Miroslav Volf and N. T. Wright on the Future of the Church

[Music] [Music] as it happened tom and miroslav and i were going to be hanging out tonight anyway and we thought we might as well just share our conversation with all of you so we decided that doing it in this venue would be a good thing thank you very very much for coming we're delighted that you're here to share in this conversation together i'm very appreciative of tom and miroslav being willing to submit to my questions as well as to yours and the way this is going to work is that i get the first shot so we're going to ask a few questions and then there'll be an opportunity for you to be able to uh to enter in and bring whatever questions you may want to bring to them our theme tonight is the future of the church this could mean all kinds of things and we're thinking about the church acknowledging that it's a church around the world that it's the church that extends through all kinds of cultures and ethnicities all sorts of denominations and structures fuller seminary itself represents something like 120 denominations and 60 countries so it's a place where we're thinking about the church not just in one dimension or in one place but acknowledging that it's the church that it really is a global church that it's god's church that it's an avenue of god's grace and truth and mercy and justice in the world so what we're talking about in a way uh i think is important for us to remember is not just an object uh this is after all of christ's bride that we're talking about and yet it is a bride that as we all know has all kinds of issues and questions and dilemmas things in us and around us that are anything but easy and anything but necessarily healthy so we come i think out of a spirit of wanting to be honest with one another wanting to engage seriously in the meaning of the church and the future of the church while acknowledging in humility that what we're talking about is something that god calls holy and something that we are uh perhaps many of us at least uh very actively a part of so thank you again very much for being here thank you for the spirit of the opportunity for the conversation that we have and uh and as we launch in i get the opportunity to ask the first sets of questions so uh let me just begin by first uh you have all known if you came earlier today miroslav wolfe who is the yale professor theology and tom wright who now is a professor of new testament at st andrews we'll say much more formally about him tomorrow when we introduce him at the beginning of the lectures that he's going to be delivering but i'm going to assume for tonight that you're sort of acquainted with these two and that we won't belabor the introductions for tonight so let me just begin by asking you to start by helping us place you in your own experience in the church you didn't just arrive here tonight you were each raised in backgrounds that deeply shaped you and your faith so as you look back on your life first i want to just ask a few questions just to help us understand your biography and your own personal experience of church so when you think about your early years growing up and the formation that you were experiencing what were some of your earliest memories that began to form when you understood the meaning of the word church please tom go ahead thank you and am i on yeah and thank you for this opportunity and it's it's good to be back here at fuller um i grew up in a very typical middle english anglican family that is to say church going was absolutely taken for granted sunday by sunday saying one's prayers in the evening was absolutely taken for granted night by night but nobody ever actually talked other than that about what it was all about because that was very unenglish and very sort of not how things were done in the 1950s at least so i was exposed to ordinary old-fashioned anglican worship sunday by sunday when i was seven i joined the choir as a boy treble in the parish church where we went and so i was singing the psalms and the canticles and hearing uh two sevens a week at least and at some point quite early on something happened for me where i remember vividly being back home one day and suddenly being overwhelmed with the sense of how much god loved me that jesus had died for me and i i still remember that i think i must have been about seven or possibly eight um and i don't think it was because anyone had preached an evangelistic sermon because they didn't do that kind of thing at my church it would have been you know over the top um and so that it was it was a very typical anglican formation with with lots of bible but again not really explained very much it was just going on in hearing the stories and so on uh we didn't go to sunday school my sister and i we i don't think there was much of a sunday school at our church so it's very basic and then in my teens i was quite suddenly exposed to um basically evangelicalism through scripture union boys camps and the main attraction of those for me to begin with was rock climbing canoeing sailing all those things which we did in the scottish islands and but morning and evening there were prayers at which short expositions of bits of scripture were given and so i'm a kind of a product of a very middle middle anglican flavor which is still where i feel very much at home from one level and then all the excitement as a teenager of getting to grips with the bible and finding what it meant for me so that i didn't have a sort of ordinary teenage rebellion my teenage rebellion was to become an evangelical rather than the um rather than the the the thing that my parents knew about so and which was kind of tense actually because i remember my my my father once blurting out something um which made me realize that for them evangelical meant either billy graham or ian paisley and they didn't actually fancy either of those thank you very much so it took a while to get over there he i grew up in former yugoslavia my father was a pentecostal minister he was studying theology when i was born pentecostal minister meant he was taking care of some 30 40 poor souls and i can't recall a time when i wasn't in the church i recall times when i had to tell in front of the whole large class of students uh kind of say well who my father's name was what his uh where does he what his profession was and i said he was uh he was a minister and nobody knew what the minister was that knew what the priest was that was bad minister must be worse than that and then i had to spell where my father worked as it turned out my father worked in christ's pentecostal church of yugoslavia so they could spell christ but when it came to pentecostal they would say christ pent f what church and i would have to explain and i swore to god that i will never do to my kids what my dad did to me by becoming of all people a pentecostal minister so my form of rebellion was a kind of a passive one for a while and and then fairly active uh kind of kind of rebellion until i was kind of brought back to church by the prayers of my mother and i think by good looks of swedish girls because i because i was asked to accompany a group of swedish young people who were evangelizing and i thought this was a great idea you know accompanying that translate a little bit of stuff you know and i get to have fun you know this is this kind of cool cool thing and little did i know that after two years of having fun i would find myself in a tent in sweden listening to a sermon by pentecostal minister stanley schubert who i could understand maybe about 25 and somehow that that would be the moment when i would um something would happen i don't know exactly what but i have reoriented or my life had been reoriented at that moment and then i became active in my dad's church um did quite a bit of youth work uh but at the same time uh kind of now now my kind of rebellion came in which was then in the context of the larger culture to be a christian was to be rebellious to be a christian was to be rebellious when you went to a mass for instance midnight mass catholic church full of folks or when my rebellion also came when i thought that some of the pentecostal services was utterly completely totally boring and inane and i didn't want to do anything with them and so i ran away from the church where i had to attend because i was a student in the pentecostal pentecostal college i ran down to the to a catholic parish a small church in the middle of zagreb uh where they were all young people fear squeezed like this standing only standing room and there was a priest there he was a professor of theology and with doctorate a brilliant guy whose fingers were all all brown from from smoke whose eyes were bloodshot i was sure he had a long night of drinking and talking i don't know but what he opened his mouth and he spoke the purest of all gospels you have ever heard our mouths were open listening to every single word this man was saying and this was also our kind of uh rebellion little footnote six year maybe three years ago four years ago i was in zagreb i picked up uh six volumes of sermons that somebody had taped he never had anything written in front of him somebody has taped and i started reading them and they had this immensely powerful effect on me as recorded and transcribed in that in that book so this is my experience with the church a band of quite [Music] unimpressive characters and boring services among pentecostals electrifying things among catholics who've just gone through vatican ii and somewhere in between i find myself a follower of jesus christ amen as all that was happening as you were naturally just continuing to grow up simultaneous with both of your early spiritual formation you had these experiences how did the gospel itself related to and distinct from in certain ways the church how did those two things either feel just fully conflated or did they begin to seem like they were two different things how did you come to a grasp of what you thought was the central claims of the christian faith and how did that relate to the church what did it seem in opposition to the church did it seem part and parcel of the church for me through my teenage rebellion um going off to these scripture union camps was the kind of shot in the arm twice a year sort of easter holidays and then summer vacation and that would sustain me through everything else i was doing um but i was at a boarding school and we had daily chapel and sunday services and i was always singing in choirs and so on so the church was where one did all that stuff but there was very seldom any real crossover occasionally there would be a sermon in the more formal setting which would relate suddenly to what i knew from my informal and biblically oriented state and then when i was an undergraduate in oxford um i went to one of the city churches which was very live very evangelical and realized what a big church full of people who are all excited by jesus and by god and by the bible would actually be like because there weren't any such churches anywhere around when i was growing up i grew up in the middle of um northumberland of the north northerly of the english counties and there's very very little of what you would call evangelical faith there certainly in the anglican church um so it was really as a student that it it started to get put together and i had known from an early age again that i was supposed to be ordained my i've got a lot of clergy in the family a lot of my mother's relatives and forebears were clergy and so it was kind of an easy thing because i knew one of my my mother's father my grandfather who i loved dearly he was a parish priest um and so in a sense i thought okay i happen to be looking at things from this angle but that's what i'm going to end up doing i'm going to get ordained i'm going to be a preacher i'm going to do that and and gradually you could see the life the church coming together with what i was believing and being taught i don't think i at that stage had the slightest idea of the church as a larger entity i don't think we talked about that i don't think it was on the agenda um it was just that one realized pragmatically that actually there were churches that were doing the business were getting out there and making things happen and i wanted to be part of it yeah so i i grew up in uh pastor's home um and you know it was kind of boring home that i grew up in in the sense that um you you you weren't supposed to gossip in our home right what's a good meal if you can't really gossip a little bit about somebody but my father was pretty straight on this and my mother mother also you just don't speak ill of anybody uh if they're not around all right so i didn't quite get all the gossip that you might normally get in a preacher's home but i kind of got the idea and i was observing this crowd of folks and i didn't know what to do with them all the way from this amazing saints and characters that are extraordinary to [Music] you know kind of laughable kinds of folks to quirky and all the kind of hodgepodge of characters i mean i remember in this pentecostal church we used to speak in tongues out loud during the services and as a 12 year old i could predict what a particular woman will say when she speaks in tongues i knew her tongue speaking as well as she did you