Theology Everywhere

by Philip Sudworth.

When Paul went to Athens, he soon realised that the preaching approach that had been successful amongst his fellow Jews was not going to work there.  He wandered around the city, got to know it and then presented his message in a form tailor-made for those people.  That sense of the need to cater for people with differing experiences, interests, education and religious background when presenting the message seems to be lacking in some of our churches.  

It didn’t matter so much in the 1950s when there was much greater consensus on key social and religious issues and the potential conflict between the biblical literalism and developments in scientific ideas was hardly publicised.   These days with so many people with little religious background, so few used to listening to long talks, and the church no longer such a strong focus of social activities, it matters a great deal. The ethos of education has altered in our schools over the last two generations. Pupils are no longer expected to sit quietly, absorb what they are told and to regurgitate it in examinations. They are encouraged to investigate, to question, to formulate their own theories, as well as to learn the latest theories. They are aware that knowledge is developing, that new discoveries and new ideas are changing perceptions. Just look at how rapidly information technology has progressed over the last 30 years.

Yet many of our local churches seem to take a single approach, which is based primarily on the minister’s personal theology and his/her own worship preferences.   Too many of the clergy seem to view their role as getting their entire congregation and as many others as possible to the point of faith that they have reached, by the same route – creating Christians in their own image.  Some of the clergy appear to struggle with the idea that there are personal paths to God and that the next best spiritual step for some individuals may be outside the cleric’s own experience.

Many evangelical leaders are particularly good in providing clear and confident structure of faith for those who need to feel certain that they have the only truth.  However, if their only response to those with questioning minds is to tell them that they lack faith, if they don’t hold the “right” beliefs, they are failing them.   A literalist approach to scripture supports those who want an infallible guide to life but leaves others dismissing a religion that believes that the stories of Adam and Noah are factual history and rejecting a God who could, according to Numbers 31, order genocide and the rape of 10-, 11- and 12-year-old virgins (13- and 14-year-olds would be already married in those days).  Liberal preachers need to appreciate that, while they may cope well with those open to new religious ideas, other people with problems want clear answers not philosophy.  The pulpit is not the place for pondering out loud.  If people come seeking answers to life’s problems but leave with more questions than they had before, their needs are not being served.

The problem with both the evangelical and liberal approaches is that they can become introspective and two-dimensional.  The liberal may become absorbed in his personal musings about the nature of God and what following Christ means in the reality of the 21^st century.  The evangelical may become wrapped up in the intensity of her love for Jesus – “Just you and me, Jesus” – and in her own personal salvation and in the personal salvation of members of her flock.  Neither is a healthy spiritual situation.  Christianity is supposed to be an active three-dimensional faith, expressing love of God and love of others in practical terms. 

It is when we start to put this into practice that we can include and respond to a wider range of people.  Provided that a loving outreach to others through practical projects is genuinely altruistic and not an evangelism strategy, it can be a unifying way of allowing people with all shades of theology to participate in a common service to God and expression of their faith.  Once we discover in practical situations that we can embrace all those who seek to live in response to God and find a role that suits their individual circumstances, perhaps we shall be more able to take account of individual differences when it comes to worship, pulpit pronouncements and pastoral and spiritual support.  Humans are not designed to fit into a mould.  Our differences are there for a purpose.  Let’s celebrate them, respond to them and so allow God to make effective use of them!

by Josie Smith.

The other day I came across some of my old broadcast scripts from the late 1980s – book reviews mostly.  Those were the days when hot topics in the churches apart from ecumenism were ‘Women in the Ministry’ often with a question mark, and ‘Inclusive Language’.  Methodism had of course ordained women as far back as 1974, but not always to popular acclaim.  In 1986 a book had appeared called Women, Authority and the Bible, subtitled ‘an evangelical breakthrough on the Biblical debate’.[1]  All the writers originally presented their material at the Evangelical Colloquium on Women in the Bible held in Illinois in 1984. It was open only to evangelical theologians and leaders by invitation, and they met to talk and listen for three days.  Given the North American flavor (sic) and the inevitable patchiness of a book with 27 different writers I commended anyone interested in the ministry of women to pick up this book and browse.  Chapter 8 is more readable than most: Kyle R. Snodgrass, a professor of biblical literature, thinks that Galatians 3:28 is the most socially explosive statement in the New Testament.  We must, though, Prof. Snodgrass says, allow Paul to be Paul.  He was not addressing our situation or our set of questions, and we only distort the thinking when we transfer it directly to our time.  Would Paul be able to deal with the concept of ordination, he asks.  He might well need time to get accustomed to the idea.

