alice

Alice entered the wood and made her way along a path which wound between the trees until she came to a place where it forked. There was a signpost at the junction, but it did not appear very helpful. The arm pointing to the right bore the letter A, that to the left the letter B, nothing more. Well I declare, exclaimed Alice in exasperation, that is really the most unhelpful signpost I have ever seen. She looked around to see if there were any clues as to where the paths might lead, when she was a little startled to see that Schrödinger's cat was sitting on the bough of a tree a few yards off.

Oh Cat, she began rather timidly, would you tell me please which way I ought to go from here?

That depends a good deal on where you want to get to, said the Cat.

I am not really sure where…., began Alice.

Then it doesn’t matter which way you go interrupted the Cat.

But I have to decide between these two paths, said Alice.

Now that is where you are wrong, mused the Cat. You do not have to decide. You can take all the paths. Surely you have learned that by now."[1]

CONTENTS

Copyright

Alice

Summary

Acknowledgements

PRELIMINARY REFLECTIONS

PART I   CHRIST? WHAT CHRIST?

CHAPTER 1    THE REAL MEANING OF CHRIST

CHAPTER 2  THE BIBLICAL CHRIST

CHAPTER 3    THE CONTINUING CHRIST

CHAPTER 4    THE CORPORATE CHRIST

PART II   GOD? WHAT GOD?

CHAPTER 5    HIDDEN GOD

CHAPTER 6    SUFFERING SERVANT GOD

CHAPTER 7    COVENANT COMMUNITY

PART III   A NATURAL THEOLOGY OF RELATEDNESS

CHAPTER 8   NATURAL THEOLOGY OLD AND NEW

CHAPTER 9    A NATURAL THEOLOGY OF DISTURBANCE

CHAPTER 10   COVENANT AND COSMOPOLIS

CHAPTER 11    FROM DISTURBANCE TO TRANSCENDENCE

PART IV   CHURCH HALL OF MIRRORS

CHAPTER 12    THE UNEXAMINED CHURCH

CHAPTER 13   A BETTER ORDER OF BADNESS

CHAPTER 14    CHASTITY AND CHAOS

CHAPTER 15    PEACE AND SWORDS, GUNS AND GRACE

PART V   SPIRITUAL ECOLOGY: THE THEOLOGICAL SCIENCE OF BELONGING

CHAPTER 16    THE GREAT DISRUPTION AND THE GREAT COMMISSION

CHAPTER 17    THE POSSIBILITIES OF OUR TOGETHERNESS

CHAPTER 18    GAMBLING WITH GOD

CHAPTER 19    THE HAZARDS OF FAITH

PART VI   CHURCH? WHAT CHURCH?

CHAPTER 20   THE ELUSIVE CHURCH

CHAPTER 21    UPPER ROOMS AND HOLY CORNERS

CHAPTER 22    THE CHURCH FOR OTHERS

CHAPTER 23    THRESHOLD PLACES

CHAPTER 24    IT’S DIASPORA TIME AGAIN!

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Summary

Preliminary reflections   The journey of faith seeking relatedness takes us into strange territory where we experience the feelings of others reflected into our own selves. It is in this wonderland that we share the sufferings of others, an indwelling that is not passive but actively redemptive. The mysterious zone of the interhuman is the place of revelation and transcendence.

PART I    Christ?  What Christ?  sets out a relational understanding of Christ, as always more than an individual, certainly more than a ghost, and a continuing embodiment, from the beginning to now and always;. Christ can only become ‘actual’ for people as they are met in their hurt and pain and literally incorporated, given real meaning and value in truly belonging among a body of people.

Going backwards from Jesus to find the corporate Christ in earlier times, and going forward to be part of that matrix of belonging here and now means we have to see Christ as more than just the individual Jesus; his role is as a body builder, in business to promote the fitting together of others rather than as a sole trader in divinity. This meaning remained hidden, and still does, in individual Messianic theology which concentrates only on Jesus in isolation and fails to grasp that it is about the kingdom and not the king.

PART II    God?  What God?   The implications of this are explored for our understanding of God. Hiddenness and mystery are built into life; they are natural dimensions of relationships among human beings  and major clues as to the meaning of holiness. Likewise the sharing of suffering, the servant work of healing and mending bodies and relationships. Thirdly God is revealed in the transcendence of togetherness, in the solidarity of living and belonging, in the covenant community. The crucial difference between covenant and covenant community is at the heart of this.

