Cultural Relevance

As usual, I get an idea of something to write about and it takes days and days to get the time to do so. The other week I was summoned along with all the other clergy in the diocese to the Bishop's Study Day. These are always dispiriting events held in more-or-less uncomfortable churches around the area, but usually the speaker provides some food for thought. On this occasion, I saw the topic was going to be 'Reimagining Discipleship' which filled me with what turned out to be justified foreboding. There's not a lot you can say about discipleship that nobody in the last two thousand years has said. It comes to something when the dreadful moment when the audience 'breaks into small groups' arrives as a relief.

The bit I remember (apart from a couple of appalling jokes from Il Rettore the content of which I have succeeded in obliterating from my memory) came in the questions rather than the matter of either of the talks. One of the speakers had come across a US study into the dynamics of small church groups across denominations, and had replicated its findings in about 70 churches across the north-east of England - that such small groups, house groups, cell groups or whatever you call them, no matter what their original purpose, inexorably move towards becoming mutual support networks for their members. But, obvious though it sounds, that wasn't always the case. Apparently in about 1912 a Parliamentary commission into adult education in Britain examined small church groups among others, and found that, whatever the intention in starting them, they tended to develop into adult education classes discussing social conditions, trade unionism, science and so on. Without positive direction they, like their modern counterparts, drew their purpose increasingly from the society around them. Only the model is different: in the early 1900s, the Workers' Educational Association; a century later, Alcoholics Anonymous. Then, the hunger, and need, was for knowledge; now, for fellowship.