This is a book not just about ambiguous bits of Greek, or about the practices of another culture in another age.  It’s a book about truth and justice and trying to discern the Will of God, and in keeping with American practice there are two or three chapters at the end about what has been learnt from the experience.  All the members of the colloquium were evangelical Christians, and if there was a weakness other than that, it was that there wasn’t a Graham Leonard there to put a spanner in the works, but there was evidently plenty of argument.

The Church of England in Britain was meanwhile agonising over the larger half of its members who are women.  Another book All that is Unseen asked, ‘Can the Church in Britain today learn to long for the full contribution of women rather than fearing and fighting it?’[2]  It’s a wide-ranging study of women generally, at work outside or inside the home, but readers are challenged to assess who does what in their churches, and to see whether this really reflects the best use of gifts among those present.

The third book was Making Women Visible.[3]  Try reacting to these two newspaper headlines –
‘People are much more likely to be influenced by their wives than by opinion polls’. 
‘Man kills his next door neighbour’s wife.’
The male perspective is seen as the dominant one, the ‘normal’ way of looking at life. The two examples are from the secular press, but the church is, if anything, more entrenched in its assumptions.  When I was at school (an all girls’ school) one of our most often used hymns was ‘O brother man, fold to thy heart thy brother’.  There wasn’t a brother in the building and the only man was the school caretaker.  Once you have recognised a problem you see how pervasive it is.  Hence the many changes in the liturgy.

More thoughts: An Anglican friend, a Revd. Canon, tells me that even now, in 2O25, in ecumenical gatherings of clergy, some of the male clergy do not recognise the validity of her ordination.

When I was appointed a Circuit Steward many years ago, I asked my mother-in-law’s advice about the best way to do the new job.  Father-in-law was a Methodist minister, retired, so who better than the in-laws to know how it worked and how I could be most useful? ‘I can’t help you, dear’ she said.  ‘In my day, Circuit Stewards always had wives’.

With those rediscovered scripts there was a slip of paper on which I had written ‘The Old Testament has the woman being made from the rib of a man.  The New Testament has the Son of Man being born of a woman. What message for the feminists?  Or from them?’

It was Tony Benn who said in 1993, ‘I hope I live to see the day when a woman Archbishop of Canterbury greets a Pope in a church that has ordained women.’  He didn’t – but most of the Church of England has become accustomed to women in the ordained ministry, and some of them have become Bishops.  Have a look at the list of possible candidates on the list to become the next Archbishop…

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[1] Alvera Mickelsen, Women, Authority and the Bible. IVP, 1986.

[2] Rosemary Dawson, And All That is Unseen: A New Look at Women’s Work. Church House Publishing, 1986.

[3] Making Women Visible: The Use of Inclusive Language with the ASB: A Report by the Liturgical Commission of the General Synod of the Church of England. Church House Publishing, 1989

by Frances Young.

On April 26^th 2025 a group of us were standing in the spring sunshine by a lake shore, peering over the wall at the sunken remains of an ancient basilica. It was quite recently, they said, that someone in a light aircraft had spotted something hidden under the water – now it was an archaeological dig. Further along the shore there was a children’s playground – Iznik was a bit of a resort. Back in 325 CE it was a resort known as Nicaea, a retreat for the first Christian Emperor, Constantine, and here he assembled the bishops, demanding that they unify the Church to unite the Empire.

We were an ecumenical group of roughly a dozen invited by the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople-New Rome to commemorate that 1st Nicene Council held seventeen centuries ago, and they were almost certainly assembled in that sunken basilica below us. The Chair of our symposium read in the original Greek the creed they then agreed, affirming that the Son/Word of God incarnate in Jesus Christ was “of one being with Father” (homoousios tōi Patri).

