by Hatty Calbus
After he became Vicar of HTB in 2005, Nicky Gumbel brought major change. Barbara Ehrenreich devotes a chapter of her book Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World to the Church Growth Movement which produced the megachurches. She reports how its leaders conducted surveys of potential parishioners, who wanted something less like traditional Christianity and more like the world. So these leaders obliged with corporate-looking buildings, high-tech, feel-good entertainment and cafés serving smoothies. Rick Warren of Saddleback Church in California proclaims in his bestselling The Purpose Driven Church, “A good salesman knows you always start with the customer’s needs, not the product” (sic). Nicky Gumbel began inviting Warren and other megachurch founders to speak at HTB services, conferences and the annual church holiday. He also visited and spoke at their churches. The megachurch approach was what he saw as the best way forward to achieve the “evangelisation of the nations, the revitalisation of the Church and the transformation of society.” Now similarly much-repeated by Vicar Archie Coates, this is also the tag for the Revitalise Trust, HTB’s charity, https://revitalisetrust.org/plants-and-revitalisations, whose huge influence I wrote about in my previous article.
The megachurch with the stand-out influence has been the particularly energised Australian Hillsong from the same movement. At its peak, it had 150,000 weekly attendees worldwide. When its leader, Brian Houston and his wife Bobbie came to HTB, they were introduced so rapturously by Nicky Gumbel, I wondered who these exceptional beings could be. Preaching at the London Hillsong branch, Gumbel said HTB and Hillsong were “the only good churches in London” [a friend happened to be trying out Hillsong the week he was their speaker].
HTB’s small groups were changed from ‘Pastorates’ to ‘Connect Groups’, like Hillsong’s. The chairs were removed and in came sofas, floor cushions, plasma screens, church notices as video adverts, rock venue lighting and sound systems, and rappers. Panini and smoothies were prepared at the back of the church during services. Megachurches love the attractiveness of celebrity and youth. The Alpha Course used to draw all ages, but not long before Gumbel retired, he said he was aiming it at twenty-four-year-olds. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/get-to-know-nicky-gumbel-his-journey-to-church-leadership/id1537327121?i=1000496021910 (25 October 2020, from 23 minutes) The photos and videos on HTB and many plants’ websites mostly feature attractive twenty-somethings.
At HTB, I heard a curate, since given considerable responsibility in a plant, justify the ironic name of a nightclub-like Sunday evening service: “the Sex O’Clock – because it is sexy!” He described a Good Friday service as “cool.” And he said prayer was meant to be “fun” – because your customers need to be kept engaged with the product. An episode of the BBC series Rev reproduced some of this with what looked like parody but wasn’t. https://youtu.be/mGfsd03KZAQ Taking general aim at the megachurch movement, an episode of The Simpsons has Lisa ask, “What are they doing to [our] church?” She’s told, “We’re rebranding it. The old church was skewing pious.” (series 13, episode 6) https://youtu.be/gggCcXroOcc When HTB took over neighbouring St Paul’s Church, naming it ‘HTB Onslow Square’, they did indeed describe this as ‘rebranding’.
All this has been labelled ‘McChurch’, defined by Wikipedia as “a McWord used to suggest that a particular church has a strong element of entertainment, consumerism or commercialism which obscures its religious aspects.” A ‘McWord’ is defined as “designed to evoke pejorative associations with the restaurant chain or fast food in general, often for qualities of cheapness, inauthenticity, or the speed and ease of manufacture.” Some excesses have gone, but the McChurch influence is still quite evident at HTB.
One point is that entrusting the revival of the Church of England to HTB’s Hillsong-like methods through ‘planted’ resource churches hasn’t been working. The target for new worshippers expected by the Archbishops’ Council with appalling precision has come nowhere near fulfilment: 89,375 forecast, 12,075 achieved (the Chote Report). This has been calculated as costing £5800 per new worshipper. In her book The Once and Future Parish, Alison Milbank points out that “the Episcopal Church in the United States has been employing managerial mission now for fifty years and there has been steady numerical decline.”
