The Jerusalem trap

 

In 1520 Luther wrote a treatise called the Babylonian Captivity of the Church. I am concerned by what I call the Jerusalemic Captivity of the Church. Indicators of what I mean include the preponderance of financial and personnel resources directed to the upkeep of its buildings, the payment of its leaders and the care of its existing members. Jerusalem based mission is attractional[1]; it is a matter of inviting others to our buildings and worship. This can be by the occasional offices, pastoral contacts and evangelistic processes. All these events we control or provide.  It is arguable that Christendom in general, and the parish system in particular, has trapped most home mission thinking within these inward facing controlling assumptions, whereby centripetal mission is seen as normal and normative.

 

It also prevents Jerusalem church from seeing that it is not definitive church. It is just one expression of church.  Jerusalem thinking has changed its post code over history. Now it can be found in Rome, Canterbury or the protectionist parish in your deanery. The mind set is unchanged – and this vast, sucking, vacuum cleaner has not been turned off.  Jerusalem minded church is blind to, and ignores evidence for, an inconvenient truth of the church’s identity. That strand calls the church into non identical reproduction elsewhere. It leads to healthy birth of fresh expressions of church.

 

There is powerful evidence that the young church was disturbed out of its inherited self centring views, by the word of Christ and the activity of the Holy Spirit. That word is Acts 1.8. “You will receive power when the Sprit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and to the ends of the earth.” The Acts story then shows the Spirit’s difficulties in persuading the church to fulfil this word.

 

I think today there is a renewed need for liberation from being mentally ensnared in the erusalem captivity trap. Mission-shaped Church is Anglican comment on how the Spirit is doing the liberation today. It drew on a wide range of stories which were disturbing the inherited pattern.[2]  It also woke us up to the existence of people outside Jerusalem who were never going to be at home there. It publicised a pie chart I created by extrapolation from Richter and Francis’s work on those leaving church.[3]  Notably this put into the public domain the terms, dechurched and non churched, that I coined in 1999[4]. They describe groups of people very different from each other and more important, both groups are made up of people largely closed to church as they know it.

 

I have written since that there is some mileage in loosely mapping today’s groups onto the distinctions and stages offered in Acts 1.8, without pretending that was Luke’s intention. 

Existing church attenders could be described as Jerusalem people.

Those on the fringe are not unlike those living in Judea, who sometimes attend. The missionary journey to Judeans is justly centripetal. They would see increased commitment in terms of deeper attachment to a Jerusalem.

The closed dechurched could be likened to those in Samaria, having in common an unfortunate story of distance, distrust and dislike in regard to Jerusalem.

The non churched, who are ignorant of the core of Christianity, or believe themselves rightly dismissive of it, can be likened to the Greeks and Romans who thought the Jews were strange, not least for their lack of idols, their insular cultural particularity and different moral stances.  While Greek and Romans do not represent the ultimate ends of the earth, they were at least a yet further stage out toward it.[5]   And it is clear from the New Testament that Paul was not content to make Rome; he had Spain in view, and doubtless would have taken a voyage to a newly found America.

 

However the view that sees the change in the Acts story as being primarily from inward to outward, obscures a further dimension that is even more disturbing. Usually this is missed. Listen to how the missionary historian Stephen Neill writes about the change. “it became clear that the movement of the church was to be, not from the circumference inwards to Jerusalem, but outwards from Jerusalem to the circumference.”[6] Or Michael Green; “Luke is at great pains to stress the links between the apostolic church in Jerusalem on the one hand and the spreading circles of Christian outreach on the other.”[7]  Both experts have only grasped one dimension of the change, thus in both cases leaving Jerusalem at the centre of the picture. This is a distortion of the Acts story. It imports Christendom thinking which assumes a Jerusalem is at the centre of society and of mission. A major correction must be offered.

 

The eccentric effect

I suggest to you that the truth is that the Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, Ends of the Earth progression is, mechanically speaking, not concentric. It is eccentric, once the Judean boundary is passed. I would even dare to suggest that the Holy Spirit is eccentric – not in the sense exhibited by some Anglican clergy, but like a cam. As it turns, the eccentric elliptical shape does work, that a circle cannot.  The eccentric cam creates patterns of disturbance that open things.

 

This brings a quite different perspective to the concentric view of outward mission. The centre of the story shifts from Jerusalem. The first indicator is noted in the Samaritan episode in which Peter and John travel to them and those converts are not brought, culturally or geographically, back to Jerusalem.

 

This eccentric pattern then grows more distinct, in three ways. Firstly the Acts story itself stops following Peter and follows Paul thus the centre of interest shifts.  Secondly, Paul travels further west and more churches different from Jerusalem are born, not just in Asia but beyond it. Thirdly, and most importantly, the non Jewish Christians are not circumcised, indicating both cultural and religious diversity. Thus simple centrifugal thinking is a serious distortion of the actual story and its intentions.  All of this is can be argued without recourse to including the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70.  But the significance of this event is not lost on Stephen Neil. “Until that date Jerusalem had been without question the mother church of the whole Christian world…. Since AD 70, the Christian Church has never had one local centre.”[8]    Neil is right; Jerusalem ceases to control the story.  Today we have not yet reached that point mentally.

