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Relevant Church Doctrine In House Church Setting

The third instalment in a series on doctrine in the context of Pacific Parks, the house church I meet with each week.

Pacific Parks for four years has worked around the three core values of being relaxed, relational and relevant.

Founding members of Pacific Parks were aware of the difficulty many Australians have when first attending traditional worship. We identified cultural cringe factors for most Australians of our age and younger and undertook to develop a culture of gathering that did not feature ceremonial vestments, long sermons and hymn singing accompanied by organs. However our understanding of ‘relevance’ hopefully goes deeper than cultural preferences.

When we say ‘relevant’ we mean:

“We seek to make Jesus accessible to people, and seek to break down any barriers that might prevent people from knowing him personally. We value people, wanting them to discover and exercise their unique giftedness.”

As we developed our approach to being church in a number of new housing areas, we were deeply aware of the diversity we faced. There is no one culture on the north Gold Coast. Even though we had ‘postmodern’ and ‘emerging generations’ in our received mandate, we were very much aware that it would take several different approaches to connect people with the good news of Jesus.

Take music, for example. A number of our original members were embedded in the country music scene. Others were more into electronica and ambient music. Some enjoy singing praise and worship songs. Others don’t like singing in public at all. We have been tempted to develop formulas that will attract people from each of these cultures. What we’ve ended up doing though is focusing less on marketing, entertainment and ‘ambience’, and focusing more on relationship building that is uncluttered by programming.

We seek to make Jesus accessible to people, and seek to break down any barriers that might prevent people from knowing him personally.

Our value of accessibility is grounded in the doctrine of incarnation. We believe that God was in Christ, reconciling the world with Godself. As the Uniting Church Basis of Union says, our call is to be a fellowship of reconciliation, a body within which the diverse gifts of its members are used for the building up of the whole, an instrument through which Christ may work and bear witness to himself.

We believe Jesus to have lived as “God in the flesh” in the context of Roman-occupied Palestine. Looking at Jesus’ ministry we see a range of relationships. Jesus camped out and went fishing with the disciples. He dined in with wealthy society leaders. He took part in public expressions of worship in synagogues and in the temple. In all of these situations the focus was not on form. The focus was on accessibility.

With accessibility in mind we have let go our preoccupation with purpose-built church buildings, choosing instead to meet in places where people naturally gather. We meet in parks, homes, cafes and taverns, and at times in church buildings.

The doctrine of the incarnation tells us that God was prepared to become embedded in a small backwater local culture, without expecting instant success.

As frustrating as this has turned out to be, we have made a commitment to growing a relationship at a time.

One of the temptations of working with a commitment to accessibility is “fear of offending”. We have the challenge of presenting the good news of reconciliation in a way that leads to people living lives in harmony with the values of the Kingdom of God. We ourselves are confronted by the priorities of Jesus. We shouldn’t be surprised when others take offence at Jesus’ teaching. However we want to avoid offending people with cultural insensitivity or arrogance.

We value people, wanting them to discover and exercise their unique giftedness.

Our valuing of people is founded in a Christian doctrine of the human person, traditionally referred to as “Doctrine of Man”.

Most approaches to the Christian doctrine of the human person begin with creation - the belief that the human is created by God to be an expression of God’s character earthed in a environment of fragility and uncertainty. The inherent value of each person is grounded in the value given by God’s gift of life. As a community of faith we are challenged to see each person in our wider community as an expression of the image of God.

We believe that God has given us the capacity to continue discerning the depths of God’s call as a community, and also as persons in community. As Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 13, “Now I see in part, then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” In our shared life-transforming interaction with God’s Spirit, we are equipped to recognise what it means to be truly human in our own context.

As we connect with Jesus, God’s character in each person emerges. We are gifted with the opportunity to participate in God’s ongoing act of creation. We can become tempted to interpret this challenge by filling out skills inventories to determine our contribution to weekly church life. The deeper challenge is to daily discern the ways in which we are called to live out an incarnational presence in our unique sphere of influence.

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Relaxed Church Doctrine for House Church

Pacific Parks Uniting began with a group of people who were keen to explore an alternative to the hectic pace of a church addicted to excellent performance. We’d been in churches that measured effectiveness by the number of people attending Sunday worship and midweek on-campus programs. We’d also been in churches with a focus on correctness, in which newcomers were carefully tested for right belief and respectable lifestyles.

