The Easter Season readings from Acts, tell us about the adventures of the Early Church both its internal organization and growth and, as today the explosive effects of the Holy Spirit carrying the Gospel out into the world.
We heard from Handley, the week before last, how some of us have been thinking about ways to grow the church here in Hampstead. By “growing churches” we tend to mean increasing numbers of those attending on a Sunday. That is, of course, desirable, so long as it does not simply mean decreasing numbers at some other church. But I think we ought mean something more important by growth, and we should start with growth in the sense of growing up.
Inner growth, our growing up as Christians and a deeper, more mature understanding is the business of any church. We grow up as individuals but we do so in a community; physical and emotional growth happen in our families; educational formation happens at school but it is in the worshipping and active fellowship of a church that we will find increasing religious awareness and understanding. That process will go hand in hand with the two areas of expansive growth which Handley identified. First, improving the way in which we welcome newcomers and the way we nurture our existing members and second, improving our outreach, to the local and wider community.
Just as, individually, our inner growth should- or is most likely- to happen in the context of a community trying to live the Gospel, so I think that Gospel will be spread best by the community, by local churches. There is, of course, a role for individual witness, but even the most outstanding Christians will, I believe, draw on their membership of Christ’s body for their inspiration. Whatever we achieve in the world will be achieved as agents of Christ, or as limbs and organs of his body the Church.
Growth means change and it will sometimes be painful and usually uncomfortable. As it looms, the temptation is to look inward and rather too fondly at our rules and our traditions; the things that define us as a community. If we are to grow in any sense then our traditions will need to be adapted and our rules modified, if we don’t jettison them altogether. But we should undertake this process not by looking to what alteration is needed to make us more attractive as a church to outsiders, nor cosier to those who already members, but by returning to the first principles of our faith. And this is where St John comes in showing us the fundamentals of our religion.
His first letter is addressed to some Christian community which has undergone change and trial; it’s not entirely clear what the problem was but it seems to have been as result of Gnostic ideas. This isn’t the place, nor am I remotely qualified, to explain the nature of Gnosticism; it is enough to say that it is a portmanteau word for a group of ideas which broadly, held that object of philosophy and religion should be to try to attain a purely spiritual existence eschewing the changing, decaying squalor of the tangible world around us. Applied to Christianity this had a number of consequences. First, and most obviously was very hard to reconcile the Incarnation with this belief, but more significantly for my theme, it suggested the Christian life should be introspective, an esoteric existence as disengaged as possible from “the World”.
The challenges to modern Christianity are not those that faced the 1st century church, but we still encounter a distinction between religion and “the World”. For many, myself included, church is too often just a haven and a solace. We like the cosy feeling of being in a secure place, with familiar faces and practices, the same music and other trappings together with the relief that the unpleasant outside world so rarely breaks through (and if it does, it is usually prepared to go quietly when asked to do so by the Churchwardens) Equally, it is difficult to witness to one’s religion in a largely irreligious world.
Intellectually, the noisiest threat to religion, and Christianity in particular, is from materialist philosophy and science which maintains that our behaviour is governed by laws of economics and evolution.
John has no time for either this introspection, nor materialism. His repeated theme is a return to the basic principles that should guide us in striving to grow as individual Christians and as a Christian community; those principles are as applicable to the internal challenge of growing in maturity and fellowship, and the outward challenge to spread the Gospel and bring about the Kingdom in to the world. It’s the latter that I want to emphasize in the close of this sermon, as it seems most appropriate at the start of Christian Aid week, but as I have said outreach into the world whether communal or personal depends the strength and growth of the community from which it comes.
At first, it seems that John’s first principles, that God is light and love place him in the philosophical, the Platonic, tradition, from which Gnosticism grew. But the love that is God is not an idealistic theoretical abstraction; for John, God is love and we are the children of God. God’s love is expressed in our love for one another. This is practice not theory. It is love ative in the world as Christ was.
John acknowledges- elsewhere in his letter (2:16)- that the World is hostile, it does not know God but consists instead of “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life” which we might summarise as worship of the material. That worship reveals itself, for example, in the belief that the only real imperative is economic and the only meaningful rewards are financial or in the certainty that only evolutionary theory can explain all our behaviour. At the heart of both theories, is the confidence that self-interest is the defining force in our existence. Expressed like this is clear just how opposed the World is to Christianity, and I suspect most world religions.
But John gives us hope; with faith we can overcome the World; that faith is the expression of God’s love, a love that is recognizable and realized by loving action. I believe Christian Aid expresses that love; its many and varied projects feeding the hungry, educating the ignorant and empowering the dispossessed, are all witnesses to the love of God for the world. The same could, of course, be said for many charities, notably the Fair Trade movement, which this church also supports, but it’s the start of Christian Aid Week today, not Big Brew Day. And there is something special about Christian Aid, and that is its boldness in using “Christian” its name. It may seem obvious to you- I hope it is!-but it is not always fully appreciated that the “Christian” means by Christians not for Christians; it is Christians doing what John says we should do; conquering the World, by love. Supporting Christian Aid is one important way of showing the world what Christianity means and as church we should support it wholeheartedly and be seen to so. If you are able and inclined, there will be an opportunity to do just that next Saturday morning as a group of us wave a banner and rattle our tins in Hampstead Village. It is one way in which we can reach out into the world around us and be seen to be force of good.
But we should remember that our ability to release that force, that is our ability to spread the Gospel, is dependent on our ability as a community to grow and realize our potential as God’s children- that is our ability to love one another and to make ourselves Christ’s body. And conversely we cannot meaningfully love one another if we do not spread that love to all God’s children, however far away they may be. If others, who have not yet come to see God’s love for them, see what we do, and are curious to find out what else we get up to, then so much the better. We must welcome them in. Amen.