AGENDA FOR FAITH by Stephen Mitchell (Chair of "Sea of Faith", 1995)


PREFACE
Can the church change its beliefs? Can it rewrite its creeds?
When I wrote Agenda for Faith in the early 1990s I believed that it could and should.
I was keen to see the church change.

It’s not surprising that having been a priest in the Church of England for twenty-five years
I wanted to see a growing future for the church.
Many people whose beliefs had changed were giving up on the church.
I met some of them in the Sea of Faith Network.
My faith had also changed but I wanted the church to accept that change.
I knew that it was not easy for the church to change.
In the past, doctrinal change had led to reformation and schism.
I was concerned to see what other strategies for change were available.

One strategy for changing the doctrine of church is to show that some things are simply incredible.
It is simply unbelievable to believe, for example, in the devil, or hell or the virgin birth.
It isn’t difficult to persuade people that they don’t need to believe in some of these things.
Many people in church congregations are all too willing to give up on hell and the devil.
But to make a real difference this has to be written into the formal beliefs and structures.
Unless the church officially acknowledges that it’s OK to give up on the devil and hell,
nothing really changes, because the belief is still expressed in hymns, creeds, liturgies
and the official teaching of the church, the very people who are persuaded
to give up on these doctrines are frustrated with the language
they are being asked to use Sunday by Sunday.
Parents may think that belief in the devil is incredible
but when it comes to the baptism of their babies they are asked to
“Fight valiantly as a disciple of Christ against sin, the world and the devil”

The strategy of attacking individual doctrines is not without hope.
In 2001 a survey showed that:
a third of the clergy in the Church of England doubt or disbelieve in the resurrection.
It often seems that the church tries to ignore such findings.
It seems to hope that, as more and more people find such belief irrelevant,
the clergy will stop preaching them, so that in the end they will simply be forgotten.
When this fails and it is forced to reassess a doctrine,
the church comes up with a form of words designed to mollify all, but to maintain the status quo.
Even when the church comes up with a revision, no one believes that this is the church’s belief
because it not reflected in the hymns that are sung nor in the liturgy that is spoken
– nor often in the sermon that is preached.
The common view of what the church believes remains unchanged.

Raimon Panikkar, a Spanish Roman Catholic priest and scholar,
put forward the view that the history of the Christian tradition can be divided into three periods.
1.
The first was that of Christendom, when culture, faith, political life and territory all came together.
People in Christendom never really engaged with anyone who disagreed with them.
Those who did disagree were locked up or burnt. There was
a single ideological world-view. 2.
With European exploration, and with the discovery of the New World, Africa and India,
Christendom gave way to Christianity, an integrated system ofbelief in contrast to other systems.
This period of Christianity is marked by evangelism, conversion, a conquering of the world for Christ.
3.
With the wane of such imperialistic ambitions, and the intellectual challenge to the systems of belief,
Christianity is giving way to Christianness, the encounter with Christ at the centre of one’s self
at the centre of the human community and at the centre of reality.
To be Christian becomes a personal faith that adopts an attitude analogous to that of Christ.

This new conviction is spreading throughout the world, especially among the younger generations,
and among those who have moved away from the over-institutionalization of Christianity.
If the church can move in this direction it has the opportunity to return to its roots
without entangling itself in doctrinal squabbles.

INTRODUCTION
When I was an evangelical Christian student, I thought religion was easy and uncomplicated.
The truths of faith had been revealed and all I had to do was receive them.
There was no sense of embarking on a journey, a quest for the real me and the real meaning of life.
If someone had suggested to me that I should be a spiritual pilgrim in search of the real,
I would have laughed and accused them of reading too much Plato.

Jesus had burst the chains of sin and death and borne insults and torment for our sake.
When we accept his gospel, the light of life breaks through into the darkness of our lives.
Religion was not a journey but the acceptance of the gospel. The human quest was already at an end.
Such a faith, I thought, was easily tested with a check list of questions.
Do you believe in God? Do you believe that Jesus died for your sins?
Do you believe in the power of the Holy Spirit?
Is Jesus the Lord and Saviour of your life?