This was the third day of our meeting “with field trips.” We had been at the Patriarchate’s conference centre in Istanbul reading papers to each other, discussing the impact of the Council, its creed and canons, visiting key Christian sites in the city. Now our final session was held in Nicaea itself, with papers from three Orthodox scholars; earlier sessions had contributions from Western Christian traditions, Roman Catholic, Anglican and various Protestants. Our concerns had ranged from ecumenical politics to theology, but the spirit was a common respect for the essentially scriptural truth promulgated then and upheld throughout all the major splits, between Byzantines and Orientals, between Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholics, and indeed through the Reformation and the Evangelical Revival: the Son of God is fully God in every sense of the Word, not some semi-divine or angelic subordinate.

This remarkable seventeenth centenary has kept me busy over recent months, with requests for articles, lectures and indeed a paper for the symposium in Istanbul. It has provoked deepening reflection on the amazing consequence that we can read off the character of God from the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ – for being homoousios with the Father means he was – yes, truly human – but also one who was God in every sense of the term, one who out of sheer love chose to “empty” the divine self (Phil. 2.7) so as to be able to experience the constraints of our creaturely life, our suffering, even our death. It is an utter paradox, something that explodes our categories: “the immortal dies,” sings Charles Wesley, “’tis mystery all.”

And that not only demands a certain intellectual humility, but also challenges our culture. We tend to assume that a mystery is something to be solved, as in a detective-story, something to be explained away – that recourse to a claim to mystery is a cop-out. It is interesting that the neuroscientist and philosopher, Iain McGilchrist, has challenged this in his wide-ranging discussion of the short-comings of Western culture, The Matter with Things (2 vols, subtitled, “Our Brians, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World”, published in 2021 by Perspectiva Press, London):

Mystery does not imply muddled thinking. On the other hand thinking you can be clear about something which in its nature is essentially mysterious is muddled thinking. Nor does mystery betoken a lack of meaning – rather a superabundance of meaning in relation to our normal finite vision. (p. 1258)

So what about the resurrection? To take away the mystery and claim that Jesus “literally” or “as a historical fact” rose from the dead is to diminish it – like the novel which told how Jesus came round in the cool cave, managed to get out, married Mary Magdalene and lived happily ever after in Egypt. That kind of resuscitation would mean he would have to die again, and it’s not what we mean by resurrection, is it? “’Tis mystery all” because the eternal has broken into the time-space universe, because an event has occurred beyond historical investigation or proof, and new life utterly beyond death enables Christ’s presence, presence everywhere and anywhere, like the omni-presence of God.

Is it any wonder, then, that in the Gospel of John (10.30) Jesus is presented as affirming “I and the Father are one,” that the bishops at Nicaea concluded that the Son of God is “of one being with the Father,” and Charles Wesley sang of “Our God contracted to a span/incomprehensibly made man”?

by Jennifer Smith.

Each week TV presenter Stacey Solomon and her unflinchingly cheerful team have been rescuing a household drowning in possessions and helping them have a clear out.  Their belongings are displayed in perfect rows in a cavernous warehouse, and the household is ruthlessly cajoled to sort their possessions into three groups: keep, sell, donate.  With tears and memories, they work their way to letting go all but what is loved or needed.  Meanwhile, the team at home blitzes and paints, creating new ordered space to receive inhabitants and the (many fewer) possessions back.  In the final scenes, the household gasps and rejoices. 

Having less feels like having gained so much more: they can live and breathe to see and use and enjoy their possessions and each other.[1]  At least on camera, no one laments after the fact or goes diving through the skip to retrieve a cracked serving dish.  And no one addresses the serious questions about why we accumulate so much, how much time and money has been spent on the process, or what impact my consumption might be having on someone else.

What is going on here?  Why is ‘Sort your life out’ such compelling viewing, and what might the process of downsizing actually offer as a means of grace?  I am interested partly because I am in the middle of downsizing myself in preparation for moving to a much smaller, if quirkily beautiful house.  But more than that, I am interested because I am aware that my ownership of things, my acquiring or divesting of ‘stuff’ is not morally neutral.  First of all, many in our immediate neighbourhoods can afford very little or only the most basic necessities, which is why there is a market for my ‘to be donated’ no-longer-non-stick frying pan.  Should I feel virtuous about giving four away to buy one new, when I have decided those four were unfit?  Being able to own less by choice is a massively privileged unusual situation in human history.  It speaks of the injustice of our present world, and any reflection on the process of downsizing needs to start with that reality. 