PART III   A natural theology of relatedness examines what has conventionally been understood as natural theology, and considers where a relational theology stands in this perspective. A relational theology is a disturbing business. It is about feelings, those of others and those of our own and how they get all mixed up; how they do so because we already indwell each other. Christian loving relationships are not a matter of sharing nice things but of recognising the badness of the other in ourselves, taking some of that into the Christ matrix of belonging, exchanging decay and detoxifying it in the Christ factory co-op.

PART IV    Church hall of mirrors   Faith demands a stringently honest look, both as individuals and as community, into life’s mirrors. In the ‘difficult areas’ of guilt, sex and anger, we are prone to deflect unpleasant reflections from ourselves to others. It is not we who do bad things; it is not we who indulge in irregular sexual activities, it is not we who are aggressors and torturers. A theology of relatedness here demands that we do not distance ourselves from all such and recognise our common responsibilities in what Bonhoeffer called ‘the fellowship of the confession of guilt’. Failure to do so is the denial of the Body of Christ.

PART V  Spiritual ecology - the theological science of belonging looks at how we may bring people together in patterns of relatedness that give meaning and value to each and all together – Christ shaped clusters of belongingness. This creative formation of islands of covenant community is set in tension with the forces of disintegration, epitomised in the Great Disruption or ‘community lost’ thesis. The Great Commission is to make wholeness out of the fragmentation of ill-relatedness. Out of this engagement we may see the formation of small segments of people, face-to-face redemptive communities, constituting outposts of the Good Neighbour church. This is the risky work of poesis, finding a new ‘subtle language’ of bringing and holding things together. It demands the art of opporchancity, taking events and joining them up into adventures.

PART VI  Church? What Church?  examines what kind of strange churches in strange places grow out of this secret service work of shaping the covenant community Christ. It is necessary to go beyond conventional features of church and to be open to revelation where people come together in upper rooms and holy corners to share their tears. God’s secret plan is all about a ‘church for others’ in which there are no outsiders and insiders, no trickle-down holiness from an elect to the rest; church is constituted in the sharing through the indwelling of disturbing otherness. Thus we have threshold places, ‘places of liminality’ where hurt and hunger and loss can be redeemed. Here will be the dis-placed body of Christ, often found, (or hidden) in undistinguished and indistinctive places.

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[1] GILMORE, Robert, Alice in Quantumland, Sigma,1994, p.55

Acknowledgements

Those who have had an influence at different stages on the evolution of this study are legion. All the clients and colleagues I have had dealings with in various agencies have given me something to think about, many a time vociferously, and dispatched with feeling. The educational establishments I attended helped shape principles and practice: in the social work course at Exeter, whose luminaries are cited in chapter 9, and at St Mary’s College, St. Andrews where Professor James Whyte, the Reverend Michael Keeling and Professor Bill Shaw provided friendly intellectual stimulus for a transient alien.

The two parishes in which I worked stripped the fat off the theory. Mastrick in Aberdeen and Whitfield in Dundee are two urban peripheral housing schemes which demanded more than just the bare ‘ordinances of religion.’   People in church and community working together were able to build some new patterns of togetherness and belonging for old and young. This is not to be romanticised or ‘secularised’, but it is in parishes such as these that there is the greatest potential for the creative out-working of faith, and I am fortunate to have had opportunities to serve in these places.

Subsequently a period of ‘fieldwork’ for the Churches Community Work Alliance, mapping church-related community development work in Scotland, provided many rich insights into the diversity of real pioneering initiatives responding to human suffering in many hidden parish places. In basements and huts and other odd buildings, new covenantal forms were an inspiration - the semi-detached church, in some cases literally so. I am grateful to Jim Robertson, then chair of CCWA, and Nils Chittenden who was the development worker, for this time of exploration.

The evolution of Faith in Community Scotland out of the Priority Areas commitment to serve the poorest communities in the land has been an inspiration. I am particularly indebted to Iain Johnston, currently the Operations Manager, for his friendship and practical sense down the years.

In more recent times Sheila Phillips has done sterling work in reworking diagrams, reading and helping correct the text. She should not be held responsible for my having subsequently messed it up again!  Maureen Eastwood provided perceptive professional advice about structure and readability at crucial stages and I trust I have done justice to her wisdom. The Rev Dr Iain Whyte has, not for the first time, offered valuable comment and strategic guidance.

