Prayer and the Present Moment

It’s become a cliché to say that this crisis is ‘unprecedented’. Of course, it is. The initial response for many of us was frantic activism, trying to devise our immediate pastoral response. For me, this involved: setting up a pastoral care system, organising online small groups, uploading regular Bible devotionals on YouTube, feeding homeless people, and supporting my leaders. Inevitably, despite encouraging my leaders to take a day-off, I failed to do so myself! Eventually, I ‘hit the wall’ (to illlicitly use a marathon runner’s metaphor, because I’m not a runner), and had to stop. Spirituality is also about rest.

Proliferation in the Pandemic

Many have noted the increased uptake of small groups online in the Corona crisis. Might this be a glimpse of an opening, a rent, in the direction of the future? Is God breaking us out of our stultifying churchiness? Probably many will stop attending once they don’t need support during lockdown. Plus those who now have time, because they’re furloughed, may return to their previous busy lives.

Holy Corona Communion, Batman!

I got embroiled in a Twitter brawl by accident, when I happened upon a Tweet, by someone I didn’t know, and responded. He complained he was not able to take Communion, in his home, because there was no authorised person. I asked, why he didn’t do it himself? I shouldn’t have said it. I felt like an internet troll. And the thread eventually involved famous theologian John Milbank no less. A High Anglican, he defended needing a priest to officiate at Communion.

For me, this re-opened debates from when I taught at Spurgeon’s College – could we have sacraments online? Are they not necessarily physical events? I’ve seen, for example, baptisms in a MUD site, where people’s avatars are ‘dunked’ in virtual water. Is this a valid baptism? What about Communion, with virtual bread-and-wine, in “Second Life”? It seems to me, nevertheless, that sacraments do need physical embodiment. As Woody Allen said: “80% of life is turning up”. While I sympathise with those wounded by their church experience, that’s what the incarnation teaches: the essential bodied nature of Christian life.

The Electronic Corona Church

Will current changes in church life be positive or negative? Will our online measures enrich, or distract, us? Are they helpful contextualisations, to a pandemic, which may help us recover important features of ecclesiology? Or, do they betray the essence of church? Moreover, are they permanent, or only temporary adaptations? Will everything go back to ‘business-as-usua’l: what Paul Virilio called ‘’polar inertia”?

The Possbililty of Radical Church Renewal

Many pastors are wrestling pragmatically with questions arising from lockdown, as we focus on maintaining some kind of community, usually conceived conservatively as ‘running services’. The potential theological implications of our decisions are left unexplored; but besides personal or denominational, explicit or formal, articulations of belief or liturgy, lie implicit theologies. 

Perhaps, latent behind our immediate responses, there are resources for a renewal of our faith? Some pastors, wedded to a personalist model of ministry, simply attempt to do it all themselves. But this is also an opportunity to mobilise God’s people, a manifestation of what Ray Stedman long-ago termed “Body Life”: something I’ve believed in since my conversion in the 1970s.

Redeeming Rainbows at Covid Easter

Someone made a suggestion, at the start of the Coronavirus, that families should get their kids to display paintings of rainbows in their windows, during the lead up to Easter. It was a way to sensitively demonstrate hope; and also, a delightful attempt to encourage children in getting creative with craft – actually I think there’s been a real, and welcome, revival in junk modelling during our enforced in-house lockdown. Still, during our daily exercise walks, we’ve had fun identifying the middle class households, in our area of gentrified Islington, by the cute rainbows in windowpanes en route.

Our Covid Easter

The Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grunewald, is one of my favourite depictions of Christ’s death and resurrection. It has, I believe, especial relevance during this season of Coronavirus.

The piece hung originally in a mediaeval German hospital chapel, where patients could meditate on the central image. The Christ figure is twisted, writhing in agony. But particularly important were his green, putrefying, puss-filled, feet, which illustrated the symptoms of the skin diseases these inmates experienced. Here they could really sense that Christ had borne all things for them (Isa. 53.4-5).

A Theology of Corona-Time

I realise I’ve been ‘doing theology’ during this crisis, though not all of it has found expression in written form. Theology is reflecting on life in the light of God. And there is certainly much to think about now.

As such, I am engaged in what’s called ‘Contextual Theology’, i.e. reflection from within and about my own situation. It can, therefore, only be ‘a’ theology of Corona Time, one particular Christian response, since everyone’s context differs.

Ministry in this Viral Spring

In January we held a Week of Prayer and Fasting for 2020. Little did we know what this year held in store for us. During our daily prayer meetings, people shared several words of prophecy. One was that spiritual gifts would be released, like seeds, which would grow and flower in our church. What do we make of these words now, in April, after Covid? Was it all just naïve spiritual optimism?

Another word, which my wife received recently, is that this is a ‘strange spring’. Certainly so. But in that spring, I can already see signs of spiritual gifts growing. Before the crisis, we struggled to get people into small groups. Now, we have gone from four to fourteen small groups, all online – some large (12), some small (4).