And there are other problems with how the ‘product’ is packaged. According to research by James Wellman published in University of Washington Today, “American megachurches use … an upbeat, unchallenging vision of Christianity.” A key means of achieving this is rock-style worship music, much of it produced by Hillsong, earning it millions of dollars a year. https://www.thefader.com/2018/10/11/hillsong-church-worship-songs-music-industry Writer and former pastor Bill Blankschaen notes that “a church oftentimes will pour much more resources, energy, thought and time into making a killer worship service” than more mundanely-theological aspects.
This criticism has been made at HTB plants. Milbank says HTB’s music, “relentlessly upbeat … does not speak into the difficulties, suffering, tragedies and failures of human life, except in order to recount rescue from them by conversion, with the hint of a more successful life-course to ensue in the future” and that “While HTB is careful not to embrace the Prosperity Gospel, a major proponent, Joyce Mayer, addressed their leadership conference. HTB comes close to it in some talks, so sure is it that God’s blessing will rest on those who follow Christ, in contrast to the many saints who have insisted that God’s gifts to us may include an intensified yet redemptive suffering of wrongs. This positivity is one key factor in its success.” The worship highs make it feel impossible that God won’t come through with success and happiness for you personally. The disillusionment when people realise what they have been sold is faulty causes many to reject not just their own church but God.
Given the worldliness, it is no surprise that scandals keep emerging in megachurches with the ‘successful’ leaders so admired by Nicky Gumbel, none more than at Hillsong, where at least four pastors have fallen. It has now been the subject of three television exposés: Hillsong Church: God Goes Viral; the three-part Hillsong: A Megachurch Exposed and the four-part The Secrets of Hillsong, eachwithnew revelations.
One part of the worldliness is, of course, money. Megachurches’ huge congregations make them very wealthy, the pastors frequently ostentatiously so. Steven Furtick, invited to speak at HTB’s leadership conference, has an estimated worth of $55 million [various sources]. Designer clothes and trainers, fast cars and even private jets are common. https://instagram.com/preachersnsneakers?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y= Hillsong leader Brian Houston published You Need More Money: Discovering God’s Amazing Financial Plan for Your Life in 2000, iebefore Nicky Gumbel embraced his theology. In The Secrets of Hillsong, Geoff Bullock, one of Hillsong’s original musicians, says, “It was about counting numbers and counting money.”
The Australian authorities are currently investigating claims by MP Andrew Wilkie of fraud, money laundering, tax evasion and extravagant spending, based on thousands of financial documents from a Hillsong whistleblower. To select from an outrageous list, he has alleged “the kind of shopping that would embarrass a Kardashian” and Houston “treating private jets like Ubers.” Wilkie also alleges that Phil Dooley, who took over after Houston had to resign, spent tens of thousands of dollars on business-class flights for himself and his daughter. Hillsong have denied many of the allegations as “taken out of context” and say that things have changed. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-10/federal-mp-accuses-hillsong-money-laundering-tax-evasion/102077080
Although a different style, HTB’s top-public-school ease with wealth may be why Houston’s approach has seemed acceptable. It was a surprise to me how many HTB members I met working in gas and oil (as did Justin Welby) or providing concierge services for West London’s very wealthy, including, almost inevitably, tax-avoiding Britons and money-laundering Russians.
Alastair Roberts in his blog Alastair’s Adversaria says, “HTB often strikes me as an example of a highly successful ecclesial adaptation to contemporary capitalism.” In the previous article, I looked at the influence of Paul Marshall, like Gumbel a Revitalise trustee, who is a multimillionaire hedge fund manager. Ken Costa, an old friend of Gumbel’s, was a preacher and churchwarden, then CEO of Alpha International. His involvement in tax avoidance schemes was reported in Private Eye. [He didn’t sue: I checked.] It has been claimed that potential curates were interviewed on his yacht. I have been unable to verify this, but it should be too far fetched to need checking and it isn’t. At one prayer meeting, it was announced the church was aiming to raise a million pounds the following Sunday [I was there]. A staff member who’d been working on a video advert for Alpha said that was costing a million pounds. HTB clergy do not have ostentatious wealth and have not been convicted of fraud, as has happened at other megachurches. But all this might explain why “marketized evangelicalism” in Milbank’s phrase, has seemed natural. And despite Hillsong’s disgrace, as recently as summer 2023, the Revitalise Trust’s email newsletter showed a speaker against a background with just the Hillsong logo.