In bringing out the essentially relational nature of theology, the local domestic interactions of home, family and friends should not be taken for granted. It is here that daily we enter into interpersonal exchanges in which we seek to share feelings, fantasies and frustrations. So thanks are due to my wife, children and various assorted cats, all of whom have been for me down the years a faithful covenant community.

Finally the customary statement of limited liability. I shall be using that phrase in a slightly different sense later in the course of this study but here I wish to absolve anyone from blame for what some may perceive as heresies in the following pages. It is perhaps a cliché to say that today’s heresies are tomorrow’s truths, but if that is the case, I wish to claim all the credit for them myself.

Biblical quotations, unless otherwise stated, are from the Good News Bible.

Italicised text is used for case studies and similar illustrations. Where italics are deployed in quotations, these follow the authors’ original use.

All web addresses checked May 2015.

All sources have been carefully acknowledged and annotated I have taken care to work within the framework of ‘fair use’ and ‘fair dealing’. A difficulty is that criteria for this seem to vary somewhat, and I apologise if anyone feels I have fallen short in this endeavour. I am immensely grateful to everyone whose creativity I have drawn upon, and can only hope that reference to their work in these pages may enable others also to catch that inspiration.

PRELIMINARY REFLECTIONS

Faith in wonderland

And my intellect said to my love:

Duality is not for us;

We mingle in love.[2]

The term reflection is chosen deliberately so as to clarify what is most of all needed in this quest for the secret service church, this journey of faith seeking relatedness. Reflection is commonly understood as a rational exercise of the mind – thinking and rethinking ideas. But that is not even half of it.

Thinking is not living’, John Macmurray insists: ‘the capacity for reason belongs to our emotional nature, just as much as to the intellect.’[3]  He uses the term ‘emotional rationality’ to remind us of the need to feel as well as to think. Rudolf Otto, in ‘The Idea of the Holy’, acknowledges the importance of reason but emphasises that ‘Religion is not exclusively contained and exhaustively comprised in any series of rational assertions.’[4]

We do well to consider that Jesus could not have done what he did in his ministry if he only thought about the people with skin diseases and dead limbs. Even if, as it is commonly believed, in his earlier life he worked with wood, feeling and thinking would both be needed. The Jesus of the gospels is a craftsman of the imaginative insight, working down beneath bare reason into the deep affinity of self and other. As another practitioner of the same trade puts it: ‘religion’s something else beside notions. It isn’t notions that sets people doing the right thing – its feelings.’[5]  We indwell the mirrors others offer up to our own selves. We don’t think reflections. We feel them, fear them, are freed by them.

Let us go down with the original Alice into the depths of her reflection. Looking into the mirror she could see all of the room she was in, well, most of it:   ‘…there’s the room you can see through the glass – that’s just the same as our drawing-room, only the things go the other way. I can see all of it when I get up on a chair – all but the bit just behind the fireplace. Oh! I do so wish I could see that bit.’[6] Most of the image she sees does not trouble her; it’s that hidden bit that attracts her. It arouses feelings in her, thoughts too certainly about this puzzlingly incomplete image, and her mirror adventure takes her, and all those of who share it with her, into basic aspects of our selves, who we really are. We discover our selves in others, who in their sometime perplexing absurdity, are agents of spiritual revelation.

But what is faith doing in wonderland, down rabbit holes and through mirrors? Is it seeking refuge from the brutal buffetings of the real world? Faith surely demands straight stuff, the formal sobriety of the bread and the wine at the holy table, rather than a crazy party with a dozy dormouse and a hare, hosted by a daft man in a large hat.

But if, as we are here contending, faith is about relatedness then we have no choice but to enter the world of wonder. How can we be in touch with another if not by the exercise of that imaginative power we call empathy, enabling us to feel into the reality of the self of another?   And where that other self is a place of hard suffering, it is no less a wonderland full of strangeness, where powerful personages intent on decapitation are a constant threat, where frightening absurdity is the norm.

For much, if not all suffering is absurd. Emmanuel Levinas describes it as ‘useless suffering’.[7]  Such can only be redeemed if another takes some responsibility for being with and for the sufferer; being a mirror companion, receiving and accepting the reflection which bounces across the gap between them.

