APEST and Anglicans, part 2

The Lambeth Quadrilateral (building on the Chicago Quadrilateral) is recognised as the common basis of Anglican ecclesiology, defined by:

(a) The Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, as “containing all things necessary to salvation,” and as being the rule and ultimate standard of faith.

(b) The Apostles’ Creed, as the Baptismal Symbol; and the Nicene Creed, as the sufficient statement of the Christian faith.

(c) The two Sacraments ordained by Christ Himself—Baptism and the Supper of the Lord—ministered with unfailing use of Christ's words of Institution, and of the elements ordained by Him.

(d) The Historic Episcopate, locally adapted in the methods of its administration to the varying needs of the nations and peoples called of God into the Unity of His Church.

How does APEST relate to this? Here are some initial thoughts.

(a) APEST function (corporate behaviour, presence, or manifestation) and vocation (personal calling, profile) are found throughout Old and New Testaments, and as such where any dimension is missing, the Church has fallen away from the scriptural rule and standard of faith. But is this ‘necessary to salvation’ or adiaphora—things permitted but not essential? Firstly, it is hard to describe the unfolding drama of salvation history without drawing on all five functions. Salvation is wrought in the person of Jesus by his being sent (and sending) (A), his covenant faithfulness (and drawing others into this) (P), his embodiment of good news (E), his laying down of his life as the Good Shepherd (S), and his instruction as the Way, the Truth and the Life (T). Moreover, if salvation is something to be lived-into, it cannot be fully embraced and inhabited without all five functions.

(b) The Creeds are historic statements that address particular issues facing the Church at the time of their formulation. While we affirm, in particular, the Apostles’ Creed and Nicene Creed, they are first words (sufficient) rather than last words. The Apostles’ Creed is the baptismal declaration, by which we offer ourselves to the Lord (to use the gift receiving-and-giving language of Psalm 68, in which Paul anchors the gifts of Christ). Both Creeds begin with God and the created order (see my earlier post on APEST cosmology). Both Creeds affirm the ascension, the act from which Jesus gives APEST to the Church. Both, especially the Nicene, emphasise the apostolic sentness of both Jesus and the Church. Prophets are recognised, in relation to the Holy Spirit, and also the call of the Church to holiness. Unity is recognised in the call on the Church to be one; diversity recognised in the insistence that the Church is catholic (i.e. we recognise one another, in our difference). The Jesus event is proclaimed as good news for humanity. The forgiveness of sins and the resurrection of the dead are profoundly pastoral, shepherding emphases. The systematising of faith into a creed that can be taught, a teaching impulse.

(c) Baptism is the event in which people—apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, and teachers—are liberated, through the waters, from death to life, and presented as gift by the Lord to his Church. The Supper of the Lord (or, Holy Communion, or the Eucharist) is the regular event in which our unity and diversity are held together; in which we recognise one another, and Christ re-members his Body.

(d) The Historic Episcopate is apostolic in that it guards the deposit of the faith (through time) and its spread (through space). (Not every bishop is primarily an apostle by gift, though all must attend to that aspect of their APEST profile.) The call to attend to the varying needs of nations and peoples called into Unity requires attending to all five ‘intelligences’ or biases, in order that the Body be built up: what needs to step back, in this or that context, in order that another might step forward?

APEST and Anglicans, part 1

Earlier this week, I was engaged in delivering some APEST teaching for a cohort of Anglican clergy in Durham Diocese (and as I am a member of the Durham clergy, they are my regional colleagues). In preparation, they had taken Alan Hirsch’s APEST profile test. One of the observations was that, in a room that represented a diversity of tradition, age, gender, and length of ministry experience, there were several Traditional Catholic colleagues who all came out as ES (Primary gift: Evangelist; Secondary gift: Shepherd).

