by Andrew Watkin, Mae Partain, Graham Edwards.
What is the church?” and “how do we know?” these are questions that many of us ask from time to time. The reflections we offer here emerge from a visit to the Methodist Church Ghana earlier this year with a group from Cliff College and members of the Methodist Church Connexional Team. For many of the group, this experience challenged our understanding of church. Our experience helps us make sense of the world, and our experience of life and faith often means we perceive the church in different ways. Graham is a Methodist Presbyter who has been involved in lay and ordained ministry in the Methodist Church for over twenty years; Mae is nineteen, from Montana in the USA and grew up in traditional and later a Vineyard church; Andrew is nineteen and grew up in the Methodist Church in Britain in which his mother is a Methodist Deacon. We know the church through our experience; Avery Dulles argues we cannot form a completely objective view while being actively engaged in the church, “we know it through a kind of inter subjectivity” he writes (2002, p. 10). Therefore, if those involved in the church cannot fully objectify the church, what our experience tells us is vital; experience helps us see and know the church in new ways. This reflection is a conversation between us, as we reflect on what our experience tells us about the church.
Graham: I always find it hard to articulate clearly what I think church is, whatever definition I start with never feels entirely sufficient. I think the heart of the church is a group of people who choose to become a community that listens to and responds to God.
Mae: Church should be a safe place for Christians to gather, in fellowship and praise and to encounter God. Church should be a place to find authentic community and motivate each other to be disciples.
Andrew: Church to me, simply put, is the place for us to gather as disciples to worship and strengthen our relationship with God, for brothers and sisters to come together and praise God collectively.
Mae: Sometimes I think we get caught up in tradition, trying to look professional and successful. Sometimes, church feels like a performance on stage with a group of people going through the motions instead of building connections with God and each other.
Graham: I like what Stanley Hauerwas writes about the church he argues (1981, p. 92) that the church should strive for the formation of a society shaped by the character of God. He suggests that the community is formed by the story set out in the Biblical narratives “what we require is not no story, but a true story. Such a story is one that provides a pilgrimage with appropriate exercises and disciplines of self-examination. Christians believe scripture offers such a story” (p. 149). As we live the story of God through the church we are shaped and changed, and the way we see the world changes too.
Andrew: This is what happened in Ghana. We saw a church living in the story of God in a very different way. There were many different examples of that but one which particularly stood out to me was how much joy was constantly on the faces of the people within this church. They were filled with endless excitement to dance, sing, shout and be with their friends in the church. We saw two opposite ends of the spectrum whilst there. One church in Accra with a huge building, lots of lighting, expensive equipment, a full band with a choir, absolutely beautiful. We also visited a church in Tamale which was just a room with a few pews in and not much else. Hugely contrasting churches but one thing the same – joy. It makes me want to bring that back here. How do we incorporate that into our culture? Is it realistic to expect that? Lots of questions. But I now see church as a place we can come together to rejoice in happiness, which I had not seen previously.
Mae: Yes, the most prevalent and noticeable expression of joy was in the form of dance. The offering and worship consistently included joyful dancing and clapping, and during sermons, people in the congregation would offer frequent shouts of “hallelujah”. Even though these Ghanaian churches were singing the same hymns and preaching from the same Bible, they were bringing new life and joy into the church. While sometimes churches in America and England simply go through the motions of a Sunday service, the people of Ghana passionately expressed their joy and thankfulness of being able to praise and serve God in their churches.
Graham: I found the sense of joy in worship – and in all church life – remarkable too, especially as we explored some of Ghana’s history, and the place of the church in that history.
Andrew: The ‘Slave Castles?’, yes they were difficult.
Graham: The most challenging moment for me was when we were in one of the dungeons where thousands of men and women were held in appalling conditions, held to be sold as slaves, we were trying to process that horror, and we were told that literally above us was the first Anglican chapel in Ghana. As people made in the image of God endured unimaginable suffering, a church worshipped the God of love over their heads. I struggled to get past that, and the questions that it raised for me. What is our church built on? Are we built on injustice? How do we ignore or injure the humanity of our brothers and sisters?
Mae: Despite that history, the churches we visited were places of joy – perhaps that is about finding a new way, seeking a life-giving foundation for the church?
Andrew: In his book Routes of Remembrance (2008), Bayo Holsey talks about how the slave trade is sometimes minimised in Ghanaian history, because it allows Ghanaians to express their identity in ways that they choose to, rather than be defined by that dark history, and maybe that is where that focus on the joy of God in church becomes the most important thing.
Graham: When our experience challenges our understanding, when it shakes what we thought we knew, perhaps we need to revisit the way we understand church, and the foundations we base that understanding on.
References
Dulles, A. (2002). Models of the Church. New York: Doubleday.
Hauerwas, S. (1981). A Community of Character. Notre dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
Holsey, B. (2008). Routes of Remembrance. Chicago: The University of Chicago press.
Theology Everywhere 