Thinking Anew – Why believing and belonging go together

In these uncertain times for the church, it is worth remembering how difficult it must have been for the followers of Jesus after the resurrection to come to terms with their situation. No matter how convinced they were of the Easter message the challenge to spread that message in a hostile environment must have seemed daunting.

The book of Acts has been described as the first history of the church. It has also been called the Gospel of the Holy Spirit because its author, St Luke, sees the emergence and growth of the church in people’s lives empowered by the Spirit of God.

Traditional views are challenged, lives changed, and new understandings take root, sometimes after bitter argument.

Tomorrow’s reading from Acts describes early church life: “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts . . .”

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Archbishop Michael Ramsey commenting on this passage made the point that “They did not think of the church as a kind of a thing in itself. They were concerned only with the dying and rising of Jesus and the power of his resurrection at work in their lives.” In other words, they were unburdened by the institutionalism that has emerged since.

Faith difficulties arise for some people today because of their frustration with institutional religion. They have a sense of the spiritual, of the One that religious people call God, but they find the church as it is today irrelevant.

Bishop George Appleton in Journey of a Soul suggests that people are no longer prepared to take their faith from the tradition in which they were born nor from other people. "They want to deduce it from their own experience of life. They do not need theories, but the experience which will be the source of their own interpretation. They are suspicious of anything which seems to escape from life into theory, from experience into doctrine, or from the thing itself into talk about it."

But the reading makes clear that believing and belonging go together. The faith community is intended to be an example of community, people living in harmony, united by their loyalty to Jesus Christ. This was to be a model society in a fractious, divided world; instead, we add to that fractious, divided world with our denominational rivalries and loyalties.

Bishop Francis Duffy writing in this newspaper recently suggested that the church has become too comfortable, too aligned with political and social power, and has neglected radical elements in the gospel. One might add that it has also failed to communicate the faith to younger, better-educated generations in terms they understand. A Roman Catholic priest friend once said that when he asked questions about his faith his father told him to stop; all that mattered was that he be a good Catholic, but people will no longer believe because they are told to.

Fr Tony Flannery has suggested that we examine the suitability of religious language today. “Some of the very basic doctrines of the church no longer make sense to the modern mind, and are being quietly rejected even by people who still attend church. Some of these doctrines are not scripture based, but came out of the early centuries of the church, a time when there was a very different understanding of the world and of humanity, and, probably most significant of all, a very different language which is still used to proclaim these doctrines ... Our understanding of the universe and of the human person, through science, has greatly influenced the way we look at ourselves and the universe, and church doctrine has not adapted to this.”

We don’t have to agree with but he raises important questions, and as the American writer Aiden Tozer noted, “Scholars can interpret the past, it takes prophets to interpret the present.”