The American journalist Julie Roys reports daily in The Roys Report on scandals in rich and worldly megachurches that, despite all the image control, eventually become public. I wonder why HTB and the Archbishops’ Council think it will be immune. Behind Church scandals are Christians being hurt, often profoundly. I shall look at this in my next article.
There’s a great deal to digest in this second episode, but a question niggling away at me is: “are we allowed to critique our leaders?” Almost every time I read the gospels, this is exactly what Jesus appears to be doing I.e. calling out the religious leaders for their wrongdoing and how the Kingdom will be taken away from them.
Also, and building on the theme of digestion, and the Mc Church analogy to fast food it’s an interesting one. There are queues outside our local Mc establishment which tells me not so much that the product is highly nutritious, but addictive.
And are we being dished up “food” at the HTB altars which isn’t healthy for our souls? Dopamine-inducing highs replicated each week with a continuous lust for more? As we discussed on the previous thread, we will see the fruit of this strategy for better or worse in the years to come.
Charismatic evangelical-dom has an almost ubiquitous connection with HTB, which has its own theological college. The influence is everywhere, as is its antecedent training academy Soul Survivor and Mike Pilavachi, as Nicky G told us on YouTube.
So you’re not charisgelical? Or not even evangelical? I’ve not seen much if any opposition to the wholesale adoption of HTB-isation, by even our overtly Anglo Catholic bishops, mainly because of the money they assume will be generated by HTB methodology. If they’re somehow hoping they can quietly coexist, taking subsidy money and the Empire won’t notice, I suspect they’re in for a nasty surprise.
The only way I see this changing, is if survivors of abuse scandals join their efforts together to raise awareness of what’s going on WITHIN the charisgelical world.
One all-telling video from the Redmans can only be effective if it’s part of a CONTINUING stream of counter arguments.
The work is not done.
I went as a tourist visitor (very many years ago) to both HTB and to All Souls Langham Place. The latter felt a bit like a 1970’s primary or secondary school assembly. The teaching was orthodox and clear. HTB had orthodox teaching, but the intense welcome felt very different from the tone at All Souls. As a middle aged adult, new to assured faith following decades of scepticism, HTB really impressed me. Now, however, I wonder if the HTB welcome possibly had an element of organised sales pitching. Had it a similarity to city centre JW’s? Latterly, a midweek lunchtime prayer meeting (with no collection plate!) has a huge appeal. Happy to take HC every few weeks at a midweek Anglican BCP service, too. The MP scandal at Soul Survivor helps explain why so many Churches are closing or empty. ‘Two or three’ gathered together allows a high degree of honesty. The collapse of the UK institutional Church once felt very threatening to me. Now, however, a yearly reading of Acts sees me pause (for a day or two even) at places like Acts 17 vs 24 and 25.
Didn’t Jesus say something to the effect that we cannot serve God and money? There are no pockets in a shroud.
Something went very, very wrong with the charismatic church a long time ago, selling its original commitment to God for cheap popularity and success. As Tom Smail put it, they walked straight into the temptations of Jesus with their eyes wide open.
Genuinely, I pray God will grant HTB’s leaders wisdom and discernment.
Is Archie Coates any relation to the late Gerald Coates, just out of interest?
‘“A good salesman knows you always start with the customer’s needs, not the product” (sic). ‘
I’m curious to know why there’s a ‘sic’ after this sentence.
You mention rappers as part of your list of – what I assume is – things borrowed from Hillsong. Does HillSong have rappers?
These reflections are in light of the MP abuse, but is ‘The chairs were removed and in came sofas, floor cushions, plasma screens, church notices as video adverts, rock venue lighting and sound systems, and rappers. Panini and smoothies were prepared at the back of the church during services. ‘ really what enabled him?
It may be non-‘traditional Catholic’ but do we think that traditional catholics are immune to abuses like (and much worse) than MP’s against young men and boys?
(Honestly, there is a sense that unusual ‘success’ did enable him and cause (liberal) Bishops to give him more leeway. But we can’t reject success- if we do, we might as well shut down all the churches to be sure of protecting people from it. No, what we need is for all churches to have a genuine desire and priority to preach the good news regardless of tradition.)
