Church: God's Polycentric Experimental Community

This is a new ecclesiology unit at Pilgrim Theological College. I'll be co-teaching it with John  Flett in first semester. It adopts a new approach to the scholarly discussion and exploration of the church. 

This is the formal description of the unit's content:

This unit explores the roots of the Christian community in the messianic ministry of the crucified and risen Jesus Christ and the sending of the Spirit. It highlights the diverse embodiments of the church found in the New Testament and presents them as evidence of the ferment and de facto experimentation which characterised the formation and self-understandings of early Christianity. The ecclesiologies built around the classic marks of the church will be surveyed, but this survey will demonstrate that such ecclesiologies often obscure the experimentation which properly belongs to reflections on the Christian community. The Reformation's disruption of the Western church, the modern missionary and ecumenical movements, the emergence of the 'global church,' and ecclesiastical scandals and corruption all provide the background to the contemporary recognition of ecclesiological ferment and recent discussions about the polycentricity of Christianity. This ferment will be framed Christologically and pneumatologically in ways that provide theological foundations for experimental reflection on the church's mission, structures, and sacramental practices. The unit will include some focus on the relevance of these issues to the vocation of the Uniting Church in Australia.

Why the framing ideas of experiment and polycentricity?

The notion of the church as an experiment is a theme that runs through Mike Higton's recent book, The Life of Christian Doctrine (T&T Clark, 2020). He writes this at one point:

With all its division, and in all its diversity the Christian church is being beckoned by the Spirit into the discovery of God’s abundant gift in Jesus Christ. Its life is a collection of experiments in which the abundant love of God is explored and embodied (p.203).

To think of the church's diverse life as a "collection of experiments" in the exploration and embodiment of the love of God incarnate in Jesus Christ provides a new language and conceptuality to study the church. 

The notion of a polycentric church is taken from the discipline of 'World Christianity' (arguably a better term than 'global church') where it is used to resist received ideas of Christianity being controlled from established  institutional, geographical and cultural centres. As John Flett suggests in his book Apostolicity (IVP, 2016), this shift is a long-delayed recognition of what happened at the Jerusalem Council:

Theorists of world Christianity...affirm that God works in and through history and that the Holy Spirit structures the church [anew]. These theological axioms guided the decision of the Jerusalem Council and stimulated the non-territorial pluriformity and polycentricity basic to the Christian faith (p.285). 

This does not mean that the church has no norms. It means, instead, that the church's norm lies outside of itself. As Flett also says: 

Apostolicity means that the church does not possess its own identity. The church finds this identity in the history of Jesus Christ. This is the possibility of historical continuity, for it is the continuity of the resurrected Jesus Christ and his abundance through which every history is redeemed. Because it is the history of Jesus Christ, it takes the form of participation in his being sent to and for the world and thus the integration of multiple histories into his and only so by the testimony of the Spirit (p.328).

Within this framework, therefore, students who study this unit won't merely be introduced to official ecclesiologies or be presented with a "how to" ecclesiology. Rather, they will be invited to develop an imagination to foster their own contribution to, and leadership in, experimenting with the church. The first step in developing this imagination is to see that it is not possible to think about the church without first thinking about the "history of Jesus Christ"  and the "testimony of the Spirit." There can be no ecclesiology without Christology and pneumatology. Learning to think about the church in this theological triangle will be the challenge and opportunity of this unit.

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Lectures will be on Thursday mornings at Pilgrim. It is mutli-coded, being available for credit in Christian Thought (CT), Missiology (DM), and Mission and Ministry (DA). You can enrol in either the face-to-face or online synchonous cohorts. The unit can also be audited.

Check out the official unit descriptions, course content, reading lists and assessments at these links:

• Undergraduate Face-to-Face:  CT; DA; DM;
• Undergradute online synchronous: CT; DA; DM;
• Post-graduate Face-to-Face: CT; DA; DM;
• Post-graduate online synchronous: CT; DA; DM;

For enrolment information contact Pilgrim's registrar at study@pilgrim.edu.au 

(I've written here about the other unit I'm teaching this semester: Christianty's Big Ideas.)

Canada, China, Church: An Observer's Observations

Two weeks ago I had the privilege of being an 'observer' at a forum between the China Christian Council and the United Church of Canada.  It was held at the Nanjing Union Theological Seminary. My presence there was part of growing partnership between the CCC and the Uniting Church in Australia. We had held a similar joint forum with the CCC in 2013 and hope another one might eventuate in the near future.

