What is in Kelvin's Head?

What if Jesus chose the wrong brother?

30/11/2014

Can you just suspend your cries of heresy whilst you read this one blog post?

Because it will make you think, that’s why.

What if Jesus chose the wrong brother on whom to found his church? What would the church look like if he had chosen Andrew instead of Peter?

People rather like doing speculative history. As the world thinks about the time of war that raged a hundred years ago, there have been a couple of documentaries about what life would have been like today if the war had never been fought or if the outcome had been different. What if the bullet had missed Archduke Ferdinand?

Similarly, when I was last in London I saw a great play that imagined a Britain in which the present Queen had just died and came up with a drama about the chaos that ensued when the new King Charles III picked a fight with parliament and refused to sign Acts of Parliament into law.

The Labour Party, currently in the doldrums in the UK is haunted by the choice of leader they had to make a couple of years ago. People will always ask – what if they had chosen the other Milliband brother. Maybe they would have asked whichever brother had been chosen.

So, I ask you to think for a minute this St Andrewstide what life would have been like for the world if Jesus had chosen the other brother. Peter (“the rock on whom I will build my church”) and Andrew (“There is a lad here with five barley loaves and two small fishes”) were the choice he had.

The question is, what if Jesus (and we the church are the body of Christ in the world today so we might as well ask “..if we…”) had chosen not the person who was destined forever to be a gatekeeper but chosen one who had an instinct for hospitality and introductions?

So much of church life has been predicated on the power to open the gates of heaven. So much has been based on deciding who is in and who is out. We have a whole genre of humour that is based on what people say at the pearly gates to Peter to see whether they gain admission to the feast or not.

What if Jesus had chosen the other brother?

What if we had based our notion of church life on the brother who was particularly good at inviting others to help Jesus make eucharist? What if we had based our notions of church life on the brother who seemed to have a gift for introducing others to Jesus, not least his impetuous hothead of a brother Peter? For Andrew seemed to have a natural affinity for bringing people (including children, note) right into the presence of Christ. And it is Andrew who famously, with Philip, brought Greeks (ie foreigners, migrants, outsiders). Indeed, in that case, Andrew seems to have been the go-between – the Greeks approached Philip who didn’t know what to do and Andrew took them all off to the very presence of Jesus straight away, instinctively, impetuously even.

What if Jesus had chosen the brother with the impetuous, infectious, hospitable, personality instead of the one who always worried about whether he was right or wrong and who seems to have had a short fuse? What if he had chosen the brother who practised natural inclusive spirituality rather than the one who stands like a doorpost never able to stop judging people?

What would our church have looked like then?

Did Jesus wonder as he watched and waited and prayed in Gethsemane the night before he died whether he had made the right choice? Did he comfort himself with the idea that having picked a whole bunch of disciples, they couldn’t all make a hash of the task in hand? When the disciples slept and Jesus prayed, what did he hope for the world that was to have to learn of his message through the band of named apostles and the others (the women! the faithful weeping women who did last it out at the foot of the cross!) who were part of his movement?

I know it is uncomfortable asking whether Jesus ever got something wrong. Religions are programmed to believe that their founders got it right, preached gospel truth, knew exactly what they were doing.

But ours is a faith with a vulnerable God.

Can you even allow for the fact that he wondered?

And if you can, can you wonder whether the different personalities that Jesus surrounded himself with give us different moods, different ways of thinking about being Christ’s followers? Is this the time in the life of the church where the fulness of Jesus’s choices are realised and we begin to act as though all the gifts of his disciples matter if we are going to bring the kingdom in?

What would the church be like now if it had been founded on the brother whose intimacy with Jesus was such that he was happy to let him wash his feet rather than the brother who didn’t like to be touched?

This St Andrewstide, let yourself wonder what life would have been like if we had presumed that Andrew’s gifts were the way to extend and grow the church.

And give thanks for him.

He may not have been the rock upon which Jesus chose to found the church in those days.

But which brother would he chose today?

St Andrew, St Peter

7 responses to “Whither the Kirk?”

Pausing Place

25/08/2010

I missed last night’s programme, but I thought your comments were interesting.

In a sense, perhaps it’s unsurprising if the SEC is inwardly more positive about itself than the CofS. My take is that in the recent past, at least, the SEC started from a lower common denominator, not being the “local” church in the same way as the Kirk, and so it doesn’t have to contend with others saying of it “look how the mighty have fallen” in quite the same way.