 

Yet the eccentric is undeniable, it is validated by the Acts 15 Council of Jerusalem.  We forgot it later in Christendom, which reverted strongly and self consciously to the Jerusalem mindset, infected by Roman Empire values of  power, control and uniformity.  It is a trap. We have lived in it too long. It is an unbiblical view of mission, of church and the Holy Spirit. It is time to escape.

 

Instead of thinking that mission should replenish existing congregations, the logic of mission that is centrifugal and eccentric, makes it credible to create churches that are neither physically or culturally modelled on the particularity of a Jerusalem expression of church. In our day these rediscovered patterns have begun. Since the late 1970’s fresh expressions of church have formed, mainly not in church buildings, nor always in relation to parish boundaries. Moreover their worship, common life and ongoing engagement with society, was shaped both in relation to context as well as drawing on the inherited tradition.  They found very different starting points in being church through the journey to people living in diverse cultural and spiritual addresses. This highlighted starting with creating community not providing worship.  It emphasised lives changed by Jesus, before talk about Jesus. I suggest we have failed to root the legitimacy of these discovery in Acts 1.8 and a doctrine of the Spirit in mission. This is the normal, staying in Jerusalem is not.

 

So how shall we escape the trap?

The headlines from Acts give us promising directions.

 

1                    Hold onto Jesus words:

 

Do that even when you can’t see how they would be fulfilled.  I suggest you look at them not as a geography lesson but a cultural journey. Church is called out beyond the safe familiarity of Judea, into disagreeable and disreputable Samaritan relationships and beyond our imaginations to cultures and groups we don’t even know about yet. My understanding is that Jesus’ words make

this progression normal.

 

2                    Do not be deluded by success in Judea: Acts 5.16  : “Crowds gathered also from the towns around Jerusalem, bringing their sick .. and all were healed.” 

 

I bet that went in the Jerusalem Parish magazine. “It’s working folks. They’re coming”. Yes rejoice, because God loves those in Judea too. But that was not the longer intention of the Spirit. Don’t confuse part of the story with the whole of the story. 

I am not saying that journeys to Judea are always wrong.  Gal 2. 7 Peter is called to be an apostle to the Jews.  The problem is more subtle and more deep. Judea is not enough; that journey isn’t always right. Moreover it doesn’t equip you well for a Samaritan Safari.  What works in Judea may need to look different in Samaria, Athens or Rome.

Let every church with a representative here dare to return home and ruthlessly analyse their membership. Find out how many are faithful Christians, how many are converted from the fringe, how many were seriously dechurched and how many had no Christian background. Then compare that to national proportions. Mission cannot not be done by recycling Judeans between flavour of the month churches.

 

3          Welcome the 3 eccentrics – for eccentric is part of normal.

 

1st Ask who are the Philips. Spot them, pray for them, and let them go. They won’t stay with traditional diaconal roles in My Big Fat Greek wedding, but will want to move on to Mission Impossible. Let them be troublesome, surprising and dangerous. And don’t think they will all be known to the church and recognized as Lay or Ordained Pioneers. We have no idea who founded the three greatest churches of the early days– Antioch, Alexandria and Rome.  God works also with the anonymous – the Christians who just do the stuff as they go.

 

2nd  Pray to recognize Cornelius when he comes, even if he looks like an unclean animal.  You will be re-evangelised by the Spirit and by the God-called God-fearer.  Go back to Riddell’s book Threshold of the Future. Re-read his take on Acts 10 which he calls a paradigm for our time.

 

3rd Pray that today’s Pauls will be converted, found and welcomed. Who is being called to go to the uncircumcised, the outsiders, the non churched? Pray for wisdom to accept that these eccentrics will do church differently, they will surprise and even shock us. Eccentrics are there to cause change to what we think is centre.

 

4          Don’t try to make it happen.

 

Planting Fresh Expressions of Church is about compassion and call; it cannot be done well from Christendom motives like power or compulsion.  Nor is it about being trendy or fashionable.

 

Pretending you have a serious Fresh Expression when you are re-badging an outing to Judea is I think rather sad.

Persuading the rest of the church in Jerusalem to go on a crusade to Samaria would lead to race riots, not spiritual conversion. Pushing all in Jerusalem out to Antioch is not vocational, it is imperial. 

 

Let the Spirit disturb the church with his eccentric effect and follow what God is doing. Then there is just a chance we may escape out of the Jerusalem trap, for the sake of the world and the glory of God.

 


[1] This term has been perhaps coined, but certainly popularized, by Frost and Hirsh in their book The shaping of things to come.  Hendrikson 2003.

[2] At least the following are cited: The earlier church planting report Breaking New Ground 1994; Moynagh M; Changing World Changing Church, Brown C; Death of Christian Britain, my own quarterly series of stories and reflections Encounters on the Edge, begun in 1999,  Richter and Francis Gone but not forgotten.

[3] Mission-shaped Church  CHP 2004: p37

[4] Lings G W: Living Proof a New way of being church: Encounters on the Edge 1: Church Army 1999 pp 13-14

[5] Lings G W : Discernment in Mission; Encounters on the Edge 30: Church Army 2006 pp 16-20. Since MSC we have rightly been asked to take note of the 6% of people in the other faiths, for whom non churched is not a good label, but to whom we have a mission, though accompanied by different sensitivities.

[6] Neill Stephen : A History of Christian Missions : Penguin Books 1964: 22

[7] Green EMBG : I believe in the Holy Spirit : Hodder and Stoughton 1975: 137

[8] Neil 1964:23