I believe in eucharismatic church: word and spirit and sacrament church that takes seriously the history and theology of the church, believes in God’s action in all aspects of our gathered worship, and is devoted to reading the Bible three-dimensionally.
Of course, not many—if any!—of these churches exist. I don’t lead one (yet), not least because change needs to be paced and taught well. These ideas mostly exist at the level of theory and need to be considered from several angles and tested in churches. Most of the theological work hasn’t been done, that will take time and resources.
I’ve written extensively on the need to build institutions to resource churches, both to develop unity between disparate groups and to centralise resources to allow some of this thinking and dissemination to happen. I did take a faltering step in that direction with Eucharisma, though if we’re honest that project has stalled as both Jonathan Black and I moved into full-time ministry. It’s not dead, and the articles for a third issue have been submitted by some very patient people who are long overdue feedback on them. I have some big idea for where Eucharisma could go, but I’m a long way away from any of those.
To make something like that work requires people to be willing to write and therefore have the time to do so, someone to have asked them in some fashion to do so, editors to edits pieces, and someone to paste and post the final text of articles. There’s labour involved that doesn’t happen quite as easily as I naively thought.
To share ideas, do theological work, and try things in churches also requires settings for people to get together and discuss these sorts of questions. The biggest theological conference in the British New Church world is THINK, run by Andrew Wilson. Though, calling THINK a theological conference is probably a misnomer: it’s a theological retreat for pastors focusing on either a biblical book or theological topic. Gathering around tables to eat Jamaican food and drink beer is as important part of it as the intense, mind-stretching content. Worship times are deliberate in demonstrating eucharismatic worship. While there are other things we could do in the future, if you believe in constructing eucharismatic theology or growing eucharismatic churches then get yourself to THINK. I hope to see many of you there; I have the surprising joy of presenting a session this year (we’re going through Luke’s gospel) and am going to play to type and talk about trees and tables.
If I dream out loud, I can imagine larger, shorter settings and smaller, longer settings to do some theological thinking together popping up in the future. I think we have lots of theological work to do that, if it is to be useful, needs to be tethered to and developed in the context of local churches. We could also conference ourselves out. There is a finite limit to people’s time to attend things and read things. There’s no great rush to start a hundred things.
However, doing theological work together will require we do something, eventually. In a wider sense than I’ve been speaking, I think readdressing the discipleship crisis within our churches will also require various forms of collaborative work that is going to be easiest with appropriate banners to gather under. That’s one of the reasons we’ll need institutions, and understood in the broadest sense, to give us banners to gather under.
There are other challenging questions: finance, organisation, timing, the exact boundaries of a particular institution, and which ideas are actually useful rather than Tim spit balling things while he writes on a Saturday morning. I find these questions interesting to consider and am keen to put them on other people’s radar, but realistically rushing at them would be the worst thing. We don’t need these whatever-they-ares tomorrow. We would do better to do it right and manage it in 10-15 years’ time. That sounds impossibly long in the context of a movement that’s about 40 years old, but churches are gardens, they grow slowly. We can think generationally; we should do theological work that makes our grandchildren’s lives better.
Personally, I’m focused almost entirely on my local church but enjoy taking a few minutes to write and dream about the future. My proximate need is to hire a new Operations Manager for Harvest Church. If you read nuakh and are operationally minded, then do talk it over with the Lord whether you should apply. If that’s not your skillset but you love the idea of working with me, do drop me an email there might be another opportunity coming up.
There’s no rush to build these institutions, but neither are these things unimportant. It’s as we dream collectively about what we need to move us forward that dreams coalesce, and that we discern which dreams are from God.
Photo by Bovia & Co. Photography on Unsplash
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