It may seem somewhat odd that C.S. Lewis, who also provided an entrance into wonderland, not down a hole or through a mirror, but through the back of a wardrobe, could state that ‘You can’t really share someone else’s weakness, fear or pain. It can’t be transferred.’[8] But Lewis, in the aloneness of his loss, was really only being honest about the self-confessed lack of empathy in his own day-to-day encounters with others. Only when bereavement pierces his own heart is he led to say ‘If I had really cared, as I thought I did about the sorrows of the world, I should not have been so overwhelmed when my own sorrow came.’[9]

The impossibility of such emotional commerce is common wisdom and I thought that way too until, in my social work training, I learned the truth about ‘the transmission of feelings.’[10] I was initiated into the wonderland of anxieties that were mine yet not mine, but were lodged with me by clients. It can be a hard truth to take on that we humans are not just billiard balls that bump into each other but selves that interpenetrate each other.[11] It is the gospel truth of indwelling.

The ‘Professor of Truth’ in the novel of that name, is also an ‘unbeliever’: ‘But you cannot feel what another person feels. You cannot even imagine it, however hard you try. This I know.’[12]    Later in the book he finds himself drawn into this mysterious territory of the reflective sharing, not of hard facts but of common humanity, the interhuman.

The empathy zone – the theological university of the secular age

The interhuman is the number one zone of mystery and revelation. There are boundaries of selves but multimedia signals zap across them. ‘Who touched me?’ said Jesus to the woman with the chronic haemorrhage. Something happened ‘between’ them; there was an exchange. The ‘mirror neurons’ in their respective somatosensory systems may have been mutually activated,[13] but it was not about a physical transaction only. Jesus did not give a blood transfusion, but entered into her totality of being and shared what it was like to be her.

Martin Buber introduced us to ‘the interhuman’:  ‘the sphere of the interhuman is one in which a person is confronted by another.’[14] But this ‘between’ is not so much an intermediate gap as a way of referring to a meeting characterised by interchange and indwelling. Ronald Gregor Smith, inspired by Buber, took up the ‘between’, and sought in his last work to tease it out further; ‘Spirit is what happens to man when he is open to the full possibilities of his togetherness with others.’[15] As Smith’s final words make clear this is no ‘static isness’ but rather ‘the endless fulfilment in an endless movement of reciprocity which we already glimpse and see as in a mirror, darkly.’[16]

Transcendence happens. Smith asks us to understand this as ‘secular transcendence’. He did not use the term empathy but this faith-full energetic indwelling reflects the stuff of true togetherness. Edward Farley calls empathy divine so that in being present in and for others, as with Jesus in the gospel events, we see the nature of God. ‘Empathy not only feels with another but would ease the others sufferings and promote the other’s well-being.’[17]

Empathy without the religious trappings has been on the go for a long time. John Keats gave us ‘negative capability’, a kenotic quality of receptivity to the whole world of states of being. It seems appropriate that it was on his way home from a pantomime that Keats hit on this. We are not told which fantasy production he attended; it could  well have been Alice in Wonderland but we may conjecture that he  was leaving the theatre with his head full of nonsense and that led him to hit on the importance of being receptive to all dimensions of mysterious influences.

In more recent times, Carl Rogers has been one of empathy’s major exponents; he describes it as ‘an unappreciated way of being’, and defines it thus:

An empathic way of being with another person has several facets. It means entering the private perceptual world of the other and becoming thoroughly at home in it. It involves being sensitive, moment by moment, to the changing felt meanings which flow in this other person, to the fear or rage or tenderness or confusion or whatever that he or she is experiencing. It means temporarily living in the other’s life, moving about in it delicately without making judgements; it means sensing meanings of which he or she is scarcely aware, but not trying to uncover totally unconscious feelings, since that would be too threatening. It includes communicating your sensings of the person’s world as you look with fresh and unfrightened eyes at elements of which he or she is fearful. It means frequently checking with the person as to the accuracy of your sensings, and being guided by the responses you receive. You are a confident companion to the person in his or her inner world.[18]

‘In some sense’, Rogers adds, ‘it means that you lay aside your self; this can only be done by persons who are secure enough in themselves, that they know they will not get lost in what may turn out to be the strange or bizarre world of the other, and that they can comfortably return to their own world when they wish. Being empathic is a complex and demanding and strong – yet also a subtle and gentle –way of being.’

