David: “Spirit” is another word that seems to be misused. KJS made the rather strange point in her Pentecost letter that different people are hearing different messages from the Spirit. Surely the Spirit would not give different messages on the same subject depending on the “context”.
Rev. Dr. George:  I bet you, if you were to press Bishop Schori, even she would say we may be at different stages of hearing; my guess is she has a notion about what the Spirit is ultimately saying. I suspect she may have some notion of the unfolding of geist in history that’s moving somewhere. So the language of context serves in a certain situation, but she’s got a destination.

David: What I’m getting at is that people seem to be using “spirit” as an excuse to validate their own thinking.
Rev. Dr. George:  Well I think some users of “spirit” have in mind a certain idea of history; traditionally for the church the test was that the work of Persons of the Trinity is indivisible, so the church traditionally tested the spirits by the canon of Scripture and the movement of the Spirit moves towards Jesus Christ. I think there is an invocation of the Spirit on behalf of charity and trying to overcome conflict, so I’m sympathetic to this: I think it’s true that, where the Spirit is, there is charity. It’s also true that Christians have traditionally taken the witness of the Holy Scripture as the canon rule by which they determined which spirit is speaking.

David: Do you think the idea of “inclusion” has become an idol?
Rev. Dr. George:  I think that what our secular age longs for is a kind of shadow or fragment of what the Gospel actually offers. In other words, we long for inclusion; what the Christian Gospel offers is the hope of the Kingdom of God first of all and it offers in the meanwhile the joining together of all nations of the earth in the Church. So the secular longing for inclusion has a response in the catholic nature – the global – nature of the Church.

David: But I meant is it an idol in the church.
Rev. Dr. George:  The Anglican Communion is inclusive and diverse and in cities of Canada you see a remarkable gathering of the people of the earth in worship. So, as someone who is interested in mission, there’s a valid kind of inclusion, which is the gathering of all the peoples of the earth. The culture’s more general reaching after this is less focussed.

David: I dug up some numbers of how many people attended the ACoC over the years: in 1961 it was 1.2M, in 2001, 625,000 and in 2009, 325,000. If you plot a graph, that gives you zero in 2040.
Rev. Dr. George:  There is a widespread awareness and worry among contemporary Canadian Anglicans about that.

David: Yes – a little while ago I was talking to a professor of church history – one of yours.  He takes a very long view of things. I didn’t bring these figures up with him, but we did discuss ANiC and why some churches thought they had to leave. In his long view, he believed that the ACoC could return to orthodox Christian belief, so it’s worth remaining in the ACoC. But if the numerical decline continues, there won’t be anything left to come back.
Rev. Dr. George:  the church may well need to reorganise itself and downsize. But the real work is evangelistic and catechistic: the church seems to have lost a generation and it has to be a church that can find old and new ways to convey the faith. That is what we exist to do and I would emphasis that that is why the church needs to find an important place for its evangelical mandate.

David: That’s what you’re trying to do.
Rev. Dr. George:  Yes, whether it be something more traditional or Fresh Expressions, whatever modality, people who have a burden for evangelisation and for catechesis are often traditional Anglicans – which is not to say they are the only ones who do this, but they have a very particular and important role and that is the real task ahead of us. That being said – as we talked about yesterday – I do think that the church is usually dying and being born; I think there is still considerable attraction in the notion of being evangelical in a catholic Christian mode.

David: I don’t have to be convinced of that.
Rev. Dr. George:  So I think, as Mark Twain said, “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated”. I agree with you 100%: there are dire statistics which the church would ignore at its peril. At the same time there is something here that, for all its confusion, is worthwhile.

David: African churches have been sending missionaries to North America. Is this a good thing?
Rev. Dr. George:  I think the missiological slogan, from 6 continents to 6 continents is a good thing and it undoes some of the presumption about the movement of people and resources from the West to the global south. It’s complicated – being a Nigerian or South Korean or Ugandan coming to North America is not a culturally easy thing. To give you an example: I was ordained in Tanzania and still stay in touch with my friends there – and it is a normal expectation for a parish to plant a church yearly. Now is that a fair expectation here for every rector? No, not in our culture. But is that a good wake-up call and challenge? Yes. In East Africa they thought about the structure of the church in a way that made sense evangelistically and catechistically: there weren’t that many ordained clerics but the were lots of people who would still plant churches. So they had a structure – and they were evangelicals so this came naturally to them – which was conducive to these things. It would not be a bad thing for us to be challenged to think about what kind of structure we need.

David: I talked to another of your professors about Fresh Expressions. The concern I raised was what would the techniques he was teaching be used to express – would it be the Gospel?
Rev. Dr. George:  I think encouraging the church to let many flowers bloom evangelistically is good. You know, the flowers will thrive or they’ll die – like the parable of the sower. The fact that the professor in question himself is a theologically grounded is not irrelevant. These things are not just techniques – the Gospel is never a technique.

David: My point is that that was all very well, perhaps, while he was still involved, but once it was handed over to a less than orthodox diocese, it would no longer be a Fresh Expression of the Gospel, but something else.
Rev. Dr. George:  Maybe I’m an optimist.

David: I’m not accused of that very often.
Rev. Dr. George:  I think there is a felicitous version of the law of unforeseen consequences: you scatter these things and what God can do with them is maybe surprising.  Is there a potential that it it could become a mere technique? Sure, but there’s also the potential that….

David:… something good could stick anyway.
Rev. Dr. George:  I think so. And you know, Fresh Expressions was a child of the evangelical wing of the Church of England, so to understand it requires remembering the soil from which it springs and that in some ways is as important as the actual technique itself.

More to come in Part 3

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