Here are a few highlights and learnings:

• Since I had a gap in my diary, I arrived at the Seminary a few days in advance of the conference. This gave me the chance to work in the library as well as to have conversations with staff and students as opportunities arose. As I've reported in blogs following previous visits, the Seminary is the focus of a very different world of theological education than ours in Australia: 350 residential students, nearly all of whom are under 30, some straight out of school. Within a few years, all these students will be pastors in churches with 100s and even 1000s of members. Still, even this number of students - together with the smaller numbers at the regional seminaries - it is going to take a while to change the present ratio of 1 theologically-trained ordained minster: 18,000 Protestant Christians. The enthusiasm and dedication of both students and faculty is exemplary and inspiring. A cohort of about 25 graduate students sat in on the conference for its duration and often asked very probing questions.
• The Canadian delegation was made up of 22 people, including the Assembly Moderator, the General Secretary, and a range of other leaders and members; the delegation also reflected the cultural and ethnic diversity of the UCC. An indigenous elder among the delegation opened the Canadian presentation with an indigenous ritual used when starting communication with new friends. It also included a retired UCC theologian who had spent 2002-2007 teaching at the seminary. He was warmly welcomed back to Nanjing.
• Listening in to the various presentations and the interactions which they produced,  I was struck at how often the conversations replayed the dialogue the UCA and CCC had undertaken in 2013. It didn't take long for questions such as these to emerge: How is the unity of the church articulated theologically? What is the relationship between gospel and culture? What are the demands and opportunities of being
  
  post-denominational and post-Christendom churches in both China and Canada? How does the church co-operate with the state in the provision of community services (a new possibility for the Chinese church which was prevented from doing so until 2011). I think that united and uniting churches work, at least implicitly, with ecclesiologies that are not easily mapped on to the ecclesiologies of Christendom. I think that in exploring these questions the UCA, the CCC and UCC are fellow-travellers.
  
  
• For me a real highlight among the presentations was a paper, "Gospel and Culture: A Chinese Christian's Understanding" by Rev Dr Yongtao Chen from the Nanjing faculty. It was a very illuminating perspective from within the Chinese context of how Christianity appropriates elements of Chinese culture and what it is that Chinese Christianity can contribute to Chinese culture. He offered a very interesting reading of Jesus' encounter with the Samaritan woman in John 4 as a paradigm for the encounter between Jesus and another culture. A fuller version of Dr.  Chen's paper is available in Christianity and Chinese Culture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010) edited by Mikka Ruokanen and Paulos Huang.  
• Both before and during the visit I took the opportunity to delve more than I have in the past into the truly vast and rapidly expanding body of contemporary scholarly writing on Chinese Christianity. I would simply mention the following as a fairly random sample of the literature which I myself have only skimmed and which others might also find helpful:

Daniel H. Bays, A New History of Christianity in China (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012)

Jason Kindopp and Caroll Lee Hamrin, God and Caesar in China: Policy Implications of Church-State Tension (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution 2004).

Justin Tan,  "Chinese Protestant Christianity" in The Church in China (Adelaide: ATF Theology, 2010) 83-120.

Yang Huilin, China Christianity and the Question of Culture  (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014). 

Gloria S. Tseng, "Revival Preaching and the Indigenization of Christianity in  Republican China", International Bulletin of Missionary Research 39 (2014): 177-182. 

Alan Hunter and Kim Kwong Chan, Protestantism in Contemporary China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) 

Several themes emerges from even a rapid engagement with these works: the sheer complexity of the history (ancient and recent) of Christianity in China; the immense diversity of Christianity in China, a diversity which extends from the impact of contemporary Pentecostalism to alliances between Christianity and folk religion; and the challenges of being the Christian community in a one-party state (a challenge which is not reducible to the status respectively held by the registered and unregistered churches); and the need for Westerners to recognise that 'state' oversight of religious activities has been part of Chinese culture and society for over a millennium. I would also draw particular attention to the work by Yang Huilin mentioned above. Huilin is a leading Chinese academic, presently the Vice-President of Renmin University in Beijing. Huilin is among a group of Chinese intellectuals - only some of whom are Christian - who engage with Christian theology as an intellectual discipline in its own right. In this particular book Huilin engages Christian ethics, the place of theology in the humanities, Zizek's post-secular appropriation of Christianity, and even a chapter on Scriptural Reasoning, as tools for dialogue between China and the West. Whilst I understand there is some ambivalence from the church theologians towards this enterprise, it is fascinating - and perhaps salutary- that intellectuals outside the church find Christian ideas interesting precisely as ideas which have contributions to make to the welfare of Chinese culture.

Once again, I returned from a visit to China deeply grateful for the opportunity to be exposed to this growing church, and on this occasion also to learn about another united/uniting church, i.e., the United Church of Canada. The blog which the UCC delegation produced throughout its visit can be found here. I'm grateful to both delegations for letting me eavesdrop on their conversation.

Basis of Union Conference, 2014: Part 1

Last weekend, the Assembly Doctrine Working Group, Uniting Mission and Education, and the United Theological College jointly hosted a conference on the Uniting Church's Basis of Union. The theme was Basis of Union: Catalyst for Renewal. This followed an earlier conference on the Basis in Melbourne in 2010. This second conference drew around 80 participants over the weekend. The keynote address was given by the leading scholar of the Basis, Andrew Dutney, who is also the current President of the UCA. You can read his address here.

