Cinderella with Amnesia

In his first column reflecting on the challenges that lie ahead for church communities in the UK, Steve Chalke asks whether we’ve forgotten that we must be willing to change in order to progress.

As I pulled up outside the church building, the dilapidated old notice board said it all. The letters were unclear, some of them were missing, and the glass covering them looked as if it had been cracked many years before. The grounds were unkempt and overgrown. Weeds pushed through the tarmac of the litter strewn car park. But, on the wall of the church hall, crystal clear to every passer-by, hung another sign. It read:

‘Trespassers will be prosecuted
No illegal parking
Clamping in operation’

Something had clearly gone dreadfully wrong for this local community of faith. Their building stood in the middle of a busy housing estate, teeming with need; an embattled fortress of faith, in a hostile environment, doing all it could to protect itself, and its culture, from the wider community around it.

I was reminded of a book that I read years ago, penned by Michael Griffiths, with the telling title: Cinderella with Amnesia. ‘Christians collectively seem to be suffering from a strange amnesia’ he lamented. ‘A high proportion of people who “go to church” have forgotten what it is all for. Week by week they attend services in a special building and go through their particular, time honoured routine, but give little thought to the purpose of what they are doing.’

Standing in that car park I couldn’t help thinking that this was a church who were suffering from some kind of memory lapse. Somehow the energy, zeal, passion and vision that saw that building erected, and a mission begun in the first place, had been forgotten.

But, as I looked around, I reflected on the fact that, as I travel the UK, I see more and more churches tearing down the ‘no trespassers’ signs and dismantling the mentality that goes with them. I see wonderful communities of Christians who have caught a glimpse of the mission and purpose of the church again and committed to serving the needs of others. They don’t have all the answers, and, in truth, their problems are more numerous now than they were when they were fortresses of faith. But they are alive!

Their buildings get damaged, their programmes disrupted and their plans changed. But, these are simply signs that they are connecting to the pain and the longings of those who they exist to serve in Christ’s name. Trading the comfort of security and predictability for the risk and adventure of faith, these Christian communities, instead of sitting back and waiting fearfully for the return of Christ, are pressing into the darkness around them. And as they do they make a wonderful discovery – God is already at work in the communities around their buildings.

They meet him in the lives of ordinary people, who have never been to a church service. They hear him laugh in the exchange between two neighbours over a fence. All around them they see green shoots of hope growing – in the single mum who will not give up on her kids, in the young couple determined to make their marriage work. They have caught a glimpse of a God who will not be hemmed in, holed up or pushed out.

And this discovery illustrates that the real challenge for Christian mission in the West is not that there is an absence of spiritual hunger within our pluralistic, globalised society. It is rather the church’s struggle to engage with this longing on the part of so many. But, even more than this, even where such recognition does occur, there’s often an unwillingness or, perhaps, an inability to respond in any terms other than those dictated by our existing traditions and structures.
It is a difficult lesson to learn that faithfulness to scripture does not necessarily mean ‘doing things the way that we have always done them.’ Instead, biblical faithfulness calls us to a humble recognition that the Holy Spirit still has more to teach us than we have, so far, been able to receive. Ironically, it is only by way of this kind of thoroughgoing re-imagining of what it means to be the church in our new environment that we will remain firmly rooted in the historic tradition of our faith.

There are those, in the Church in the UK, who look ahead and see a Church that must ‘defend’ God and protect him. I am not one of their number. I imagine a different future – a future where the local church awakes from its amnesia to once again recover its role as the hub of the community; welcoming the different, the broken and the ordinary; creating a place of acceptance, hope, forgiveness and transformation. I can imagine a different future. Can you?

Steve Chalke is the founder of Oasis Trust, the church.co.uk
Network and the Faithworks Movement. His latest book
Change Agents – 25 hard Learnt Lessons in Leadership is
published by Zondervan.