know it's all learned by heart and i you know just after a while you start thinking about it where is kind of god in all of this what are these people doing doing here so kind of that that's the one side of the experience of the church um and then a little bit later and of course at that time i was kind of frustrated with my father as a teenager right what's he doing with these people the losers he's himself a loser it took me a while to realize the beauty actually of what my parents were doing uh taking time sunday after sunday weekday after weekday and helping just ordinary people with their highs and their lows smart people and not so smart people everybody in between helping them along and ministering and proclaiming the gospel the good news that is just the good news that they embodied by loving these people and the message that they proclaim was just that and then i realized that actually what i was attracted to really wasn't so much the church but what the gospel did in the church and kinds of people that it could produce and i then distinguished obviously between the kingdom or something like that or the gospel itself and these people that are on the on the way and ever since then um i have great actual appreciation for the wide variety of what happens in the church of the taste theological taste diversity all these kind of incarnated ways of our struggles to live gospel and live gospel in community and how many countless hours and worries and tears are spent by people who attend to the well-being of people their bodies their souls it's an amazing amazing institution i think so i'm i'm a great believer in the gospel and by inference also in the concept also great believer in this kind of troubling reality that the church is and the beautiful at the same time you know one of the things that i think gathers us here tonight and why so many people are here to hear the two of you is that you have been such interesting examples of people who are deeply engaged in careful theological and biblical reflection that you have stayed and are deeply committed to the church and that you believe in a god who actually acts in the world and that is unfolding his purposes in the world and that that combination is one of the things that captures our attention and your way of articulating that in your writings and in your speaking has just been uh very broadly used around the world and certainly among many of us that are here tonight so i'm wondering where along the way then did as it were god come clearly into the vibrant picture of this you've sort of each described uh emerging faith experiences in church uh scripture union uh times on um swedish uh trips with and and as that process has unfolded there have clearly been uh i think what you referred to in a certain way this morning as axial moments in your own life in which there's been breakthroughs breakthroughs about the nature of god breakthroughs about the call of god on your life can you give us any insight into some of those moments um now thinking as you are emerging young adults or uh as you're casting your your future yourself where did god really become a vivid um expression of life in you there's two quite different things one is the general awareness of the presence of god which i think i've had on and off right through my life um that's that wasn't something that was absent for a long time and then suddenly appeared there were two or three moments interestingly in my theological training actually when i was at seminary when i remember vividly suddenly it being as though all the lights have been turned off um and blundering about thinking what am i supposed to do um and then i do not know it's frustrating i don't know how they came back on again but they did um it was a matter of maybe two or three months um and i think uh actually quite often that happens when people are studying theology and in training yeah well well um i've obviously worked a lot with ordinance and and so on over the years since and i've seen this sort of thing so but but the fact that that was such an odd experience for me tells me something looking back about how what was the norm and that i was aware of the of the presence of god um and that's something that i just can't imagine being without um the particular vocational moment for me was and i remember it very vividly um in my second year at oxford when um some of us had organized some extra seminars with john wenham i don't know how many of you will know john wenham he wrote a book on a manual on new testament greek which everyone used to use in days gone by and he was a wonderful pastorally minded theologian who was working in oxford at the time and he came and did three or four seminars on key doctrines that some of us wanted to to get more information on and in one of those seminars he said just as a throwaway remark um that actually for far too long uh what's been happening is um liberal theologians and liberal exegetes i think he used the word liberal even though it covers many things but we knew what he was talking about they've been um writing books and putting ideas out there and the evangelicals who actually believe the bible have been scurrying around trying to say no no it's not quite like that and and trying to refute them and he said what we really need is for people who love god and love the bible to be getting out there and actually taking the lead and making the liberals scurry around in the background to see if they can answer and it was one of those electric shock moments where i just thought oh my goodness what an amazing way to spend your life you know it's just a fantastic sense of wow that would be a great thing to do and i hadn't even got my first degree at that stage maybe at that that may have been the point when i actually started to take my academic work a bit more seriously um because you know i realized that is an amazing possibility and of course for many years until you sort of get your degree and get a doctorate and so on you can't be sure if that's actually a vocational moment but looking back now 45 years later yep that was a vocational moment all right thank you that's great so so i when i my life was reoriented i wasn't sure that it actually happened i never had a kind of breakthrough experience it was always um there's always a kind of sense of ambiguity in this i remember also when i was later there's a youth group with my in my dad's church very vibrant because they're folks who were converted from came from outside to church very very active and i was supposed to be a minister's kid here who is himself also um active in faith and i i i there's this constant sense of that i don't quite measure i'm not what i'm supposed to be not just by somebody outside measure but my by my own measure there was attraction and there was ambivalence there were questions so i think my whole life has been one of not a very clear and clean face it's been one of always inhabited by doubts but some kind of light was always pulling a kind of attraction of the gospel and the character of the gospel of jesus christ so that i didn't have this this great certainty i think if anything a moment that came in my life that was significant was when i encountered my brother-in-law who had peter kuzmich some of you might know him he started dating my sister at that time he was 26 i was 16. he was eloquent brilliant you know and that he was kind of what my teenage imagination kind of needed and he kind of pulled me out of opened up the possibilities what i could kind of do if i were to kind of study theology and one of the first books he gave me was bertrand russell's wisdom of the west right burton russell is a kind of not just bona fide atheist but the kind of atheistic evangelist and this is the book that i get to study philosophy you know obviously that got me my head turning and i was no wonder i was ambivalent about things right but but it kind of pulled me into into things and very early on then i think i was 16 and a half i have a clear sense of what i wanted to do because there was this little school that he started and that school needed somebody to teach systematic theology i had some interest in that and therefore i think i ought to be pursuing that that line and i knew i will have two doctorates one will be in philosophy one will be in theology and i'm going to teach theology and creation that was my my goal in life about 16 and a half it didn't quite pan out the same that way but uh but i had this early intellectual uh kind of awakening uh associated with faith partly also because i was the only openly professing christian kid in my high school of some 3500 people they're christians there but they were not openly professing so when i came to school and i was talking about christian faith everybody descended upon me they wanted to know then i wanted to know what they wanted to know which sent me uh reading all sorts of stuff and generated uh ever a new interest and i think what it generated also is always a sense that i'm not about explicating simply christian faith and making that faith uh kind of plausible for myself but i'm also there to connect that faith to the broader life and that became also trajectory also of my work so part of what you've just each mentioned and sort of exemplified in a way is that you come from such different social settings and church is always local right in the end it's local and your two experiences are really quite different from each other i mean you are obviously groomed in a national church with the church of england and all of the implications of that at the time that that was going on you were as you say the only self-professing christian in your high school among a group of christian baptized students would that be the right way of putting it yeah yeah many of them were members of uh bob they were baptized whether orthodox or catholic or few sprinkle or protestants yeah so as you've you grew up in those contexts and you began to emerge as young adults as scholars as people that had a genuine intellectual life and as that occurred one of the things that strikes me is just how much that experience those experiences have actually shaped in a certain way it seems to me the trajectory of the things that you've actually been able to give yourselves to because part of your description of the long-term project that you have been given by god comes out of a context where connected to the gospel to the broader culture is sort of the nature of your context and the context of of reclaiming an evangelical gospel in a context in which uh uh other kinds of critical theories perhaps or approaches had had uh seem to have abandoned the gospel of critique the gospel out of existence perhaps um but in your each of your cases it's a reflection of your backgrounds i guess i'm just curious you know many people here are students who are in the process of discerning their call many are trying to understand what it means to serve god's purposes in the world talk a little bit about the connection between the framework of your upbringing and your sense of vocation i mean one of the odd things about england and i think not everyone in america fully appreciates this is that though we do have a national church and an established church with bishops in the house of lords and the queen is the head of the church of england etc etc um in all sorts of ways england and indeed scotland function pretty much like america does that is to say um these are sort of symbolic things but at ground level it's pretty much the same when i was at my boarding school there were uh about half a dozen of us in a school of 450 who self-identified as actually evangelical christians and though we had school chapel etc which was compulsory um and there were people who would be sort of hey that was quite a nice service that was an interesting sermon we heard etc but there was actually no serious christian life going on among the boys so it wasn't too different um but the wider society was still in the 1950s and 1960s sort of tolerating this social socially acceptable christianity that's all changed now completely and so um but but yes for me relating the gospel to society is much harder um because um it was just sort of assumed that britain was a christian country and so um what would one be doing what would one be relating to whereas for miroslav i mean obviously it was a totally difficult different situation politically and more like um what again we have in the uk now where there's a lot of militant secularists who even though we're still officially a christian country they say no no it's not like that anymore we're just utterly secular and utterly plural but for me it i it was really only when i went to work in litchfield after years of teaching the university i want to be dean of litchfield and found myself running a cathedral in the midlands um in the middle of all sorts of social and cultural and political issues and discovered that the cathedral was absolutely at the heart of the local society and that i was expected to be able to go and talk to the local magistrates and to be able to advise the local council on how to deal with the problem of gypsies camping in people's fields illegally and and i had to grow up suddenly very quickly and i had to ask myself suddenly very quickly things about um what