Never done it this way!

Early this week I attended a consultation between the Baptist Union of Great Britain Associations and Alan Roxburgh of the missional network. http://www.roxburghmissionalnet.com/ It was a great 2 days talking about rediscovering a role for our union. As many of you will know, for the last year we have been talking about the future of the union with church leadership groups, with church clusters, at Assembly and at Council.

Through this process one of the key questions that we have been asking is what is our DNA? Alan Roxburgh’s suggestion was that our DNA pre-dates our core convictions which were written much later, reflecting back on the journey that these people called Baptists had taken. His reflection was that our DNA is to do with ordinary men and women who were part of institutional church feeling a dis-ease about the way that the church engaged the local community with the gospel. They were people who therefore took a risk, travelling into the unknown, mapping out a new way of being a Gospel people in a changing culture, ultimately choosing to live under Christ’s rule. Roxburgh argued that it was in our hungering after legitimacy we became a denomination and sold our birth right.

I find myself sympathetic to this perspective of our DNA. It would seem that the Spirit of God is pushing us today into a world where I, for one, do not know what to do, or maybe even how to be? Like Abraham or even the early church we cannot rely on our old maps to show us where to go or what to do; but in living under the Lordship of Christ, travelling as ordinary people who are really concerned that our churches fail to engage with people of our nation in this present culture, we have an opportunity to find fresh places of engagement between the gospel and our nation.

It is reassuring to know that God’s work is more easily fulfilled by the weak and vulnerable than with the confident and strong.(1 Cor 1:27) So I am asking the question: How can we create a culture of vulnerability and reliance within our churches, that breaks away from the ungodly fear contained in the statement “we’ve never done it that way before!” to a culture of experimentation, a culture of map making rather than map following, a culture consistent with our DNA, a culture of travelling with Christ to new places and new understanding about how the gospel engages meaningfully with the world we live in?