Reform December 2009

RefoRmnews, COMMenT, inspiraTiOn, debaTe

Trevor Dennison the radical message of Christmas

Graham Crayon fresh expressionsof church

BethlehemBehind the security wall

God at our feet?

December 2009 £1.80

• December 2009 • REFORM10

Dwindling congregations. Irrelevant. Outmoded. Is that how the 21st century Church in Britain looks? Not according to Graham Cray, the Anglican Bishop charged with spearheading Fresh Expressions – a major ecumenical initiative to foster Church growth.

The initiative began formally in 2005, following the publication of a Church of England report, Mission-Shaped Church. Its aim: to plant congregations in groups, communities and networks among people with whom the traditional Church has no impact. This year, the United Reformed Church signed up to the scheme – which currently has up to 3,000 Fresh Expressions of Church across the UK.

The model is as diverse as the people within it, ranging from midweek groups in schools to police officers meeting for prayer after a shift, to a surfers’ beachside venue.

The ideas come from individuals, communities and existing churches and they are said to be creating waves across the UK, and as far afield as Canada and New Zealand.

Graham Cray tells hazel southam how he is riding that wave and trying to keep up with what he believes is the work of the Holy Spirit.

‘I have always been keen on the spIrIt In people, In mIssIon, In people takIng rIsks’ • December 2009 • REFORM10

REFORM • December 2009 • 11

IntervIew

How and why did Fresh Expressions start?

It all started with the report Mission-Shaped Church, about how our culture has been changing fast and how the culture of the Church now seems very distant from that of a great proportion of the community. The report was about church planting and Fresh Expressions means the commitment to plant a new congregation of faith. It might be an additional congregation at an existing church. It might be a new church being planted where people have no connection to church as it stands. It might be a neighbourhood meeting, or it might be a midweek club. But always we mean a new church for people who are unaffected by existing churches.

Why do we need this?

We do not live in Christendom anymore. It’s serious. At least 40 per cent of the adults in Britain and a much higher proportion of children and young people have never had any contact with a church in their life. Yet much of our strategy has been: get them in the early years and one day they will come back. More than half the population has never been, so they will never come back.

Added to that, our churches have been leaking like sieves for the last few decades. A significant number of those who have left – probably more than half – left intentionally. They didn’t leave because life was getting busy and gradually church dropped out of the picture, or they moved and meant to go to a church and didn’t. They left because they could no longer make a connection between Sundays and the rest of the week. Churches just seemed to fight in public, etcetera, etcetera. Sixty per cent of the population is unlikely to be reached by the Church as we have it now.

How do you feel about that?

I feel that’s a call from Jesus to do something about it. That 60 per cent is very diverse. You can’t produce a new model and clone it and put it out there. The other distinctive thing about Fresh Expressions is that it has to be appropriate for its context. While remaining authentically Christian it has to engage with the people it serves. That’s both exciting and scary.

I’m really convinced that we have hit a wave of the Holy Spirit. In 2004 when I chaired the report, there were maybe 20 or so interesting things happening and maybe up to 100 others that you could have identified. Now there are between 2,000

and 3,000 Fresh Expressions of Church. That’s extraordinary.

Why is Fresh Expressions currently so successful?

We think God’s in it and that it’s enabled God’s human partners, the Church, to think about what Church could look like. People are suddenly realising that with a midweek club for children, if you invite the parents you have a midweek congregation – where people are happy to be, at a time when they are happy to be there.

The second thing is that this will work differently in each setting. This is a grass-roots initiative. People want to do things locally. It’s no good having a national thing to tell them what to do.

Isn’t there a danger that Fresh Expressions will simply fragment the existing Church rather than build it up?

It could be worse than fragmentation – you could have nothing but niche Church.

This is Church where the Gospel meets people where and how they are. That’s profoundly theological. Therefore it’s inevitably going to be diverse. Archbishop Rowan talks about a Church within which the component parts all need each other. If you imagine the main service at the church you attend, that’s an expression of Church. An after-school club in a school that’s become a midweek all-age congregation is equally an expression of Church. It’s the same challenge with a slightly different spin. Each has something to give and something to learn.