am i doing as a christian um if i'm not saying i haven't got anything to say to you until you become a christian what else have i got to say to the wider society and how does that work and i think until the early 1990s when i went to do that job i'd been aware of those questions but they hadn't been existential for me because i'd had plenty to do without getting involved in that and so over the last 20 years i've been kind of catching up quite a lot with all of that um i i suppose a kind of connection between or the bridge between a kind of sense of calling to faith and sense of calling to a particular kind of ministry and then what i kind of ended up actually doing that that kind of bridge happened by trial and error i mean i i almost knew i thought i knew that i would be um in former yugoslavia than croatia i would be teaching and i would be preaching maybe pastoring a church and this is going to be my long-term trajectory but i've discovered that it's one thing to think that you have certain gifts and the other thing is to people actually receive the gifts that you give them and for a gift to be given it's not enough for you to give it it they have to receive it and it's in this connection or lack of connection between what i thought i had to give and what people were able to receive that i have slowly then discovered my my calling i did not think that i would have a calling of a kind of academic theologian at the level at which i and i ended up working because i thought i would be much more connected to the church i realized that at some point that i'm just not very well suited to be actually a pastor of the church even though my father would have wished that very much yeah and that's interesting if i could just comment on that because through my teens i was just aware that i had been called to be ordained and i'd known that since i was i don't know 8 9 10 or whatever i'd hardly told anyone because i didn't quite know how to say that um i think by my mid-teens i had told my parents that was where i was heading but then it was i remember this quite clearly when i was about sort of 17 18 19 i i would look at what parish clergy did and i would admire them for it but i had no kind of yearning at that stage to do it myself that that actually came later i mean the last 20 years um i've loved doing the pastoral stuff but it was as though i was deeply down somewhere being prepared to step back from um ordinary parish ministry in order then for the academic thing which at that stage i had no idea was on on the on the table at all to come through and i i remember thinking well i guess i'll enjoy it when i'm doing it because i knew that was what i was going to do so i thought i would enjoy it but but in god's mercy that was kind of being being scaled down in order that the others should come up it's it's odd how that happens i don't know i don't have good categories for that really yeah yeah i think what i think is kind of sensibility uh and sensitivity to what is around and then courage to give up on what was a dream and you are not seeing it actually kind of fulfilled because i sometimes the knowledge to know when to persist on a dream and when to receive those signs as signs that it ought to be given up because there is some other dream that that ought to be pursued and i can and i think this ability to sense that and then to follow it the courage to follow it i think that's i found for myself very very important and in some some instances it was also very important to seek advice of of deeply uh spiritual people i was just recently thinking when when these two two popes were canonized and there was a mention also of the papal preacher um who who is continuing to preach to the present pope and preached to john paul ii reiner cantala mesa and some of you know know him but i remember the kind of discernment that i had to go through leaving yugoslavia and coming to fuller as to teach it was a very difficult agonizing decision because some dreams had to be given up so that other dreams could come come alive and i remember conversations then with people like him i've i spent one hour walking somewhere in menace uh with him and telling him listen i'm just so completely conflicted what do i do and then this this very famous and very gentle and very wise man helped me kind of discern that i trusted right the the the advice so i find that this this kind of sensitivity and ability to respond to situations in the view of larger things that god might have in store combined with courage was very important let's uh let's fast forward a little bit too to today and your own purchase on seeing the church because you do see it globally you see it through the lens of your own particular background but also both of you travel so much all around the world and you have an amazing purview really of what's going on in lots of places so i think we'd all love to just hear a little bit about how you when you sort of speak casually freely spontaneously at home about the church and you say the thing about the church today is what do you find yourself saying oh goodness um it's it's very difficult when you've been as intimately and uh fully immersed and involved in one particular bit of church as you are when you're a bishop of a diocese it's difficult to step back from that obviously i did step back four years ago into my present job but even so when i'm thinking about how the church works what the church is my natural inclination is to think myself back into durham with 250 parishes in the rust belt poorest area of one of the poorest areas of of england and to see these little communities grittily struggling to hold on to their identity um and to to witness to that community and to be there for that that town village whatever it was um and for me that's actually that was very very moving because in my previous work i'd never quite seen as much of that close up as you get and and see this is this is authentic christianity whether it's happening in the northeast of england or whether it's happening in central africa or southeast asia or whatever is actual communities who are drawn together to worship god in christ who then without having a great global strategy or whatever are just aware because the spirit is making them aware of the needs in the local community of illiteracy of drug abuse of homelessness of of the banks leaving town because half the shops are shut and that sort of thing and the community saying we need to do something about this and it's actually wonderfully moving to see the church being the church without us i say any of these people necessarily who are doing this having read lots of liberation theology or any such thing um just because they're praying because they're worshiping because they're coming to the lord's table sunday by sunday the spirit makes them aware of the needs in the community and stirs them up to go and do something about it and and it's become clear actually it's now being quite widely said in england that of all the people who volunteer to go and serve cups of tea at the visitor center in the prison um to to make toys for extremely sick kids in hospitals and so on the great majority of people who are doing that volunteering are actually practicing christians we've been there's a big thing recently in the uk people have been noticing that food banks are becoming more and more of a reality in many areas of the country they had a whole program about that on the television a few weeks ago and it became clear that almost all these food banks are run by churches um and you know it's as though nobody's actually told them to do that there hasn't been a directive from the general synod or lambeth palace or anybody it's just that the local churches are worshiping seeing the need and finding the strength from their worship to go and meet it and that to me i i don't think that changes that much across cultures when i've been in other countries that is that is kind of real christianity um and it's it's this is i think what jesus meant when he talked about you know the meek and the hungry for justice people and so on these are the people who are making the kingdom happen here and now um that outward looking thing and of course when people are doing that when then they say to their people they met on the street um well we're having a special service next week or it's christmas or it's easter or whatever why didn't you come in it's much more likely people are going to come and join them when they realize that that's not why they're doing it but it's part of the whole thing and it was hugely heartening to me to see that that stuff actually happens whether or not people have a grand scheme a mission statement a great plan um it happens because the holy spirit is at work okay wonderful yeah no i i'd want to echo what tom has said and you know i'd maybe just add was it maybe a year and a half ago two years ago i was sitting in our local church in a small town of madison and there's this group of people who most of the sundays they're connected with the church in brazil right and they worry about what's happening when the flood comes they're worried what's happening when some of the workers need to go they send missionaries to go there just to help and strengthen this little community with whom they're in this context and i think what an incredible thing that people do just also no directive from anywhere from within it was welled up in them somebody made a contact they identify with them and they they stand by them half a world away unrelated completely which i think is just a marvelous extraordinary thing i also think of the many places in the world where the church is persecuted where the church is experiencing variety of pressures and sometimes outright uh vicious and deadly deadly hostility and the kind of dedication that you see among people um it's it's sometimes amazing to observe it what is the power of the gospel that makes people against all odds against all adversity to stand firmly and be attached to something that's larger for them than the life itself when i compare that sometimes with lives that we that we lead and when i think of little um worries that we are gripped by uh whether churches or elsewhere and then you see these people they're giants they're absolute giants because they will rather lose the whole world and lose their own soul and they live exactly in those ways that's amazing to me i'm also amazed for instance uh you know often people complain about how much kind of heterodoxy and variety of things are are in the churches i'm actually amazed how without very much pressure or or kind of doctrinal policing in many of these churches you get basic stuff of the gospel comes out now there's this power of the gospel to impose itself upon the imagination of people power of the example of christ that that kind of leads which i think is also amazing think of movements and what happens with them and yet there is this continuity over the centuries also so i'm all excited about that kind of stuff i'm also sometimes i'm concerned also i'm concerned and maybe one and there are aspects of concerns of one i will articulate which was experienced interfaith experience in which i was some of the major world religious leaders were gathered together and i served as a christian advisor to christian group but there are also other theological advisors so i was kind of in a circumference on the outside observing what was going on and dalai lama was present there a few other folks were present and what struck me actually is and never left me since that time it was in amritsar in india what struck me is and maybe that was just selection of folks who came but i don't think it is just that how religious leaders of some other religious groups saw themselves primarily as spiritual guides and christians acted primarily as intellectuals and bureaucrats and that got me thinking how do we what does it mean for us to be in charge of a church um how do we understand our task what is at the core at the heart of the ministry that we are engaged in and i can never shake that image away and i always think we need to find ways without betraying obviously the intellectual demands of the task of leading the people of god without betraying the organizational demands as well which there are plenty of course but somehow the spiritual heart somehow the identification with who jesus christ is and what it means to follow jesus christ day in and day out how that shapes the desire how the shapes practice how the shapes engagements that to be at the very heart and the center of the ministry i sometimes wonder whether we for whatever reason and i'm still having puzzled this out have not kind of at least comparatively don't didn't look at this point to me as well as i had hoped we would that's that's very interesting because my experience through the years that i was bishop of durham was that actually um that would be the case if you went to general synods or councils of the church or whatever that the people who tend to be involved heavily in those things are as you describe and it was always a relief to come back to the reality albeit the often the the poverty stricken reality you know some very genuine poverty and to find ordinary communities doing the real thing but also that that transcended um denominational