It is Charles Taylor’s contention in ‘A Secular Age’ that such subtlety is quintessential. Taylor takes up Shelley’s phrase, ‘a subtler language’[19] to point to the need for a new kind of creativity, a fresh poesis. The task of faith is to find ‘softer’ expression than that of standard verbal formulations, visible structures and unquestioned wisdoms. It is my thesis here that the subtler language that is basic and generic is that of relatedness, the quality of togetherness which in faith opens out into a transcendence free of all ideologies and idolatries.

This is not an invitation to enter the wrong kind of wonderland. Jeremy Rifkin could be alleged to be falsely optimistic in writing the following:

Hundreds of millions of human beings – I suspect even several billion – are beginning to experience the other as one’s self, as empathy becomes the ultimate litmus test of a truly democratic society. Millions of individuals, especially young people, are also beginning to extend their empathic drive, although less pronounced, to include our fellow creatures, from the penguins and polar bears adrift on the poles to the other endangered species inhabiting the few remaining pristine, wild ecosystems. The young are just beginning to glimpse the opportunity of forging an empathic civilisation tucked inside a biosphere community. At this stage, much of the anticipation is more hope than expectation. Still, there is an unmistakable feeling of possibility in the air.[20]

David Augsburger gives a more sober assessment: ‘The human capacity for empathy might well have increased in the information age and the communications webcasting explosion of the last 30 years – but the evidence suggests that the opposite may be true. We seem to know more about each other and yet know each other less.’[21]  Augsburger cites a range of ‘visionary prophets’ all of whom

..share the conviction that empathy –the fundamental social skill, the essential people skill that moves interacting to relating – is the most basic form of non-defensive action. The empathic response – taught and modelled in in the practice of radical attending and listening – hears the feelings behind what is being said and intuits the thoughts that elicited those feelings. A shared common ground is being created  where a sort of co-pathy, com-pathy, or inter–pathy might begin to link persons and communities in a reciprocal search for understanding and mutuality.[22]

Faith in search of a theology of relatedness is about live interaction and interchange among human beings, particularly in the sharing and distribution of that which is noxious, harmful and hurtful. Such interpersonal transactions take us into the true realms of faith, where together a body of people takes on, and bears, because it is so constituted as to be able to do so, the unbearable pain of others. Correct togetherness, by this standard, opens out into transcendence: ‘real presence’. Relatedness is what happened to the wandering people when they came to the mountain of smoke and fire and thunder. They met holiness in their togetherness, in the live electricity of the body of interdependence they were called to form. God leads through his embodiment in that covenant community, another name for which is the Christ. A state of empathic togetherness provides that ‘centre space’ which Taylor identifies. It is the place which all may inhabit and learn together how to build a true covenant community.

A relational theology is generic and the key clue informing an understanding of the ‘new natural theology’ which Ronald Gregor Smith called for. He saw that the gospel scales weighed religion in the balance: ‘it reduces our baggage allowance with quite ineffable concern.’[23]   There are some things we really do not need for the journey of faith.

Practical no more! Pastoral no more!

James Whyte’s watershed paper of 1973 provided us with ‘New Directions for Practical Theology’[24] in which he stated that ‘One of the tasks of a sound Practical Theology is to debunk the theological pretensions of established usage’. He notes the limitations of both terms, practical and pastoral. A major  drawback  of the first occurs if it is understood to be about ‘hints and tips’; it is notable that many books in the field do still come into this  category, not in any narrow sense, and often  replete with much that is the valuable and inspiring wisdom of experience. Ian Ainsworth-Smith’s challenging list of 50 ‘better ways’ does indeed make an incisive cut into those ‘pretensions of established usage.’[25]

But ‘pastoral’ encounters yield limitless demands for practicality for which no manual of wisdom can be adequate. How do you deal with a dog drinking the milk directly from the jug as it is poured into your tea during a post-funeral visit?  As Robin Lovin has observed, ‘Practical theologians have no formula that will yield a prescription for each and every one of these situations.’  We need more than ‘a bag of tricks.’[26] Lovin argues that ‘All theology must be practical theology’ in which case the ‘practical’ prefix is strictly unnecessary. To identify a particular area of theology as practical just gives other theologians licence to print volumes of words.