But I had questions.
Did a person choose God or did God choose his people?
I was obsessed with myself, with the individual and the individual's state of grace.
In those days, my starting point for an exploration into God was the teachings of the church
- its doctrines handed down from generation to generation, presented in creeds,
liturgies and preaching and witnessed to by the bible.
I began with Jesus and his significance for my life and my needs.

Now, some 20 years later, I begin the exploration into God with the search for the real.
The real world in which we live and work is shaped for us by the language and stories
of our art, faith, culture, conversation and commerce.
It is a world which interacts with us and flows through us
and the realities of our world come from the very practical business
of living in this present, textual, historical and personal environment.
So I begin my exploration by examining the way we handle the stories that shape our world.

I choose this starting point in order to give faith a place in every aspect of life.
Classically faith has never just been about the claims of a religion or its founder,
nor just about personal salvation, nor even just about moral and social responsibilities.
Faith has been seen to affect every part of our being, even creating the reality of our world.
The human and spiritual quest is an exploration to be pursued in any and every corner of life.

The church has become a club with rules making it easy for people to discern its members.
Many do not wish to belong to the believer's club and need not assent to its rules.
Yet they can demand that the clergy, the officials of the club, should do so.
It is a neat way of pushing faith aside into a department of its own,
there for those who are able to sign up to the creeds and rituals,
but faith is not a matter of running down a list of credal statements.
Dissent is much more radical than questioning particular doctrines
or altering one or two of the club's rules.

Concentrating on particular doctrines of belief makes it virtually impossible
to suggest that faith might be something very different
and involve questions of interpretation and meaning and the nature of reality.
For those who practise a faith, questions about the credibility of their faith are not usually uppermost in their minds.
The truth of creeds and doctrines is not usually the starting point for their faith.
They begin with an exploration of worship, prayer and the reading of the scriptures.
They follow the saints and seek to pursue justice and peace.
As they immerse themselves in all this, they immerse themselves in their God,
the God in whom they live and move and have their being.
God and the world are for them created, discovered and defined in the living out of their faith.

Those who practise a faith also find that the language of faith challenges their most commonly held assumptions.
Christians, for example, speak of their baptism as a dying with Christ and a rising to new life.
In their worship they say "We are the Body of Christ".
They seek Christ in their neighbour and the needy.
This is not, for them, poetic imagery pointing to hidden, supernatural truths.
For the believer, this language is sacramental.
Rather than pointing to Christ, it identifies the believer with Christ
- an identification which redefines the common sense views of our relationship to time,
space and personal identity.

That to me is the nature of religious experience, language and practice.
What is needed is a strategy which in remaking our understanding of God also remakes our world.
The revision of faith has to penetrate every aspect of our lives.
Reshaping God must go hand in hand with a reshaping of reality,
for nothing less than this is claimed by the practice, language and experience of faith.

I do not see faith as being right or wrong nor doctrines as true or false.
I accept the tradition as a whole.
I do not feel compelled to get rid of parts of the faith which seem incredible.
Credibility is no longer the criterion for judging faith and credal boundaries have lost their defining power.
I judge faith by its fruits. Does it continue to move us and motivate us?
And if faith seems to be oppressive or responsible for grotesque attitudes and actions,
then I feel that we are free to work towards changing it.
Where faith is seen as supernaturally fixed, it takes superhuman efforts to change it.
If we see faith as handed down to us from a supernatural world "up there", we put ourselves down.
Such life is like a stately home, where there will be a grand, dazzling, aristocratic upstairs world
and a poor shadowy downstairs world of servants.
Those in service have little control or power over their lives
and are made to feel grateful for having somewhere to live.
Any contrast between a world "up there" and this world -
be it heaven and earth, life after death and life now,
the divine and the human, theory and reality -
robs us of the responsibility for creating meaning and value.