“Prayer” was made by a literally-literal and ad hominem mindset into something that had to be hands-on and a weapon. As semiconscious doubts creep in about these foundations, any semblance of prayer disappears. Generic prayer preferably without gratuitous ceremoniousness, and petitions for God’s protection and providence towards our peers without awaiting boss-ship permission, are surely the real remedy.
Since Hatty’s second article appeared several other issues have cropped up, which put this in perspective. We have friends who live in Kenya, in a rural village which has been badly hit by recent floods. Their lives are basically hand to mouth; struggling to find resources for essentials; Christians, whose lives in recent years have been one disaster after another; the latest is for the grass roof of their house to collapse with the rain. Quite how the megachurch message is supposed to affect their lives seems a bit of a mystery.
Things seem to have changed since I became a Christian. A common theme then was that, if prosperity was the blessing of the Old Testament, adversity was the blessing of the New (certainly so for our friends in Kenya) and, in some circles, austerity along with it. Missions living and working on a shoestring ‘by faith’ was somehow deemed more honouring to God.
I’ve mentioned this, either here or on Thinking Anglicans before; the HTB world Hatty describes does not fit the working class world I know, of food banks and benefit cuts, struggles to survive and hardship – and it certainly doesn’t fit the circumstances of a vast part of the Third World with their crises and gross inequalities. So how is the megachurch gospel relevant to that world?
Or is it simply not expected to be? Is it solely for the young, the beautiful, privileged and well off? I’m reminded of the two clergymen in the film ‘Poseidon Adventure’; the young go getter whose gospel, the older man said, was for the strong and not the weak.
Until Hatty explained it I was unaware of the link between HTB, Hillsongs and the US ‘megachurches’; the latter have always made me feel uneasy. So many of them seem to attract financial scandals – after what seemed a genuine spiritual awakening Pensacola did, I believe, and the same with Joyce Mayer, the Bakkers and a good few more. I’m left wondering who is being worshipped – God or Mammon, and yes, there but for the grace of God go I. I’m as fallible as they are – just too simple minded and lacking the opportunities for temptation.
So what’s gone wrong? Have we embraced the world’s ‘pleasure principle’ culture in an effort to seem ‘relevant’? Copying secular business tactics for short term success is not God’s way, surely? And certainly not if it leads to the same abuses of that world. Alpha itself is a useful tool – the basic message is traditional, standard issue evangelical Christianity – and it has done a great deal of good; God has definitely blessed and used it but, why then, do so many ‘non-Alpha’ churches, with essentially the same message, struggle? God doesn’t have favourites – but then does he have secular marketing managers? Leave it at that. I don’t have any answers
Christ ascended (the birthday of the church) in order to distribute gifts unvetoed (their gift those 10 days was to pray in fear). The charismatic of Michael Harper and the evangelical of Lloyd-Jones got replaced (across most denominations) with the “New apostolic” (muscular christianity) which confines gifts to the boss-ship only. C of E refugees don’t understand why they wanted or needed to flee, so they import the same. Outside London, christians no longer include leaseholders or people who catch a bus, or singles other than a couple of 29 year olds. My main prayer life is muttering Glory Be’s (without counting them).
I live outside London and I know a number of Christians who catch buses, rent or lease, and/or are single. I’m a single renter myself.
Isn’t Pentecost usually regarded as the birthday of the Church?
Being over 30, I’m now less eligible as the target demographic. The focus on young people is an extension of Soul Survivor’s mentality.
Older people are accepted, particularly if they bring significant wealth however.
I’m in the same demographic. Why do I not like the sound of all this? It revives too many bad memories.
I didn’t mean to have to go into details about the contrasting complications of leasing and renting; I was trying to sample “glaze over” characteristics in other christians’ minds – inarticulacy, frailty and slowness are some more. These aren’t common in usual styles of church, to the extent one can’t request some pals to pray for God’s providence. Christians who were between churches, less often go to (any) one quic ly. Meantime even the married who throw church dinners, are lonely.
Re pentecost: as you say “regarded” but why? And what was its main ministry? Beware of becoming a dispensationist. Pentecost was an epiphany in public roles, yes, hence the temptation to fixate on public personages. Christianity at large doesn’t have a prayer concept any more.