We were committed to exploring an alternative approach to church that would equip its members to live out radical discipleship largely in the context of everyday relationships. Our gatherings would need to inspire and support people to engage with real life, seven days a week.
To summarise this approach, we started describing ourselves as “Relaxed Church”.

We come together in a welcoming, warm, encouraging and inclusive way.

The primary doctrine that we affirm here is the doctrine of grace.

Serene Jones describes a similar connection between the doctrine of grace and the ryhthms of a church’s life in her article, “Graced Practices: Excellence and Freedom in the Christian Life”, found in Practicing Theology: Beliefs and Practices in Christian Life, edited by Mirsolav Volf and Dorothy Bass, 2002. Jones is a theologian with membership in a United Church of Christ congregation in New Haven.

Serene Jones describes the ambitious vision-casting process developed by a ‘Millennial committee’. As they presented their plans to the congregations they found people becoming tired, overwhelmed and without enthusiasm. In response, the committee went back and explored the benefits of the good news of Jesus Christ. They unpacked what it meant to live out of justification and sanctification. They revisited the Scriptures and found there the narrative of God’s grace, from creation through to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. The congregation’s leaders then began to explore what it would mean to develop gatherings that would be good news to their participants. Practicing the sabbath, grounded in the freedom of justification, became a gift to people already exhausted by hectic lifestyles.

So what would living in the grace of God look like for a new network of house churches? Pacific Parks began with the grace-imbued practices of Sabbath and hospitality. Instead of beginning with running worship services, we started with leadership meetings on Sunday mornings in each others homes, over a barbecue. We moved to public parks and started inviting friends and family. Our first purchase as a church was a large catering barbecue. We followed that up with sports equipment.

At first some of us felt a little anxious, perhaps guilty, about missing out on Sunday morning worship. We weren’t busy ‘running Church’. There were no rosters to fill. There were no offerings to take up and count as we had already made arrangements for direct debit giving. There was no ‘order of service’ and no post-event evaluation. It was strange for people who had spent all their lives ‘doing church’.

We discovered that our energy was now available to focus on expressing the hospitality of God to those around us. God brought into our circles people who would not have fitted neatly into a church committed to excellence. Like the woman with only one outfit for wearing in public who was anxious that her grandson was sipping on a drink during a worship time. We pointed out that most of us had a cup of coffee in our hands. The couple who were living together who joined one of our house churches, later holding their wedding in one of our homes and regularly bringing their extended family and network of friends. The young people who struggled with multiple addictions, who time and time again found themselves responding to God’s grace.

We seek to be flexible, accepting and authentic, creatively responding to others.

As in the relational approach to Church, our relaxed approach is connected with our perception of how God dynamically relates to the world. We believe that God interacts with the world as it is, continually helping creation respond in tune with God’s call. We don’t believe that God has a blueprint that we must discover and follow slavishly. In the life of Jesus we see constant examples of responding to people as they are, in the settings in which they live, using the elements of each scenario.

Earlier this month I met with a family network for a baptism in the park. When the parents of the boy being baptised asked if we had to hold the service in church on Sunday I explained that the Uniting in Worship regulations did specificy that baptism should be held after a sermon during a Sunday worship service. But because Pacific Parks was committed to developing flexible and creative approaches to church, we could say yes to Saturday morning in the local park. Besides, we didn’t have a church service on Sunday. Neither did we have a church building to hold it in!

So where’s the doctrine here? The Uniting Church in Australia does have well developed doctrine around the connection between word and sacrament, designed to ensure that baptism is a corporate experience of the wider Church and not just an individual rite of passage. In planning the baptism service one of my first priorities was to ascertain who the congregation of the faithful would be in this case. I had two couples from Pacific Parks Uniting who would be affirming a commitment to nurture faith in the child and his family. The parents themselves were keen to express their own emerging faith. His parents, sister and brother-in-law were Catholics and were able to participate meaningfully. For others it was a case of being welcome, included and encouraged to explore faith for themselves.

We have deliberately sought to delineate between primary doctrines of Christian faith and more practical doctrines that are not essential in these settings. For the sake of authenticity and consistency we seek to develop shared experiences of faith that are consistent with the Uniting Church services of baptism and communion. However, we sense no obligation to maintain the traditional or even contemporary ‘order of service’ for worship. For example, we rarely sing together. In our earlier days together we did. We bought a keyboard and practiced hard for our corporate gatherings. But as we moved into separate house churches we discovered that not everyone finds singing helpful in connecting with God. We came to see singing as a practice of faith that would be used when appropriate.

