In the final part of his three-part series, the Very Rev Dr John Chalmers explains why radical change is needed to reshape the Church of Scotland to serve in future.

SERIES

ANALYSIS of past failures is one thing but it is an altogether different challenge to look deep into the future and describe the shape of things to come.

It is particularly difficult in relation to the church, when what is really needed is a transformation so far reaching that the church of tomorrow may bear little resemblance to the church of recent generations.

This is hard for me to say, because the church I have been a part of all of my life still speaks to my spiritual needs. That, however, is because I know the ancient narratives, I am familiar with the hymns and songs of the faith, I’ve had a lifetime of engaging with the poetry of our public prayer and I associate sanctuary with buildings as magnificent as our cathedrals and as simple as our country kirks. These are the core diet of my faith. I would rather not see their passing and if I thought they were the recipe for nourishing the faith of a future generation I would put all my efforts into keeping the tradition alive. That would suit me fine and it would see me out!

But it’s not the future. What began as a disciple community committed to the way, the truth and the life of Jesus never, in its beginnings, required all of the baggage and paraphernalia which it has accumulated over the centuries. Richard Halverson, Chaplain to the US Senate in the 1980s is credited with summarising the development of Christianity in this way, he says: “Christianity began on Palestinian soil as a relationship with a person. It moved on to Greek soil and became a philosophy. Then it moved onto Roman soil and became an institution. It moved further onto British soil and became a card-carrying church culture. It moved again, onto American soil, and became an enterprise, something to be packaged and sold.”

Of course, that is not a detailed mapping of the history of the church, but it’s impossible to resist the reality that the narrative of our faith has strayed a long way from its roots in a community bound together by its love for Jesus of Nazareth. Whatever you have been brought up to believe it was no part of the first century plan that one day 1.2 billion people in the world would be described as Roman Catholics, that another 185 million people would call themselves Orthodox and another 600 million would bear the name Protestant.

As I contemplate the future of the church that has meant so much to me I look back with some regret, that too much of my time has been spent arguing over the philosophy, reorganising the institution, fretting about the membership and devising better ways of promoting the enterprise. This has mostly been at the expense of developing that relationship with Christ and at the expense of properly coming to terms with the transformation of life and of our understanding of God which is the far reaching message of Jesus’ ministry. It’s time for me to recalibrate and it’s time for the Church to recalibrate and spend less time on the peripheral stuff and more time on the relationship stuff.

Richard Rohr, that deeply insightful Franciscan friar has said: “Much of common religion today is ideology more than any real encounter with Presence, but abstract theology will not get you very far. When religion becomes mere ideology or theology, it starts – and stays –with universal theories and the rubber never hits the road.”

The real truth today is that at the intersection of the church and real people, living on real streets, the rubber is not hitting the road and the traditional patterns of church life (with which I have been so comfortable) are not going to change that. Patterns of living are not going to shift back in time, so, space for spiritual reflection and development now need to take on a different form, and they need to be built into the rhythm of life as it is, not as we would wish it to be. A revolution in scientific understanding requires us to be able to speak of a God who is in and yet transcends all of life. People will not embrace old dogmas which may have been understandable in an age of less knowledge. Only a faith which speaks to the deepest needs of human life will be transformative for both individuals and the communities they belong to.

Photo: iStock

So, we need to become a church which thinks seriously about how we support the widest possible range of people on their spiritual journey. One size will not fit all, the modern day seeker needs access to worship, learning and prayer 24/7 and the future may be one of deeply committed disciples who may not have much interest in a church with a centralised bureaucracy.

One of the tools for this is now quite literally in our hands. A whole new generation cannot be separated from their smart phones and tablets. In these there is the power to help to sustain people on their spiritual journey and nourish their inner life. The Church of Scotland is already working in this forum; it has opened its first online Church http://www.sanctuaryfirst.org.uk and it is offering a spiritual push to your mobile device every day. Resources like those that are available from the Center for Action and Contemplation https://cac.org will become more common place, but it is the local church that must provide the vital connection between the virtual communities and the real communities which live out Jesus’ prayer for the kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven.

In the earliest days of the Christian Church the apostle Paul advised the religious folk of his day to place less stock on the customs and rituals of religion and in his letter to the Galatians he says (chapter 5 vs 6) “the only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.” I take that to mean that the business of the Church must be to nurture deep faith and profound understanding of God and then translate that into practical expression. So, the buildings that we decide to keep, the resources that we decide to develop and the structures that we decide to maintain must, it seems to me, be tested against their capacity for enabling us to be a people who express our faith through love.

Many congregations are already ploughing this furrow, their premises are open every day, they are making a difference to the lives of a whole range of people in their communities, their footfall during the week far outstrips their footfall on a Sunday.

They are signposts of a living faith and they are building communities of love.

One size will not fit all, the modern day seeker needs access to worship, learning and prayer 24/7 and the future may be one of deeply committed disciples who may not have much interest in a church with a centralised bureaucracy.

I think that the future will be built around such local centres of activity where people, whose spiritual life, nurtured in very different ways, find expression of their faith in very practical ways.

The purpose of God is not about saving denominations or institutions from extinction and the mission of church is about building communities of justice and peace and love - the Church of Scotland can be a part of that mission or it can drift into irrelevance and obscurity.