Scott Robertson asks how we avoid the hardening of our church arteries.
W
hen Lesley-ann Craddock was licensed as the first Ordained
Pioneer Minister in Glasgow & Galloway diocese, it was a landmark
day in more ways than one because she was the first such person
in any Scottish denomination to train as an OPM. It was a joy for me to join
the congregation of St Oswald's, Kings Park, Glasgow, and Christians from
around the area to preach on such an historic occasion.
One of the things
I wanted to
highlight was the
fact that the
church, like any
other institution,
is perennially
susceptible to a
hardening of the
arteries. It can
become, in
Hebrew Bible
parlance, 'hard-
hearted' – as well as clogged with self-indulgence; theological apathy; a
bloated sense of its own importance or even delusions of relevance. There
are those who argue that the structures of the church; the liturgy of the
church; the music of the church; the politics and the general ethos of the
church are now so wildly out of tune with the times in which we find
ourselves that we must radically alter who we are and what we do in order to
regain some credibility.
And, of course, as you might expect, there are others who would scoff at this
iconoclastic approach, accusing those who hold to it of cultural vandalism
and harbouring an unhealthy, worldly desire to be 'trendy'!
Both of these approaches are symptoms of a church that has already
hardened its arteries and both are as misguided as each other. Why?
Because the common denominator of both of these chunks of ecclesiastical
cholesterol is the assumption that we start with the church. That's a bad
place to start. Better to end with the church than to start with it. So let's
'finish' with the church, with the self-indulgence, theological apathy; bloated
sense of our own importance; delusions of relevance – and instead let us
start with something else.
Let us love one another.
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