The Faith of the English by Nigel Rooms

Author:Nigel Rooms
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SPCK

5

English inculturation – face to face and eye to eye?

At the outset I want to emphasize that this chapter is only a beginning of the exploration of the integration of ‘Christ and culture’ in England today. In Chapter 1 we discovered how inculturation is a process and not an end-point and in Chapter 2 how England itself is a fluid idea. The main body of this chapter reports on the findings of the participants when the adult learning course associated with this book was run several times in different locations. But first let me remind you of how we got here and the purpose of this journey of discovery.

We explored in Chapter 1 the importance of the incarnation to the Christian faith – ‘the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us’ (John 1.14, NIV). The Church therefore forgets to engage with culture at its absolute peril. Perhaps the rise of groups like the English Defence League is partly due to the Church’s lack of engagement with cultural questions in this period after Christendom. The relationship between faith and culture is a two-way street characterized by Walls’ indigenizing and pilgrim principles. Faith is not so much about assenting to some core irreducible truths; rather it embodies and lives those truths within a culture. Culture is therefore holy ground, and to be taken seriously as a source of revelation. We can expect to find ways in which the gospel both resonates with and challenges English culture. As we do that we will discover how the English, and particularly the English Christian, can become more human and more free – we want to further humanity among the English.

So we now move from the description of English culture to some measure of prescription about it. A proper evaluation needs to take place and the initial results from the course presented in this chapter will help us to do that. One of the advantages of the way the course is run is that most of the material generated is recorded on flip-chart pads and can be kept, written up and reflected upon later. The course has been run by me, the author, and in order to prove that it wasn’t solely dependent on me it has also been run by someone else using only the explanatory manual for the facilitator. I am very grateful to all the participants who took part in the pilot programmes and who generated the material presented in this chapter. While I believe sufficient ‘data’ has been generated by these initial courses to present a full picture (they were run in both urban and rural contexts), I hope that the course will be delivered many more times in the future; that is why this is simply a beginning of English inculturation work.

I shall first present the course participants’ findings, derived from their imaginative theological ‘play’ both in the English metaphorical worlds created by the six sayings and in the worlds from the Bible or the tradition that were placed alongside them during each session.

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