Church for Every Context. Michael Moynagh

he was convinced that in baptism Christians were initiated into the kingdom of God and set free from self-concern to serve others. They were to be a positive force in the world, working toward a good society – much as we have seen at Little Gidding and in the Methodist societies.

      When, in 1844, Kingsley first arrived at Eversley, he was told by a local farm labourer that there was an oppressive weight on the hearts of the local people – ‘and they care for no hope and no change, for they know they can be no worse off than they are’ (Kingsley, 1899, p. 96). As Kingsley got to know those whom he had been called to serve, he became deeply concerned about the grinding poverty and spiritual darkness of their everyday lives. He saw how the circumstances of everyday life can extinguish hope and sap interest in or commitment to change. Kingsley tended to people in their everyday settings, sometimes working beside them in the fields, and calling on them as many as six or seven times a day when illness and other crises hit home.

      Equally remarkable, however, was the way Kingsley mobilized his small and impoverished parish to address the needs of its context. It organized cooperatives for the poor, ‘shoe clubs’, ‘coal clubs’, a maternal society, a loan fund and a lending library. An adult evening school was established to address the problem of illiteracy, and Sunday schools and weekly cottage lectures were planned for general as well as Christian education. Kingsley’s revival of catechesis and confirmation provided a model for the whole Church of England. A church building that had formerly been vacant throughout much of the week was now buzzing with all sorts of activities on a daily basis. In its own way, Kingsley’s parish church became ‘a school for God’s service’.

      Learning how to read, having wider access to the Scriptures and gaining a deeper understanding of God’s mission in the world remained the chief concerns of the church at Eversley for years to come. These commitments turned an insular country parish into a missionary outpost. Even the dilapidated structure of the church was refurbished and reconfigured with multipurpose spaces to serve the expanding array of ministries. Once again, a church was recovering the vision of how to be a community of the gospel in the midst of life.

      It was Kingsley’s vision of the kingdom of God that provided the DNA for this outreach, moving the church beyond an exclusive ‘come-to-us’ mentality that sometimes marginalizes parish life. The recovery of an incarnational ministry had such dramatic effect on the Eversley parish that it was, in effect, reborn as a mission and contextually-shaped church – two of the hallmarks of ‘new contextual churches’.

      Eversley parish was

       missional – the church served people, including those who rarely attended;

       contextual – it addressed the needs of people in their ordinary lives;

       formational – Kingsley revived catechesis and confirmation, and pioneered Christian education.

      Dorothy L. Sayers’s pub audience

      Among the more innovative aspects of Charles Kingsley’s ministry was his popularization of Christian social ideals in novels like Yeast (1850) and Hypatia (1853). He also knew how to use the print media of the day (magazines and tracts) like we use the Internet – to get the word out, form networks and show how Christians think and act in the modern world. In these ways, Kingsley opened new channels for the gospel that would continue well into the next century.

The next major breakthrough in communication technology, the radio, quickly became such a channel in the 1930s and 1940s, thanks to the missionary vision of Archbishop William Temple and the creativity of writers like Dorothy L. Sayers and C. S. Lewis. Let us conclude our journey through time with a brief look at what Temple called ‘one of the most powerful instruments in evangelism’ of his day.14

Between the two World Wars, Britain experienced a widespread decline of small communities, the expansion of mass media (especially the radio) and a growing interest in new forms of entertainment like the cinema. William Temple, as Archbishop of York and then Canterbury, recognized that while the Church of England had managed to retain a strong institutional presence in society, Christian belief was widely discredited among intellectual elites and disconnected from the everyday realities of the working poor. It was no longer assumed that the church had answers to the questions posed by modernity. So Temple initiated a diverse array of responses that would restore a ‘Christian map of life’.15

      A renewal of crucial ties between Christ and culture came about, in part, through Temple’s strong support for religious broadcasting on the BBC. He was active in the founding of the new medium, served on its councils, and encouraged the airing of religious programmes – sometimes meeting stiff resistance from those who worried that this might draw people away from actual church attendance. According to his biographer, F. A. Iremonger, Temple was, himself, ‘an admirable broadcaster (1949, p. 556). The map of life he presented to a rapidly growing audience sought integration of religion, art, science, politics, education, industry, commerce and finance. Not unlike Charles Kingsley, he was convinced that Jesus had something to say to the world, through a church that served as herald and foretaste of the reign of God.

      Based on this keen sense of social witness, Temple encouraged writers, dramatists and playwrights to offer their gifts to religious broadcasting. Dorothy L. Sayers was among the first to accept an invitation from the BBC to present religious drama for a popular audience. Her debut was in 1938 with the production of a nativity play for the Children’s Hour. But it was in 1942, with the airing of The Man Born to be King, that she received, according to the Controller of Programmes, an ‘overwhelming nation-wide response’ that would be long remembered as ‘one of the great landmarks of broadcasting’ (Reynolds, 1993, p. 327). Already famous for her detective novels, now she received some negative publicity as well – this as a result of her emphasis on the humanity of Jesus and use of contemporary language in the script rather than ‘talking Bible’.

      Temple thought Sayers’s work was a ‘fine piece of Christian evangelism’ and appreciated the need to present a more ‘realistic’ life of Christ. For her part, Sayers assumed this was all part of what it meant to engage in incarnational ministry. To communicate timeless spiritual truth through ‘the arts, all letters, all labour and all learning’ was to take up the ‘sacramental position’ realized by Christ himself, she insisted. This defined the mission and ministry of the church as well – but a Church now communicating the gospel well beyond the traditional parish locale (Reynolds, 1993, p. 336).

      Sayers, in fact, found a medium that spoke to people who were not being reached through traditional means. She perceived a gap between the Christian message and a growing audience that no longer found this message credible. Of course, she never imagined herself to be a missionary or church planter in uncharted mission fields, but she aimed to reach people outside the church with the life-changing ‘drama’ of the Christian message.

One of the unexpected outcomes of her radio broadcasting was the spontaneous formation of networks of listeners around the programmes – even in local pubs! After another nativity play by Sayers was aired on Christmas Day in 1939, she was surprised to learn that a lively discussion on its message had ensued in the ‘pub audience’. At a time when the BBC was attempting to sanitize her scripts, she was pleased to note that the conversations generated by her plays were prompted by a deep sense of identity with the gospel story. Sayers had relied on her artistic instincts: ‘I felt it important to get people to believe that the characters in the Bible were real people like ourselves, and not just “sacred Personages” apart from common humanity’.16 From her standpoint, she thought this was the best way for the church to say something ‘loud and definite’ about Jesus Christ – especially in a world of growing complexity and, as another war approached, conflict.

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