Second of all, each of the objects I am getting rid of was made by someone.  Whether in a factory or piecework in someone else’s home, a real person assembled the hairclips and T shirts, novelty curios or fridge magnets.  Our getting of stuff is not an individual action, but part of a whole inter-related network different people working together for good and ill.  It should not be news to Methodists that our way of spending or keeping money and the things it buys are part of our ‘social holiness.’  In his sermon ‘On the use of money,’ John Wesley was specific that no earning of it could be righteous if it caused workers harm, or distorted a marketplace.[2]  James K A Smith observed that if the mall or online purchase has replaced cathedral and religious ritual in our contemporary culture.  This means that of course I end up with too much, if I have enough money or credit to do so.  It is in the process of acquisition that I come to know I exist, and by which I belong to a group and participate in a common culture.[3]  In this culture, perhaps the show ‘sort your life out’ is the new form of participatory public repentance. 

How then, might downsizing be a means of grace?  Obviously, it is helping me to remember that my stuff is not the foundation of my personhood, much as I have loved some of it.  Objects are for me signs of memory, reminders of story.  But even memory and story are themselves signs in turn of our creation by a God who loves us and delights in us.  So downsizing is about reclaiming a more durable identity, I hope.  It is hard, as it means walking again through times of loss.  And a laying aside of some parts of life that for me are finished.  But I hope, in this season as I get ready to move, I might also re-focus on what I do love, and who I love, and how my getting and giving sits in my whole community.  I don’t think John Greenleaf Whittier meant anything as prosaic as cluttered closets when he wrote ‘…take from our souls the strain and stress, and let our ordered lives confess the beauty of thy peace.’ [4] But if I start with a closet, maybe it gets easier to move on to an institution, to an economy, to a culture or political system.  One household at a time. 

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[1] ‘Sort your life out’ plays Tuesdays at 8 pm on BBC1, until 10 June.  https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00116n4  (31 May, 2025)

[2] John Wesley, ‘The Use of Money,’ Sermon 44 in Sermons on Several Occasions, (London: Epworth Press, 1944). pp 576-81.

[3] James K A Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. (Michigan, USA: Baker Academic, 2009).

[4] John Greenleaf Whittier, ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’ in Singing the Faith. (London: The Methodist Church, 2011). 495.

by Ruth Gee.

Writing in another week of news about the actions of powerful leaders and the impact of their decisions on the most vulnerable in the world, I am reminded of a paradox at the heart of the Christian faith. The sorrow of Holy Week, including the crucifixion and death of Jesus and the long, despairing wait on Holy Saturday are transformed to joy on Easter Day as we proclaim, “Alleluia, Christ is risen. He is risen indeed! Alleluia!”  St Paul wrote, “…God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” (1 Corinthians 1:25). It is this that we proclaim as followers of Jesus in whom the glory of God was revealed on the cross.

On 24 May 1738, John Wesley came to a deep realisation that assurance was not something that could ever result from his own actions and strengths but is a gracious gift from God. Any true strength we have comes only from acknowledging our weakness and our need of grace.[i]

As I reflected on these things, I was reminded of a reflection that I wrote some years ago:

Mother and Son: End and Beginning.

Your hair is so dark, streaked with red, the blood of birth. They told me you would be born with hair when they knew how very sick I felt as I carried you, my son. How could human hair have so profound an effect on me and on you?  This dark hair can never be cut; it marks you out as chosen for better or for worse.

I remember the first time I felt that overwhelming nausea and the faintness that made me sit down quickly to prevent falling. I didn’t know what was wrong and I was frightened until he explained it to me. I never expected to be pregnant, no-one expected that of the barren one. That is how I am known, the barren wife of Manoah, descendent of a people once great and now without hope. Your birth has changed all that, with you the change begins. This is the promise made to me and binding on you, God’s promise to the nameless that the sun will rise in its might. You are named for that promise, Samson.

You are precious my son, full of potential and offering so much hope. The blood of life and death runs through your dark hair.

Your grip on my finger is strong, your mouth moves urgently, seeking comfort from the breast. You suck and are at peace. Sure of your own importance you are at the centre of your own world. All is well.  All is quiet and there is a hush of expectation in the air.

Outside your range of dim vision, he arrives and the sound of sudden movement startles you. Your arms fly up and out pushing against the weak resistant air until all is well again – you are at rest. My son with blood-streaked hair.

