At the ABC News Religion & Ethics blog, Stanley Hauerwas, Bruce Kaye and Allison Milbank reflect on the parish church:
THE PLACE OF THE CHURCH: LOCALITY AND CATHOLICITY
By Stanley Hauerwas in Religion & Ethics
The rhetoric of Constantinianism and anti-Constantinianism – with which I am often associated – can be quite misleading just to the extent that it can suggest a far too clear alternative.
John Howard Yoder sometimes sounded as if the choice between those alternatives was and is clear. In fact, however, he recognized that even when Rome made Christianity the only legal faith of the Empire there were faithful forms of life that continued to shape the life of the church. Indeed, Yoder observes:
“The medieval church remained largely pacifist. The peace concern of the medieval church was institutionalized by the designation of holy times and places, which were to be completely exempt from the pressure of war.”
Yoder understood well, therefore, that you do not free yourself of Constinianism by becoming anti-Constantinian. For him the alternative to Constantinianism was not anti-Constantinianism, but locality and place. According to Yoder, locality and place are the forms of communal life necessary to express the particularity of Jesus through the visibility of the church. Only at the local level is the church able to engage in the discernment necessary to be prophetic.
DOES FRESH EXPRESSIONS MISREPRESENT THE GOSPEL?
By Bruce Kaye in ABC Religion & Ethics
A new movement is sweeping through the Church of England called Fresh Expressions. It began in the early years of this century and took shape in a report presented to the General Synod of the Church of England in 2004. That report proved to be the most popular Senate report in decades having sold 18,000 copies in the six months after it was published.
A new department has been established in the Church of England called Fresh Expressions to be headed by a theologian, Dr Steven Croft. In the words of the report, Fresh Expressions aims to enable new forms of church to be established:
“It is a way of describing the planting of new congregations or churches which are different in ethos and style from the church which planted them; because they are designed to reach a different group of people than those already attending the original church. There is no single model to copy but a wide variety of approaches for a wide variety of contexts and constituencies. The emphasis is on planting something which is appropriate to its context, rather than cloning something which works elsewhere.”
All of this is a dramatic change from the traditional parish structure of the Church of England. For centuries in England the parish has been the basic unit for social and church life. Even with the coming of the Industrial Revolution and the migration of populations to the cities, parishes and parish churches remained central to the understanding of the Church of England.
WHY THE PARISH STILL MATTERS
By Alison Milbank in ABC Religion & Ethics
The Anglican Church in Australia, just like the Church of England, has been experimenting with what is called a “mixed economy” of Church.
In an attempt to reach out to the unchurched, they have developed not only outreach work in networks, cafes and clubs but what are called “fresh expressions” of Church, in which the cafe or book club is an independent worshipping community, without any relation to the parish in which it is based.
The marketing terminology of “fresh” is deliberate: this is a mode of evangelism that assumes the secularism and consumerism of market capitalism as a given, and seeks to work with it. In Australia, as well as in the UK, the parish system is being seen as belonging to “inherited church,” and an irrelevance.
In For the Parish, Andrew Davidson and I do not attack the outreach but the philosophy of “Fresh Expressions.” Using Wittgenstein, we argue that form and content of faith are not so easily separated. In seeking this separation, the language and identity that forms us communally is quite lost because the meaning lies in the practices and not beneath them.
How we worship and work together as a church is, indeed, the expression of what we believe – the traditional lex orandi, lex credendi has always been what unites Anglicans.