Hospitality and Community after Christendom by Francis Andrew;

Author:Francis, Andrew;
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
ISBN: 3116656
Publisher: Authentic Media
Published: 2012-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Journey Continues

This chapter’s sections are three predominantly autobiographical strands. Alongside Emmanuel URC (in Chapter 3), they provide concrete examples of developing practices of hospitality and community in differing ways, gathered over thirty-plus years. They are not simply discussion options at a mission conference. For most, the journey continues.

Today, the Hull houses with the yellow doors and the big fish in the windows are gone – sold. Our lives evolve. If we are not to ossify, our faith communities need to evolve too. For some, the heat in their kitchen becomes too much. For others, the heat cooks up something new and different. Each narrative strand’s example has been worked out ‘on the hoof’ – as their journeys progressed. My life and many others were changed by the community behind those yellow doors. But every meal and each encounter with each of these faith initiatives was life-changing.

The diversity of all these activities, communities and projects emphasized principles which I had first seen and heard about during teenage visits to the Taizé and Iona communities. I recognize that discipleship is teaching similar lessons across Britain, to those previously declared in rural Burgundy and Hebridean Iona as well as in the New Testament and radical church history.

I have been privileged to hear the founding prior of Taizé, Brother Roger, teach that today’s church must always respect the ‘dynamic of the provisional’; he later used this as the title of some of his diary entries. With equal clarity, I have heard the modern Iona Community’s founder, the Revd Dr George McLeod, preach about discovering new ways of living Jesus’ ministry now – without being tied to the institutional church. Both these visionary men came from orthodox Reformed churches yet spoke with the prophetic voice of the Radical Reformers.

In developing home-based churches, Banks identified ‘four factors that are an integral part of a new home church: a solid foundation, a basic commitment, a framework of belief and a pastoral centre’.16 The experience of the UK emerging churches now, as they are beginning to establish themselves, all have the four factors; whether they openly declare them or identify them similarly is irrelevant. All the Pilgrim groups, which I started or have had an involvement with, also had those same four factors. The development of the Ashram, Iona and Taizé communities during the second half of last century shared those four principles. They are essential to other communities – dispersed or residential – too.

Pressures and stresses do arise. How we meet them and/or deal with them will determine the survival and growth of whatever group, home church or community we are part of. Crises occur – whether in human relationships or from external factors. Bonhoeffer wrote, ‘A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community.’17 Just as we are prepared to plant, we must be prepared to let failing initiatives die.

‘True community only develops as we learn to face the reality of our differences and work through them together .

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.