Likewise ‘pastoral’, which is too easily identified with the work of pastors alone. Pastoral imagery may have much to commend it in terms of commitment and dedication in caring, but reduces too easily to individualism, and that most often in the context of illness. Pastoral care is sick care, the pursuit of damaged sheep. Another writer forsakes the rural context for the maritime and states that ‘Pastoral theology has something of the character of an octopus.’[27]  The fact that he can identify only five arms for the creature would seem to indicate it is a disabled octopus, which perhaps reinforces the pastoral-pathology connection. Faith-inspired care can be cherished and theology pursued without being labelled as ‘pastoral’. Reference to care needs as ‘pastoral care needs’ is meaningless and arguably pretentious. As such, pastoral is essentially redundant. Practical no more! Pastoral no more!

Sectioning life into ‘disciplines’ is fine until it becomes narrow and often nasty. Mafias develop. A person in a car may assume the identity of  ‘motor-ist’ and a woman in a pulpit can adopt that  of ‘femin-ist’, with militant and exclusive consequences. They need to get out of their respective boxes and recognise their common humanity (human-ists). Together they need to become art-ists.

James Whyte argued that we need to ‘widen the scope’ and ‘deepen the question’, in the search for ‘the possibility of a theology of the world, a theological interpretation of what goes on in human life.’ But it needs to go further than that, to take up Ian Fraser’s even more radical challenge of ‘reinventing theology as the people’s work’, of doing theology where life is in full flow. ‘Mainstream theology must be done where the pressure is on, and in very mixed company’[28] rather than as a means to the end of its merely being fed back into academic word grid, as suggested by  a more recent definition of Practical Theology: ‘By ‘practical theology’ we mean that movement among seminary and university and divinity-school faculty which makes the process of formation of Christian community and personhood in the world thematic for critical reflection.’[29]

Challenging the centrality (or more accurately eccentricity) of the thinking factory demands awareness of the fundamental reality that all theology and all care is live and interpersonal. What is needed is not the appendage of practical and pastoral to academic theses, but active intelligent immersion in what indwelling means, being involved in the agonies of creating states of relatedness. This process is anchored in the Biblical reality of the covenant community, the essential nature of which is about giving qualitative, corporate shape to relationships. That is the major signpost which we must follow carefully into the wonderland of faith.

On not ending up in Pluck’s Gutter

So long we have been walking

In the same wrong direction

away from the city of our hope[30]

On a cycle tour in southern England, we were comfortably following the marked Sustrans route through a sequence of roads and lanes; comfortably, that is, until we came to a large sign which said ‘DIVERSION’. Following this alternative route as it wandered its circuitous way along multiple byways, we did not doubt it would put us safely back on course. But then the diversion came to an end at a T-junction with no indication as to correct direction. We chose one and ended up in Plucks Gutter. Seeking assistance in the Dog and Duck, none of the regulars, even with the assistance of their bifocals, offered any helpful navigational clues. However we set off again hopefully in the right direction and with the help of the post lady, re-routed ourselves successfully.

This anecdote is meant not as a detailed allegory of faith, Pilgrim style, but to make the simple point that faith must necessarily, if it is to find itself in wonderland rather than blunderland, always be vigilant in re-routing. It is of course not we who re-route faith, but correctly faith that re-routes us. But we are needed in this with all the spiritual energy given us.

Theology takes wrong turnings and makes mistakes. It has no immunity from error and indeed its history is littered with the effects, not so much of the errors in themselves, but of the insistence of those who have perpetrated them that they are absolutely right and the path they have followed could not be other than the correct and best one. In the trek up the holy mountain, it is inconceivable that at that junction back there we should not have turned left. Some are happy with the old track. Others feel the need to do a bit of exploring.

Harvey Cox provides a fundamental orientation: ‘It is true that for many people faith and belief are just two words for the same thing. But they are not the same…’[31]  Indeed, faith is about a dynamic, shared, holistic energy that we tap into to shape our lives together. Beliefs are the interpretation of this spiritual electricity which people try to capture on an institutional grid. Creeds. ‘Creeds are clusters of beliefs. But the history of Christianity is not a history of creeds. It is a story of people of faith who sometimes cobbled together creeds out of beliefs.’[32] Faith looks into the mirror and finds new revelation. Belief has no need of reflective surfaces – the picture is complete.

Thus the preferred path of theology has been that of word and reason, the dogmatic creedal formulation that demands intellectual assent; the package of statements which you agree to that makes you a ‘believer’; or you dissent from it and attain the status of atheist or heretic, to be rooted out, and if not in our age burnt, shot, or put to the sword, at the very least made to feel guilty, bad, lost and hell-bound. We need to move on from that.

