In this third sermon exploring the prayers of St Paul we look at the one thing that Paul’s prayer for the Colossians. We all want to know God’s will for our lives. Paul is confident is knows what that will is and prays consistently that the Colossians will know what it is too.

This is the first sermon of our latest series at SPS called On Your Knees, exploring the prayers of St Paul. In this talk I consider how Paul was able to continually pray for the churches he planted, arguing it was because he knew who to pray to and what to pray for.

This is the second talk in our vision series ‘We are SPS’. It is a vision for Connect Groups our primary vehicle for discipleship. I wanted to root it in a common experience of London life and the need for social spaces to make friends. I also wanted to clarify the vision and inspire everyone to make membership of Connect Groups a real priority.

In this series called New Year’s Revolution we explored the practical aspects of the Christian life. In this sermon I look at what it means to be shrewd with the way we use our money. It was a tricky sermon as I wanted it to be very practical and applicable. But I also wanted to focus on Jesus. All the time working through one of the most confusing parables Jesus ever told!

In this Advent sermon I unpack Philippians chapter 1. How does Paul remain joyful in the face of imprisonment and suffering? It’s about both feeling right and thinking right.

A few weeks ago I attended a fascinating conference on Disciple Making Movements (DMM). At the conference there was a strong rejection of institutional or attractional models of church. It was argued that these models of church hindered multiplication, exponential growth and the development of disciple making movements.

Instead the church should send out teams of disciple makers just as Jesus did in Luke 10. Teams of two will then locate ‘people of peace’ in the local community or culture. These people of peace are then discipled through a simple bible study method called the ‘Discovery Bible Study’. These studies essentially ask three questions; what does it say? What does it mean? What will you do? This must be a replicable process that is not dependent on knowledge or expertise. The person of peace then begins discipling others. In this way, new disciples is not asked to leave their community or culture and neither are those they disciple. This, it was argued, is the true definition of missional.

So David Broodryck who leads a movement of over one thousand communities says “Inviting others into a community they don’t already belong to, whether a service or gathering, a missional community or a cell, is by definition attractional. To be missional is not to invite someone into a new community, it is to redeem their existing community.”

In stark contrast, I’m currently reading ‘Deep and Wide’ by Andy Stanley, the Lead Pastor of Northpoint Community Church in the US. He sees a regular Sunday attendance of 33,000 over several sites. He is also passionate about making disciples but goes about it in a completely different way. In his book he says, “We are unapologetically attractional. In our search for common ground with unchurched people we discovered that like us they are consumers. So we leveraged their consumer instincts. When you read the gospels it’s hard to overlook the fact that Jesus attracted large crowds everywhere he went. He was constantly playing to the consumer instincts of his crowds. Let’s face it: it wasn’t the content of his messages that appealed to the masses. Most of the time they didn’t even understand what he was talking about. Heck we’re not always sure what Jesus is talking about. People flocked to Jesus because he fed them, healed them, comforted them and promised them things. Besides what’s the opposite of attractional? Missional don’t think so!”

One is “unashamably attractional”, the other is exclusively missional. Perhaps this reflects a third conversation I had this week about sodalities and modalities. Missiologists such as Ralph Winter argue that the church has two dynamics which must be held in tension for it to grow. The first is the local church (modality). This is the place to belong. Winter argues it is a place of first decision. People choose to attend, to belong and that is enough. The second is the sent church (sodality). This is the place of mission and disciple making. Those who make up the sent church have made the first decision to belong, but they have also made the second decision to become disciple makers. This is the place for those who do are frustrated by the local church. Traditionally these two dynamics have expressed themselves as parish churches and monastic orders. Winter argues that people are one or the other. To try and introduce one into the other will simply produce resistance or frustration. So, the argument goes, don’t try and create a missional local church, instead locate the ‘radical few’ who are naturally part of the sent church, disciple them and release them to make disciples in the communities and cultures around the local church.

I wonder though whether this is a false dichotomy. This analysis leaves me with a number of questions. Can you create a missional culture that attracts people into a new community? Can you mix sodality and modality or will you simply produce resistance?