Why are you so passionate about this?

I’ve always been in the charismatic stream, but that has always been for the sake of mission. As a young student, thinking I was going to be an RE teacher and thinking

that I had left the C of E, I had a personal experience of the Holy Spirit and that’s been deeply related to my desire to share my faith with others.

I was called to ordained ministry in the Church of England. I told God he was wrong and it was impossible. You may have noticed that I lost! Renewal and mission go hand in hand for me. That’s the strength of my particular pilgrimage.

As a Christian leader I have led a theology college and a large parish. I have been a bishop. I have always been keen on the spirit in people, in mission, in people taking risks. So when they needed a bishop to do this, I was the one whose door they knocked on. It is a Graham Cray-shaped job.

Biography Bishop Graham Cray (52) was appointed as the Archbishops’ missioner and leader of Fresh Expressions earlier this year, having overseen the report out of which the initiative grew in 2004-5.

A big fan of rock music and young people, Bishop Graham says that the Church as it currently stands isn’t reaching the majority of the population. He believes that Fresh Expressions can go some way to fixing that.

He was consecrated in 2001 and became the Bishop of Maidstone and the Bishop for Mission in the Diocese of Canterbury where he remained for eight years.

Before this he was principal of Ridley Hall, Cambridge, a Church of England theological college, after 14 years as vicar of St Michael le Belfrey in York. He has been chair of the Greenbelt Festival and is currently chair of Soul Survivor, an organisation that runs Christian-based events for young people.

“I have a totally adolescent interest in pop and rock music,” he jokes. “And I’ve never been able to get away from youth ministry. It tells you where your culture is going. It’s an early warning system about change, about how out of touch the Church might be.”

He is the author of many books, the latest being Mission-Shaped Youth (Church House Publishing, 2007), which he wrote with Tim Sudworth and Chris Russell.

He is married to Jackie and they have two daughters, Catherine and Sarah.

‘I had a personal experience of the Holy Spirit and that’s been deeply related to my desire to share my faith with others’

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The wise men went to the wrong place,with the wrong expectations,the wrong gifts.They went to Jerusalem,its high walls, its palaces and shining temple,its Herod, High Priest, and clanking soldiers.They took rare and expensive gifts, fit for a king.The one they were looking for was lying helplessin a peasant’s housein a village a few miles away,off the main roads,and his mother had never seen gold or frankincense or myrrh in her life and didn’t know what to do with them.They went for a king,and found God instead.

That is how I began one of my more recent poem-sermons. We miss the sharp irony, the dark playfulness of Matthew’s brilliant story of the journey of the magi. More seriously, we Christians sometimes fail to see how extraordinary a tale we have

to tell about our God. That tale does not begin with Bethlehem, of course, but it enters a new chapter there and takes a turn that comes as a profound shock.

Matthew’s magi set out to find “the child born king of the Jews”. So, of course, they go to Jerusalem, the centre of political, economic and religious power. Very wise. Then they start asking where this new king is. Very foolish in a place that has a king already, and one of the likes of Herod. The consequences of their questioning will soon be utterly tragic, and the village of Bethlehem will see the slaughter of small children on a scale that even Gaza did not see in the last brutal Israeli invasion. But the one they are looking for is not in Jerusalem. The star has led them a merry dance.

Nearly 20 centuries later, in North Korea, when Kim Jong-il was born, official biographers said that his birth was foretold by a swallow, and heralded by the appearance of a double rainbow over the mountain of

his birth and a new star in the heavens. Jesus’ contemporaries and those who came soon after him, including Matthew, would at once have recognised such talk; it would have reminded them of the tales they had heard about the births of the Roman emperors, Augustus, Tiberius, or Nero. Yet when we look at the figure of Jesus of Nazareth, whether baby or man, we have to say that one less like Augustus, Tiberius, Nero, or Kim Jong-il, we cannot imagine.

Some rulers of the ancient or modern world did have humble beginnings, but then rose to great wealth and power. Not so Jesus of Nazareth. In Matthew the unfolding story of his birth gets worse, as he is snatched up in the night and taken by Mary and Joseph into Egypt, against the sound of soldiers marching to the village. Later, much later, this Jesus is anointed, as if for kingship, but the ceremony is performed by an unnamed woman in a leper’s house.

