Christ is alive and remains completely relevant today
Some weeks ago I wrote a piece for the newsletter titled: an entangled church. It was my response, if you like, as a prayer to share my new understanding with you. I was trying to recognise something important for us to embrace in our journey towards a future plan we might conceive of and grow together under the leadership of our now, newish priest, Dwayne, who when he joined us, asked us to pray for a future we could imagine, knowing that there are difficult times ahead.
In this note I showed how crucially our churches provide a nationwide network of relationships, grounded in our living lives, relationships that include many people who are outside out Christian faith but who nevertheless value our churches and want them to stay as part of our legacy.
Let me develop a second idea that takes us into the very centre of our faith. I have been fortunate to have worked in the private, public and ‘third’ sectors; the latter presented as the one that is more sharing in its nature. I became an academic, and for over fifteen years I worked closely with the Congolese to support them through the asylum experience, In capturing this project, I was confronted by the tribal nature of academia, and experienced first-hand the need to locate myself within one of its fields of study; a painful process. Adding to this my twenty years working in manufacturing, where I had witnessed the creation of 'chimneys of excellence’ namely, columns of protected expertise, where new knowledge was accessible if you knew the right people. It was obvious from my broad experience that we are a defensive lot, and significantly territorially protective of our gains.
Rutger Bergman identifies in his writing and in presenting the Reith lectures that the idea of protecting knowledge and property can be traced back to formation of civilisation, perhaps first through the growth of agrarian society, and it was Rutger Bergman who identified for me that the roots of owning land, property or knowledge almost invariably led to having to protect it, the extreme of this is war. During this part of our ‘evolution’ our neighbours became our enemies. Rutger describes this as a catastrophic failing in the growth of homo sapiens because it introduces a world where neighbours are seen as a threat to each other. It seems that until this time, our growth prospered through people pooling their knowledge by working collaboratively together. Bertrand Russel, a towering thinker and philospher of the last century, summed up his three passions for living: namely of yearning for love, his search for knowledge and his unbearabble pity for the suffering of mankind.
As a lay member of the church, I of course see the Christian faith through the ministry of Jesus Christ expressing precisely these passions consistently and unreservedly: Jesus tells us we must serve humbly, show love, kindness and forgiveness (Philippians 2.5-11, John 13:15 and 1 John 2-6). Jesus always meets and greets tha stranger, especially if they are located on the edge of society. There is ample evidence he loved his neighbour.
In summary, my thought is that we must not be afraid that Jesus speaks with the same power today as he always has. We might not as Christians, have the best branding today, but Jesus is at least as relevant today as he was when he visited us on earth. And in this belief is our salvation.
Peter Walker