Not enough people in one’s life ma es one vulnerable and God isn’t said to be someone Who can send help any more. John had time for Clive because John trusted Holy Spirit to ensure John didn’t lose out.
Pentecost is regarded as the birthday of the Church because that’s when the Holy Spirit descended on the disciples and many of their hearers. They were utterly changed and began their task of evangelisation and living out God’s love.
There is no danger whatever of my becoming a dispensationalist, but thank you for your concern.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘“glaze over” characteristics’, but the churches I’ve known have been blessed with the presence of the inarticulate, frail, and slow, as with the poor.
Hullo again, Janet. The system notifying us of new posts is tantalising in its brevity – always makes me wait till I can read the whole message though.
I can’t remember who originally made the remark about Abram – it was a very long time ago – and its purely an opinion, but we had to start somewhere…. what matters is that each of us is indwelt by the Holy Spirit, and that will be different for each of us.
And no, I’m not a dispensationalist either, nor am I an exponent of ‘second blessing’ theology – the spirit comes at conversion (if not before, to awaken the realisation of the need of it). What I would challenge is any idea that there is some sort of universal experience, or church structure which is imposed on us. But then there’s room for so many different opinions and experiences, we could talk for all eternity without deciding on a uniform view.
I agree that there is no such thing as a universal pattern – God treats each of us as in individual. Which is marvellous. The Spirit is the enemy of uniformity.
As for second blessings: I was converted at 7, and received an overwhelming experience of the infilling of the Holy Spirit 10 years later. Both were transformative. I’m not too bothered about the various possible terms to describe either, but they were both very real.
Now that brings us right back to your opening paragraph – there are no ‘hard and fast rules’. I’d been a committed believer for a year before even hearing about the ‘baptism of the Holy Spirit’, which occured shortly afterwards. Or did it?
Personally speaking, I prefer to think, as with you, that it was a case of going deeper into our experience of God. Certainly, the conversion experience was real enough, as was the later expansion, infilling or whatever term you wish to employ.
By ‘second blessing’ I’m referring to the old Pentecostal term which, from memory, required the person to have reached a particular level of sanctification (but am open to correction if wrong). This particular term caused a lot of aggro with non-Pentecostal evangelicals in the 70’s, and Tom Smail very firmly repudiated it in discussion with them.
As you rightly say, the terminology doesn’t matter a jot – its what’s in the bottle that counts. God bless
“Requiring a level of sanctification” is an aberration (and wasn’t embraced by those pentecostals I encountered): the real issue is comprehensive teaching on HOW salvation will work, while being evangelised (Mt 29), because inbreathing/indwelling, and bestowing, occur in TWO manners in the NT, both simultaneously, and the latter as catch-up where needed. I can now see that for the disciples the one was before ascension and the other as they came down from the mountain of ascension, the initial and ongoing main grass-roots “manifestation” being precisely their praying – enlightened by three years solid teaching from Jesus and insight into OT meanings – despite their fear (the headline actors in Ac 2 were apostles – potential boss figures for some).
Like you, it depends on who you knew, and what they thought. From memory, Jim Packer had a lot of problems with it and the Keswick ‘holiness movement’ – see his book, “Keeping In Step With The Spirit.”
As a small as well as big picture thinker, I see their grass roots praying (in Spirit and truth, Jn 4) for 10 days as part OF their evangelising and other ministries (it does follow the Great Commission), which is why you’re not wrong about this at all. Also my broad brush sketch is commonplace except where organisational factors and good spiritual vision have been exploited to maintain better balance, so isn’t a uniform description, much as a lot of “senior leadership” I’ve encountered covertly or overtly think it ought to be.
That’s open to consideration, Janet. Some of us would argue that it was when God told Abram to up stumps and leave Ur, and Abram said “OK.”
But in our context, indeed, yes, Pentecost or Whit is the beginning of the modern church.
By the way, Jill and I live in a rented social housing home too. (Not that that matters in this context.)
HTB is a whole training system. Our former church in middle class town and area, had one occasional working class visitor. We’ll call him Clive. Clive was a former neighbour of mine, and I knew him to pass the time of day. Occasionally he’d turn up at church, usually sitting in the outer area in a corridor, with rough hands, flushed with alcohol.