This didn’t surprise me, though it took some unpacking for me to articulate why. My observation is that our own tradition shapes us for the nurture of particular gifts, as well as how they are expressed. So, for example, a conservative evangelical context will nurture Teachers, because ‘right teaching’ is of central importance. My observation of the Trad. Cath. tradition is that for generation on generation, they have gone to communities that live with multiple indices of deprivation; and, while not pretending that the challenges aren’t real, insist that such communities are deserving of and indeed in real need of beauty. Trad. Cath. ritual, with its colours and smells and processions and dressing up and candles and statues and ta-dah! is good news writ large for all the senses. And if we come from a very different tradition, that would express good news in a very different way, we might not even see it. And then, of course, they live alongside these communities and care for those who present themselves in need, of food or conversation or help in coming before God to give thanks for the birth of a child. Of course such a tradition produces ES’s.

As for me, I had been thinking that the Church of England is relatively weak at communicating good news. But whenever I teach, I learn. And on this occasion what I learned was my need to repent of my earlier assessment and believe something new.

APEST hermeneutics

Increasingly, I am using APEST as my hermeneutic of understanding pretty much everything, grounded, as it seems to me to be, in the very nature of God. As Alan Hirsch suggests, this pattern applies to cosmology (the way in which God has created, has set up the universe), anthropology (how we understand humans and human society), Christology (our understanding of Jesus), ecclesiology (our understanding of the Church), and eschatology (our understanding of where everything is heading).

Here is an outline APEST cosmology:

The universe is expanding, and inspires us to send out probes in search of other life. That’s apostolic sent-ness.

The goal is that all creation be reconciled to God in Christ Jesus. That’s prophetic covenant-faithfulness.

The heavens declare the glory of God. That’s evangelistic good-news-telling.

We live in a Goldilocks Zone that enables life. That’s the shepherding impulse to enable life to flourish at work.

There are whole university departments built on discovering the mysteries of the universe. That’s the impact of the teaching function.

Here is my take on APEST as hermeneutic for reading scripture and/or Bible story-telling:

A: How does this passage move the story on?

P: Who speaks/ What do they say?

E: Is there any good news to share?

S: How is the community built up?

T: How does this passage connect with what we already know?

And here is my take on APEST as hermeneutic for reading the Body of Christ, our lives in our neighbourhood:

A: Where have you been (say, this week)? What did you see? Who did you meet?

P: What have you heard—from God? from others?

E: Do you have any good news stories to share?

S: Who is in especial need of care? (And how might we respond?)

T: What are we learning to do as we follow Jesus together?

APEST and Psalm 68

Ephesians 4:¹ I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, ² with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, ³ making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. ⁴ There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, ⁵ one Lord, one faith, one baptism, ⁶ one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.

⁷ But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift. ⁸ Therefore it is said,

‘When he ascended on high he made captivity itself a captive;
    he gave gifts to his people.’

⁹ (When it says, ‘He ascended’, what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower parts of the earth? ¹⁰ He who descended is the same one who ascended far above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things.) ¹¹ The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, ¹² to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, ¹³ until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. ¹⁴ We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. ¹⁵ But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, ¹⁶ from whom the whole body, joined and knitted together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.

Writing to the Christians in Ephesus, from where many churches had been planted across the cities of Asia Minor, about the gifts of Christ—apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, and teachers—Paul refers to Psalm 68, citing (in Ephesians 4:8) verse 18.

I have argued for the best part of twenty years that this is not a tangential thought, but that it anchors Paul’s thesis. Psalm 68 describes God descending on Mount Sinai in order to liberate his people from slavery in Egypt; journeying with them in the wilderness in order to shape a new community; before ascending on Mount Zion. For Paul, this prefigures the incarnation, ministry, and ascension of Jesus. The ascended Jesus liberates women and men who have been held captive to death by taking them captive by and for Life; and gives these newly-liberated human beings as gifts to his people, his ‘body’ the Church.

