At Westbourne Grove Church, we are currently doing a series of teachings aimed at renewing the intellectual foundations for our engagement both with the Bible and with a world going through tumultuous upheaval. An extravagant and presumptuous ambition, I know, but you’ve got to try.
For me, it is an opportunity to implement much of the narrative-historical hermeneutic that I have argued for and used on this site and in other writings. I’m not putting myself forward as a model speaker—far from it. But I’ve enjoyed doing these talks, the response has been pretty good, and perhaps they will give others hope that the church can be shifted on to more solid biblical ground as it braces for the shockwave of the age to come.
The text in each case is not a transcript but an overview of the topic.
In the Christian West, in the pre-modern world, the parish church met the religious needs of people living in the parish. It was necessitated by and sustained by a culture that had been in place, in one form or another, since the conversion of the Roman Empire under Constantine and his successors.
In the modern world the contract between the church as a priestly community and society at large began to break down, and churches came to rely on the personal conviction or interest of attendees to sustain them. That corrected some of the shortcomings of the culture-sponsored church, but it led, arguably, to a consumer model of church: to keep attendance and income up we had to stimulate need and then meet that need as efficiently as possible.
There are still many churches implementing the consumer model and doing a good job of it, but in an increasingly post-modern world churches are looking to re-engage with their social context, in all sorts of ways. This has often been called “missional church.”
The methodological reorientation, however, creates a new funding problem. If we abandon the competitive, consumer-driven, church-growth approach and prioritise “quality”—whatever we may mean by that—over quantity, we have perhaps three practical options:
- We can keep our costs to a bare minimum by not paying for buildings and personnel; or we may support ourselves by working bi-vocationally. Such communities can struggle to gain visibility and credibility and can be hard to keep going.
- We can ask for financial support from big wealthy churches, but the money may come with strings attached. Transcultural missionaries often operate on that basis, and they may find that the strings weaken or break over sufficiently great distances.
- We can generate income from church-based business activity, but this requires a quite fundamental repurposing of buildings and rethinking of ministry.
Westbourne Grove Church in West London is a good example, I think, of the third option. Twenty years ago, long before I got involved, the old Baptist building was radically reconfigured in such a way that it now houses quite significant social, cultural, and economic activity alongside the religious life of a smallish but growing church community. That has both made it sustainable and given it diverse new ways of being present in the local environment.
We are not a monastic community in any literal sense, but the practice of the “urban monasticism,” which I just happen to have adopted from friends in Communitas, supplies us with some very useful tools for clarifying who we are, what we are doing, and how we are doing it.
I have also learned, to my surprise, that “modern monastic” was a key element in the brief for the redesign of the church given to the architect nearly thirty years ago. And I thought I was being clever!
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