Do you have to let go of the local church, acknowledging that they will only ever be places of first decision and find the ‘radical few’ willing to make the second decision to make disciples, or can you cast a vision and create the necessary structures that allows the local church to be the sent church?

It seems to me that Jesus refuses to choose one or the other but holds the two in creative tension. In one sense, he is clearly attractional. Not only does he attract crowds with his preaching and teaching, he calls his disciples to follow him. He takes them out of their community and culture and creates a new community, a new Israel. According to Broodryck, we must also call this attractional disciple making. Having said that, Jesus also sends out disciple makers into towns and villages across the region, establishing indigenous communities of disciples that Paul quite possibly encountered on his missionary journeys a few years later.

Paul also appears to maintain this tension. His whole mission was to new people groups. In one sense he refuses to ask them to abandon their communities and cultures. But in another sense that is precisely what he does. In his letter to the Ephesian church, he speaks of the creation of the one new humanity out of the two. The church was to be neither Jewish nor Gentile, it was to be a third thing. In Paul’s thinking the church is a new community, an alternative city or ‘polis’ that is different and distinctive, citizens of heaven, aliens and strangers in the world. In fact, one can argue, persuasively I think, that most of the metaphors for the church in the New Testament assume the attractional model. Paul speaks of the temple and the body, Peter speaks of living stones and the kingdom of priests

The New Testament describes an ecclesial rhythm that includes come and go, invitation and challenge, community and mission, breathing in and out. Lets transcend this false distinction and create highly attractional worship experiences and plant missional communities and cells throughout the community and workplace.

Retreat is a painful thing. I’m on the second of my new monthly rhythm of retreats. I don’t go very far, but I am alone for 36 hours with a few books, my thoughts, a journal and my restless ego.

Last month I read Tim Keller’s book ‘The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness’. It has its origins in a sermon on 1 Corinthians 4:3. Paul, he says, does not care what others think of him. Neither does he care what he thinks of himself. All that matters for Paul is what God thinks of him. Keller makes the point that his ego is quiet, it’s working properly, it’s not drawing attention to itself like a swollen, distended organ or limb. I was reading this acutely aware that I was alone, without anyone to impress, and on retreat, without anything to do to give myself value. My ego certainly wasn’t quiet.

Today is equally painful. Strangely perhaps, I feel intensely lonely. Over lunch I looked at a beautiful photo of my daughter that a friend had emailed to me. I am missing her and its only been six hours! I also feel restless and unsettled. My mind and my spirit are all over the place. It is easy when you are alone to feel defeated and depressed. You feel like your thoughts and feelings are out of control, untameable. Certainly there is frustration and a touch of despair. It may be the extrovert in me but I fear solitude as something inherently destructive. My temptation is to flee, to escape into fantasy, or simply to do something, to get busy, to be appreciated.

The Psalm for Morning Prayer today was Psalm 42. Verse 1 jumped out at me as I read:

“As the deer pants for streams of water, so my souls pants for you, my God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.”

 As I read I felt a still small voice say to me that my sense of desolation and restlessness was not something to flee or escape from, rather it was an expression of desire, in this case, desire for God that could only be satisfied in prayer and contemplation. This sense of longing and lack is a recognition in my spirit that God alone satisfies. It is possible to drown out this yearning with the white noise of the world around me, to momentarily gratify my ego with gifts or experience. But it never lasts and the real state of my ego, my self, becomes all too apparent when all of that is stripped away.

My aim today then, is to get to a place of contentment and peace; to simply hold myself in God’s presence; to remain alert and aware in the stillness. If I can do that, it will be progress indeed. If not, at least I have a stash of chocolate to turn to!

“O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water…My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me.” (Psalm 63:1,8)

In the days since I have thought a lot about the decision. I am one of those who wants the Church of England to remain a broad and inclusive church; one that is able to disagree well. So for me, it is important that those of a minority view do feel that they have a place in the church as it moves forward. Having said that, trying to understand why those who disagree with me on this issue do so, is not easy.

