City Churches Celebration 2004 |
Behold, I make all things new.
The true God whose beauty is ancient but always fresh promises freshness to everything and everyone he touches.
That is one of the ways we recognise his presence.
Notice that he does not say Behold I make all new things. That is the anthem of a restless spirit, the spirit of motiveless and ultimately meaningless modernisation.
I was in another city centre a couple of weeks ago opening new facilities at HTB, I am referring of course to Holy Trinity Brussels. All other non RC Churches have quitted the city centre for the leafier suburbs and HTB is left in the red light district next door to a night club called Crazy Love.
As we hear the voice saying behold I make all things new are there things to learn from club culture? Many clubs in the UK are housed in former church buildings. They have names which vaguely resonate with a half buried Christian world – Joy; God’s Kitchen, Ministry of Sin are actual examples and come to think of it Crazy Love is not such a bad name for a church.
The clubbing experience offers many of the aspects of church life at its best. Regular attendance at events with no ulterior motives beyond the event itself. There are preparation rituals like donning the right dress and saving up for the night out. Then there is a sense of belonging and openness to one another and sometimes even what people describe as a mystical experience, an oceanic experience induced by the music, dancing or by drugs. Ecstasy, the drug comes with a mystic sign embossed upon the tablets.
The music also is often explicitly concerned with spiritual themes. Take the band Pink and their song God is a DJ. The chorus runs thus,
If God is a DJ
Life is dance floor
Love is the rhythm
You are the music
If God is a DJ
Life is dance floor
You get what you’re given
It’s all how you use it.
Christians are not absent from this scene. There is an attractively designed web site entitled Clubbers Temple, explicitly but not embarrassingly Christian. Its mission statement says that “Clubbers Temple is for those who know that there is more to life…for those who believe the truth is out there and the invisible is more real than the visible.”
In a needy world, of fragmenting relationships and threatened by loss of meaning and by mortality, popular culture has given birth to para churches and even para sacraments. Time does not allow me to explore this theme properly but visit Clubbers Temple to see what I mean.
Now there is hardly anything more ridiculous than the sight of an ageing follicley challenged ecclesiastic wearing a pink wig and gyrating to some primeval stomp. I shall not be asking the Venerable Brian Kirk Duncan to learn the electronic guitar. There is room in our church for many different styles as long as we are united in our love for the one true God, Father Son and Holy Spirit and seek to communicate the faith uniquely revealed in the Holy Scriptures and set forth in the Catholic creeds. But we are also called to proclaim this truth afresh in each generation. Behold says the God whose beauty is ancient but always fresh, I make all things new.
The City Churches already have a wonderful diversity. Fine bible teaching at St Helens. A wonderful re-engagement with Natural Science in the Boyle lectures at St Mary le Bow. A fruitful and energising encounter with other Christian traditions. Engagement with what artists are telling us about the spiritual needs and energies of our time at St Giles Cripplegate. Rich traditional worship and expository preaching in many places. Help with prayer at the London Centre for Spirituality. Contact with the media at St Bride’s. Almost everywhere pastoral care of the highest quality and in some places more specialised ministries of healing and deliverance. And there is so much more.
The scene has changed dramatically since the day when the Archdeacon of London successfully protested against the relegation of the City Churches to the leisure section of a guide to City Life.
I spent my first ten years as a priest amidst evidence of a massive loss of nerve in the church and an academic consensus that society was being irreversibly secularised.
The truth is now that the world is being de-secularised. The census of 2001 showed three quarters of the English population declaring themselves “Christian” though as we all know that figure does not translate into a significant level of observance. That is our constituency and I believe that the City Churches, encountered by people when they are often away from home and open to new experience have a vital part to play.
The particular point I am making this evening is that one of the challenges for us is not “how to make people spiritual” for they already are but how can we connect with their innate spirituality and point them towards Christ.
The lesson I take from the gospel is that we have been given a huge deposit by God. Our inheritance is many talents worth. The gospel warns us against chronic lack of risk taking and failure to engage and experiment.
In this great church I think of St Paul visiting Athens and spotting the altar to the unknown God whose identity he then proceeds to share. St Philip does the same thing when he meets the director of one of the multinational corporations [the Ethiopian eunuch] in the spiritual desert. He begins where the man is and asks “do you know what you are doing?” A creative re-telling of the Christian story so that we connect with the half submerged concerns of the club culture and of so many of our contemporaries is what we are called to do.
We have to respect the fact that many spiritual people do not expect any great help from the church or believe that the Christian community is a fruitful place for searchers. Here in the City you are changing attitudes and we need to be energetic in putting out the gifts we have been given in obedience to the God who does not say “behold I make all new things” but who does say, “Behold I make all things new”.