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Mother, see me bound in chains and led by a child. Where is the promise now? Blood from the beating is sticky in my new born hair. I am in pain. I long for your love, your trust, your hope – all gone now and buried in sorrow.

I have no ass or fox or fire to help me here. They are taunting me and I am alone with only the hesitant grip of a child to keep me safe. Named for the sun, I see no light. My enemies have my eyes, my lover has my hair, and a child has my hand in this place of fear and darkness.

I am the centre of a celebration that is not mine. I am important only for my weakness, the product of treachery and broken promises. I am a symbol of all who place their hope in their own strength and desire beauty above truth. I am God forsaken; my bones are as wax and my heart thrice broken.

I, who cannot be held, am bound to solid stone and I am desolate. There is no comfort now, not even from the small hand of the child. The tumultuous crowd quietens into a pregnant, expectant, dark silence. Is this the quiet before the storm?

Then, beyond my dimmed vision I hear a sudden movement.  Like a startled infant, I call out – “Mother, God help me!” My arms fly out and up and push against the stone and the blood runs through my dark new hair.

It is finished.

(Judges chapters 13-16)

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[i] On 24 May 1738, John Wesley wrote, “I felt I did trust I Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”

by Philip Sudworth.

“When a scientist brings a bottle of sea water back to his laboratory, it is still essentially sea.”  A church leader used this analogy to try to explain how the man Jesus was still actually God himself.  What it did  illustrate to me was how we can sometimes have too limited a view of God.

Suppose an exchange teacher took a bottle of seawater to a landlocked country, showed it to the children and told them that they had now seen the sea.  What a limited understanding of the sea that would be.

Even those who have dived into the depths only have a partial knowledge of the oceans. South Sea islanders may spend most of their lives by, in or on the sea but they have no appreciation of what the sea can be like for the crew on an Icelandic trawler in a winter storm.  Even oceanographers would not claim to know everything that goes on in the great deeps. On Boxing Day 2004 the world was shocked at the power within one wave. 

How much more beyond our understanding then is the creative force that produced the oceans and the thousands of species in them on this minor planet orbiting one of trillions of stars?  Yet we too often think that we can encapsulate God in doctrines.  Some even have the effrontery to claim that they have the only truth about God and all other religious experiences are invalid.   It is like telling people that unless they have ridden the waves on a surfboard, they have no real experience of the sea.

No such attempt to present the “the simple truth” about God as a neat package of ideas is going to come even close to doing him justice. He is far more wonderful and multi-dimensional than we can ever imagine.  St Augustine warned us that, “If you understand, then it is not God.”  When we insist that people see God as we do, we attempt to contain God within our own faith-shaped bottle.

Too often we project onto God our own understandings of unlimited power and complete knowledge.  Hence God is often depicted like a medieval king on his throne – listening to petitions, munificent to those who submit to him but executing terrible justice on those who disobey him. Just what we would do, if we were in his place.  Some even claim to know how God thinks and attribute to God motives, such as “God must always act against sin” or “God can only forgive people if they believe the church’s teaching.”  This measures their own level of compassion rather than the depth of God’s love and mercy.  Such thinking puts God in a bottle shaped in our own image. 

Those who believe that God is perfectly revealed in scripture forget that God cannot be contained in words.   The pre-scientific and often poetic descriptions of people’s experiences of God present such different pictures as a God who orders genocide and joins in battles by hurling great hailstones and one who is the good shepherd going to great lengths to find one lost sheep.  Whenever we read or discuss scripture, we interpret the words.  Unfortunately, we too often use scripture more to condemn others and to exclude their beliefs rather than to challenge ourselves.  Scripture becomes the word of God when it is lived out and so changes people’s lives.  God does not fit into a book-shaped bottle.

We should encourage people to develop their own personal experience of God rather than try to impose our own faith upon them by telling them what they must believe about God.  How many people have we lost because we insisted that their faith must be a particular shape and their experience of God did not fit into that bottle? 

Jesus compared the attempt to contain the power and vibrancy of a living and dynamic faith within inflexible religious traditions with the folly of putting new wine into old bottles. Attempts by church leaders to constrain new experiences of God within the bottle of orthodoxy have led to young people leaking out of the church in huge numbers in recent decades.

