Roxburgh Missional Network

In this video (I took from a distance, I confess) of my friend Martin Robinson, he describes something of the shifts happening in the UK churches.  His three points are wonderfully inviting in terms of thinking about out own contexts here in North America.  I want to add a few further reflections to Martin’s own about this question of our worship.  In the UK, over more than thirty odd years, one has seen an amazing blending of the liturgical and the charismatic to produce life that is more like the train station in Antwerp than the canary in a cage.  I’m not suggesting all is well and all churches are like this, but there are some real, critical differences in terms of the UK and North American churches.  I’m struck by the level of which non-conformist as well as high church groups in the UK have blended this liturgical and charismatic together in some wonderfully enlivening ways.  Think of the influence of a group like the Northumbria Community (located just a few miles from the holy isle of Lindisfarne where the early Celtic missionaries Christianized much of North England) with its dispersed order. This is a community whose influence has entered into much of church life in the UK and some of its primary leaders are Baptists and charismatics.

When we met for summer school last week with people from many differing denominations and independent churches, our days began with morning prayer and ended with Compline - all from the liturgies of Northumbria. This is simply illustrative of the multiple ways in which creative liturgies are shaping church life. See, for example, last week’s interview with Gerard Kelly where he described his own love and indebtedness to Catholic liturgy.  At the same time, the charismatic renewal has had a distinct influence on these churches in terms of both worship, the expectation of God at work, and the reign of God being for now, not just a nice idea from the past or a muted longing for the future.  Thoughtful leaders of UK churches have shaped this charismatic renewal; it crosses all the boundaries from Anglicans to house churches, and it has played a vital role in the emergence of mission-shaped life.

I heard the Luke 4 text being read last week, the passage where Jesus enters the synagogue in his own home town and reads from the prophet Isaiah: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me...he has called me to proclaim good news to the poor, to announce...”   We’re very familiar with the text.  Too often, in North America, I experience the text being read as a prophetic, moral agenda that our liturgies are urging us to engage.  But underneath the urging is that absence - this wish that somehow, sometime, God would actually turn up.  The thing about the text Jesus read is that he got into a lot of trouble in his own town, and the people wanted to push him out of the town and kill him.  It wasn’t because he read the text.  Nor was it because he urged these good religious people to work harder to make it happen, or that Jesus criticized them for being colonized to powers that kept people locked in poverty or prison.  These good people got upset because Jesus dared to say that God was there among them and that this text was about to get lived out among them.

One can overdo this comparison and I do not mean to paint the English church scene as somehow wonderful – it’s not.  It’s possessed of many problems and challenges.  That being said, last week as I worshiped, as we read liturgies and completed our days with Compline, I was aware that these people also believed they were standing in the midst of a time when God turned up among them and in their churches.  Out of this, they have stories.  The source of this has been the blending of the liturgical church with the charismatic renewal.  At times in North America, one stands in the midst of wonderful liturgy, but it seems bereft of the sense that this God is actually present and up to something.  In all the conversations about being missional, one of the things we need to discover again is a way of worship that causes us to dance in our Antwerp stations.

Alan Roxburgh