Fresh expressions

Last Saturday David McCarthy told Oscar Wilde’s story The Happy Prince. It’s about a city-centre statue of someone from the city’s history, a statue with heart. The Happy Prince contributed the gems and gold leaf he was decorated with to help and transform the lives of people in need, assisted by a bird which put its migration plans on hold to help out.

In the end, decrepit and unappealing, a dead bird killed by exhaustion and the onset of winter cold at his feet, the statue was demolished by civic leaders. And yet in God’s eyes, the most precious things in the city were the Happy Prince’s heart, and the bird’s fragile remains.

David, a Church of Scotland development worker was speaking last week at a conference held by the Church in Smithton aimed at empowering churches in their mission. Oscar Wilde’s story resonates with us, David said, because its themes – love, serving others, sacrifice and transformation – are close to our hearts regardless of the beliefs we hold.

Also that day, Steve Aisthorpe from Badenoch reported on his research project into ‘invisible Christians’ – an astonishing 45% of the Highland population who have Christian faith but do not currently attend church.

Those who once went to church had stopped for various reasons: they no longer felt they fitted in, they found sermons had little relevance, church didn’t fit into their schedule, ‘changes which happened within me’ made church no longer appealing. Others wishes to free up time for things they felt called by God to do.

Steve’s research confronts us with the fact that as Christians we have many different ways of experiencing and expressing,  and of describing and understanding our faith.

Yet some of us are not, I think, particularly comfortable with difference in Christians. Someone suggested that people considering leaving a church should be offered counselling. Now this may be appropriate if the person’s disaffection with church has resulted from some traumatic life experience.

But I believe people who have a foot in the back door should be seen not as a problem to be sorted, so that once again they will ‘fit in’, but as a challenge to make the church sufficiently inclusive of those who at present feel ‘on the edge.’

David McCarthy’s area of expertise is in developing ‘Fresh Expressions’ of church – a new approach to meeting together out in the community, in places like coffee shops and pubs and leisure centres where folk who would never be at home in a formal church can gather and talk about God.  Many new churches of this kind have come into being across the UK.

We call it a ‘fresh expression’ of church. Perhaps it’s more a recovery of an old expression of church before we made the Church an institution. It is the way of Jesus, who gathered people around him in the fields, among the fishing nets, in their homes – at the heart of their everyday lives.

I felt rather on the edge at the conference, because the language used by some of those involved was the language of evangelicalism, one of the streams within the Church of Scotland. People at home in that stream are often passionate and devoted in their faith, and I tried for many years to be a good evangelical. But I came to realise that though I love and totally trust the God who came among us in Jesus, my faith is a fragile thing of many doubts and questions.

Fresh Expressions, Dave McCarthy assured me, reflect all strands within the Church, yet I was reminded of our tendency to expect people coming to faith to experience and express it in the same way we do.

Folk who are moved and responsive to the fundamental principles of love, serving others, sacrifice and transformation are already, albeit unconsciously, responding to the call of Jesus, in whose life these principles are embedded. For them, to find Jesus is to discover whose voice they have been listening to for so long.

Fresh Expressions, in my view, should not be about imposing a particular model of spirituality on people, but on learning together as we sit round the table with the Happy Prince.

All God’s creation is wildly varied – why should we be surprised that there are many different ways of being Christian? Our failure is not one of faith or commitment, but of imagination, a failure to embrace the glorious rainbow people of God, not ‘ins’ and ‘outs’, but sisters and brothers.

Finding faith is becoming our true selves, no longer constrained by cultural pressure or by the views of a particular church group. It is as we discover God loves us in our uniqueness that we begin to live out a fresh expression of our authentic identity.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 2nd October 2014)