Episode Details

In recent times, dictionaries have gotten into the habit of giving an award to the ‘word of the year’. It provides some motivation, I suppose, to all those other words to try harder next year, while also allowing the dictionary companies to parade their social consciences. Recent winners have included ‘climate emergency’, ‘toxic’, ‘cancel culture’ and ‘they’ (as a non-gendered singular pronoun).

I’m guessing 2020 will have plenty of candidates: ‘pandemic’, ‘social distancing’ and ‘black lives matter’ are obvious favourites. My personal choice would be ‘unprecedented’, which has been used at unprecedented levels.

But my way into the rest of today’s post is to suggest that essential services has been one of the phrases of the year in 2020. The privations of lockdown have forced everyone in the community to pause and consider what really matters. When severe limits are placed on what can or should be done, what essential things must be done?

This has been true, of course, for churches. We’ve had to consider how to retrieve as many essential services as possible, given that nearly all our normal activities have no longer been possible.

And now, as we start on the road back to normal, it’s an excellent time to reconsider what ‘normal’ essentially is. This is not only because we will still have limitations placed upon us for some time to come, and some tricky choices to make. It’s also because the coronavirus lockdown should help us realise that we always have limited resources and opportunities, and that tricky choices always have to be made about what is essential and what is peripheral.

For many of us, restarting church is a chance to reboot—to consider what existing essential things we must put back in place, what new essential things we might take the opportunity to start, and what non-essential services, activities or priorities we might quietly allow to remain in ‘shutdown’.

And following on from my post a couple of weeks back on pragmatism, we need to make these decisions with a conscious reflection on our principles—that is, on what the Bible itself directs us to consider as essential.

That’s what I thought I would do over the next few posts: go back to Scripture with the posture of an apprentice, and have a crack at laying out the essential principles of church ministry. I’m sure I won’t get everything right or complete, and I’m equally sure that there will be other good ways to express the same principles. But I hope my attempt will stimulate you to articulate your own version of the essentials more clearly.

Where to start?

Our instinct is to start with what and how. What are the essential activities or events or programs that we must get up and running as soon as possible? And how could we do them as effectively as possible?

It’s better, though, to start with the essential why, because what and how always flow from why. The reason or purpose we have for doing something generates particular aims or goals, which in turn lead us to think about exactly how we will achieve those aims, with what particular resources and actions. But it starts with why. Why are we churching? What reasons or purposes shape the whole enterprise, provide it with meaning, and direct the particular strategies and activities we undertake?

The why of church comes, of course, from God, who gathers his people together (‘church’, remember, is a jargon word for ‘assembly’ or ‘gathering’). You could describe the whole Bible as the story of God scattering people in judgement (think driving out Adam and Eve from the garden; the tower of Babel; the scattering of Israel), and then