As to the health of the Kirk (and the SEC for that matter), I think we need to reflect on our self-perception and to consider carefully the points and places in which a dying church (congregation or denomination) should be allowed to die gracefully, and the ways in which we might see new life emerge from the rubble.

As a young(ish!), relatively new Christian I have seen examples of (both urban and rural) SEC and Kirk congregations where there are few signs of new growth, little to draw in younger (under 50 year olds, to pick a random-ish number) new folk, and much to sustain negative preconceptions of church as boring, irrelevant and so forth.

We as a faith community need to get much better at stepping up to the mark in our creativity and engagement with our society. The sad truth is that most young adults do not know and have not heard about Jesus Christ, and unless we engage with them in ways culturally relevant to them, and which do not presuppose previous knowledge (too often taken for granted) they never will.

It troubles me, but I do think it’s true to say that in the SEC and in the Kirk we have a church sustained by the traditions and cultural reference points taught to a previous generation. Culture has shifted radically, with the result that the same will not be able to be said in 20 years time.

Our challenge is clear. Whether the Kirk and the SEC can step up to the mark to address what it means to live out the Great Commission in the 21st century is less so.

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Cal

25/08/2010

I didn’t really understand who this programme was aimed at, or even what its aim was.

Yes, numbers have fallen, but perhaps the small number of people who remain are there because they actually want to be, not because it’s the done thing on a Sunday morning.

And personally, I rather like the idea of a church “sustained by traditions”. Clearly the church has to be relevant to modern society, but in abandoning the traditions of worship then you lose the centre of why the church exists in the first place.

There was something very Presbyterian about the programme with its “we’re doomed” mentality. I find the SEC generally more positive in outlook.

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John

25/08/2010

The only book the presenter seemed to have used in his research was ‘The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800-2000’ By Callum G Brown – indeed Callum Brown was one of the speakers. The thesis of this well argued sociological study is that “quite suddenly in 1963 something very profound ruptured the character of the nation and its people sending organised Christianity on a downward spiral to the margins of social significanceâ€. That something he identifies as new media, new gender roles and a moral revolution which has dramatically ended peopleâ€™s conception that they lived Christian lives.â€ It could be said to have happened as â€œsex beganâ€ between the end of the Chatterly ban and the Beatles first LP as the poet Philip Larkin so famously put it.”
To balance this statistical decline the programme flagged up some of the “church without walls ” iniatives in a lame sort of way. All in all a most unsatisfactory programme that only told half the story.

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Kenny

25/08/2010

Good crit Kelvin. My reflection at the end of the programme was, “Lord, we visited this stuff over 30 years ago, and have come out of it stronger and better Church in the SEC.” Hopefully, we stopped longing for ‘the good old days’ a long time ago!

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MartinRitchie

26/08/2010

I thinking “Pausing Place” makes a good point about needing to creatively engage with society. From my own experience of working with a CofS congregation, this creative engagement is a weak spot for many.

As a counterpoint to the programme, interesting to note in the latest “Life and Work” a very positive article about a growing CofS congregation in Stornoway – and I mean really growing! So not all doom and gloom, and I’m sure there are many more examples of bright spots, just as there are in the SEC!

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Graham Vahey

28/08/2010

If the C of S disappeared completely we would be at a loss. During the dark and bleak years of Thatcher’s reign she refused to visit Scotland for 5 years. When she did she expressed shock that we had Royal Regalia and ordered it to be removed immediately for safe-keeping to England. Her ‘Sermon on the Mound’ is now historical for its condescension to the Scots. She was none too pleased to be handed two reports on poverty in Scotland by the powerful Church and Nation Committee. Indeed, it was to this Committee that the population turned to for a moral lead during Thatcherism. When James VI (‘Jamie the Saxt’) became James I in England, the population turned to senior Scottish earls for a moral lead. Unfortunately, the Piskie Church does not give a moral lead in Scotland, apart from the work of the Scottish Constitutional Convention in the recent past. The RC Church does pronounce on moral issues. Could it not be conceivable that all the major Churches could unite in a Committee to pronounce for Scotland on moral issues as the Church & Nation Committee once did?

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Aldous N. Gaiters

01/09/2010

Speaking as a Nonjuror myself I am sure the SEC has a right to a moral voice in Scotland. Taking the US daughter church of the SEC as a model you could see where the fissures would appear. There is room for a modern liberal Christian voice, but even I an old Liberal myself, would have to fear that such a voice might appeal to only a select few.

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