« Back to Issue 45

The Half-Life of Exiles

By Simon Jones.

I’m writing this on the fifth anniversary of my arrival in exile.

It’s also some thirty years since my call to ministry. That was a hot July evening. I had hitchhiked from Manchester (where I had just graduated in history and was waiting to begin a Masters) to Nottingham. There, at a conference on Christians and political action, God called me into ministry.

It was during a session led by Clifford Hill, then running the Newham Community Renewal Project. I remember being stirred by his story of ministry as community transformation. Even more, I remember the text that Clifford constantly repeated - Jeremiah 29:7: ‘seek the shalom of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its shalom you will find your shalom’ [NRSV amended]. Of course, no English version leaves the Hebrew word ‘shalom’ untranslated but it might be better if they did. They go for ‘peace and prosperity’ (TNIV) or ‘welfare’ (NRSV).

It was another decade before I started at LondonBibleCollege and launched into full time ministry in inner London. But all through that time this text was helping to shape my view of God, the world and in particular ministry and mission in a difficult-to-define  society.

My current exile began as God called me to leave Peckham to become team leader at BromleyBaptistChurch.

Exile has become something of buzz word in certain circles in recent times. In biblical studies, Walter Brueggemann and Tom Wright have written at length and with great illumination on what the word means for our understanding of the unfolding story of God and his people in scripture. In emerging church circles, writers are often musing on what it means for the church to live and do mission in a time of exile.

But recently one of my members sidled up to me and asked, “Do you really feel as though you’re in exile?” (she’d been reading my blog) and before I had a chance to answer, she added, “because I’ve always thought evangelical non-comformists were exiles; we don’t fit.” So it’s not just an academic fad this talk of exile.

Then one my leaders asked me, ‘Do you still feel you’re in exile?” I’d just returned from sabbatical. We’d spent an excellent month in Prague and holidayed in France, caught up with friends and chilled out. I wasn’t sure what lay behind his question, so I answered somewhat cautiously. Then he asked outright whether I was thinking of leaving. I replied: “Absolutely not. God has sent me into this exile and I have no sense of him saying it’s ending.” That might sound flippant but it wasn’t intended to be.

Having preached on Jeremiah 29:7 more times than I cared to remember and always applied it to the church in the UK, suggesting that God has driven us to the margins of our culture so that we can speak and live more effectively for him, I was beginning to realize that this was far more personal to me than I had been prepared to accept.

As I read and reflected on it early in 2006, thinking about the shape it would give to a new project we were about to launch at church, I had a strong sense of God saying “Have you ever thought of applying this text to yourself?” I hadn’t, of course. But in that moment I knew God was saying “So, you’re in exile, get over it, get on with it.” The very thing he had said to the exiles through Jeremiah two and half thousand years ago, he was now saying to me.

But the question is how do you minister in exile? How do you lead a church when you feel that the place in which you are ministering is a place of exile? Can we preach the Lord’s word in a strange land? The answer to that last question is, of course, a resounding ‘yes’. The other questions are more complicated and answering them is tied up with how we read the culture and the congregation within which we are seeking to embody the gospel.

David Voas, a sociologist from ManchesterUniversity, has helped me read our culture and how it relates to my congregation probably more than anyone else. Analyzing data from the British Household Panel Survey, he argues that the church has a half-life of one generation because two church-going parents have a 50% chance of passing their church-going habits on to their children. He says:

What these results suggest is that in Britain, institutional religion now has a half-life of one generation...The generation now in middle age has produced children who are half as likely to attend church.

What this does to the social context within which we minister is obvious. As he observes “The world our great-grandparents inherited was Christian in a way that the one we inhabit is not.” Truly, we are in exile.

And he adds this helpful insight for ministers:

The change that leaders have to worry about, in other words, goes on not within any particular generation, but from one generation to the next. Secularization is not making each of us gradually less religious. On the contrary, the evidence suggests that, on average, people experience little change in their beliefs and practices once they reach their early 20s.  What secularization does is to change the environment in which children are raised and the likelihood of effective religious upbringing. Each generation comes to be less religious than the one before.

