Tag Archives: good news

WHAT’S GOOD NEWS?

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I’M OFF TO A DAY CONFERENCE on “Catholic Evangelism” tomorrow. I’m not wholly sure whether it’s going to be about Catholic Evangelism (capital C, capital E) or catholic evangelism (small c, small e), and I’m rather hoping for the latter … hoping, that is to say, for a catholic evangelism that really is about good news (evangelism) universally applied (catholic), ie, for everybody – no matter their “faith tradition” or lack thereof – everywhere.

I’ve spent a very great deal of my life passionately pondering what exactly constitutes good news, and in particular why having some sort of acknowledged relationship to / with the Source of our lives might matter – to individuals, to communities, to nations, to our world, to the whole created order – some of these whole and healthy, some desperately broken, hurting, and in need of that Divine touch that brings healing. And I’m consistently finding that old definitions of what it means to be Catholic, or Protestant, or Christian, or shades in between all of these, don’t fit all sizes any more, if they ever did.

Christ everywhere …

What constitutes Good News in a ‘catholic’, pluralistic world? Where is an / our anointed Christ to be found? (as I’m sure such a Christ is indeed to be found, anywhere in the world, and across the world’s faith traditions). And the questions are so important to me because as a Christian priest, seeking always to live and learn – to be a disciple – after the pattern of Jesus of Nazareth, I have observed that some kinds of Catholic, some kinds of Protestant, and some kinds of “Christian” plainly do not represent very good news for many people at all. So catholic evangelism must be something quite different, something much more open, something prepared always to be held to account as to the reach of what it purports to be good news. Catholic evangelism will not, I think, be too prescriptive.

Feast of life for all

Catholic evangelism will offer the “feast of life” to people in the “highways and byways” won’t it? Catholic evangelists, personal and corporate, will have dismantled their drawbridges. Catholic evangelism will be less concerned (although not wholly unconcerned) with the Faith of our Fathers and hugely more concerned with Faith Being Received Today. When I’ve asked adults over the past thirty years whether they’d like to come to confirmation classes, so that they can be presented to the bishop, confirmed, and thereafter receive Holy Communion many have politely declined. When I’ve offered the Sacrament of Holy Communion “no questions asked” it has been the case, more frequently than I can count, that the recipient has ended up doing the asking, seeking to confirm a present and acknowledged reality – satisfied hunger – in their lives.

Let’s explore!

And I remember that Jesus was ever ready to go the extra mile for children, too. “Do not try to stop them for the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these”. Catholic evangelists will work hard at becoming more, well … catholic – so that they’re more plainly seen to be, well … “Christian” or “Anointed”. Catholic evangelists will be interested in marginalised multi-tasking-capable women, tax collectors, prodigal sons, unimaginative but very opinionated men, quieter and more imaginative men, too, and in lost sheep. Catholic evangelism won’t chastise the lost sheep for having left the fold in order to “explore”, still less tell the poor creature that God forbids it. Instead truly catholic evangelists (like Jesus of Nazareth) will make the fold larger so that there’s the space for MORE sheep to engage in the business of exploration, to engage, that is to say, in their God-given Life!

The Sound of Silence

One of the biggest growth areas in our parish (liberal Catholic with blurry edges – a bit like my paintings!) – has been a call to shared and silent meditation in the parish church – arriving and departing in companionable silence. No coffee or handing out electoral roll forms afterwards. And numbers in excess of many a church’s entire Sunday congregation have responded to a call – we believe a Divine call – to dwell for a space, together in the “house for the Church”, to wait upon the Word that touches life in silence. (The Word – not words. There’s not “even” a Bible reading). It’s life-changing, say many participants. It’s the only occasion in my month when I’m really and deeply aware of the heartbeat of God, the pulse of life, say others. This silence, this “that’s not very Catholic” but absolutely catholic encounter is breathing into our common life new elements of what it means to bear good news in our lives today, what it means, first and foremost to BE the Body of Christ now on earth, what it means to be religious in the original sense of the word (religare) – reconnected, re-membered. Restored to what we’ve forgotten.

Old assumptions yield

So whether tomorrow proves to be slanted more to Catholic Evangelism, or to catholic evangelism, I hope we’ll be asking the same question – What is Good News? – at least sometimes. Because, remembering Louis MacNeice’s Mutations again:

… old assumptions yield to new sensations.
The Stranger in the Wings is waiting for his cue.
The fuse is always laid to some annunciation …

BEYOND OURSELVES …

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NICK BAINES, the Bishop of Bradford, writing of events in the UK “from a distance” is one of those contemporary “seers” who speaks with the voice of sanity and reason.

… It is no good to condemn what has gone wrong unless we can offer a realistic alternative that makes sense of the world, of our own experience, and links us to a greater community of human lives. Whichever narrative this might be, it will require … a text that takes us beyond ourselves. In short, I believe … that we need to recover the Bible – not as an incontrovertible text of rules for keeping God happy and us in our place, but as a text to be taken seriously for intellectual curiosity, engagement, argument, imagination, poetic resonance, prophetic power: to offer a narrative in and against which the world might best be understood and lived.

