By Eric Bray

Three articles from Eric Bray a former minister of the Chapel. These articles were originally printed in Christward some ten years ago at the start of the Millennium and when we were searching then for a new minister. I think they are very relevant to our current discussions and I am grateful to Eric for allowing me to reprint them.

A Church worth fighting to get into.

Face up to it. What will the quality of our faith and life have to be like if we are to be a Christian in this new Millenium? How much do numbers matter? As Baptists we have a history of standing in two camps, the one evangelical and the other Calvinist.

We have always had a temptation to Calvin's natural elitism - "we are the sweet selected few" How can we make sure we are not like that without making our demand slight and our faith shallow? Rigorous habits of thought and belief can be open to the widest circle of people surely.

I believe we can only achieve this by conducting our entire life together as openly as possible completely respectful of everyone, demonstrating mutual acceptance vigorously. I give you a text. "A what", they cry. "A TEXT!", he says. After all this is once in a thousand years.

ACCEPT ONE ANOTHER AS GOD IN CHRIST HAS ACCEPTED YOU.

Questions of life-style, education, culture, even morals can be worked out together afterwards when the fundamental thing is straight. Read the New Testament letters and see that that is how they did it. Black, White, Roman, Greek, Jew, Gentile, women and men, slave and free. They lived in our kind of society, multi faith and multi cultural. People entered the church from the political establishment and from the underclass, from the educated who could recite the classic poets and from the illiterate, from the strict moral code of Judaism and from the gutters of Corinth where they hadn't yet chanced on the idea that stealing was of doubtful social acceptance.

The world begins the Third Millennium fragmenting as it globalises. I suspect that in this world much depends on groups of people who are dissimilar holding together in a wider acceptance - this is the traditional, orthodox belief of the church. It is a kind of fundamentalism if you like. All one in Christ Jesus. Around us those who know all the answers join together in groups of like minded people. Let it be so but don't let them pretend that smearing a little popular culture over this comfortable and exclusive fashionable Christianity makes their faith truly accessible and their "success" is God's approval.

What if the two or three gathered together are not the cosy sympathetic group of the preacher's imagination, huddled against a hard world, defensive yet scornful of those beyond? What if they are two or three who have little in common, scarcely understand each other's lives, and in normal circumstances couldn't stand each other but in faith and hope are bound together to resist by one who promised to be in the midst of them? That would be a church worth fighting to get into!

                                                                                                                        January 2000

Leadership

Here's my last shot in the one-man campaign eitherto get people to stop using the word "Leader" in the church context or, since I seem to be loosing that one, to prevent it from ever being used at Union Chapel!

I've been trying to work out why I'm so suspicious of it. Former Baptist Union President, Steve Gaukroger, according to the "Baptist Times", was addressing the crowds at the Keswick Convention on the subject of leadership. In some ways I would have cheered him. In the camp of all that is conservative in the life of evangelical Christians he was heavily critical of the white, male, middle classness of the ministry and very direct in his demand for a proper place for all. Standing no doubt under the banner, "All One in Christ Jesus" he lambasted his audience for excluding women, black people and those with the wrong social background. "'It's obscene" he cried. But then came this:

''... we have appointed the wrong people to lead our churches - we are training loads of pastors, good and godly people but they are not leaders."

How that gives the game away. I know he would say. To be a leader is not superior to being a teacher or a pastor or a healer. It's just another. expression of the gifts of God's Spirit given for the building up of the whole." But the word "leader" implies superiority in ways that the others don't. Perhaps that's why it doesn't appear as a function of the church in the Bible! And you can see the implication peeping out already in everything that an otherwise excellent egalitarian address said, stripping it of its force and undermining his criticism of others.

Leadership is certainly something we need but once people are defined as individuals as leaders and, worse, start to educate and train themselves for that function, describing themselves as leaders the game is up, divisions have been created in the body of Christ which are totally unacceptable. Getting four people together and calling them the Leadership Team doesn't solve it either I'm afraid.

In the same week Alexander Chancellor commented on Tony Blair'sattitude to demonstrators at Genoa thus:

"Democratic socialists ... like to think of themselves as sympatheticto those on the other side of the barricades. But the prime minister, in defending the right of international "leaders" to meet when and where they want without interference, sounded altogether too pleased about being himself a member of this

exulted leadershipclass."

Dead right he did. So can we drop this "leader” business now please in the church, especially in Baptist circles before it turns any more of us towards demagoguery or shall I have to translate it into what that little Austrian fellow with the moustache called himself? Amongst Baptists there can be no "Leaders" because there are no "followers", except followers of Christ of course.

                                                                                                                        September 2001

The Big M!

That brings me to the inevitable subject. I don't intend to make any points about the future ministry here but want to quote a letter to the Independent last month from Professor Richard H Roberts (surely not Welsh again?) of the Department of Religious Studies at Lancaster University taking the Archbishop of Canterbury to task about styles of ministry and church structures that make the church more like a copy of the fashionable world of business and government institutions than its spiritual challenger. He decries the "top down" approach. He accuses the Church of England of adopting a managerial theology to which the image and reality of a managerial "Head" and a managed "Body" is central. He argues that we need the counterbalance of the "laity", the general body of members, who don't want the church to fall into the trap of oppressive and undemocratic "quality management" . They know that this "managerialism destroys the freedom of the individual, be she or he doctor, teacher, social worker - or priest - and replaces it with the alien accountability of quantifiable performance in a closed setting of low or no trust." The "Leadership" emphasis in Baptist circles that I have spoken of before falls into this same destructive category.

He goes on. 'The ordained ministry requires an informed freedom sufficient to exercise the responsibility of seeking out unpredictable signs of new growth in the Spirit, rather than delivering ever more efficiently a predetermined Gospel 'product'.He goes on to say that he believes the people who are currently searching for spiritual resources don't need efficiency, regularity, predictability and control - a "Macdonaldised" religion. They don't need ministers to do it by the book but enterprising and prophetic ministers. I don't claim to have been such a minister but I do claim to have suggested that your next one should be!

                                                May 2001

                                                                                                                                    Eric Bray