I have been reading ‘Engaging Mission: the lasting value of Industrial Mission for today’ by Peter Cope and Mike West (Grosvenor House Publishing, 2011). Peter was the first chaplain in Worcester in the 1970s and early 80s (in a post from which the one I now hold can be directly traced) in a career that spanned London, Worcester, West Bromwich and Telford. Mike was also pretty much an IM ‘lifer’ working in Herts. and Beds and South Yorkshire. They both belong to the generation of missioners, now retired, who started out at a time when the links back to the roots of IM in the 1940s and 50s were still very clear and when IM was growing in strength and confidence.
Along with much of the church IM is now in a different world, and they wanted in writing the book to preserve the knowledge base before it is lost. The book is, therefore, a history but more than that. Peter and Mike are clear that IM is about more than workplace chaplaincy – a common term now that manufacturing nationally makes up little more than 10% of the economy and visiting is biased more towards local government, retail and other service industries, and the emergency services. But they also want to make the point that in contrast to Malcolm Torry’s ‘Bridgebuilders’, published in 2010, which is a history of chaplaincy, that IM is more than this.
It differentiates between the more pastoral model of the early days of South London, which was based on the vicar visiting people at work in factories in his parish, and Ted Wickham beginning in Sheffield steel mills in 1944 who sought to engage in conversations with a purpose. Initially, these would be in the ‘snap-break’ but there were also other meetings, often in the back room of a pub, to which workers and managers were invited to talk in more depth. I won’t rehearse the whole story, but the point was that it was an attempt to wrestle theologically with issues relevant to people in the workplace.
As IM developed this attempt to connect issues was reflected in some of the networks that were set up both within industries and in some cases internationally. As well as sometimes being advocates where they felt it was necessary to speak out, missioners tried to develop a deeper understanding of the issues they were confronting and the theological principles that might help them as ministers to respond. And, although IM and the Church have at times had a mutually ambivalent relationship, attempts have been made to communicate what has been learned, not least through both lay and ministerial training.
The way of doing theology was about beginning with the experience shared with people at work. Some of this originates, naturally, from being with people and hearing their concerns; some of it is connected to the theological foundations and the wider theological debate that was happening in the formative times of IM. Among the post-war theological thinking that was influential were the writings of Richard Niebuhr, Peter Berger, and also Tillich, Bonhoeffer and others. This was part of the development of inductive theology, starting with the world and seeking signposts that point to ‘another dimension’. There was a warning from Archbishop Michael Ramsey (one of the keynote speakers at the 1971 Industrial Mission Association National Conference) that the inductive model would only be effective if those who practice it had deep within themselves the timeless truths declared by the Church’s teaching. The use of the hermeneutical or pastoral cycle is a response to this where theological and ethical thinking is fed into the reflection, and there are also other developments specific to IM such as the Fraser Grid and on the other hand more deductive-based models such as Peter Cope’s own ‘Flying Machine’.
Another back-drop of the age was the search for ways of speaking of the Kingdom of God to secular people. It may be no coincidence that that the concept of realised eschatology, put forward by the biblical scholar C H Dodd, and similar ideas would have been developed in the same post-war era. But it can be, as Bishop Mike Bourke points out in his introduction to ‘Engaging Mission’, that hope of the Kingdom realised at least partially here on earth can morph into something that is always just beyond our grasp in this life, as the meditation that ends the book reflects. This may be a realistic acceptance of what is possible whilst continuing to work for the goal or it may also be that as the post-war consensus has broken down that in fact another model will take its place. In the current issue of ‘Crucible’ (January – March 2012) Malcolm Brown writes (p. 8) about how in John Atherton’s description an ‘Age of Atonement’ in the later 19th Century, through which the church emphasised its calling to live in contrast to the mores of a rapidly changing culture, gave way in the 20th And then by the late 1980s and 90s a return to another ‘Age of Atonement’ seemed to be underway as trust in the possibility of God’s Kingdom coming on earth receded and the wider social order seemed too flawed to be subject to any simple ecclesial benediction.
