View from the pulpit

ORGANISATIONAL change within the Kirk can be stressful and unsettling.

There is also considerable turmoil around the world: the traumas being faced by Ukrainians, Turks, Syrians, and others are unimaginable. The burden on world leaders is immense with public expectations perhaps unrealistically high.

For churches, the decline of Christianity in western secular society has been slow, gradual, and unstoppable. While there are uplifting stories of local successes, institutional Christianity seems unlikely to survive in any recognisable form. While our society is multi-faith, with each passing year religion becomes peripheral and more alien to the secular mind. As people of faith, we live in the most challenging times.

Over the past 2000 years, Christianity has evolved. The Swiss theologian Hans Küng wrote of five paradigms: apocalyptic, Helenistic, Mediaeval Roman Catholic, Reformation, and the modern period. Each change has been significant. In our time, we are, perhaps, evolving once again, to a largely post-institutional form of Christianity. In Europe, as institutional churches decline, there is encouraging interest in what is small and away from public gaze: house groups, retreats and pilgrimages. In the UK, individual and group retreats are similarly growing in popularity as people forage for the Mystery within. May we speak of the fragility of sacredness and the sacredness of fragility.

We are also living at a time when our appreciation of the Bible, the nature of the writing, and our understanding of the ancient world are rapidly expanding. Christians variously find God’s truth through the literal interpretation of Scripture, the teachings of Church tradition, and, like myself, through the Gospels as faith narrative comprising a mosaic of history, liturgy, and storytelling drawing on various sources, including the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), rabbinic Judaism, and perhaps the Homeric epics. In public worship, I ask my congregation what they ‘hear’ in God’s eternally fertile word.

I now rarely use the pulpit. What happens in different church settings must be appropriate but, equally, we live in a culture where it feels out of place for the minister to be other than at eye level. As the people of God, we have a shared insight into the Divine, each with our own experience and story. Standing at the Table is a better fit, not least as our congregational numbers fall. This piece might better be titled, ‘View from the Table’.

For myself, daily meditation of practising the Presence, through the beauty of nature, imaginative reading of Scripture, and cultivating a consciousness of Jesus, give me the spiritual strength that sustains me. I am also comforted by the witness of the mystic, Julian of Norwich. Living through the Black Death, the Peasants’ Revolt, and the Hundred Years’ War, Julian’s faith and visions continue to inspire and uplift people today. In her book, Revelations of Divine Love, she tenderly and profoundly draws immense strength from the love of Jesus: ‘Love is his meaning …. Jesus is our love, light and truth…We are clothed from head to foot in the goodness of God’.

As members of my congregation face the turmoil of our world, personal issues, difficult questions, and look for encouragement in their social action, I hope that our shared spiritual searching and continuing pastoral care provide nourishment in changing times. Julian said: ‘All shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well’. 

The Rev Scott S McKenna is minister at Ayr: St Columba.