Choose Your Change

I mentioned in my last post about Swanvale Halt’s ecumenical history, and the Swanvale Sisters’ role in that. By accident the other day I came across the website of Revd Murdoch Mackenzie, who had connections with the Sisters and the organisations that succeeded to their work after the community itself came to an end in 1989: he had worked in India with Sister Caroline who had founded the Sisterhood. On the website is the text of a lecture from 2002 given by Revd Mackenzie headed ‘Christianity Must Change or Die’, which is the sort of title that makes you scan an eye over a bit of text if nothing else.

As the author points out, changing, in spiritual language dying to self and rising to something new, is what Christianity is about, figuratively and very literally in terms of what happens to Jesus. No individual Christian or Christian institution can avoid engaging with dying-that-we-may-live. But it’s abundantly easy to tell yourself that at the same time as shying away from thinking about those actual, concrete things to which we must die, the ways in which we must change: working that out is far harder.

The answers proponents of Change give to that question are revealing. Murdoch Mackenzie reveals a rage at the encasing of Christians within dogmatic denominational boundaries which he struggled against for decades, and wants to see them disappear: they are all reflections, he argues, of how human beings have re-created the ‘religion’ which Christ abolished on the Cross. I have a great deal of sympathy with that. But then he starts to discuss the Eucharist as a prime example of how ‘religion’ has crept back into the humble, simple faith of Jesus. ‘It began just as a meal around a breakfast table’ he says (actually there is quite some debate about that) and it’s that to which we should essentially return. It’s clear that when Revd Mackenzie talks about the Church ‘changing’, the kind of change he envisages is in the direction of a purified Protestantism, a shape of Christian life which he equally clearly favours for strongly-held ideological reasons.

I often find that people who demand that Christianity changes have already decided firmly what that change should look like; but this is to demand really that other Christians change, not themselves. Not to specify in advance what the change should be, but to wait to see what arises from discussion, interaction, thought, and necessity – the ways in which the Holy Spirit speaks to the Church – is far more risky. I am happy, basically, with the way we do things at Swanvale Halt: I like Catholic Anglican worship and if there were to be a ‘change’ to my taste it would be more in the Catholic direction than less. But that’s not good enough. Standstill is no good to the Spirit, and nor is reshaping a church community simply according to my own predilections: it may be them to which I must inwardly die. When we do change, it will be driven by a reassessment of our basic purposes, and contact with new situations and new people, and it’s likely not to look completely like anything we envisage before we begin.