Of course, sociologists argue over how long this process has been going on, with some saying that it started with the Reformation (most recently restated by Steve Bruce), and others suggesting it is a more recent phenomenon - Callum Brown argues it started in earnest the 1960s and is all but completed now.

What has become clear to me as I’ve talked about these issues with members of my congregation is that they feel this to be a recent change. The world in which they grew up has vanished. As I walked into town one day with a long-standing, committed church member, open to new things and keen to evangelize, she said to me “I’ve lived here all my life, but this isn’t the town I grew up in; I hate it now. I’d love to leave.”

I think I understood what she meant. I grew up in the suburbs. But the street I lived on was full of children playing out on roller skates and go-karts; there were few cars and even fewer strangers. My neighbourhood was mono-cultural (I well remember the shocked tones in which a neighbour told my mother that a Pakistani family was moving into a house in the next street!) and comfortably predictable. Over the past thirty years, the suburbs have changed along with the rest of the UK. But those changes, while happening gradually under the noses of our congregations, seem to have taken them by surprise over the past few years.

The biggest surprise is that awareness of the church seems to be ebbing away in our communities. A long-time member of our Wednesday parent and toddler group was stunned when it was pointed to her that, if she turned right instead of left through the entrance to our building, she’d end up in our ‘Worship area’. “Oh really,” she said, “I had no idea this was a church”.

All this suggests that the church as an institution is experiencing something like exile. We are no longer central to the social and moral lives of the communities in which we find ourselves. Our culture might still exhibit traces of the hangover of Christendom, but knowledge of its founding story is evaporating. We might once have been custodians of the story that shaped our institutions and moral lives, but we are now yet one more group standing on the edge, shouting our opinions to passers-by in the hope they’ll pay us some attention. Exile is expressed every time a church member exclaims, “I thought this was a Christian country and yet they allow that to happen...!”

While everyone in our churches might feel exile, it does not, however, elicit a common response. This is what makes ministry in exile so fascinating and frustrating. Some experience it as the realization that the world in which they grew up has gone and they do not like what has replaced it. Others experience it as a church that refuses to come to terms with this new world. The response is often to become tribal in our exile, to cling to those who agree with us against those we see as a threat, including those in the church who either want to change everything or keep it all the same as it’s always been.

There’s nothing wrong with being tribal. Paul acknowledged the tribalism of the Roman churches in his greetings to the various groups at the end of his letter to them (Romans 16:1-20). The trouble with tribalism is that it can lead to an us-versus-them mentality, a resistance to accept difference even within the congregation, difference that might lead to creative ways forward in ministry and mission.

We live in a world of constant and unpredictable change. It is not a world where things develop - such as the world our parents and grand-parents grew up in and handed on to us - but a world that lurches and jumps, where new ways of doing things are swept away by even newer ones seemingly for no reason other than they can be. This is a disorienting place to be for pretty much everyone - whatever age we are. It seems to me that there are two broad tribes in our churches and they respond to this whirlwind of change in two broad ways.

One tribe - we’ll call them the inheritors - consists of people who’ve inherited, taken to heart and owned a way of being church that seems to have been around forever (in fact it’s only about 150 years old). They like the inherited ways of doing things for a number of reasons: they have stood the test of time - well, for as long as their memory stretches back; they provide a predictable and comfortable place in a world of uncomfortable and giddying change; and this way of doing things has been beneficial in their development as Christians and thus they suppose it would benefit others as well.

But change is provoking all kinds of uncomfortable feelings. The world they knew and loved is passing away, a new world seems constantly on the threshold of being born, but they can’t see what shape it is yet; they only know they won’t really like it.

The other tribe - we’ll call them the emergents - consists of people who have not inherited the classical ways of doing things. Indeed, they find them to be unsatisfactory and unhelpful, a distraction from living faithful Christian lives in a world of rapid and unpredictable change

They are looking for new ways of doing things for a number of reasons: they have always lived in this world of unpredictable change and the old ways don’t help then to find a place in it; they have increasingly found the inherited church ways difficult to access because their lives do not allow them the time or space to do things previous generations did; they find inherited ways of doing things no longer help them in their discipleship and witness to their peers and neighbours.