But when Jesus, or Paul, or any of the other writers of the New Testament, cite a verse from what we now call the Old Testament, they are expecting their hearers to do some work, to call to mind the full context being referred to. And twelve verses before the one Paul explicitly cites, Psalm 68 declares:

‘God gives the desolate a home to live in;

he leads out the prisoners to prosperity,

but the rebellious live in a parched land.’

(Psalm 68:6)

In recent weeks it has struck me with fresh force that the outworking of Jesus’ gift-giving, Ephesians 4:12-16, is also anchored in Psalm 68: that we find the fullest fulfilment of our personal calling within the context of the body of Christ, the Church, a community in which we are given a home and, together, do the hard but worthwhile work of knitting-together for mutual prospering. The picture painted in Psalm 68, taken as a whole, is of the transformation of the whole world, physical landscape and human society. The purposes of Christ, in laying claim to the redeeming of all, of each, of captive apostle and prophet and evangelist and shepherd and teacher is no smaller vision.

(By the way, ‘children’ in Ephesians 4:14—we must no longer be children—is better translated ‘childish’—we must no longer be childish.)

Seeing APEST across scripture

One of the questions that gets asked concerning APEST is, if this is so key a paradigm, where do we see it in play across scripture as a whole?

My answer would be, it is everywhere, hidden in plain sight.

Are there apostles and apostolic intelligence? Yes. Both Abraham in the Old Testament—the father of those who live by faith—and Paul in the New Testament would be examples of apostles, sent out into the world by God.

Are there prophets and prophetic intelligence? Of course! There are great giants of prophetic ministry, the Isaiahs of the canon, alongside the twelve shorter prophetic witnesses that run from Hosea to Malachi, not to mention Elijah and Elisha, and a host of other more local voices.

Are there evangelists and evangelistic intelligence? Four, for a start: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Are there shepherds and pastoral intelligence? Certainly. Consider Moses, the shepherd who led a wilful, wandering people through the wilderness for a lifetime, and who told them the stories that form the Pentateuch.

Are there teachers and teaching intelligence? Indeed. What else is the Wisdom literature of Job, the Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon if not a diverse collection of instruction for life?

But APEST is not one-dimensional. While we have a primary gifting, this interacts with our secondary and tertiary giftings—and we’re called to grow in them all. So how about examples of where we see someone in the Bible demonstrating all five intelligences? Let’s consider Joseph, whose story is told over Genesis chapters 37-50.

Joseph is the classic case-study in life-long prophetic intelligence, starting out from a place of immaturity that is damaging to his relationships, and being formed for maturity by circumstances of hardship. Joseph is someone who converses with God in the night. He is prophetic to his very bones. Indeed, his bones are the fulfilment of his prophetic vocation, waiting for the day—long after Egypt has forgotten their deliverer—when the family of Jacob will go out and return home, carrying Joseph with them.

Joseph is a prophet. But we see in him the development of an apostolic intelligence, the establishing of environments in which others can flourish. First, in the household of Potiphar. Then, in prison. And, ultimately, in the management of Egypt through the crisis of famine, and the provision of the land of Goshen for his father’s family. Joseph’s handling of the famine years is controversial. As the famine cuts deeper and deeper, all the money, livestock, land, and people of Egypt come into the possession of the Pharaoh. In his determined stand, Joseph demonstrates classic apostolic behaviour.

What about evangelistic intelligence? This is revealed in the names Joseph gives to his sons. Manasseh, for ‘God has made me forget all my hardship and all my father’s house’. And Ephraim, for ‘God has made my fruitful in the land of my misfortune’. Joseph has known both hardship and misfortune, but his focus has become the good news stories. In the names he chooses for his sons, it is good news that he is wanting to communicate, to his peers and to the next generation.

Though he comes from a family of shepherds, pastoral intelligence does not come naturally to Joseph. Even so, we see God at work to grow this gift within him, melting his heart with compassion for his brothers, and being moved to respond to their need, albeit cautiously to begin with. Joseph may have chosen to put his past behind him, but at the right time God brought it back.

