Last night at Tangent a conversation about spiritual disciplines and complaints about business cards rapidly deteriorated into a discussion of all kinds of different things including the Gospel of Judas, the Da Vinci Code, a missional order, the Fundamentals and theology of the cross.

Our denomination (and thus my personal theological tradition) has a belief “in the essentials, unity; in the inessentials, diversity and in all things love”.  So our congregations aren’t about teaching a particular doctrine on all issues which people must agree with.  Often when Phil or I talk about our multi-congregational approach at other places one of the primary questions is “how do you control doctrine?”.  The question might be expressed in different ways, but it is basically a question about how do you stop heresy or wrong thinking from arising and perpetuating itself.  It is a hard question to answer because we don’t have the same meaning tied up with uniformity of theology.

My short answer would be that we embrace the idea of the priesthood of all believers and think that believers in a congregational community with each other who represent a diversity of theological belief are more likely to hold each other heading in the right direction than a group who all believe the same thing that are reliant on a theologically trained person to give them input.  Secondly, I think that we all fall into error from time to time in our struggle to know God and follow Jesus.  And that those missteps can be valuable and important steps in a journey to faith.  I know that if I cast my mind back over my life I can think of many occasions when I held beliefs that I now consider to be wrong (for a while there I even liked Carmen and had a fish sticker on my car).  But thirdly, nobody is really working without a net in our congregations.  There are theologically trained people (if not ministers) in most of our congregations and there is a lot that goes on in terms of development and support for congregational leaders.  And in my (admittedly limited) experience there haven’t been a lot of instances where theology has arisen which is so outlandish so as to fall outside of what you would expect from an ordinarily diverse congregation.  Sure, people outside our church might disagree with what is being taught, but that wuold happen anyway.  Controlling “doctrine” within the multi-congregational approach suggests that we need to guard against those heretics who are already within our model.  Is there a rising tide of heresy within churches that I am not aware of?

Anyway, it does make it very interesting as a leader.  If you preach a sermon, you might be less candid and more muted than you might be in a one to one talk so as not to tread on too many people’s toes, but you are still basically just giving your view and people are bound to listen to it whether they agree or not (whilst saving their criticism for after the service).  But in discussion based congregations like Tangent, your views are much more open to challenge.  Particularly when you know that within the group there are people who have a theological perspective which is very different to yours.

But it is also part of what makes these sorts of congregations so attractive to me.  Myself I would personally be content to just continue to believe what I do without ever being challenged or having to explain or justify why I believe what I do.  Particularly seeing as I am one of the theologically trained people at our congregation and therefore share a responsibility for part of our teaching ministry.  Yet in a congregational environment like ours I know that just because I say something doesn’t mean that people will agree with it, and if they don’t agree with one thing I say, I would like to avoid pissing them off so much that they don’t listen to anything else that I say.

So it was interesting talking about gnosticism on the one hand and resurrection theology on the other.  In particular we talked about how debate over resurrection theology so often loses sight of the life that was resurrected.  Jesus’ life and actions almost become irrelevant as the essence of the gospel is distilled down to a neat picture of a cross bridging a chasm neatly labelled “sin” between the cliffs of God and humankind.  The Passion without the prophet, a death in place of a life.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 19th, 2006 at 5:35 pm by dan and is filed under theologically speaking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.