Albert Schweitzer only fulfilled his potential in God’s service when he stopped trying to shape and contain God with definitions and dogma and allowed God to shape him.  Like him, we have to worry less over doctrine about Jesus and respond to the call to live out our faith in Jesus by the way we live our lives.

by George Bailey.

Another Easter season and another round of reflections on resurrection and its implications for our daily lives. I wrote about this last year here – Growing Resurrection – and this article develops some ideas already begun in that one.

I continue to encounter conversations in church life in which doubts are expressed about the resurrection of the body. People find it difficult to grasp what it could mean in the face of contemporary medical science and the widespread practice of cremation. On the other hand, a non-bodily resurrection produces doubts about our relationship with the world around us, as eternal life might somehow not include the physical stuff of life now. Tom Wright’s detailed exploration of these themes traces clearly how ‘hope for the resurrection of the body, has however been so out of tune with several of the prevailing moods of Christian thought down the years that it has become muzzled, distorted and then not even known.’[1] Proceeding here under the assumption that Wright is correct that the New Testament is clear about the resurrection of the body being central to Christian faith, and Christians need to rediscover it for the 21^st century, there is one facet of the issues which lead people to read the NT without accepting an expectation of bodily resurrection that I am particularly interested in at present – how to approach the NT analogies between natural processes and resurrection. Here are two examples:

‘Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain, but if it dies it bears much fruit.’ (John 12:24)

‘But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” Fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And as for what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be but a bare seed, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen and to each kind of seed its own body.’ (1 Corinthians 15: 35-38)

I have had trouble bringing these images into my conversations about the resurrection of the body in recent weeks. These verses seem to be using an analogy from nature to help the reader reflect on the meaning of resurrection – new life comes from death in the same way that plants grow from seeds. The major problem with this is that when the seed is planted, it does not die. The seed contains the potential to become a new plant, usually also containing some initial nourishment, and this potential is activated and realised when the conditions are suitable (warmth, water, light etc). Seeds are a natural process of reproduction, and not of resurrection. Is this an analogy that works so far, but then breaks down? If read it as a metaphorical image, it can contribute to the diminishment of any expectation of resurrection in a bodily, physical sense – this lends support to the notion that bodily resurrection too is only a poetic image for what would actually be a purely non-material process. It is worth noting that this is difficult to explain clearly as terminology here is ambiguous (e.g. ‘physical’, ‘material’), because the Christian expectation of the resurrection of the body includes the belief that the resurrection body will be in continuity with current experience, yet will also be transformed. It will be an immortal body, but still a body – a new transformed physicality of human persons. On this point, the verses from 1 Corinthians 15 do include the helpful notion that the eventual form of the plant is very different from that of the seed. That said, the disjunction between resurrection and reproduction remains an issue.

Jürgen Moltmann proposes that we focus here on ‘nature’s openness for analogy’.[2] Accepting that resurrection is not a natural event, and is even more than simply an interruption in the natural laws of mortal life – rather, the laws of mortality themselves are being changed – what is made clear with the NT language of reproductive images (about seeds, but also birth) is that natural mortal life however remains open for analogy from the perspective of the resurrection. It is not that natural processes are helping us to understand the resurrection, but the resurrection is helping us to see natural processes in a new perspective and with new potential. Moltmann explains:

‘Although every morning is followed by evening, every spring by winter, and every birth by death, in the light of Christ’s final resurrection it is only in these natural beginnings of life that pointers to eternal life are seen, so that they are lifted out of the cycle of eternal return of the same to which they otherwise belong.’[3]

Hence for Moltmann, the natural world is not just a ‘parable of eternal life’ but ‘is becoming God’s mode of appearance and the advance radiance of his kingdom’.[4] New life, fruitfulness and harmony in the natural world are signs of the new eternal life of God’s kingdom, which will not be detached from the natural world, but will encompass a transformed natural world, with resurrected humans as part of its ecosystem. The pursuit of new life, fruitfulness and harmony in the world around us now is therefore entailed by our hope for the resurrection of our bodies, especially in the face of opposite cycles which are leading to death, desertification and climate crisis. Christian hope for eternal life is intertwined with action for change in the current day.

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[1] Tom Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (2008,

New York: HarperOne), p141.

[2] Jürgen Moltmann, The Way of Christ: Christology in Messianic Dimensions (1990, SCM Press: London), p250.