barriers very quickly and easily because even though they knew that friends across the street maybe presbyterians not anglicans or roman catholics or salvation army or we even had some syrian orthodox for some odd reason in in durham um but there was a sense of commonality at that local level as soon as you sort of said well we should have some economical dialogue then the people who got to do that would be the intellectuals and the bureaucrats and then that would be a problem um and they you know i actually believe that the real church is not what gets into the newspapers is not what you see um with some great new appointments and and big well-known name leaders the real church is the stuff that's happening at the local level and it's much easier to do shared mission it's much easier to do ecumenism it's much easier to work with local governments local structures because and there's an example of this when i became a bishop somebody from the anglican offices in london among the bits of advice they give you is they say be very careful when you're talking to journalists from the national newspapers because they're all out to get you because the national newspapers want to have stories about how stupid the church is how divided the church is etc and the slightest chance to publish those stories they love doing that but they said you'll find that the local newspapers and this is true right across the country will not be like that because they are serving communities that know that actually the church is doing a good job which it mostly is and so again and again the local newspapers even if they're editors or atheists they acknowledge that the church is a player in the society where with with the major needs that are being faced and and that was enormously heartening because it says to me that whatever is going on in the big public eye and gets on the national news or whatever that's actually irrelevant the work of the gospel is going on among the ordinary people and that's that really gives me gives me a great heart and i mean you mentioned people being in touch with folk far away i have a friend who was called recently to go and work in northeast africa and ethiopia that sort of area and i i'm on his regular email list now it is absolutely fascinating people who have nothing refugees who've lost everything and yet whose faith is vibrant and who are working for the gospel where they are out of extreme poverty and hardship and difficulty and displacement and so on and you just think this stuff works actually and and we in the west are so so sort of cushioned against the necessities that we don't often actually put it to the test in that way i think where we've moved in the conversation is is interesting because one of the challenges i think that perhaps we would all agree upon is that there's a great deal of attention that's given to what i've come to think of as the ecclesiastical industrial complex this thing uh that we would call the the superstructure of organized uh christian faith in various places and it it dominates the landscape and it's the thing that grabs the headlines and it's the demographics that get cited but both of you in the last several comments you've made have been pointing back to authenticity so connect some of those dots with the surprising arrival of pope francis and the significance of his uh witness and the way that he's been received what do you what do you make of all of that how what does that say to you about the hunger uh of people outside the church or people in the church for authenticity yeah i think the authenticity is uh is the right right word people smell hypocrisy from afar and it's worse if you're a very big and powerful hypocrite right the smaller hypocrites you are the easier is to get away with it though i must say that in my judgment uh john paul ii with all his failures uh and uh issues that one can criticize uh and in his own way benedict the 16th uh were actually deeply spiritual um [Music] human beings they weren't quite capable certainly benedict wasn't quite capable to kind of project this uh to the outside and there were aspects of his pontificate that kind of stood in a student way but kind of incredible closeness of pope francis to the people um it's it's amazingly refreshing and it's interesting to me is how little it takes right for it to actually happen it didn't take very much he take took a little bit of courage that ruffled some feathers i remember i was in croatia actually when he was elected and then came two months later also and was talking to some catholic friends and they were saying bishops were really kind of annoyed by francis because he was wearing as a pectoral cross he wasn't wearing golden cross how can then they be wearing crosses that look nicer than pope is doing and suddenly a very simple gesture of a kind of pectoral cross you wear kind of goes through the whole institution and shapes sensibilities generates fears but also realigns behaviors i think and it's a beautiful thing to see somebody who embodies the values of the of the gospel and i think it proves simply what i always have found i found it in my own work i found it also that if you zero in on the gospel it is an amazing attractive thing i think it's also in our divisions between kind of liberal and uh and conservative evangelical whatever whatever it is i think i have found also that when you speak about the gospel you'll you'll get the hearing from both sides you'll get you'll get shots from both sides too but my experience was after i wrote and the just this little little book free of charge and then all the endowed episcopal parishes because it was archbishop of canterbury's length and book they invited me to speak they liked what i was saying about this and then i received a phone call from james kennedy radio ministries they want to have me one hour on their radio and i think this is not possible right that an endowed parish episcopal parish right very liberal and james kennedy ministries radio ministry would want to talk about this thing but i think it is because one zeros in or the heart of the gospel right and that is immensely attractive this beautiful thing that we have for the the deposit of faith in the gospel this is amazing thing let's not mess it up yeah yeah let's let's discover its beauty and stand by this beauty have faith in its power and i think that's one of the things that i sometimes think the church especially in the west kind of lacks we always want to help the gospel a little bit with a bit of our own wisdom here and there and think we do better when we do that rather than letting this incredible beautiful thing that we have shine it's interesting that you use the word beauty several times because uh for various reasons i i recently was asked to read and did read the new it's not an encyclical what's it called um uh currently the technical catholic term for it evangelii gaudium the joy of the gospel that pope francis has written it's his first sort of pronouncement it's not an official encyclical with an inverted commas but it's a papal statement and almost all of that is about the beauty and joy of the gospel and almost all of it i was reading it eyes going popping out almost all of it could have been written by a cheerful charismatic evangelical and there's there's a bit at the end where we get the mary bit which is sort of woven in well you know they that's fine they do that but most most of it most of it could have been you wouldn't have known it was it was a pope writing it and and i haven't met francis i met both his predecessors and uh francis is is clearly very bubbly and effervescent when he became pope um just before justin welby became archbishop of canterbury and i i heard archbishop justin being interviewed about what happened when justin do you know this story when it's worth telling when justin met um francis went to the vatican introduced and there's an interpreter sitting there etc and the pope started to laugh he started to giggle and justin started to laugh and they laughed for about a minute and justin said of course i was toronto blessing he said i was laughing in english he was laughing in his head [Laughter] but and it became clear that they were both just overwhelmed with the sense of the craziness of god for choosing them to do these jobs now and kind of relishing the absurdity of it and it seems to me that's a wonderful moment actually in church history to have two senior church leaders who are just who just think it's uproariously funny that they should be doing this now and then one of the first things that the pope said to justin was we should write an encyclical together you know that's amazing that could not have been said you know any point i think in the last 400 years they would have been talking to each other 100 years ago just quite quite so i mean so this is an amazing new moment and it chimes with my experience of um i happen to be the anglican observer at the roman catholic synod bishops five years ago 2008 and it was on the word of god which for most of the bishops in this 2000 strong gathering that basically meant the bible some wanted to say bible and tradition some wanted to say bible tradition and magisterium but for most of them they were talking about the bible and they kept saying things like what a pity we aren't allowed to share the eucharist with our protestant brothers and sisters but there's nothing stopping us reading the bible with them and what we need to do is get new bible translations so that all they would say catholic faithful men women and children should be able to read the bible for themselves in their own and i'm sitting there listening to it and eventually when it was my turn you everyone's allowed to make a five-minute speech i i said not quite like this but this is what i meant pity you chaps haven't said this in 1525 the world would have been a different place [Applause] yeah but i i went home from that and went to went to my roman catholic opposite number in the northeast of england i said you know what your chaps and rome are saying and told him he said oh tom that's wonderful shall we do some shared bible studies shall we invite the other churches and we have this wonderful lenten program with local groups right across the northeast of england just getting together and reading the bible and most of them had never done anything like this before and the things that came out of that and it's continuing it's a program just amazing and i think that's a wonderful ecumenical instrument actually and we discover that there's so much more that we have in common than any of the things that divide us and that's that's a really really exciting thing that's great we're just about to turn the corner and invite you to invite your questions so if you want to start lining up this is the microphone that will be used let me just ask one more question before we uh while we wait um please stand there by yourself or with others please you could hold hands across the aisle if you'd like um maybe each of you could just choose uh say two three critical issues that you think are facing the church and the future of the church what what would you say are just a couple of things that do you uh capture some of the most important and urgent terrain for the church to be considering enacting responding to um but either of you say about that well well i'm not not quite sure exactly what to say um i i think in the larger society uh which will then translate into challenge for the church i think we will be increasingly facing a question of what it means to be human being with kind of medical developments neuroscientific developments and so forth i think this would be this will be a very important issue that we will be facing i'm also concerned we were talking at the table about privacy issues we are now made aware of them with nsa this kind of stuff but with social media that's always also present i'm as well as much concerned about corporations having all the data not simply about me personally but about us collectively translating those into knowledges which then mean also power which means the powering of a majority of people i think we might end up also with further a gap between extremely poor and and very very rich i think ecological issues we seem to be incapable of acting on on them we will have upheavals coming at us and it will be a challenge i think for the church how to respond in situations of possible crises yeah i i resonate with everything that miroslav has just said um when i was working on the book on paul which is why i'm actually here this week to talk about paul that the two things which kept coming at me from my reading of paul because people often ask me if if um if paul was around today what would he say to the church today and the two things which and that they're huge and obvious but they just have to put on the table is so urgent and one is unity and we've been hinting at that that i think if paul would have come to britain let alone america he just it isn't so much that he'd be appalled he just would not understand how you could have all these different organizations calling themselves christian and having precious little to do with one another you know there's just it would be completely beyond his ken okay he when he writes romans he writes um to obviously