Giving form to the movement of the Spirit

by Andrew Johnson, Assembly General Secretary

There is a story we sometimes tell about the Uniting Church: that we began as a movement and somehow became an institution.

It speaks to something important about our identity. Church Union was an extraordinary act of faith and imagination. It required people to look beyond the denominations that had formed them, relinquish familiar identities and embrace the possibility that God was calling them into something new.

Yet this distinction between movement and institution obscures something fundamental about the theological vision that gave birth to the Uniting Church.

The movement towards union required the patient work of giving enduring form to the unity we had received in Jesus Christ.

I have been reflecting on this while reading Jamie Pitts’ Organizing Spirit: Pneumatology, Institutions, and Global Imagination.

Pitts challenges the tendency to associate the Holy Spirit with spontaneous movements and informal communities while treating institutions with suspicion. He asks whether we have underestimated the ways the Spirit might also work through the structures by which people organise their common life.

For the Uniting Church, this matters. Our councils and structures are not simply mechanisms for administering the Church. They are among the ways we give expression to the unity we have received in Christ.

The Spirit moving over the waters

In our baptismal liturgy, we recall:

“In the beginning, your Spirit moved over the waters
and brought life out of the chaos of nothingness.”

It is a familiar image from the opening verses of Genesis:

“The earth was complete chaos, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.”
~ Genesis 1:2 (NRSVUE)

What follows is the extraordinary work of creation. Light and darkness are distinguished. The waters are gathered. Dry land appears. The conditions for life emerge, and creation thrives in its diversity.

The movement of the Spirit is not opposed to order. It is associated with the emergence of a world capable of sustaining life.

We should not confuse the order of God’s creation with the structures human beings construct, nor imagine that the Spirit’s work is confined to what is predictable or manageable. Yet Genesis challenges the assumption that freedom and form are necessarily opposed.

The ordering of creation is not a restriction upon life. It makes life possible.

This offers a different way of thinking about how we order our common life.

At their best, our structures sustain relationships, enable us to share responsibilities and allow commitments to endure beyond particular people and generations. But they can also constrain the life they are intended to sustain, preserving power, resisting change and becoming ends in themselves.

The question is whether the way we order our common life enables our communities to thrive in the life and mission to which God has called us.

The Spirit who brings life is not contained by the forms through which that life is expressed. The same Spirit who gathers and sustains the Church also calls it to repentance and renewal.

The theological imagination of Church Union

When we return to the work of the Joint Commission on Church Union, we discover that the relationship between theological conviction and the ordering of the Church was present from the beginning.

The first report, The Faith of the Church (1959), gave priority not only to discovering unity in a commonly held Christian faith, but also to a shared understanding of the true structure of the Church’s life.

From the beginning, faith and order belonged together.

The second report, The Church: Its Nature, Function and Ordering (1963), developed this conviction further. Central to its argument was the exercise of oversight, or episcope, within the Church.

The Commission understood oversight not simply as a matter of governance, but as a responsibility entrusted by Christ to the Church, exercised personally through particular ministries and corporately through its councils.

Councils were not simply places where decisions were made. They were communities called to discern the will of God, build up the Church in faith and love, and share responsibility for its life and mission.

The Commission went so far as to declare:

These were not practical arrangements to be settled once the theological work had been completed. They were part of the theological work itself.

In its discussion of the government of the Church, the Commission also made this remarkable statement:

“Since law is the servant of the mission of the Church, where it serves that mission it is good law; where it becomes rigid or chaotic and stands in the way of that mission it is no longer good law.”
~ The Church: Its Nature, Function and Ordering

The Commission recognised that the Church’s ordering could fail in two directions. It could become rigid, preserving arrangements long after they had ceased to serve the Church’s mission. But it could also become chaotic, losing the coherence, accountability and shared responsibilities necessary for our common life.

Yet preservation is not necessarily rigidity, any more than disruption is necessarily chaos.

There are relationships and commitments that must endure if we are to remain faithful to our calling as one Church. Equally, there are arrangements that must sometimes be disrupted if we are to respond to what the Spirit is doing among us.

Preservation becomes rigidity when maintaining familiar arrangements matters more than the mission they exist to serve. Disruption becomes chaos when dismantling existing arrangements undermines our capacity to live and act together.

Are we more inclined to preserve arrangements that no longer serve us than to risk the disruption necessary to change them?

The Basis of Union reflects the Commission’s conviction when it declares:

“The Uniting Church will…order its life in response to God’s call to enter more fully into mission.”
~ Basis of Union, paragraph 13

Church Union was itself an act of profound disruption. The participating churches relinquished established identities, structures and patterns of authority because they believed faithfulness to Jesus Christ required something new.

Yet that disruption was not an end in itself. It demanded the patient work of giving enduring form to the unity they had received.

More than a collection of congregations

There is much to celebrate in the life of our local congregations. They are places where the gospel takes root among particular people, shaped by the histories, cultures and circumstances in which they live.

As the Basis of Union reminds us, they are where people gather to hear the Word, celebrate the sacraments and build one another up in love. They are also where people are formed and equipped to share in the wider responsibilities of the Church and to serve the world. Without the life of our local congregations, there would be no people to carry forward this wider calling.

But the Uniting Church has never understood the local congregation to be the whole Church.

Our belonging to one another is not simply a practical arrangement that allows congregations to cooperate. It arises from the unity we have received in Jesus Christ.

We belong to one another before we decide what we can accomplish together.

That belonging brings responsibilities we cannot fulfil within the boundaries of our own communities.

It calls us to share our gifts and resources across communities with profoundly different capacities. It draws us into relationships with Christians and churches across the world, deepens our theological culture and strengthens our prophetic witness to justice. It calls us to give practical expression to our Covenant with the Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress, and to confront the patterns of power that have marginalised people within our own Church.