[3] Ibid. p251 (his italics)

[4] Ibid. p252.

by Philip Sudworth.

This year is 1700^th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea of 325, which produced a creed, which is still recited regularly in many churches and acceptance of it is a requirement for membership and for ordination. The traditional church celebrates that this creed has remained largely unchanged over hundreds of years and sees this as mark of the unchanging nature of God.

In other aspects of knowledge and understanding, there have been huge developments over the 1700 years. The creeds have largely ignored most of those developments. Language has also moved on. I wonder how many of the people who recite the Nicene creed week by week fully understand what it is they are saying. “Seated at the right hand of the Father” rather suggests a medieval stained-glass window. To what extent do the words they recite reflect or conflict with their own perceptions and experiences of God?

Our children and our doctors, our rugby mates and our parents, our lovers and our lawyers will all see different sides of us.  Yet that does not stop each of them having a genuine relationship with us, even if none of them know everything about us.  Do we even know all there is to know about ourselves? If humans are too complex for us to know even ourselves fully, how much less can we even begin to comprehend the creative force that formed the billions of people and innumerable other life forms on this one small planet which orbits one of trillions of stars in an expanding universe that would take us 43 million years to cross travelling at the speed of light. 

I suspect that the Trinity doctrine, as defined in the creeds, is an attempt to put a mind map, a structure on something infinitely more complex than we could ever hope to grasp – just as scientists talk about light as either particles or waves to enable them to calculate its effects. 

Perhaps, if we see the Trinity as dimensions of our individual experience of God, as in the diagram, then the interplay of relationships between the persons provide an infinite number of points or ways in which we can encounter God.  One is just right for us personally at this phase of our faith journey. 

I’ve been to church services that have focussed almost exclusively on the Spirit, several that have substituted Jesus for God throughout and others that have been totally Father-centred and ignored both Son and Spirit.  We clearly need a better balance than this but the point of equilibrium is probably different for each of us.  We can’t prescribe it for others. Indeed, our own perceptions are likely to change as we develop spiritually.

Although the Trinitarian theory of God, if interpreted in a broad rather than a dogmatic way, can allow for a variety of approaches to God, it may still be too limited for modern thinking.  In their attempts to unify the fundamental physical forces under one single theory, scientists are now postulating that there are far more than three dimensions.  Perhaps we ought to be open to the thought that God is more multi-facetted than just Trinitarian.

If “God is a Spirit and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth” as Jesus said (John 4:24), then he is too fluid to be compartmentalised.  You might as well stand in the sea off Cape Agulhas in South Africa where the Atlantic and Indian oceans merge and try to work out which water belongs to which ocean, as to try to divide up an omnipresent spirit God.

It is not how we define or describe God that matters but how we live in relation to him.  Astronomers know that stars exist that they have not yet seen, because they can see the deviation in other stars and know that some as yet unseen body is exerting gravitational pull.  People will know that God exists if they can see him transforming our lives. Christian witness is not about telling people of a God up in Heaven who will judge them when they die but about showing them a loving God who is active in the world right now.  That way, we earn the right to share our faith.

by Jo Cox-Darling.

I found myself inadvertently attending the steering group of a Public Health roundtable on end of life care, death, and dying – seeking a community-wide, holistic development of bereavement resilience.[1] 

I was asked, if as a society, each community is prepared to help by, ‘people being ready, willing and confident to have conversations about living and dying well and to support each other in emotional and practical ways’ – then what part might the church play in that?

I left wondering what a bereavement resilient church might look like – as a ‘church’ we are both a community venue, and a group of faithful, broken, volunteers, seeking glimpses of God in the shards of life. Over the last 2 years, I’ve been using a community organising change methodology to explore this.[2]  Having listened to professionals and the community at large, a group of grief-experienced volunteers have built a suite of resources available to the whole community. 

The Theos research into death and dying concludes:

‘In a modern and pluralistic society, the Church is rightly one of many voices in this conversation, but it is well-placed to make a positive and much-needed contribution – not only because of its practical assets and historical engagement in this area, but also because of its continued theological witness […] The interplay of grief and hope in Christian theology also holds space for the many complex emotions people feel as they face dying and bereavement – and ultimately, gives theological voice to our intuition that grief is really about love.’