different house churches there they are in romans 16 and one of the reasons he's writing out is to make sure they are actually in touch with each other and respecting and and and able to share in fellowship with one another so the ecumenical movement starts there really in the middle of the first century but but unity is the one thing and the other is holiness and and there's and the trouble is this gets the question of holiness gets downgraded to sexual behavior or sexual identity but actually it's much much bigger than that and i think it's particularly in the protestant west and often even catholics in the protestant west have still learned from us to think the way that we have um which is to say oh we don't believe in law we believe in grace therefore we believe in tolerance and that happens on all kinds of issues it's not by no means just sexual behavior and that is just such a a low-grade and twisted vision of what actually the challenge to genuine humanness that is there in the gospel is is all about and i just hear continually um crazy reasoning whether it's people talking about bankers bonuses or or people talking about um as you say ecological issues there's just a lot of seriously fuzzy thinking about what christian responsibility is for our world for ourselves for our marriages for our communities for our bodies etc and i i just dread the thought of more drift in terms of muddle and so on and we need to get a clearer vision of the joy and beauty of a genuinely human existence which is what holiness is all about a god reflecting image-bearing existence so so unity and holiness we've got a lot of work to do on that and behind that there's an issue which could be presented intellectually and i i could present it intellectually but i actually i've seen it practically and that is the intellectual version is that when we read the gospels matthew mark luke and john is this really about jesus announcing and proclaiming and launching the kingdom of god and then happening to go off and die on a cross or is it really about jesus dying on a cross so that we can go go to heaven and all that early a bit was just kind of interesting teaching and we're not quite sure how it all fits together and when i was again i keep referring to it but we are talking about our experience of the church when i was bishop of durham there were lots of churches in my diocese which would see jesus doing the kingdom feeding the hungry helping the poor and the marginal and and being kind to as we say cheaply old ladies stray dogs and small children you know that's um and and church is thinking yep that's that's what it's all about we're going to follow jesus we do doing that stuff what a pity he died so young you know and and then you have other churches the other side of the street for whom the sole and only message is jesus died for your sins so you can go to heaven and don't even think about doing social work because that's uh that's um works righteousness and it's the social gospel and we know and i i spent a lot of time interpreting those two communities to one another and trying to help them and help the church at large to see that actually the story is much bigger than either of those communities have got hold of and it's a major challenge how you put together the preaching of the kingdom the launching of the kingdom and jesus death on the cross and yet the evangelists do it effortlessly for them it's all part of the same thing and i think this is very deep in western culture that the way that our culture has worked probably since the middle ages is such as to prise those two apart so that we find ourselves living on one side of the line or the other i see that as a major challenge and it's something that theologians hopefully like miroslav or or like david ford in cambridge or whatever might give serious attention to and exegetes as well but it's something that actually is going on on the street in terms of what ordinary christians actually do and say and think and pray maybe maybe just one maybe just want one additional thing that i uh that i uh generally when i'm asked the question that you've asked me i say and this time i didn't so i better do um and that is i i'm quite concerned about what i one one can describe as functionalization of the christian faith by this i mean that it's there just to achieve certain ends that we set for it now those ants can be integrity of a nation um sacred canopy over those ends can be helped me succeed as i'm pursuing this or that kind of endeavor a kind of sense that this is one tool at my disposal as i go about doing my my life living my life and i see it as a kind of perennial temptation of the church uh that's what it is about human beings a man does not live by bread alone by but every word that comes from the mouth of the lord that's what that is about but i think in it particularly significant in the church in the modern age particularly in the church in the capitalist age it just seems to me that we take god for granted as our servant and the lordship of god the holiness of god the fear of god which i think are so fundamental and indeed the foundation of our wisdom they're getting kind of shoved aside so every new examination of that issue i think is very important both already given us a great deal we're going to whoa uh we're going to have an opportunity to hear from from others let me just invite you to introduce yourself to state your question briefly uh we would really encourage you to state it as directly and simply as possible and if you'd like to give a lecture you could do that someplace else but not in the line at the microphone so uh that's just a general disclaimer so with that we look forward to your question uh please introduce yourself and state what you'd like my name is ryan i'm a phd student here at fuller in theological ethics because of that i'd like to thank you gentlemen for writing books like after you believe and free of charge i think those are a great service to the church my question involves the shift of christianity to africa and south america now we've been hearing a lot in the past few years about how the shift is taking place this is the future of the church this is where the the powerhouse of christianity will be but you gentlemen on the stage and i'd like to ask to tell all three of you you represent a swath of geographical area from let's say berkeley california to sarajevo that doesn't seem to be anywhere near south america or africa what are your hopes what are your fears what are your expectations for the church and places which are being described as churches in exile or as churches that are in post-christian nations one one of the great signs of hope that happened in my church um within uh the last 10 years was the appointment to some people's surprise but not to those of us who knew him of john center who was a ugandan exile as the archbishop of york um and uh the point has not been lost on british society as a whole that actually we used to send missionaries to africa and now one of our own leaders is somebody who's come from africa to remind us of what it's all about and that's a that's a wonderful symbol and though there aren't enough such people yet it is happening and that that's a that's a sign of that but i think we are all aware of the global shift and i think in a sense we're kind of waiting to see how that plays out we can't um suddenly stop doing what we're doing um because it's all supposed to be happening somewhere else and indeed we all rather hope that the holy spirit will not completely leave america and northern europe um and depart somewhere else but you know the wind blows where it wills so there are there are there are signs there are signs of hope but yeah i'm not really answering the question beyond that and just just want to say yes we hear that we hear the situation um and thank god that fascinating and wonderful and exciting things are happening yeah i agree with uh with tom uh i i hope also that we will keep our eyes open and keep our hearts open um take seriously voices that come from these parts of the of the church of the world um i think it's so easy for us to be to have this parochial view notwithstanding all the information that we have and get we filter it so easily and become even more narrow-minded that we otherwise would be with all the exposure that we can have to um enter within through internet to anything that we that we want um but i hope we will have eyes open hearts open have a sense that they have something profound to teach us that we might have forgotten things that they know and look actively for the learning to actually happen and there's another wrinkle here as well which as miroslav is talking just occurs to me that um one talks grandly from time to time about what's going to happen when the power of the west declines and who are the emerging economies and who's the next world leaders and two of the obvious candidates for that are china and india and one of the most exciting things that i think is going on is the amazing chinese christian church and very recently within the last decade amazing numbers of christians in india but people becoming christians particularly among the dalit and if those countries were to become even more world leaders economically and socially than they are at the moment i think it's very exciting to think that god has raised up new generations of people who are not in any sense in an established national church rather the very opposite and particularly in china try as they may to stamp the church out it grows and it grows and it grows and i don't think we've heard even the beginning let alone the end of what we're going to learn from the church that's been persecuted in china because i think their own writings have not been usually translated yet and i suspect that there's a huge amount of christian wisdom going to come out of that church when those writings become public property so you know we are bumbling along doing our stuff and god is doing fantastic new things in ways that we are only just beginning to be aware of amen [Applause] hi my name is john zigler and i just finished mdiv here at fuller and my question is for you dr wolf um i'm under the impression that you have in the past couple of years um converted to anglicanism or joined an episcopalian uh congregation um and then i read your book after our likeness and it um it was decidedly not anglican it was a pre-church ecclesiology that you were arguing for so my question is have you changed your understanding of ecclesiology and if so could you maybe tell us a little bit about that journey and if not maybe you could share with us about the tension of being a theologian and having a different theology from the the body in which you worship you mean writing books that don't fit with my life yeah that one that's the one well i wrote a book on virtue too that's bad enough you know um when i'm asked why do i worship in um in an episcopal church um uh and and i do and i have for quite some time even while i was teaching here at fuller so it's not nothing nothing recent uh at all i was formally received i never converted the one doesn't convert i think in my judgment i was received to episcopal church i think it was in 1989 or something like that not 98 i'm sorry and often i'm asked why i said wine and god uh wine actually happened here at fuller i came from uh from yugoslavia we had single chalice wine in it for quali communion i went to a local assemblies of god church and i was i was served shot glasses with grape juice inside and i and i said i love shot glasses but not in church and loved them uh somebody doesn't want me to say this my microphone isn't working but i don't like grape juice in them and then where can i go to a church where i will take communion from a single up and take wine i had to go to episcopal so i started actually worshiping right here across the street in in the episcopal church and then the reason i stayed is actually liturgy i have been in so many churches where i have been finger has been wagged at me either about my personal holiness or about some social causes i've been psychologized i've been sociologized and all of this stuff and to do better with a cup of cappuccino in my packet back at home but i have found in this marvelous episcopal liturgy i found all the elements of the gospel present and where i was going to say to one of the preachers in local evangelical church just please sit down and have somebody read the scripture don't give me this um i won't say what i said in my uh in my mind uh i always go quite happy no matter what the bloke says from the pulpit uh i go i go home quite edified and encouraged because i have heard um the gospel in the in the liturgy now how does that fit with my ecclesiology you know uh ron williams had uh reviewed my um book on the church after our likeness and when i saw him uh for the first time i think it was it said andrews there's a conference in john's gospel in theology july 2003. uh ron was there and so i introduced myself to him who i was you remember amazingly marianne was there too uh at the same time we were and so as iran uh you know i i you know i'm delighted to tell you that i've become one of your sheep uh and so i've joined the default and so what kind of episcopalian i am you know i'm a local church