He is proclaimed king, too, and in the temple, but those crying “Hosanna to the Son of David!” are the children, surrounded by the blind and the lame (Matthew 21.14-15, a quite extraordinary passage). He does receive a placard bearing the words “The King of the Jews” (just what the magi were looking for), but it is attached to a Roman cross, put there for his careful degradation, one of Pilate’s sick, racist jokes. At the end he emerges from the confining dark of his tomb, but still he has the marks of crucifixion upon him, like the tattooed numbers upon the arm of one stumbling out of Auschwitz. Anyone less like a king we still cannot imagine.

Luke’s story of Jesus’ birth, though so

Trevor Dennis finds in the Christmas stories a radical message about the true nature of God incarnate in Jesus Christ

‘Jesus is anointed, as if for kingship, but the ceremony is performed by an unnamed woman in a leper’s house’

The king who wasnot a king


There is a problem at the heart of Christmas. I’m not referring to ongoing commercialisation, or renewed local authority efforts to replace our festive season with a “Winterval”. I think there’s a problem within the Christmas Story itself – or at least within the version of the story

that most of us have learned to accept. The earliest versions of the Christmas Story are found

in the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Matthew, but the two Gospel writers don’t seem to have compared notes or used the same sources. Matthew and Luke each tell the Christmas story in their own way; they offer us quite

The ReAL CAsTOF CHRiSTMASIn blending and blurring the distinctive gospel accounts of Matthew and Luke – and the characters they chose to focus on – our Christmas tradition has failed to grasp the revolutionary significance of what the biblical writers were trying express, says John Campbell

different storylines with entirely separate supporting casts of characters alongside the three central figures of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus. So, right from the start, we have two distinct Christmas stories. Over the centuries, church usage has worked these two distinct Gospel stories into one blended Christmas Story; we meet it in carols, in nativity plays and in the little nativity scenes in wood, wool or pottery. It’s probably this blended version that most people keep in their heads as a sort of “default setting”. But I think something has gone badly wrong in the blending process.

Picture, if you will, a typical model nativity scene. In the middle, inside some sort of stable, we find the holy family, Mary and Joseph watching over the baby Jesus


Henry’s big yearHenry’s

Everyone knows that England broke away from the Roman Catholic Church because the English king, Henry VIII, fancied a woman who wasn’t his wife, but who would not

agree to be his mistress. The Anglican Church was the by-product of a messy divorce. It was all (sexual) politics, and no religion. Or so the story goes.

Yet, while Anne Boleyn was certainly a catalyst, this leg-over version of history obscures Henry VIII’s obvious piety, his theological convictions, and above all, his profound belief that he should be supreme head of the Church in England, with the power to determine the beliefs of his people. The story of Henry and the Reformation from 1536 onwards makes this very clear.

1536 was an important turning-point. The Act of Supremacy in 1534 had declared that Henry was, and always had been, the supreme head of the Church. But 1536 was the year that Henry started to implement these powers. If Henry’s Reformation had only been about Anne, then he would probably have returned England to Rome after her death in 1536, as many observers expected him to do. Even evangelicals like Archbishop Cranmer feared it. He wrote to Henry: “I trust … you will bear no less zeal

Five hundred years after his accession to the throne, suzannah Lipscomb looks at a critical year in the life of Henry VIII. The English Reformation, she argues, wasn’t all about Anne Boleyn

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Christmas items such as new clothes, shoes and drinks are provided. Those with rural homes will visit to celebrate with relatives. Prices escalate – especially transport costs to rural homes as almost everyone will be travelling. Old people will expect presents from their children in the towns.

Cattle, pigs and any edible domestic animal will be slaughtered. Some old religious ceremonies are performed and traditional beer will be brewed. A two-day wait at a transport rank is common – as are accidents due to overcrowding and speeding. Theft is widespread. Many bars will open all night and drunkenness amongst the young is rife. One can witness street fights, some fatal. Police are on duty all day.