What does this have to say about the way in which we do theology? Malcolm Brown and also Peter Sedgwick in the edition of Crucible I have referred to above have produced two very thorough and thoughtful reviews of Christian social or public theology. Sedgwick identifies at least six strands of thought in British public theology but I want to pick out just two because they reflect a debate that I and some friends have been engaging in: that is between Christian Realism and Radical Orthodoxy. Christian Realism is the description my former colleague John Reader uses for the thinking behind the book he wrote with Chris Baker and John Atherton (all of the William Temple Foundation) called ‘Christianity and the New Social Order’ that I discussed in a post on 11 January 2012. It has its foundations in the thought of William Temple (and in the original use of the term, Reinhold Niebuhr), though in Reader’s work also the thinking of many continental philosophers. But the key point in this discussion is ‘realism’ insofar as it starts from how the world is. One can see the connections with the IM thinking I have been laying out above. On the other hand Radical Orthodoxy, two of whose proponents are John Milbank and Graham Ward, is a reinterpretation for the present age of a Christian grand narrative that in conjunction with writers such as Philip Blond of the ResPublica think-tank (of whose trustees Milbank is the Chair) sets out a vision of society based on an earlier mutualism popularised by the Big Society and in Blond’s book ‘Red Tory’.
There is no doubt that Radical Orthodoxy has many influential friends including Rowan Williams (Crucible, p. 29) and this may explain its rising profile. And if we are now more in an ‘Age of Atonement’ one can see why it would have an attraction over and against a secular world that must be resisted and changed. In summarising Ward’s thinking, Sedgwick (Crucible, p.30) speaks of the image-obsessed, destructive power of global capitalism that must be resisted by the only force that can stand up to it, which is the church. ‘The church’, he says, ‘can embody a different desire, which is the participation in the ecclesial, sacramental body of Christ.’
My difficulty with this is that it contains an idealism that I only see in the church at its best, and not very often. Too often I see an attenuated church struggling for its own survival, obsessed with its own affairs. It may be a safe haven with friends who speak the same language sometimes but that is to separate me from the real world where I am impelled to be.
However, when I am in that ‘real world’ I am also conscious of how slender the credibility of the church and faith that I represent has become. Christianity, in the UK and Europe at least, is under pressure, as the latest judgement about prayers before a council meeting seems to suggest (an issue for me as a chaplain to a council chairman), though I am aware that the ‘secularisation’ debate is much more complex than those who throw slogans about may wish. It is, however, a much greater issue for Christianity in the UK in my view than the anxieties of some about the pluralism of religions in our multi-faith society.
Sedgwick concludes his article (Crucible, p.32) by pointing to the enormous gulf between the highly sacramental world view of Graham Ward and those who represent what he calls the William Temple tradition and says the challenge is whether there can be communication between these different traditions rather than a set of self-contained theologies. For myself at the moment I think I settle for something akin to the pastoral cycle, which seems to have wide acceptance, in bringing biblical insights and Christian tradition (and the best of the sacramental life of the church) to bear on the world as I encounter it along with other wisdom I have encountered along the way. Christianity may be the most important thing for me (there are certain precious jewels I want to offer, as a friend experienced in inter-faith dialogue put it) but there are many other insights too that make it not the only means of playing my part in the life of the world.
Whether we go with the ‘Age of Atonement’ as the model for engagement with the present age or need to develop something else (I wondered in early posts in this blog about the OT prophets in the times of exile and wilderness) it seems to me the sunny confidence in sharing in the growing of the Kingdom of God must now be in question. I have experienced some hard times in my own life so as to question whether it can only get better, and it seems to me both shorter term cyclical economic issues and longer term geo-political, let alone ecological and resource issues, should give us pause to think about what is an appropriate theological model with which to interpret the world as we go forward into an uncertain future.
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