what am i doing here with this thing it's not not quite working let's figure out uh i'm a local church episcopalian in fact i do think that i don't think that the denominations are ecclesia ecclesially significant i think local churches are um and i think universal church is but not any of the denominational structures i don't think there is a particularly theologically significant to say kind of episcopal church as opposed to something something else so i'm a cheerfully and i'm a bishop bishop wright might disagree strenuously with me on this but i'm a cheerful uh episcopalian anglican with strong free church sensibilities well it's it's very much possible that and the thrust of the book i'll say one more thing the thrust of this book that i that i wrote was actually to to retrieve the importance of the free church ecclesiology for the ecumenical discussion in long ecumenical debates uh it was great it was almost a given that free church ecclesiology is a deficient form of ecclesiology and i was never able to uh to understand it partly because of my experience i was thinking of all these small churches at the heart of their lives was the gospel they have given their lives uh sometimes sometimes literally to the work of the gospel and they somehow aren't churches but i can name whatever other institution there is the church by the sheer fact of the succession and communion with rome and i for life of me could not see how this is the case and how this in any way would correspond to what one finds in the new testament so i decided to write a book that would connect the holy trinity with local emphasis on the local church and congregation and retrieve this as a legitimate form of ecclesiology my argument is not for all times and places this is the most appropriate form of ecclesiology it is just one importantly important and valid form of the church hello my name is andrew just somebody who's knows that the calling of the church is my life i'm not necessarily a student yet um and my question really is based on unity and what you just said is if unity of the church in general is one of the largest issues that are facing us now should we look for the breakdown of denominations um and disqualify them or should we somehow look for unity of denominations or what are signposts moving forward yeah that's that's the right question to ask i'm not sure it's easy to give the exact answer i think we have to look in long term because grant you know we have to start where we are not where we aren't and i think we probably most of us think that if we had a clean slate and we're starting again we wouldn't do it like this i mean some people might i don't know um but the idea that when you disagree about something you go away and you start a new church um that's just not it seems to me anything you could find in the new testament they would have been horrified the early apostles of that sort of idea if there's a problem then you bring it to the whole church and talk it through and pray it through and search the scriptures and see what's going on as i said before fortunately that is happening at all sorts of local levels and i think what's going on at the local levels with shared bible study with shared mission with shared concern for the work of the kingdom in the society yeah you can link arms with all sorts of brother and sister christians and indeed link arms with people of any faith and none to do some of the things that we all need a green need doing in society and when you do that you look at each other quite differently from if you say oh well you've got the westminster confession we've got the 39 articles therefore this doesn't match with that and so i'm not saying those are unimportant i'm not a doctrinal indifferentist far from it um as those who know my work will know but it seems to me that the way forward is by that shared work and by the shared bible study and i would say by shared eucharist i'm a strong believer from the basis of galatians 2 that all those who believe in jesus should be at the same table no matter what their ethnic social cultural background moral differences whatever they belong there together and it seems to me when we can do that then it's extraordinary what happens that sort of fellowship then i i would love to see a lot of the denominationalism isn't it interesting that we even give it an ism it's a sort of second order ism um denominationalism i would love to see that wither on the vine and much more exchange of ministries and so on and the fact that here at fuller you've got how many denominations you say you've got all you know people share people right people sharing in their study people sharing in their common life people praying together what a tragedy if then they would have to go away and have nothing in common with one another when they get ordained into different denominations that that would just be meaningless so i i do think there's it's a large task but the the danger is that somebody then wants to make a resolution about this so it goes up to some senator council and they immediately set up a big committee or commission with 19 important theologians on it and they're going to have fun for 10 years and produce a long report but it's not actually where the action is at the action is local and then all sorts of things will happen no i was but yeah i fully agree with this i was participating myself in those kinds of uh kinds of dialogues um and i think that the huge challenge for unity is um that while we in ten years that it took us to hammer out some kind of consensus uh on the doctrine of that we were that we were studying there were about 1000 independent churches that were founded yeah um springing all over the place this is this uh immense spiritual uh spiritual anger energy that's coming from the from the bottom a bottom up and i think in some ways we have to kind of reconceive uh what unity actually is what it means and what it can mean under these kinds of uh kinds of conditions and realize that um i mean it's one thing to to uh as tom mentioned to kind of start from the scratch and then to design the whole thing and it's another thing to live in a concrete situation concrete cultural situation in which we find ourselves today because churches are always incarnated and then ask ourselves what are the appropriate modes of unity expressions of unity in this concrete situation in which we find ourselves and there are such we can pursue them uh and i think we need to make it a bigger goal for ourselves great thank you hello my name is josiah and i actually have a bit of a different question i'm not a student i'm a screenwriter i work in hollywood and often i feel there's a bit of a tension in my life between being an artist and trying to be an active um regular member at a church i often feel that what i do for a living what i am passionate about is not something the church understands or gets or necessarily values and so i'm wondering um like here from both of you what you think the place of the arts is in the church in the 21st century and how the arts can help further bring about the kingdom of god okay what a wonderful question thank you uh curiously i was speaking at a church in phoenix arizona last night and uh there was about five minutes of what i said was exactly addressing that question and i have found again and again and again in different parts of the world um that whenever i speak about the place of the arts in church people come up to me afterwards and say exactly what you said i'm an artist my church hasn't a clue what i'm about and they don't know where this fits in one of the key texts that i've been interested to know if miroslav knows his book as a book called the master and his emissary by ian mcgilchrist who's a brain scientist who's also a literary critic which is an interesting combination and he has this he has this amazing thesis and i'm going to simplify it and he doesn't simplify it it's a long and important book um and he says that western culture is basically schizophrenic and as a brain scientist he knows what happens if the right hemisphere gets detached from the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere is where music and faith and culture and metaphor and meaning uh happen and the left brain is what determines um all the the nitty-gritty all the details all the money all the all the sorting out of of of the uh the smaller details um he said what's happened in western culture is that we have become a left-brain-dominated culture and again this is radical over-simplification and don't take me as representative of what the book's saying but this is how i'm oversimplifying it for tonight and i see this in the churches colluding with what's happened in western culture that the arts have come have become the pretty bit of decoration around the edge which we say oh it's nice to have a bit of that but but now we're getting down to the real business and for that you know we don't need all that fancy stuff we see this in our education policies in in the uk that whenever the government shrinks the education budget the head teachers look at their budget and say well we don't actually need somebody teaching art and we don't really need those periphetic music teachers that that's kind of incidental and and we it's time to have a major major major reaction against this in in the name of um i was speaking to somebody about this earlier today in ephesians chapter 2 paul says we are god's artwork the word he uses is poyemo which is the word from which we get poem we are created in christ jesus to be ourselves both work of arts works of art in ourselves and people through whom beauty happens in the world because we believe that god is making a beautiful new creation out of this old creation that he began to do this with jesus and that there are several things about that message which though you can articulate them intellectually you will only fully grasp them when you do it through music through art through literature through imagination one of the great reasons i love being in saint andrews we have an institute for theology imagination and the arts and we try to hold those things together and and the arts are ways into the center not the pretty board around the edge so god bless you go for it and make it happen that's great i can't let that moment go by without just pointing you to the brim center for worship theology next question my name is anthony of the transfiguration and i'm a member of the community of the beatitudes which is a catholic community that was founded by a reformed minister calvinist minister in france 40 years ago and a community with the charism notably of art and beauty in the liturgy and i appreciate both of your attention towards liturgy and my question concerns the sacramental unity of the church in the substance of the liturgy and the the subject came up in our mica group i participated in the mica group and now i'm becoming a facil a facilitator and uh our group had the heated discussion uh about communion and um and who can receive communion and there are many different uh denominations represented and um and for me it helped me reflect upon how uh as much as i love my product my friendships with protestants and my uh mikey groups or bible studies i may do with them um when i celebrate the eucharist i know that that's when i'm closest to every baptized believer and when i whether i celebrate the eucharist or whether i pray my liturgy the hours i know that that's the moment when our hearts are together worshiping the lord and being being born again of him and um and so it was it was hard for me to see such a passionate discussion and disagreement about who can receive communion and i saw my question is um regarding the future of the church with the blurring of congregational lines and the blurring of moral criteria within congregations what's the future of eucharistic communion for protestant christians yeah no i think it's a so so i i have a i have a sympathy with the position taken by the orthodox church on relatively closed actually communion i understand the relationship between ecclesiology and communion i don't subscribe to it but i understand how it functions and why it functions the way it does and how in the protestant tradition often eucharist ends up being this uh it's almost like like there's a kind of smorgasbord uh feast there and you just go and take and whoever comes doors are open you just take bit for yourself and eat and that's what it is right so the type of way in which we take partake of the eucharist reflects the kind of convictions we have about the church which is very much about individual nourishment of uh of a person um and in that sense i i i think protestants need to retrieve something of the connection between the eucharistic participation and the communion of all the people people of god um uh at the same time i i think that all baptized believers ought to be able to partake of the holy communion so that the most fundamental form of unity arises from the shared baptism and the eucharist as such is not kind of a result of an achievement of our lives whether achievement in unity or achievement in holiness but eucharist is the modality of our reception of grace and in that sense it's an expression precisely of the life of those who are baptized the sum and