deep church and gospel amnesia

A mission for the deep church conversation must be towards enabling Christians to remember who they are, to be 'the kind of community that tells and tells right the story of Jesus (Hauerwas, A Community of Character, 1981, 52). I find certain sentences from books get lodged in my brain (there are quite a few Colin Gunton and John Colwell), but one particular one is from Andrew Walker's Telling the Story (SPCK, 1996). He writes, with some help from Brueggemann, that modern christians have gospel amnesia, that we are illiterate about own faith and we have forgotten who we are. I think what Andrew Walker is doing with the deep church conversation is try and rectify that problem: to make Christians literate again, to remind them and create in them a deep love of the Christian story that we find in scripture. A deep church is one that has a deep theology, that is able to read scripture, pray and worship drinking from deep wells.

The deep church conversation I think requires us to acknowledge that there is more than the evangelical story or the charismatic story or whatever tradition we swim in. The deep church conversations wants us to see their is a richer, deeper story of God, that if we begin to hear from can help train us and make us fit for living the Christian life. I remember Roy Searle of the Northumbria Commmunity speaking at Greenbelt about how too many Christians identify themselves in one narrow way, and that instead, we need to receive and learn from one another and from the history of the church.

I look the fact that John Colwell a Baptist writes a book that argues for the seven sacraments. I like the way that Colin Gunton would bring Karl Barth, John Owen, John Calvin, Irenaeus, Edward Irving, John Zizioulas and others into conversation. I like the way Stanley Hauerwas is identified as a Roman Catholic, but calls himself a Methodist, leans towards the Anabaptists and belongs to an Anglican church. These are theologians who recognise we need a deep theology for a deep church.

What I liked about Remembering Our Future is that in each of the chapters there was shared concern for scripture being heard in church and then also a concern that our worship be more trinitarian, a concern that we take seriously the sacraments, a concern that our spirituality be rooted in the everyday.

With those in the emerging church rightly encouraging us to ask what does it mean to be church and those in the alternative worship movement encouraging us to ask what does it mean to be worshipping communities, I believe it is good that those who have begun this conversation around deep church, are encouraging us to be rooted in the gospel and engage with the theological tradition of the church.