Usually I was summoned to talk to him, and it appeared to me that I was the only one who could (be bothered to). Even if I was on band duty and trying to rehearse, “get Steve” was the order. I’d sit with him, and we’d look ahead saying nothing. He was in pain of course. The thing is, and I’m no saint, it used to annoy me that of the multitudes hovering around no one else could be found. The HTB (via church plants) vicar was far too busy putting the chairs out, I kid you not. Other church leaders? Nope. Other helpers? No. Ministry team servers? Of course not.
Because he wasn’t like us. We can only engage with people like us. Middle class? Yes but wealthy middle, educated, aspirational middle class. Other class variants are available but not here.
HTB and its vast empire have infiltrated this echelon of society. Our new worship pastor was straight out of Soul Survivor. It’s classy but, in my opinion, not in a good way.
We don’t go there anymore, so who is there to look out for Clive? It doesn’t matter now, because he died. Will any other “Clives” drop in? Not if they have any sense.
I thought the foundation of the charismatic movement – besides the Holy Spirit, of course – was ‘every member ministry’? Or has that been legislated out now by the new god of safeguarding? Surely there must have been ‘ordinary joe’ congregation members who had the necessary gifts? Oh, yes, I forgot. He wasn’t like us……
(There is no room in God’s kingdom for two sorts of people – those who say “That’s NOT my job”, and those who say “That’s MY job.” You can see what I mean. )
Actually, I fully understand where you’re coming from, Steve, being only too well acquainted with similar problems in my past. No names, no pack drill, but too many middle class suburban churches simply can’t cope with, or understand people from ordinary life.
(And yes, I find it difficult at times – but it is what we’re called to do. )
There is a kind of inbred, semi conscious sense of respectable superiority in so many of us religious bods which relates best to our own kind, and looks down on those who aren’t.
(Oh dear, I’m getting very bolshie these days – some of it is frustration with life in general.)
James in particular says some very sharp things about churches who favour the well to do. Thank God that you cared enough to spend time with Clive – for all we know, it may have helped him into the Kingdom…….
And when “Clive” is giving an account in heaven of the treatment he received at the church, I wonder what the Lord will think of how we treated him?
‘What you did for the least of these, you did for Me”.
When I think of the little I did, and my desire to get back to the (much more fun) band practice, I get on my knees
Indeed, I have similar regrets over various relationships which could have been far better handled. We have to remember the loaves and the fishes, and what Christ does with the little we give him.
Thankfully, he is better at forgiving us than we are at forgiving ourselves.
“When he sees the Hope and Anchor, where we met before the game,
Sang Cwm Rhondda and Delilia, man, they sounded both the same.
When Saturday was Sunday, and the hymns came on a tray,
And we made a new religion – Duw, I wonder what he’ll say…..” (Max Boyce)
“Takeover ministry” is what’s going on here. Dear bishop, please may we plant a church in St Clive’s? Yes, and here’s £1.7m to kickstart the city centre ministry from the Church Commissioners.
Or NO, you may not plant your church in that parish. HTB then seeds a not-specifically-Anglican congregation in that parish anyway. Result: a well funded competitor and all the trendy people (and their money) join the competition and Parish Shares decline. Or they go to the nearby Hillsong congregation.
You can see the pressure on senior church leaders to cede control to HTB. It has considerable power, and can and has acted in these ways.
Incidentally other powerful genres have attempted the same schemes: Emmanuel Wimbledon seeds conservative evangelical churches outside the C of E. Whenever you see “seed” in the Annual Report, this is the disguise word for church Plant, a formal diocese-approved takeover, “seeding” is a generous gift to a completely new congregation (consisting of wealthy people shifting over from their existing church which isn’t conservative enough).
I’m not saying per se, that all the above practices are wrong or right, simply pointing out what’s happening, and the dynamics underlying it. Obviously this is just a snapshot.
https://riverchurchipswich.org
I don’t know this place, only (to my regret) its “home page”
Anyone else spot the deus ex machina golden buzzer machine “effect”?
What do you mean?
BTW I used to live in Ipswich but this church post-dates me.
I think he means that stack of lights behind the guitarist. Actually, Michael jogged my memory – you have to be careful with some forms of flashing lights, as they can trigger epileptic fits in some people.