It is a time to be truly joyful and a time for giving. Some people will even get married, paying lobola (dowry) in rural areas. Children will show off their new clothes. Every home you visit will provide a special

Michael Masedza, artistOur Christmas is the most important holiday of the calendar. Even the poor try their level best to save and buy a packet of rice and chicken. Children will wear new clothes kept for this special occasion. Most families prefer to spend Christmas in their rural homes. Beasts, goats and chickens will be slaughtered. Loved ones will travel from all parts of the country. Politics will be temporarily set aside. It is a time to exchange gifts, particularly new clothes. I will be taking groceries paid for with donations from the United Reformed Church to my rural home – it promises to be a big reunion – I am excited.

Livas Masiyiwa, part-time city workerMany companies are closed around mid December to mid January to allow families from over the country to meet. The father, as head of the household, must ensure

John simpson, UK support coordinator of an artists’ cooperative project in Harare, asked his Zimbabwean friends and colleagues how they will be celebrating Christmas, given the ongoing social and economic crisis in their country. This is what they told him

Christmas dish of rice and chicken, because this is a rare treat. We remember the birth of our saviour Jesus Christ. At church I will thank God I have reached Christmas Day in one piece. I will pray that God will look after my family until next Christmas – churches will be full to the brim.

fr David harold-Barry, priestA fellow priest was arrested the other day for reading a letter from the bishops at Sunday Mass about national healing and reconciliation. That this should be considered a dangerous topic by our rulers makes it clear just where we are at the moment. Reconciliation means listening to the other person – and listening opens a breach in the defences with which our ruling party holds the keep, where it stores its power and wealth. There will be no solution in Zimbabwe until those defences are down and people are able to plan the way forward together.

A man in government privately commented recently on their way of allocating funds: “There is just one plate of peanuts and after the strong have taken their share the rest take the leftovers.” He was talking about funds for the national university, but he could have been talking about any of our public services.

comfort aNd Joy?

Food aid is distributed among the local community outside St Alphonsus RC Church in Tafara, Harare

People in general flock to church and despite constant hardship celebrate Christmas with great joy. The churches are too small for the crowds that come and many communities have simply given up on the building and hold services outside.

Interesting comments from a cross-section of friends from different walks of life. It is clear however that against all the odds most Zimbabweans are still highly motivated to attend church. Silveira House for example (a Catholic-run development support centre in Harare) has a regular attendance of between 300 and 400. The average age of its congregation is 34 to 37 years, which is sadly in line with life expectancy in this still beleaguered country.

John simpson is a member of St Andrews URC, Walton on Thames. For details about the work of the stone artists cooperative, email [email protected]


For generations the olive-carvers of Bethlehem have been carving Bethlehem nativity scenes with wooden stables and little figures

of the holy family, the shepherds and the gift-bearing kings.

In recent times, however, the olive carvers have introduced a dramatic change to their representations of this timeless scene of worship around the stable. As a particular extra, they now include a stretch of brutal concrete wall and a corner watchtower (all carved in smooth and shining olive wood) which you can place right across the front of the nativity scene, blocking all access to the stable.

This is an obvious affront deliberately placed at the core of the Christmas story. It provides a magnificent collision between the Bethlehem of Jesus and the Bethlehem of today. For this wall and this watchtower do not come from the world or time of Jesus – they are careful copies of the new and brutal security barrier that cuts Bethlehem off from Jerusalem in our times.

Unsurprisingly, most Christian tourists do not buy this version of the nativity scene.

They have come to the site of the Christmas Story with pilgrim hearts, not to get embroiled in the politics of contemporary Israel/Palestine. Indeed, as foreign tourists the new security barrier need not affect them very much at all. Likely enough their gleaming tourist bus was waved straight through as they passed the checkpoint between East Jerusalem and Bethlehem – it probably felt like a particularly smooth and easy border crossing.

It is the local Palestinian inhabitants of East Jerusalem and Bethlehem who have to live daily with the brutality, the absurdity and the affront of this monstrous wall. Weaving irregularly through the suburbs of Bethlehem, to include and exclude particular properties, its vast concrete sections shout division, exclusion and control – a message driven home day after day at the official crossing points by the unexplained delays, interrogations and

arbitrary decisions to refuse entry that confront the local Palestinians, even when travelling to hospital for treatment.

