An open dialogue - a space for readers response

I read Bruce Puddle's story in the previous issue of Spirited Exchanges with both interest and sadness.   Interest, in that I first knew Bruce when he was a very little boy but had lost touch with him in recent years.   And sadness because I was left wondering if there could have been a better way.

Our backgrounds were surprisingly similar.   We were both influenced by Roy Puddle .. he was Bruce's dad, and my first Baptist pastor.   Bruce describes himself as having been strongly evangelical and charismatic.   I started following Jesus in a fringe Pentecostal church .. maybe in the late 50s they were all fringe!    Like Bruce I was initiated into an experience of Christianity that was full of certainties.   There were nine gifts of the Spirit, God wanted us all speaking in tongues and always wanted his people healed; the determining factor was our faith!   And when it came to who was to be saved, we knew who were “in” … and who were “out.”

But I didn't stay there.   Maybe my “ecumenical” beginning, having a father who was a non-practising Catholic and a mother a non-practising Presbyterian, then growing up in a Salvation Army Sunday School and a Methodist Bible Class before my life changing conversion in a Pentecostal Church and finding my true home with the Baptists, gave me an appreciation for the whole church.   When I was on Baptist Union staff, I attended National Council of Churches' meetings.   I intensely disliked their focus on justice issues almost to the exclusion of everything else.    But their insistence that we face the issues of racism and feminism and gender issues for example, was a goad that pushed me out of my comfortable one dimensional understanding of what God and church was all about.   It was a lesson that I was to learn time and time again … the primary catalysts for growth in my life have come out of uncomfortable and painful times and not jumping ship!

And I think that this in part brought me to the realization that following Jesus was not just a journey, but an adventure.    I began to learn that as God gave me the prod, I needed to keep moving ahead, stepping out, and often into the scary unknown, like…

• exploring seven day spiritual retreats nearly 20 years ago and, with John North and the wonderful help of Dominican Sister Mary Concannon, and introducing most other Baptist pastors to them and to spiritual direction;
• living cross culturally, first in Papua New Guinea and then in Japan.  At first very difficult, leaving all of our kids back in New Zealand and living in the dangerous environment of Port Moresby, but in retrospect the most formative years of my wife, Heather's and my life.   I doubt that I will ever be as privileged again as I was then, in seeing the transformation of a community of 2,000 people by the gospel of Jesus;
• living not only cross culturally in Japan, but in a Christian community of people from the Greek Orthodox to the Catholic churches and everything in between.   Uncomfortable at first for most, but in the end, life changing for us all;
• and more recently, experiencing God in perhaps the most surprising of places, in conflicted churches!    Yes, stressful, but also deeply rewarding as God again and again restores hope and community, and the church begins again to function as the Body of Christ.

Bruce tells us that he found that he had outgrown the general spiritual ethos of most evangelical churches with their “frightening shallowness in worship and sermons .. and control assumptions.”    Churches I have been a part of have moved into Taize services, silent retreats, stations of the cross, labyrinths, dipped their toes into classical music and moved beyond “swearing and dirty jokes as the big sins” to explore some of the big church and society issues today.    We have rolled up our sleeves and worked in squatter settlements in Port Moresby, partnered an orphanage in Bacolod in the Philippines and worked alongside Japanese churches in helping the homeless living on the streets in Osaka.   And most in the churches I have been in have in the end been very happy to read more broadly, and to think more deeply about what it means to be a follower of Jesus today in our much more secular and pluralistic culture.

In the words of one of our faculty at the Baptist Theological College when I was a student (Stan Edgar), I am now more certain about less .. and a lot less certain about most things.    But two of my strong certainties, are that Jesus was God incarnate and God's gracious answer to the prayers of people of all traditions and beliefs for forgiveness and hope … and secondly, that following Jesus is something we must do in company with other believers.    And that has come from broad reading .. and continuing the great adventure.   In this I have been helped by the stories of Asians in particular who in coming to faith in Jesus Christ have expressed it in terms of moving from darkness to light.  And helped also by the depth of scholarship and insight of present day evangelical authors like Tom Wright, Leonard Sweet, Mark Noll, Alister McGrath, John Stott, Clark Pinnock, Brian McLaren, Gordon Fee, Cornelius Plantinga and numerous others

I understand that there are many people who have been deeply wounded by others in the church.  I have met some of them.   But isn't it true that we have all been both hurt, and have created hurt, in churches?  That's the nature of churches, they are communities of people “on the way.”   And without being too simplistic, there is another category of Christians it seems to me: those who have left churches that they have significantly helped to shape, and no longer like!     But I have long since come to the conclusion that the strength of churches is in their mix of great people (and I have learned that if you expect to find such people in any church, you will always find them), and difficult people who make living Christianly difficult but who in this strange twist, become the catalysts for character and spiritual growth.

But I will leave the last comment to one of my favourite writers, Eugene Peterson, who in an interview in the March 2005 issue of Christianity Today, was asked to respond to the comment that many would look at the church today and say it was dead, merely an institutional expression of the faith.  He answered:

“What other church is there besides institutional? There's nobody who doesn't have problems with the church, because there's sin in the church.  But there's no other place to be a Christian except in the church. There's sin in the local bank.  There's sin in the grocery store. I really don't understand the naïve criticism  of the institution.  I really don't get it.

Friederich van Hugel said the institution of the church is like the bark on the tree.  There's no life in the bark.  It's dead wood.   But it protects the life of the tree within. And the tree grows and grows and grows.  If you take the bark off, it's prone to disease, dehydration and death.

So yes, the church is dead, but it protects something alive.  And when you try to have a church without bark, it doesn't last long.  It disappears, gets sick, and it's prone to all kinds of disease, heresy and narcissism.  In my writing, I hope to recover a sense of the reality of congregation – what it is.  It's a gift of the Holy Spirit.  Why are we always idealizing what the Holy Spirit doesn't idealize?  There's no idealization in the Bible – none!   We've got two thousands years of history now.  Why are we so dumb?”