The secret service church has been in existence from the beginning. It is no contemporary innovation but must yet always be new. The right ordering of the elements of life in Genesis 1 is our ‘primary constitution’ the just structuring of the world with a right(eous) place for all. The one and the many is there from the start, an elusive balancing trick of right relatedness, which can be seen to be good when all are in position; it is the fit community – the body where all the members fit in.

The open secret of community breaks forth dramatically at Sinai, the covenantal ordering of just living. It comes upon them with a thunderous bang, but still remains hidden. And so it does when Jesus treads the soil of Galilee. It is the pattern, the form, the order of relatedness that defines the covenant, the Kingdom, the Christ. Such must be the foundation of anything we want to call church, whether it has been standing for years or has just emerged out of a cloud of postmodern dust.

The form of the church of course indisputably needs to be modelled on the form of God. But God does not give out the exact specification of his self to be assembled as per the text of some ‘Divinity for Dummies’. ‘Fresh expressions’ are needed, yes, but these be construed out of the energies of the spiritual imagination that was released at Sinai, that went into forming the covenant community, the body of Christ. We take our bearings from there and follow the clues which reveal themselves to us on the way.

Photo0011

The three big clues implicit in my title are the three dimensions of the Secret Service Church:  as I see them in the Biblical context these are the hiddenness of God, the suffering servanthood of God and the covenant community of God. These I shall pursue in Part II but in Part I it is important to pursue evidence as to the meaning of Christ, as the seam of gold running all through the Biblical story, from the beginning right up to now, providing the major clue for the continuing nature of the revelation of God and  whatever kind of church should be shaped accordingly.

These are pointers in possible new directions, for ‘new and unprecedented itineraries.’[33]  They are clues for new beginnings. If we find ourselves disturbed and directionless and are lost without the familiar signs from the old route, then fresh bearings need to be taken. Not bad faith, bad doctrine or even bad science; rather a welcome and careful reading of all these maps so that we don’t end up in the gutter and the way we do take is one of those that leads  to the city of our hope.

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[2] MACLEAN, Sorley, Reason and Love, in Spring Tide and Neap Tide. Selected Poems 1932-72, Canongate, 1977, p.6.

[3] MACMURRAY, John, Reason and Emotion, Faber & Faber, 1935, p.33.

[4] OTTO, Rudolf, The Idea of the Holy, Oxford, 1926, p.4.

[5] ELIOT, George, Adam Bede, (1859) Wordsworth, 1997, p.151.

[6] CARROLL, Lewis, Through the Looking Glass (1872), Penguin, 1994, pp.18-19.

[7] LEVINAS, Emmanuel, Useless Suffering, http://files.meetup.com/1470198/wk%2005.%20Levinas%20Useless%20Suffering.pdf

[8] LEWIS, C.S., A Grief Observed, Faber and Faber, 1961, p.14.

[9]  LEWIS, p.31.

[10] JORDAN, William, The Transmission of Feelings, in Case Conference, 15:8, December  1968, pp.298-301.

[11] CLIFFORD, Paul Rowntree, Interpreting Human Experience. A Philosophical Prologue to Theology, Collins, 1971

[12] ROBERTSON, James, The Professor of Truth, Penguin, 2014, p.1.

[13] KEYSERS, Christian, The Empathic Brain,  Social Brain Press, 2011.

[14] BUBER, Martin, Elements of the Interhuman, in BUBER, Martin, The Knowledge of Man, (1965) Humanities Press,  1988, p.65.

[15] SMITH, Ronald Gregor, The Doctrine of God, Collins, 1970, p.144.

[16] SMITH, p.183.

[17] FARLEY, Edward, Divine Empathy. A Theology of God, Fortress, 1996, p.296.

[18] ROGERS Carl, Empathic: An Unappreciated Way of Being, in ROGERS, Carl, A Way of Being, Houghtom Mifflin, 1980, p.142.

[19] TAYLOR, Charles, A Secular Age, Belknap Harvard, 2007, p.353.

[20] RIFKIN, Jeremy,. The Zero Cost Marginal Society. The Internet of Things, The Collaborative Commons and The Eclipse of Capitalism,  Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, p. 303.

[21] AUGSBURGER, David, Interpathy Re-envisioned: Reflecting on Observed Practice