culmination of that of that celebration of that life and reception of grace and in that sense i'm for open uh communion of all baptized believers what i don't particularly care is when communion is open uh so that partaking of the communion is a modality of evangelism so to speak you can take of the commun partake of the communion but whether you're baptized or not that strikes me as not quite right tie between baptism and communion is still strong for me yeah i i very much agree with that and i know that there are some churches in america in my own denomination which have actually um given up baptism as the the the the line as it were and that is unprecedented that's never happened before i think in the whole history of the church and represents a major departure and many others in the wider anglican communion are very very worried about that as well as our economical partners i think part of the thing is um to remind ourselves that the eucharist is not the pr property of the church or of any one church the eucharist is is jesus property which he graciously is sharing with us and when we start to think how do we do it like this or like that um i mean that may sound rather sort of pious and obvious thing to say but i think we have to constantly we have to go back to um making sure we're doing that otherwise it can become well we do it like this and we're just protecting it or guarding it or whatever when i was working in westminster abbey it was a nightmare when we had a communion service because there was no way that you knew who all these people were and you get a busload of tourists that had just been dropped off at the door and then suddenly everyone was coming up to so they would come up too and however much it says in the printed order of service all baptized christians are welcome to receive communion many of our tourists came from other countries couldn't speak any english so if they stretch out their hands i don't say are you baptized i say the body of christ and because i think that actually um god is generous god has a sense of humor god is much happier that we should do that than that we should become horribly fussy about it at the same time in ordinary church life and obviously western australia is not ordinary church life i think it's only very very recently that any churches have stopped doing a very serious confession of sin as part of the preparation for the eucharist and because that's absolutely there in scripture in first corinthians 11 let let a person examine themselves and so eat the bread and drink the cup not that we have to attain a standard of holiness but this is the lord's table and if we're sharing fellowship with jesus then we can't just come blundering in with whatever going on in our lives and that's when the eucharist has to be part of an ecclesial community because this takes pastoral work to deal with the problems that arise so to try you can't isolate it as a as a separate action and try to sort of police it or organize it it is bound up with the life of the rest of the community which is another reason for exactly as you say um eucharist and community belonging very closely together a huge huge issue but let me just say this in my tradition and in some others people have sometimes tried to restrict eucharistic participation to people who have got the intellectual ability or maturity to be able to articulate a particular theology of what is going on in the eucharist that seems to me entirely wrong when you baptize a child the child is part of the family now and should come to the table i firmly and strongly believe that one of the things that always used to almost reduce me to tears there was a church in my diocese where there were two or three rows of people with down syndrome who would be regular members of the church and to give communion to these lovely people who couldn't have begun to articulate a theology of it but their eyes told you that they loved jesus and that they were part of this community that was a wonderful sign of the gospel to me and i wouldn't have been without it for the world just just before we go on yeah all right go i want to ask a follow-up question to that because i think there's a lot of people at fuller who come from a non-denominational backgrounds about a few percent of our uh students come from non-denominational backgrounds some of which also come from a context in which the link between baptism and eucharist would not be as obvious and strong as you've just described so what's the danger of the disconnection from your points of view of the this connection between those two things well you can disconnect in one of two ways you can disconnect by saying the eucharist is for anybody and everybody who happens to walk in through the church door and from the beginning it has always been the family meal and uh has always been the place where at jesus command heaven and earth come strangely close and something happens which is hard to describe but which is about holiness which is about the presence of god and just to say who cares anyone can come the church has never done that and if it was going to be an innovation we should we should be much clearer than we are but it can disconnect in other ways when people say yeah you've not only been baptized but you've either got to be confirmed or you've got to go through all sorts of other stages as though it's something which you gradually climb up to and so it can disconnect in either way and i think both of those are unhealthy exactly well it seems to me that it empties it of its meaning right um it might you might as well go and spray everybody with water and call it baptism right the church has sometimes done that yeah i know that's been a great moment in its history right uh so so so it seems to me that if it did it indeed is the body of christ a kind of connection with that body of christ that is enacted in baptism that is sealed in baptism is essential for eucharist to be the eucharist you might turn the question the other way around why would you do that why would somebody participate in a right to which they have no absolutely no relation or understanding does it become some kind of a magical thing and it cheapens and then in a different way makes it empty for meaning for a person and kind of expects that somehow just by the virtue of taking of this bit of bread that has been consecrated something's going to happen without you having any connection with the community or with the larger story of which this is a part great thank you thank you very much for the question let's move on all right um my name is sam uh i'm a senior at uh biola university and uh i grew up in the korean church and that's my background and um i'm i'm currently serving at a korean church at the moment and the one thing that i am constantly struggling with is trying to always because um the korean church is always known for their long prayers and their passion for prayer which i completely i mean i respect them for that so much um but we're not really known for our strategy mission mission strategy within the local community and my question is how well am i supposed to really balance out the power of prayer but also equally as implementing you know strategic ministry strategies within the local community so that we can properly reach out to the local community as well with prayer and i think that's the best way i can please get a question thank you i'm not sure i've completely understood actually what the i think do you want to restate the question yeah so the question is um how to balance out and i don't and i don't like the way i question it actually but how you how are you how am i supposed to balance out prayer as long i mean prayer with ministry strategies and then planning certain ways to really reach out to the community because i feel like in the korean church we've over emphasized prayer so much where prayer is a solution to every single solution and we haven't really so it's the contrast yeah i mean i was being puzzled because uh it seems to me you've got to do both um on the other hand i do know some christian leaders whose every answer to every question is i will go and pray about this and that can drive you nuts actually if you want them because yeah yeah okay we we but actually it's much more common in my church that any question is well let's get a committee together um and and then i want to say no you should be praying about this for an hour perhaps a week perhaps a month um you know depending entirely what it is um there is also a question of giftedness here some leaders really do have some christian views really do have a special giftedness for a ministry of sustained prayer and it's not always the leaders actually sometimes members of a church are just people who are called to be people of prayer and get on with it and without that we would all be completely messed up lost you know forget it equally there are some people who are very very good at thinking strategically and that too is a god-given gift you can develop it but it is a gift this is why we have this wonderful thing called the body of christ to make sure that the prayers and the strategists are actually working together and and because we do need each other without prayer strategy is just going to go round and round in little circles without strategy sometimes prayer is still wonderful but i think the answer to prayer is always somebody has to think out how we're going to do this so yeah a balance but i'm an anglican i believe in balance i wonder whether it work is in the kind of contrast between supernatural and natural planning is natural planning is what we do prayer is what we ask god to do and uh whether this kind of opposition between the two is a helpful and healthy way to to think about it and then it would be a theological question so that the means which we employ aren't in contrast don't stay in contrast with the activity of god through those means so that in other words you can have prayer so just so that you can think strategically well and strategic thinking can feed into prayer so the two are not so much opposed but to go hand in hand yeah yeah thank you very much for your question we'll take the questions that are in line and i think at the risk of otherwise turning this into a sauna we would be done so we'll take the next question hello my name is linda and i'm a phd student school of intercultural studies um dana robert talks about the fact that more than half the human beings in the world are women and more than half the christians in the world are women and makes the argument therefore that christianity might be called a women's movement and i'm wondering what you think the the trajectory is in the global church of women because you know up to this point it was like all men in line here i mean fuller's not that one some of us noticed that yeah and it's all met up there as we did this yes exactly um i've decided that you know not don't need feminism in the the confrontation but we need to have some gender responsiveness going on and and some looking at each other's perspectives and i'm wondering what you're thinking well i have a certain kind of women envy uh that i sometimes wish i had been born as a woman women might have a certain access to certain things that i as a man do not do not have this is a little bit in jest but i think it's very important for us to kind of honor women's experiences and not just to kind of assume that because i think a lot of church runs on women right women run a lot of churches and yet they don't get recognition their voices often are not heard in where where it's where it matters they may be i remember in former yugoslavia which is the same in many parts of the world that i've encountered you can have a woman who starts a church who runs the church but then when baptism comes the time for baptism comes when times where burial comes then they have to send some kind some mail in order to do the the kind of formal work of the church whereas the life as it goes goes by the power and strength and giftedness of women i think we need to kind of be clear and recognize this and celebrate this and open up the church and we'll be better for it yeah it's you know you probably know much more than i do about the trans-cultural thing because that's what you're studying but my sense is that there is enormous variation not only over time through the last 2000 years but across cultures to this day and when i've been working say in the middle east or in some other places which are very very different from my own country i've just been aware that the whole place of women in different societies is so radically different i remember when i was first in jerusalem a bishop came from canada to speak at a clergy conference in the middle east and was berating them for not having women's ordination and as one priest said to me plaintively afterwards it's hard enough to persuade the congregation to accept that a woman might actually do the prayers or read the gospel you know that's where we are at the moment you can't just say we now in the west have decided that it's got to be like this therefore everyone's going to come into line and i chafed that because i believe in women's ordination and have taught it and written about it and certainly practiced it i've ordained a great many women in my time