So, three cheers for the olive wood carvers who have departed from their historic representations of the birth of Jesus to add this shocking symbol of modern day pain and injustice running through Bethlehem. It brings the birth of Jesus back out of the candlelit glow of religious reverence and the elegantly-edited experience of the passing pilgrims and repositions it in the Bethlehem that is there.

But I’d like the olive carvers to go further.The traditional nativity scene, with

shepherds and kings worshipping Jesus side-by-side, is just as safe and unreal as the experience of the tourists stepping off their air-conditioned coaches for a two-hour Bethlehem experience. I’d like the olive-carvers to alter the scene itself, to keep the smelly shepherds and the dodgy foreign astrologers, but lose every suggestion that any sort of king, emperor or overlord responded so sweetly and respectfully to this birth. For even when I add the wall and the watchtower, the traditional nativity scene does not tell me on which side of the wall this baby belongs. The gospel stories, however, leave me in little doubt.

John Campbell is principal of Northern College, Manchester and was part of a study visit to Bethlehem in April

Comment

‘The wall shouts division, exclusion and control’

shut out of the stableIn Bethlehem, Christian tourists flock to buy olive wooden nativity scenes. The carvers who produce them have updated the story by adding the brutal modern detail of a security wall cutting off access to the stable. Three cheers for them, says John Campbell

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A vast security barrier cuts Bethlehem off from Jerusalem


decent minister would wish to abuse his or her position of trust, or a crematorium’s hospitality.)

It was a 35-mile drive to the crematorium so we left in plenty of time – arriving with a full half-hour till the service was due to start. Sat in the vestry, taking the time to go through the story of the deceased’s life, I yielded to the promise of a pleasant way to steady my nerves; reaching into the cupboard, I decanted a modest measure of malt into a crystal glass.

All well and good – no doubt it put an extra glow on my cheeks and sparkle in my

eyes. But there was a problem. As I readied myself to head on through to the chapel, I was horrified to think that I might breathe incriminating fumes over the mourners. Beginning to regret my weakening, I popped into the vestry toilet and there found relief from my anxiety. Those generous-spirited attendants had thought of everything. On the sink-side, a bottle of mint mouthwash.

And so death was done well that day. The shop window was not tarnished, and the experience reminded me that even the despatch point on the triangle of contact can present a minister with one of those much-needed lighter and brighter moments – in retrospect at least.

s ministers are fond of reminding themselves, the window to our world of religious ritual is most commonly unshuttered for the

non-church-attending majority when there is a baptism, when there are nuptials or when there is a final farewell. Ministers and others may regret such sporadic encounters, but better in my view to celebrate the holy equilateral triangle of contact – hatch, match and despatch – than to mutter about being used and abused. Who knows, it may be a way in if a decent welcome is shown.

All rites of passage are reminders for ministers and people alike. Funerals remind us of our own mortality. Baptisms should remind us of our own commitment. And I find that weddings I conduct make me think back to before I was married myself. I remember those far-off single days when elderly aunts would come up to me at family weddings and take great delight in poking me in the ribs, saying (or screeching, witches-of-Macbeth-style), “You’ll, be next! You’ll be next!” Every wedding the same, “You’ll be next! You’ll be next!” – until I started doing the same to them at family funerals.

It is important to conduct farewells, marrying and “dunking” with equal attention to detail and dignity. But death presents perhaps the most important challenge. And that is not just a matter for ministers. Colleagues are

required. Undertakers, grave-diggers and crematorium assistants all play their part.

Burial in Scotland is still the most common form of internment. However, crematoria are not unknown and one tiny crematorium in the north of Scotland, offers exceptional facilities – catering not just for the needs of the grieving but also for the comforts of the minister, even to the point of supplying some fine Malt Whisky in the vestry. Now I understand why the undertaker insisted I travel in the hearse rather than take my own car! (Of course, we are not talking party time here – no

‘As I readied myself to head on through to the chapel, I was horrified to think that I might breathe incriminating fumes over the mourners’

Stephen Brown is minister of Fraserburgh URC in Aberdeenshire

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