They are impatient to see the church change as the world around them has, so that it helps them to live their Christian lives and do mission in this world, not a world that has disappeared. They are looking for new ways of being church to emerge, but it hasn’t happened yet and they aren’t entirely sure how to make it happen.

Two tribes caught up in a world of rapid and unpredictable change. Two tribes with the same call - to live faithful Christian lives, create communities that embody Christian values and engage in mission to bring the life-giving message of Jesus to those around them lost and floundering in this world of rapid and unpredictable change; or to put it in the words of Jeremiah, ‘to seek the shalom of the place where I’ve sent you into exile.’

Here are two suggestions about how these two tribes might engage with one another and so help each other to engage with the world.

1. Dialogue

If we talk to each other - and listen carefully to what the other says - we will see that each tribe has insights that the other needs to live faithfully in today’s world.

The inheritors will see that the emergents actually have to the tools to cope with the world as it is. They also have a holy restlessness to see the church rise to the challenge of making Jesus known in this world and the gifts of creativity that make it happen. The emergents will see that the inheritors have a history of faithfulness over the long-haul, traditions that have been handed down over generations of teaching and theology, the skills of organization, the commitment to stick at things over long periods - qualities that will be needed in whatever world is emerging.

2. Diffusion

If we talk to each other, we’ll hopefully offer two things to one another. One is the grace of honouring each other’s ways of doing things. There is not one right way of being and doing church. The gospel can be earthed in any culture and will look different in every culture in which it is properly and faithfully earthed. The other is the space to allow each tribe to be church in a way that meets their needs and that of their peer group outside the church. This means groups of various kinds meeting in various ways and at various times to be and do church in a way that builds their faith and equips them to reach out to the world. It might mean several things happening at once, targeted at different groups - even on a Sunday morning. This makes ministry exciting, if a little scary!

Exile offers the opportunity to see things from fresh angles. For me, coming from a multi-cultural, mainly poor community to a more monochrome and prosperous one, it has afforded the chance of asking afresh how a group of people can embody their faith in the culture in which they live.

Peter, the fisherman-apostle, thought about what it meant to be an exile. His first letter can be read as a sustained reflection on how Jeremiah 29:7 can give shape to small, scattered Christian communities in a landscape dominated by an all-embracing empire. And reflecting on his letter has helped me to ponder what ministry in exile to exiles is like.

Since Peter begins his letter by greeting 2the exiles of the dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia” (1:1, NRSV), we are used to thinking of exile as a theological idea. ‘This world is not my home, I’m just passing through,’ we’ve heartily sung; we’ve comforted one another by stressing that here we’ve not found any lasting city, that we are bound for the city God has promised to us.

But for Peter this language was also profoundly sociological. His first hearers were literally exiles, people displaced from the heart of empire to its periphery. And that’s why his letter can help us think about exile as a context for our ministry and mission.

Commentator Karen Jobes has made a strong and convincing case that the core of Peter’s audience comprised Jewish believers displaced from Rome in the disturbances of AD49 and sent to the eastern extremity of empire (what is now Northwest Turkey). There they had to make a life among people of different religious views, different cultures and social mores. The temptation is to hunker down and huddle together, to pray for deliverance - that is, restoration to the heart of the empire.

Peter’s pastoral response was that these people needed to learn to live, minister and engage in mission as exiles - just as he had done. After all, he is now exiled in Rome, having fled as a fugitive from Jerusalem to anonymity in its alien but teeming streets.

His advice is that they live lives of good works, noticed - even commended - by the wider world (2:11-17). Because of their distinctive beliefs and way of life, they will stand out. But, in the wonderful phrase of Miroslav Volf, they are to exhibit a ‘soft difference’, defining themselves by God’s call on their lives and not their neighbours’ opinions of them, and making good connections with the people around them through how they live and the way they treat people. Ministry among such exiles is about making community that sustains such a life of good works.

Five years in, I am beginning to see what this involves. At the risk of stating the obvious, it’s about opening the Word of God, walking with people in their bafflement and joy, modeling and molding community after the image of our triune God. And doing all this recognizing that this is not home, but it is the place where God has sent me - and my congregation (even those born here). And in doing it, finding God’s presence and blessing flooding my life - and that of my congregation - in unexpected and unimagined ways.