as a bishop and and i've seen the the wonderful things that can happen in churches through women's ministry so i'm completely up for that but as with paul in first corinthians when he says this is the strong position this is how i think we should all be but i recognize that there are people from different cultures who just aren't there yet and paul interestingly will not force them to catch up with this great agenda which i've got he says no we we've got to proceed pastorally and that can be of course and often has been an excuse for dragging one's feet for saying oh well never mind we you know maybe the next generation will do it sort of thing um and miroslav's absolutely right there are an awful lot of churches that run on women as it were and in my denomination the the movement called the mothers union has done amazing things in africa particularly it's one of the major forces for social um uh i don't know what the word is but social advancement for teaching of basic domestic skills for all sorts of things and yes for preaching and announcing the gospel and i think it all goes back you know when jesus wanted to find somebody to tell other people that he was alive again it was mary magdalene that he chose and said that's that's not an accident and people often don't realize that but i think we have to be careful because i know the word complementarian has been corralled by various groups in america an american society i fear is not actually helping the rest of us to come to terms with this because the polarizations that happen in america don't map onto other people's polarizations in other parts of the world but it does seem to me that there is and miroslav implied this radical difference between normal maleness and normal female this is not a complete disjunction there's all sorts of overlap but that is highly complex and highly charged and often highly contentious but that that there is a difference i have no doubt um and v vladi for us and so because when i was in uh when i was younger people were arguing for women's ordination on the grounds that there was no difference and that therefore women should be ordained and i i've taken the completely opposite view which is that because women come with very different gifts it's wonderful to have those different gifts in ministry alongside those that god gives to men so but we're all in this and it's it's so freighted and fraught with different spin-off issues that we have to be very careful even what i've said is probably setting hairs running if i'm not careful but so i think yeah we we resonate with that actually you know the the the queue could have formed sooner you could have come out and got in the front but uh so but that that's where we are as a culture yeah thank you very much thank you very much three more questions my name is james uh i'm a traveling speaker and a leader with a discipleship program in san diego um forgive me if this question is broad the church is is kind of ever-changing throughout the centuries so in your wisdom or knowledge do you see any one or few vital things that the rising generations of the church are missing or lacking in difference to the generations before them is there anything vital being lost thank you very much i i had on my heart at heart earlier today as i was thinking about this one particular thing which i see going on in the newer churches actually within my denomination but also outside the new free churches and that is the absence of the sustained public reading of scripture that may sound very old-fashioned very boring very liturgical but actually throughout church history the reading of scriptures and not just two or three verses but but entire chapters and doing it well so that it's not just but actually coming across and people are engaged with it um that is actually an act of worship it's not primarily to teach the congregation what this passage says it's celebrating the mighty acts of god and in my tradition one of the things i'm proud of in my tradition that we actually do that morning and evening we read large chunks of scripture and the congregation is therefore through that act of worship enfolded into the great story what happens when over a generation people's entire church-going experience has no public reading of scripture that's incalculable and a huge danger of and there's a lot of young people who go to churches where they just it never occurs to anybody that you might actually read the bible out more seriously i think i really want to challenge people to take that seriously in the middle of that is psalm singing which is another of my particular hobby horses at the moment but the public reading of scripture is in danger of being lost it's extraordinary to hear myself say those words but i think it's true [Music] [Applause] you know i want to thank you for asking that question i think it's a very important question i often ask myself so what do i find in the bible or the long christian tradition present repeatedly present as a pattern but absent in my experiences today and i think it's a very good and important exercise because it indicates certain forms of blindness that we have certain forms of cultural patterns that we have taken on that may be to our detriment um and some of the things some more theological that come to mind for instance fear of god is not spoken very often at least not in many of the western fear of god okay fear of god or submission to god a kind of familiarity has entered into our relationship with god and building on this father as abba we have become extraordinarily good buddies with with a guy upstairs good morning god is how we begin our days or something of that sort a kind of sense of loss of loss of transcendence that's just one example there are many other other examples for example for instance in my own work i've always been thought that the the kind of sense of connection between forgiveness and certain forms of forgetting are very important because the church has believed it through the centuries and yet sixties on uh suddenly it starts disappearing and i say wait that cannot be right church for two thousand years i have to have very good reasons to think to know why i think the church was wrong for those so many years but now suddenly i've come with this deep insight that i can discard this so i think thank you for the question i think it's a very important thing to ask ourselves repeatedly thank you good evening gentlemen thank you for being here um my question is a personal one um dietrich bonhoeffer wrote the book the cost of discipleship and in that if i'm not mistaken please correct me if i am he contrasts cheap grace and costly grace and he talks about living costly crisis living and dying in christ on a daily basis if i'm not incorrect my question to you is as a disciple of jesus christ and this is addressed to both of you um as a disciple of jesus christ how do you view your central role as a disciple um what do you consider your central role wow in terms of that bonhoeffer quote particularly um well that sort of context yes but you know certainly if you have a different view then um no i mean i take it for granted that what paul says in romans 8 about the daily dying is part of the deal and it seems to me that the closer you get to jesus whether through prayer or through service the more in ways that you couldn't have imagined ahead of time you will be asked to take up some form of the cross and it's going to be different for all of us and in many cases it will be very secret and private but something which is absolutely a major disappointment which you simply have to grit your teeth and get on with or a major issue in your life where you really love to do this but god is clearly calling you not to either because it's wrong or just because it's not for you or whatever and i think as a pastor i know that when people open up to me again and again things that you would never have imagined from knowing them quite well when they actually open up there are real daily dyings either to sell for to sin or to ambition or to hopes or whatever which just happen all the time and you can't predict that you can't say in advance okay if you want to do this you're going to meet this problem and that challenge whatever it's just going to happen and if you are actually seeking honestly wholeheartedly to serve god in whatever vocational capacity it is there will be challenges you will have to face something sooner or later probably sooner i've seen it again and again in myself and in many other people so if that if that's the sort of question you were asking yes the answer is um the christian life is not simply swimming along having fun um saying your prayers from time to time and hoping it'll all work out it's it is actually a slog and a battle and and we're all involved in it but you know i i i said once a final year ordinand asked me in public what's it really going to be like when we're ordained and i said i took my courage in both hands i said it will be far worse than you fear and i said and i said it will be far more glorious than you can possibly imagine yeah it's this other side of far more glorious that you can imagine that i wanted also to just contribute to this um it seems to me that in every right kind of death and they're wrong kinds of deaths right we sometimes take wrong kinds of crosses right which aren't the one in the footsteps of christ right but every right kind of cross and every right kind of death is followed by resurrection so that the hope lies precisely that the costly grace is the enriching grace in that sense and so that it's a source of new life rather than a form of masterism which we have to undergo so that we'll get some kind of a crown when we go up to up to heaven but in terms of broader your broader question what it means to follow christ and i think i want to tie it to the character of the church i always liked the image of the church as a moon which doesn't have light of its own but reflects the light of the sun and the church fathers and throughout history most recently benedict xvi has emphasized this image for the church and i think that indeed is the deep spirituality of the church that it is by virtue of its relationship to christ and i think that's also the spirituality of individual believer of the following christ it is this kind of consistent steps in the right direction not in nietzschean sense of that term because he meant exactly opposite of what we are he meant it was a criticism what we uh claim as a a as a proper attitude toward life but but it's not just that it's a kind of sense that his life is our lives in our life and i think that's what death and resurrection are so that in our lives he is shining through in our lives our echoes of his life more we reflect christ the better we are as christian thank you what an amazing feast you have given us tonight in your uh reflections and i i really do say thank you to all from all of us to you we'll express our things in just a second but i i'm just touched by the fact that um that as we began this conversation none of us knew where it was going to go we knew that we were going to jump into a variety of questions that i was going to ask and others were going to ask and where we've landed it seems to me especially uh even in these last moments it's just been very profound and an expression of the fact that the hope of the church and it's and the future of the church really finally is not in our hands under our control or our strategies but really under the the power and influence of god's presence and mercy and grace and you've pointed us to that again and again tonight so before we express our thanks i just want to lead us in a brief prayer oh god how thankful we are that you who are lord of the church and its only true hope and savior are the one who knows us by name and knows your people around the world and throughout time including the future and so we come to you tonight praying for the future of your church to be a moon that would truly and brightly and faithfully reflect you thank you for the fact that the life that we have thought about tonight that is the life in the church is not ultimately about us we are staggered that it gets to include us that it involves us that it involves your great love for the world but our life is ultimately your life and so we come with gratitude tonight praying for what the church has been and what it is and with great hope for what it will become if we had taken other directions tonight we could have explored the pain of the church and the disappointment of the church and the confusion and anguish of the church the at times what seemed to be the death throes of the church but in your grace it is never the final word and so in this easter tide we acknowledge again that you who take seriously the whole range of our humanity the character of the world that we are a part of and for which we have been called to follow that we might be people who point faithfully and wisely to you help us find our place in your communion help us to embody it in word and deed and help us to show forth the reality of the cross and the resurrection by how we love to the glory of your great name we pray amen amen let's thank archuker [Music] you

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Published: Thu Feb 10 2022