Youth and Adult Study – Week 2

Prayer –

God present to us in History:

Thank you for this opportunity to gather and be your people in this time and in this place.

Open our hearts and minds to your word for us today and always. Help us to carry what we learn and what we experience into the world to your honour and glory. In Jesus Name. Amen

Last week we discussed a number of things. One was the nature of God and why the concept of the Trinity is so important and worth preserving. The idea of God as a community that loves us and invites us into its dance, and that we can love and participate in the dance is vitally important. We discussed church as “the community that gathers to tell the story by living out the story.” The story was defined as:

• the creation of the universe and humankind;
• God choosing his people from a group of slaves and rescuing them from slavery
•  the life of the people in the land God gave them including the way God sent them prophets to bring them God’s word;
• the coming of God into the world as a human being to stand in solidarity with humankind;
• continuing with this theme the life, death and resurrection of Jesus as told in the four Gospels;
• the in-between times in which we live, and
• God’s dream for the earth when all will be perfected and there is no more sickness, oppression or violence in the world.

The Church is part of the story of the in-between times and begins in the story of Acts and includes the letters of Paul (and others) to the early church. And continues to our own day.

The Church lives out the story in by living and caring for each other in community, by telling and acting out the Gospel story in worship and in study and by serving the world with God’s help in the Holy Spirit. These three activities of the Church are represented in our weekly worship and its three-fold pattern. Gathering, which reflects community, proclaiming God’s word (which incorporates the sacraments of communion and baptism) and going out, which equips God’s people and incorporates/represents service.

Today we are going to be discussing community, including the story of God’s people living in history as the Church (which reflects and echoes the Hebrew Scripture stories of the prophets and God’s people in the land) and the way in which the Church lives together as community.

Scripture –

Job 42:10 –

¹⁰ And the Lord restored the fortunes of Job when he had prayed for his friends; and the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before. ¹¹ Then there came to him all his brothers and sisters and all who had known him before, and they ate bread with him in his house; they showed him sympathy and comforted him for all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him; and each of them gave him a piece of money^[a] and a gold ring.

Acts 24:13-35 –

43 Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. 44 All who believed were together and had all things in common; 45 they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds[a] to all, as any had need. 46 Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home[b] and ate their food with glad and generous[c] hearts, 47 praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

History of the Christian Church

1.      Early Church

2.      Global Church

3.      Constantine

4.      Remformation

5.      Modernism/Secularism

6.      End of Christendom/Post-Modernism

After the life of Jesus and whatever happened that we know of from the story as the Ascension, the Church grew rapidly. First in Jerusalem and Palestine, then through the Jewish Diaspora around the Mediterranean Sea, then among Greek Speaking Gentiles and even to Rome. Growth was not without its bumps. Persecution against both Christians and Jews happened sporadically and there were also tensions and a split between Christians and Jews. But by and large the Church grew.

Roman Empire

Although a vast oversimplification of what is a complex story that varied over a number of different parts of western Europe and through vastly different historical periods, by a large Medeval Society organized itself around its own particular understanding of Christianity and what it was like to be and live in a Christian society. The social contract was undergirded by the Great Chain of Being. This placed God at the top, in control of all, and then God’s assistants (either Pope or King, they each tended to place themselves above the other), the hierarchy of the Church (Bishops, Abbots, Priests, Brothers, Sisters) and of secular society, Emperor, Kings, Nobles, Knights, the people, then the animal kingdom, the plant world and rocks and water.

There was the also famous three-legged ideal of society, with nobles to provide physical protection, religious to provide spiritual comfort (there were orders of monks whose main duty was to pray for individuals and society as a whole) and producers (farmers, craftsman and the like). Monasteries were an early part of this, and we owe this movement a great deal as they were the ones who preserved culture and learning through the dark ages and continued even through the high middle ages into the Rennaissance or rediscovery of Classical Culture, including the recovery of ancient Hebrew and Classical Greek.

Many issues began to put cracks into this social contract and also the way in which people related to the Church. The rise of independent city states and the merchant class put to rise questions around the ordering of society. Theologies that were embedded in this had trouble addressing the theological needs of  a growing middle class. Restrictions against usury meant that banking was restricted to Jewish people, which was problematic during the frequent bouts of popular anti-semetism and occasional Pograms. Rivalries between nation states with the Church caught in the middle or between rulers and Church officials also became fractious.

Out out many of these issues came the Reformation. Time does not permit us to examine this in great length, but it is vitally important because our Church is a product of the Reformation and these events. Incidently, the Roman Catholic Church as it exists today is also a product of the Reformation which also changed it profoundly, something we need to remember as we work together with our RC brothers and sisters.

The point here is the Presbyterian Church in Canada and the way we do things and organize ourselves is very much a product of the Reformation and we are going to be looking at this for the rest of today and again next week in a couple of different ways.

Meanwhile, the world does not stand still. As the idea of the Great Chain of Being goes away so does the Divine Right of Kings. Kingdoms are replaced by nation states, sometimes violently as Louis XVI found out during the French Revolution. Philosophers and eventually individuals question even whether God exists. Frequent periods of evangelical or religious growth are contrasted with periods of decline or questioning. Massive calamities or wars arise and cause people to both question and to come back to faith. We are currently seeing both simultaneously as the Church is growing in the Global South by leaps and bounds even as it declines in the industrialized North. But again, we remember that these are sweeping generalizations and conditions from place to place and time to time are always in flux.

As I noted Presbyerianism is a particular form of the Church that arose from the crucible of the Reformation. It is part of a form of Protestantism called the Reformed movement that has its roots in Switzerland, France and Germany and then spread to the Northern Netherlands, Scotland, Hungary, Korea, Taiwan, much of the Caribbean, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, southern Africa and a few other places. Presbyterian is a description of our form of government which I’m going to get into. Not all Reformed Churches are Presbyterian but all Presbyterian Churches are reformed.

Presbyter comes from the Greek and means elder or ruler. Our form of government is based on the theological principle that all of us are equal before God. So instead of a pyramidal structure with God at the top and power in the hands of God’s specially chosen individuals, in our polity power rests with each individual Christian (Galatians 3:27-29). There are actually two different forms of government that have arisen in this context, Congregationalist and Presbyterian. Congregationalist means just that, each congregation rules itself, usually through general meetings.

They then create greater bodies for mutual help and cooperation, but by and large these bodies rest on the principal of volunteerism, individual congregations are free to enter or leave them as they will and they work as loose grouping on specific projects. Presbyterian forms are more like representative government, individuals are selected from the group and represent the group in decision making. Each congregation is responsible to a Presbytery which is made up of clergy and lay elders equally, which is in turn responsible to higher forms of government, in our case Synods and General Assembly, although other groups use the terms Classis or Conference. But again, the system is basically democratic with power coming down from God (Jesus Christ as Prophet, Priest and King) and rising up from the people.

There are other implications of the Reformation on what we believe and the way we do things but those will be left to next week when we discuss more on worship, the nature of scripture, our understanding of the sacraments and spirituality.