And it needs to have big room for failure.

Condemnation, whoever’s being condemned, is not a fruitful exercise in the context of city centre fires, violence and looting that frighten the daylights out of ordinary, good living people.

Bishop Nick’s right … we need a text, a narrative that really IS good news for all people (as opposed to being just called “good news” whether the soundbite’s proffered by religious rep or politican); we need whatever form of encouragement is required to “take us beyond ourselves”; we need modern day prophets – or “seers”. Nick’s approach to the Bible is generous enough (not “an incontrovertible text”) to include all-comers in dialogue and discovery. Church and State alike must do away with tired and dangerous fundamentalisms and recognise that the narrative of humankind (and health and hope and peace) belongs to and must be shaped by all of us.

But the world is made up of individual persons too, not just of religious institutions and states. And we as individuals need something to tempt us away from our personal addictions – ranging from unthinking devotion to anything at all that’s on the always-on radio or telly to as much dependence on anti-depressants as upon water. Thank God for someone who’s willing to speak up for a society in which “intellectual curiosity, engagement, argument, imagination, poetic resonance, prophetic power” underwent something of a revival!

Whether we’re looking aghast at petrol bomb fires in our city-centres or the fires of hunger and thirst in Somalia tonight – may we be the more ready to be taken “beyond ourselves” than to add to already overheated (and therefore pretty much useless), addictive condemnation.

ARK BUILDING

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Once in a thousand year floods in Cumbria: November 2009

BLOGGING JUST FLOWS SOMETIMES. At other times it’s floods of words that overwhelm. It’s as well that God, the Word we know in Jesus, is content to keep silence alongside us.  It’s the silence, sometimes, that assures us of the presence of a saviour. It’s in the silent spaces in our worship here that I most fully sense a redeemer.

And – God help us – we need a saviour. We need redeeming. So much of the Church’s conversation in recent months has embarrassed me. Who’s in and who’s out? Who’ll “stay” and who’ll “go”? “Who is on the Lord’s side?” – and who’s not. When may we turn a blind eye to persecution and when not.

I know I’m not alone in having wondered whether anyone in the Church reckons to take gospel – good news – seriously anymore? In the contemporary Church it’s all too easy to find oneself marooned on an island in the midst of an ocean of cruel words. Where’s the gospel to be seen and heard? Where’s the good news for all humankind?

Jesus spoke and still speaks of good news for everyone: whatever the colour of their skin, or the name of their place of birth. Male, female, straight or gay. From East and West, from North and South, people matter before all else to Jesus. His religious certainties were bound up, every one of them, in the confident proclamation that God’s love must prevail.

What will help to grow God’s kingdom of peace? Running dangerously close to adopting mere modern management language our parish and diocese are currently engaged in a process called Growth Action Planning - or GAP for short. Other parishes and other dioceses are engaged in similar exercises that they’re calling Mission Action Planning – or MAP.

GAP or MAP amount to the same thing. Where’s the gap between what we are and what we’re called to be,  and is there a map that’ll show us the way out of the ecclesiastical impasse the Church at home and abroad seems currently to be embedded in. God lives in his people, in the whole of Creation.

How might we clear the way in order that we may the more readily recognise divine presence in one another? How may we engage in the kind of Growth Action Planning that Jesus led the way in amongst his contemporaries on earth 2000 years ago? How may we “give God worth” (worship) in one another instead of being an embarrassment – perpetually washing dirty linen before a by now largely uninterested public?

Oddly, and not for the first time, the gap is seen to be closing in parts of Cumbria this week. There’s not much talk in Workington or in Cockermouth today about “the gay debate” or women’s ordination. Not much talk about getting “bums on pews” or the rights and wrongs of a million religious views. But there is something of a Communion to be celebrated. Food and drink – “bread and wine” are being shared by and amongst a people whose priorities have been changed.

Christmas shopping has given way to clean-up operations. Who’s in and who’s out are non-issues. Flooded by words as well as by water there’s a sense of the fragility of human life. The Christmas Tree stands battered and without lights. Modern day Noah stands battered but illuminated from within. In a police officer’s life given up for the lives of others, in the fearful bravery and selflessness of dozens and dozens of “ordinary” human redeemers, olive branches are brought home to the ark builders.

Ways will be found to rebuild bridges … and in more ways and in more times and places than just one. Here is Love. Here is gospel. Here are redeemers. Here are people BEING what Jesus Christ inspired his disciples to be. Mind the GAP. Dangerous gaps are to be found wherever we question “who’s in and who’s out”, wherever we’re too quick to denounce the lives of others as “the work of Satan”.

If there’s not room in the loving embrace of God for all of us there’s no room in the divine embrace for any of us. As it is, by divine providence, any who need to eat of bread or to drink from a cup, any, that is to say who are alive and human in this world, have access to Communion. That’s God’s answer. That’s God’s Growth Action Planning … something plainly recognisable in many faith traditions. Something plainly recognisable in the marvellous and extraordinary gift of human life generally. And it closes the gap.