The range of topics and the various approaches taken can be checked out in the conference brochure.  Some highlights for me included hearing the new Preamble of the UCA's Constitution read by an indigenous person, the appropriation of the Basis by a panel of UCA Young Adults, the input of theologians from the Nanjing Theological Seminary, and Bec Lindsay's engagement between the Basis, Deuteronomy and the churches of South-East Sydney.

Over the next week I'll post some brief reflections on three specific issues raised at the conference and which I've been pondering since. These three issues are: the relationship of the first 13 paragraphs of the Basis to the last 5 paragraphs; the place of the triune understanding of God in the Basis; and the question, 'Whose document is it?'

In my own paper I focused on Paragraph 4, specifically its reminder that we are "called to be disciples of a crucified Lord, and to enter into the fellowship of Christ's suffering". I argued that the appropriation of the discourse of discipleship, so understood, could help us resist moralism, triumphalism and nostalgia. On that basis I suggested that this fourth paragraph could feed into the post-Christendom and post-denominationalist calling of the UCA. (My presentation included a project I've been working on with the Young Adults from the local congregation of which I'm a member. They offered themselves as first time readers of the Basis. Their filmed responses were interesting, diverse and challenging, and injected a form of engagement with the Basis which was well-worth hearing.)

I also emphasised the reference in Paragraph 4 to the claim that "in his own strange way, Christ constitutes, rules and renews [his disciples] as his Church". The priority of Christology over Ecclesiology evident in this paragraph continues the same Christological priority articulated in Paragraph 3, the paragraph described by D'Arcy Wood as 'the basis of the Basis'.

The question was raised in the discussion after my paper as to whether the Christological priority of these paragraphs really do condition the theology of ministry and government in Paragraphs 14 and 15. Are those later paragraphs as open to renewal as the core, intentionally controlling paragraphs would mandate them to be? This question was reinforced in the final plenary session when it was asked, 'What if the Basis had simply stopped at Paragraph 13?' Behind these questions lies a concern - widely articulated - that the paragraphs on ministry and government have made the UCA less flexible, more structure-bound, and less mission-oriented than it was meant to be.

We can only speculate about the possible consequences of the Basis finishing at Paragraph 13. We can, however, engage in a much more concrete discussion about the earlier question: Are Paragraphs 14 and 15 really controlled by the normative Paragraph 3? Or, despite the framers' claims to the contrary, are these later paragraphs the place where a bit of 'ecclesiastical carpentry' does actually come to the surface?

For what it's worth, what follows is simply some unpacking of the presenting question with a few observations and/or questions of my own, and in no particular order.

• Paragraph 14 is not without its note of renewal and openness to reform. This is most explicit in the reference to the renewal of the diaconate. It is also present, if a little less transparently, in the acknowledgement of the 'reconsideration of traditional forms of ministry'. 
• The note of renewal and openness to reform is harder to find in Paragraph 15. Nevertheless, the duty of the councils so mandated is to ensure that the "whole body of believers may be united by mutual submission in the service of the Gospel". Any given council of the church can be called to account by this criterion on the authority of this paragraph itself.
• If these paragraphs have stifled the church's capacity for flexibility (on which see below) is that less because of their content per se and more because of the way they have been received and appropriated? Is it here that the Uniting Church hears the strongest echoes and/or remnants of the language and structures of the predecessor churches that they have become the locus of attempts to resolve matters unresolved at union? And if this is so, might it be that the tensions around this will pass the more distant we are from union?
• How inflexible is the Uniting Church anyway? Attention was drawn in the final plenary session to just how diverse the UCA is and how many different trajectories and diverse forms of ministry it has pursued since union. Is this because of or despite the Basis of Union?
• To what extent are the various demands for extra flexibility a summons to gospel-faithfulness and to what extent are they driven by an anti-institutionalism? I'm not suggesting that the latter can't be a tool for the former. But anti-institutionalism is not a self-evident virtue, even if it is deeply embedded in Australian culture and society. Interestingly, the reference to the post-denominational calling of the UCA in my own paper was heard by various people - approvingly by some and not so by others - as a critique of our institutions. This was certainly not my intent. And the call to renewal in the Basis should not be set against the church's institutional dimensions. The call to renewal of church order and law in the Basis is call to the constant reform of government and law, not their elimination.
• Perhaps the trickiest issue to address here is that of the impact on our readings of these paragraphs, especially Paragraph 14 and its reference to ordination, of our ecumenical commitment and impulse. This issue was also raised in the conference plenary. Paragraph 14 can produce quite different resonances when read through the filter of Paragraphs 1 and 2 than when it is read through the filter of Paragraph 3. This is a big question, and one that requires more than a dot point in response. I hope to publish some posts on this question from various interested parties in due course.

So, the question of the Christological core of the Basis is not a stand-alone question. It unpacks into a range of more specific questions, none of which, in my view, can be answered terribly easily.

The next post will be about the way the question of the  Trinity surfaced at the conference, not least through prompts from our Chinese visitors.