Christ in the strangers guise - some thoughts.

When staying with the Iona community on the wonderful island of Iona the service on the first evening is one of welcome and often incorporates the words.....

We saw a stranger yesterday
We put food in the eating place
Drink in the drinking place,
Music in the listening place
and, with the sacred name of the triune God
He blessed us and our house,
Our cattle and our dear ones.

As the lark says in her song
Often, often, often, goes the Christ in the strangers guise.

(Iona Worship Book)

These words over the years have increasingly meant a lot to me. A constant challenge to my preconceived ideas. A prod not to judge people when I meet them by what they look like or how they behave, and thats a tough one. Oh how I long to have that gracious acceptance of others working out from a belief that in this individual I am encountering Jesus. This continues to be a life times work. 

My involvement with the Iona community has been one of the most important influences on my life of faith. I grew up in the Methodist Church at a time when on the surface it appeared healthy and vibrant, well we did have the largest youth organisation in Europe at one time. Looking back it seems to me, to some extent, the Methodist church was in the business of telling the world it had the answers, or followed a pattern of life from another era when its influence was greater not noticing things had changed. So the church felt it should keep repeating the pattern of the past even though the results were not there. I'm not sure the church as a body took seriously the need to rediscover the ever changing contexts it found itself in. That is not to dismiss some amazing life changing work it undertook, for there were always individuals and churches that sought to engage with the world as it was, not as it had been. Without this later engagement its slow demise would have happened at a faster pace.

What has always struck me about the Iona Community is the over arching driver  to engage with the context. Find out what people were doing, learn from them, and yes ask in what way could the church assist. It is of course time consuming to do that and means it will be different in every place. I can only confirm that having served as a minister in four very different geographical, economic and political areas, while there are some similarities they are uniquely different. Every local church community is different because of its own history, let alone the communities they are set within.

The other week I was handed a small booklet to read. I read it and re-read it making notes and I'm not even working!!!  Reflecting upon it and then chatting to its author has meant lots of thoughts have been triggered not least around discerning where Jesus is to be found. 

I am having to learn in a new situation what the context is in which I find myself. Part of my new context is my changed role within it. The booklet speaks of what lens we look through and I guess my lens has changed. Being now a 'supernumerary minister', in other words one who is no longer itinerant, I am in a new relationship with both church and the community in which I live. I see myself as retired even if the Methodist church sees this as a new phase of being an ordained minister. I see the situation as being one where I am discerning what it means to be a follower of Jesus afresh. I have found it refreshingly easy to let go of all the stuff I busied myself with. It's great to be anonymous while at the same time beginning to make new friendships. But my lens is being retired and being a disciple of Jesus, what does that look like for me?

In terms of the church I find myself part of an anglican congregation in a parish regarded as one of the least deprived in the country. This contrasts with having been the minister only eight months ago of an LEP  parish church in one of the most deprived parishes in the country. From a place where the population was mostly under 45 to one where 50% are 45 and over. Now in a community that is 94% white while before it was 34 %, 72% christian compared to 30%. It is quite a contrast. It's going to take some digging into the local data and lots of conversations to gain both an overview as well as a detailed understanding. Hopefully I will be able to tease out what God is doing in the wider community and join in. 

What of course does not change is the need to appreciate that on meeting people I may well be meeting 'Christ in the stranger guise'. 

Being in a new relationship with the 'church' I am struck afresh by the need to remember that the church is not the Kingdom of God. 

When you are caught up in church life it does tend to absorb all your energy and blurs the edges so you can be forgiven in thinking that the church is the Kingdom. This key difference matters because we need to be on the outlook for signs of the Kingdom to see where God is at work. To undertake the mission entrusted to us by Jesus we need to hold onto what those signs look like. 

When I was involved with others in bringing eight methodist circuits into one in Sheffield we spent a lot of time teasing out signs of the kingdom. We did so with an understanding that God's Kingdom turns things upside down. Jesus did a lot of disturbing and looking back at my ministry I see moments of  disturbance as very uncomfortable but without it no change would have occurred. Perhaps another reason why I like the Wild Goose as the symbol of the Iona Community and of course a symbol of the Holy Spirit, the one who disturbs. 

I guess looking at signs of the Kingdom was a way of trying to get people to look at their various contexts through the Lens of the Kingdom and it was uncomfortable. To do so would mean engaging with people of faith and no faith. It meant taking risks. It would mean a true sense of justice informing decision making and that might mean sharing resources in a way that gave a bias to the poorer parts of the City. The fact that at the outset of the process to becoming one the majority of paid ministry was to be found in one  area of the city in a disproportionate way,  highlighted the lack of justice. We produced lots of paperwork sharing the gathered understanding of signs of the Kingdom.

While the eight did become one I don't think we managed to shift the way many people looked at their context. Still they assumed you could repeat failed patterns and get a different outcome. Disappointingly there was not a willingness to share the resources in a just manner. So where paid ministry is continues to reflect the bias towards the relatively wealthy and larger congregations. I can't help but feel that the congregations essentially wanted to keep doing the same things or employ someone to come in and fix things for them while resisting what was proposed. So a crisis exists and folk cannot agree what to do. In effect people have become paralysed by the crisis they find themselves in. So rearranging the deckchairs on the titanic springs to mind when I now hear what is taking place.

As for me I'm looking hard through my lens and await the joy of being surprised by meeting Christ in the strangers guise, I just hope I have eyes to see and ears to hear. Plus the courage still to be disturbed as well as to disturb.