The space provided by death to forge meaning-filled connections with people is one of brokenness, vulnerability, raw emotions, curiosity, kindness, and trauma: the very places that Jesus was to be found.  We pressed into the question of what it means to be a bereavement confident church, a place which offers death-confidence and open-hearted compassion to all.

In our local situation where the Church now has little part to play in the rituals of death, (funerals are largely taken by celebrants) we noticed that there remains opportunity for relationship building which goes far deeper, and lasts much longer, than the funeral planning itself. 

In partnership with our local hospice, we learned about the ‘Death Café’ movement, which helps people become informed about end of life, death, and bereavement care.[3]  We heard their firsthand experience of attempting to pilot something in our village – the negative response being so damaging that the entire campaign was cancelled. 

People don’t like talking about death.

People don’t mind talking about health and wellbeing, though – so we hosted the Primary Care Trust’s annual wellbeing roadshow…on the theme of bereavement. This was a cross-sector, open event, including contributions from anyone involved in death, dying, and bereavement care.  The church worked hard to be a safe, hospitable place.  We built trust in both people and the church as a community venue – which led to memorial services with local funeral directors, other PCT themed roadshows, and the beginning of a wellbeing hub outside of clinical spaces.

We also reviewed our own funeral care and memorial service provision.  We researched what other churches offered, audited of all of the poems and music used in funeral services, and posed the question ‘what do you wish you knew about planning a funeral?.’  As a result, we:

• Produced a booklet of prayers and poems entitled ‘The Gift of Grief.’ 
• Collated resources from organisations, making them available around our buildings.[4]
• Our craft group began crocheting Forget-Me-Not brooches[5] for memorial, and prayer shawls for healing.[6] 
• A memory tree is available at the village Christmas fayre for the names of those loved and lost, which are then presented at…
• … a memorial service using a Blue Christmas theme.
• Christmas cards are sent to every bereaved family.

We asked social prescribers, public health, and the Integrated Care Board what it would look like if our volunteers became amongst the most trusted bereavement self-care specialists in the area. As a result, we were asked to start a bereavement café that others could refer folks to, and we now run a weekly drop-in café with peer to peer support.

Around the same time, a young adult in the community died, raising questions for many about the power of prayer, the existence of God, and the ‘right’ way to respond to the family in their grief and trauma.  

The volunteer leaders realised that if they were to be resilient, they needed two things… 

1. to be supported to do their own bereavement work, before they could offer support to others.  We engaged with The Bereavement Journey,[7] and have courses to support people taking their next steps in the grief journey. 
2. some basic training in bereavement support, which we sourced through Care for the Family’s Bereavement Care Awareness training. 

The circuit meeting has requested all local church councils to consider committing to the Bereavement Friendly Charter[8] and to embed their own practices in a shared and strategic fashion: so that the Methodist Church becomes a place of inclusion, justice, growth, and connection for all who have been bereaved.

Finally, using the resources of AtALoss, we have also engaged in political action, writing to our MPs to support the Early Day Motion – which has led to the All-Party Consultation on Death, Dying and Bereavement – bringing the experience of death and dying to the heart of government policy making.[9]

In Lent, we are reminded that we are but dust, and to dust we will return.

Ashes to ashes.

Dust to dust.

At Easter, we know that death is not the end of the story, and that the world can change because of, not despite, our experience.

If we can get our care and compassion right for the community, building bereavement resilience, perhaps we can be more deeply resourced for those moments of death and resurrection within our property and policy making – as well as within the precious lives of our people.

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[1] ‘Ambitions for Palliative and End of Life Care: A national framework for local action 2021-2026’, National Palliative and End of Life Care Partnership, https://www.england.nhs.uk/publication/ambitions-for-palliative-and-end-of-life-care-a-national-framework-for-local-action-2021-2026/

[2] https://www.corganisers.org.uk/what-is-community-organising/our-framework/

[3] https://deathcafe.com/

[4] This includes The Good Grief Trust, National Bereavement Association, National Association of Funeral Directors, At A Loss, and the Local Health Authority.

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvOyZaB-H6A

[6] https://www.shawlministry.com/

[7][7] https://www.thebereavementjourney.org/

[8] https://www.lossandhope.org/app/uploads/2022/04/BFC-Charter-1.pdf

[9] https://www.ataloss.org/appg