We have struggled with issues of sexuality and how they apply to doctrine. The Uniting Church Assembly in 2003 clarified that each Presbytery had the capacity to ordain people on a case by case basis. As a local leadership team we found it impossible to develop a shared understanding of how that related to doctrine. Was the Church’s traditional doctrine relating to homosexuality a primary affirmation, requiring a Christian to be heterosexual or live a lifetime of celibacy? Or was it possible that God was more flexible and welcoming than the Church had allowed for over time?

The next post will focus on doctrine in relation to being ‘Relevant Church’.

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Relational Church Doctrine for House Church

Earlier this year I started on a theology paper on doctrine and truth after modernity, a course I thought could be helpful in unpacking the role of doctrine in what we regard as a postmodern environment. When I was given the challenge of exploring in words the doctrines at work in my community of faith, I had to think carefully. For four years I’ve been a member of Pacific Parks Uniting, a house church network that would sit most comfortably in the Emerging Church movement.
Together with other leaders in the group I’ve struggled with the distinctive values and how they’re worked out in practice. But how do these values link in with the doctrines of the Church?

Over our first two months together in 2002, we developed the following statement about our life together:

“We are learning to be a relaxed, relational and relevant church in our community”.

In this post I’ll be exploring our understanding of being ‘relational church’, and how that relates to Christian doctrine. In the next two posts I’ll be exploring our values of ‘relaxed church’ and ‘relevant church’ and how they relate to Christian doctrine.

I’ll also be posting on how Pacific Parks’ approach to doctrine relates to George Lindbeck’s approach to theory of religion, considering his typology of cognitive-propositionalist, experiential-expressivist, and cultural-linguistic understandings of truth, expressed respectively in propositions, pre-cognitive experience and performance.

Relational Church

1. We value our personal and corporate relationships with God.

Here we begin with our primary assertion that our life’s meaning is found in relationship with God whose very being is relational. We discover in the way God interacts with creation, and indeed within Godself, that we are created to live in community. We’re invited to join in an experience of community expressed in that already developed in the being of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

We affirm both personal and corporate expressions of relationship, reminding ourselves that no one person or group of people can claim to express or live out the fullness of relationship with God. Although we each have individual perspectives that are shaped by our unique life experiences and formation of beliefs, we are committed to our connection with the universal community of Christian faith through time. We are shaped by our dialogue with people who inspire us, as well as people who irritate us!

Our worship is shaped by that commitment to personal and corporate expressions of relationship with God. Each week as we gather, we find ways to grow in our everyday spiritual disciplines. Our worship style allows for a diversity of approaches to prayer. Some of us are aided in connection with God by prepared prayers and use of symbolic images, objects and acts. Some of us connect with God through corporate singing - which we do by linking up with celebration services in conventional churches in the weekend. Some of us worship God most meaningfully in active service in the home and community.

2. We value genuine relationships which are caring, generous and empowering, and which show integrity and mutual accountability.

It has been said that conventional churches tend to measure the quantity of relationships, while the house churches measure the quality of relationships. As a house church we have set out to measure our effectiveness by the capacity to foster authentic conversation in which we open ourselves to the transforming work of the Holy Spirit. We don’t expect to stay the same.

Although many of us have been influenced by our engagement with the behavioural sciences, we ground our commitment to genuine relationships in the person of Jesus. The Uniting Church in Australia in its founding document, the Basis of Union, begins with Jesus Christ, the risen crucified one. As the fellowship of the Holy Spirit we confess Jesus as Lord over our own life, the beginning of a new humanity. Our commitment is to practically live out what that new humanity is about.

We see in Jesus the expression of God’s intention for servanthood (rather than grandiosity), generosity (rather than cynicism and acquisition of wealth), empowering leadership (rather than controlling leadership), integrity (rather than unthoughtful reflection of surrounding values), and mutual accountability (rather than self-righteousness).

So how does this translate into doctrine? Our belief in Jesus Christ affirms his reconciling work in the world, through his death and resurrection. The Uniting Church describes Jesus as the risen crucified one in whom God has taken away the world’s sin. But our doctrine of Christ goes beyond a one-off transaction that deals with sin. It’s this, and more. We believe that calling Jesus the Christ and referring to his reconciling work implies much more than preparing people for eternity in God’s presence in heaven. From a relational point of view, we perceive Jesus to be repairing the social fabric that has been marred by distorted expressions of humanity. We are called to be part of that transformation by learning, under his leadership, to be ‘relational church in the community’.

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