I was merely referring to the “content” of the picture on that page, since they appear to claim to be HTB plant. Notwithstanding my in-person brushes with HTB ta eovers, I believed that particular photo – which I encountered in browsing for something else – spea s for itself in self-parody. No doubt I should apologise, but those who want to have a public face, want to have a public face.
Sadly this is beginninng to sound like a ‘restoration’ mantra from the 1980s – that their disciples should take over a church by force of numbers. It was even suggested they should try the same with town and county councils, and then they wondered why people got fightened!
Such behaviour isn’t pleasant to see. Its underlying assumption is that the party doing the taking are automatically ‘right’, and everyone else isn’t. I recall our being encouraged to ‘pray people out’ – ie spiritually bully or obstruct in practical terms. Curiously, it doesn’t seem to work any too well with people like Putin and others who, in very practical terms, have a great deal of power…….
Claiming to fulfil some sort of vaguely scriptural values, panders to what is meant by “slave morality” (identified among the then Lutherans under Bismarck) on the part of those who forget they have gained dominionism (as substitute for something better) already. Peter Wagner (church growth guru and a hero for “PJ” Smyth’s associates) discerned that dominionism had been achieved by 2008.
Some churches subconsciously pull punches until a misfit goes away (“not engaging”) or, egged on by prematurely appointed “senior leadership” maintain an excess of unsettling ferment. Big names are furious with us littluns for having more insight than they do when we tried to help our fellow congregants see twenty years ago when times were easier.
Reading these blogs by Hatty Calbus, I’m reminded of the Letters to the 7 Churches in Rev 1-3; especially v. 17-21:
‘You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see.
Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest and repent. Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.’
God’s standards of a ‘successful’ church are very different from ours.
I loved the comment John about the wishful comparison of a ‘plant’ taking over a county council! Why isn’t any of this in the media/television etc why is it blocked and the huge number of survivors not visible in the public eye. Surely a warning to genuine seekers is necessarily. Why don’t we hear more about Jesus overturning the money lenders? Etc etc….
I have a very long memory, Margaret. The idea was promoted over 35 years ago but never really got off the ground.
At around the same time there was another idea, of a ‘Christian University’ or college, giving ‘Christian’ training in various trades – travel agent, chemists, garage mechanics and so on, so that we would never have to patronise secular schools, shops and businesses. That didn’t last long, either. The practical problems are self-explanatory……
Thanks to Hatty for taking time to write in such a careful and thoughtful way. I suspect she touches a nerve in many of us who instinctively feel concern about HTB, not because it is inherently bad, or full of evil people, but because it forms an extremely powerful, well connected and well resourced clique within the main organisation of the CofE ( a church sadly defined by its cliqueyness – jostling for who can and can’t mutually flourish within its rules and doctrines). The HTB clique forms an ever increasing pressure of conformity with in the CofE and has the ability, like others, to close ranks quickly if it is challenged, and to lobby very very effectively. It has expanded its influence considerably over the selection and training of CofE clergy, with a subtle shifting of the focus from ‘ministry’ to’ ‘leadership’. Lots of us aren’t and never will be in that clique, but, in comparison, feel like the little people with dwindling resources, time, and influence. We know there’s something wrong, but our voice is quickly drowned out or silenced by the much more mellifluous tones emanating from West London offering ready cash backed solutions rather than simply grappling with and living within the complex unanswerable questions. It does strike me as rather alarming that the God of all Creation, who sent the Saviour of the world into relative poverty and obscurity to die as an outcast, should now, through the Spirit, be mainly choosing to revitalise the Church of England through the expanding influence of a parish Church in the richest part of London, led by clergy from the most expensive public schools, bankrolled and advised by hedge fund managers and would be media moguls. I’m reminded of Desmond Tutu who spoke of the smiling missionaries arriving with a Bible in one hand while they took away the land with the other.
Thank you for a beautifully, clearly expressed summary of exactly what I feel too.
It reminds me of the old CECU/IVF dictum, that a lot of resources wee put into reaching university and college students because they would be the ‘leaders of the future’ and, if converted, be the social influencers for the church.
Jesus, who lived in relative poverty, also said “Those who already have will receive more, while those who have not will lose what little they have.” He was speaking spiritually, not necessarily economically or politically – but it is equally true in both spheres!