Though I don’t fully understand their position, I can appreciate that episcopacy is of real significance to conservative catholics. Consecration effects ordination, which in turn, has a profound effect on Eucharistic ministry. I worry though that this leaves my catholic brothers open to the charge of Donatism when most of them are really good Augustinians.  I can appreciate too the significance of the historic episcopacy and its links to Rome which means conservative catholics deny the Church of England has the authority to make such changes. Again though, I wonder how their conscience allows them to remain in what is really a Reformed church. We have been doing things that Rome refuses to recognize since the Reformation. Why is this different? Perhaps it is because this is the first time we are tinkering with the essence of the church. But I wonder whether the introduction of a third province will have much the same effect. It certainly seems to alter the role of the bishop and their relationship to one another and the wider church. I can appreciate too that for conservative catholics the priest represents Christ at the altar in a different way to the evangelical minister at the table. But if it is true that ‘what is not assumed is not healed’ as Gregory of Nazianzus argued, then surely one must believe Jesus became a human being rather than a man, and so can be represented by a woman at the altar. Otherwise, what are we saying about women and their salvation. I plead ignorance of these things so if someone would like to help me understand them better, please do.

But to be honest, it’s the conservative evangelicals I find harder to understand.  I have much more in common with them. I read most of the same books. I like many of the same theologians. I even recognize that complementarians can marshal a coherent and compelling case from the Scriptures. But in this debate we are not talking about complementarianism, we’re talking about episcopacy. Let me explain what I mean.

Conservative evangelicals have always prioritized the local church. It is the local church that is the base ecclesial unit not the diocese gathered together around the bishop. This, in practice, has led to Conservative Evangelicals getting on with Gospel ministry on the ground and leaving the more bureaucratic diocesan jobs to the other traditions. John Stott had to make an impassioned plea for evangelicals to get involved in the structures of the church at the first National Evangelical Anglican Congress and conservative evangelicals have been disagreeing with him ever since. This leads people I know well to say things like ‘the diocese is a para-church organisation’ and ‘if there was a Presbyterian church in the UK, there wouldn’t be any conservative evangelical Anglicans’. These are not young naïve presbyters but leaders in large churches and theological colleges saying these things.

So what has changed? It seems to me that complementarianism is much more constitutive of conservative evangelical identity than it used to be. It has become a boundary marker that indicates you take the bible seriously enough to be identified as a conservative evangelical. I also suspect the experience of conservative parishes and dioceses in The Episcopal Church in the US has left many conservative evangelicals in the UK wary of those who say the Code of Practice will be enough. These wider concerns though leave conservative evangelicals with an inconsistent and incoherent ecclesiology. If the diocese and its bishops really matter so little (and the church planting strategies of many conservative evangelical churches suggest this is so) then how can they justify such opposition to female bishops?

Instead of mustering such fierce opposition to female bishops, I wonder whether conservative evangelicals might actually be in a unique place to suggest a solution. The bible clearly speaks of multiple presbyters leading churches. So in the same way that conservative evangelicals have always prioritized the local church, they have also emphasized the plurality of church leadership (one of the reasons why Presbyterianism remains so attractive to them). I realize that the evangelical sub-culture tends to create celebrity pastors and preachers, but I think the theological point remains true. There is a built in antipathy to monarchical leadership in the church whether that is in the parish or in the diocese.

Whilst a single bishop has to represent their entire diocese it is difficult to see a way past the current impasse. Those of us who support the introduction of female bishops are probably tempted simply to wait until the next time, confident in our belief in the inevitability of change, but I suspect the next time the legislation won’t be so inclusive and that will be a shame. But could conservative evangelicals be more pro-active than that and suggest an alternative? A third province is not an evangelical answer, but plural diocesan leadership might be. It seems to me to be a relatively small change to give Area Bishops the same title as the Diocesan Bishop and in doing so create a Diocesan college of Bishops with a rotating chair that acts as the focus of unity collectively. Obviously, all of these bishops would have to recognize the validity of each other’s ministry, but in this way, much like multi-member constituencies in a Single Transferable Vote electoral system, everyone would feel like there is someone to represent them.

Despite the emotions and disappointment of this week, it remains my firm belief that there is a way forward that can gain the support of each house, allowing us to move forward as a church and consecrate female bishops. That, at least, is my prayer.