It is also in relation to his brothers that we see Joseph exercising teaching intelligence. When he makes himself known to them, he is at pains for them to learn that, despite their own evil intention, God meant what had happened to Joseph for good. And Joseph must revisit this lesson with them after their father’s death, in order for his brothers to really come to know it for themselves.

So, Joseph was a prophet, but all five of the gifts of Christ were at play in his life. Now, over to you. Where else do you see this in the characters that populate our scriptures? Bear in mind that we have selected accounts, not access to their whole lives. We might not be able to point to all five gifts in each case. But make a start, and you’ll be surprised at what you discover, hidden in plain sight.

Parliament

It must be horrific to be an MP at present.

For two-and-a-half years, the Prime Minister has refused to listen to her own party, to the opposition parties, to elected representatives—elected by the 52% and the 48%—of all our communities, there by the will of the people to work for the common good, to investigate and propose and amend and improve legislation that impacts all our lives.

In addition, they are daily accused of betraying democracy by an ultra-right-wing press, accountable to no-one, offering no solutions to any of the challenges we face as a society, who exist to stir up hate (there is money to be made there). They are daily derided by the electorate. They receive hate mail and death threats, as they go about their work under utterly unreasonable pressure. It should come as no surprise that many of them are ill as a result of all this.

Who would be an MP right now?

It has long been the practice of the Church of England to pray daily for our Members of Parliament. I can't think of a time when they have been more in need of our prayers.

Lord, have mercy.

Father, forgive.

Mothers' Day & Mothering Sunday

This Sunday is both Mothers’ Day (in the UK) and Mothering Sunday, and these are not different names for the same thing. Mothers’ Day relates to our mothers, biological or otherwise. Mothering Sunday is the annual thanksgiving for our mother church, the local church where we were baptised, the community of faith that nurtured our faith.

My mother church is St Mary’s Broadwater, far distant on the south coast. I was baptised there when my parents were on furlough from the Philippines. I have never attended that church; but every day of my life, members of that congregation have prayed for me—just as my mother has prayed for me every day of my life. Some of them only met me as a baby; some remember me from summer visits as a small boy; some have left this life to enter the nearer presence of God, joining the great cloud of witnesses who cheer me on. Some have never met me, but have had the baton passed on to them by those who did.

The primary work of love—before and beyond all other forms of nurture, however essential—is prayer. The primary work of a mother and a mother church is to pray for her children, from before they are born and long after they have grown up and left home; even to her dying breath. Even mothers who do not believe in God carry their children in their thoughts, at once within and somehow mysteriously beyond themselves; and that is prayer.

This Sunday I cannot be with either my mother or my mother church. But I will give thanks for both. Their prayers have sustained me, and, in ways we will never know, shaped me towards who I am, and am becoming.

Presence

Yesterday, for the third year running, members of Sunderland Minster spent the day at a stall in the neighbouring shopping mall. Ahead of Mothers’ Day this coming weekend, we were there to hold out the invitation to mark the occasion by writing a message of appreciation or a prayer, and placing it, along with a tealight, in a basket. The messages would then be displayed at the Minster for a whole week, while the tealights will be lit at our morning service on Mothers’ Day itself.

I find engaging people I don’t know in conversation particularly hard (and instead of approaching people, I quietly pray, asking God to send people to me). Yet each time we do this, it seems to meet a need. For me, the highlight is the many often deeply personal and moving conversations I get to have over the course of several hours simply being purposely present to those neighbours Jesus calls us to love as we love ourselves.

Yesterday, conversations ranged from the humorous—

one boy out with his mother decided that he would get her a Mothers’ Day card when he turned 18; I suggested that he practiced every year until then, so he’d get it right—

to the appreciative—

‘what a wonderful idea! You’ve made my day!’—

to the faltering—

‘what is there to say, after she’s been gone all these years; and how to say it?’—

to the poignant—

with those who have lost mothers very recently—

to the timely—

with international students who miss their mothers—

to the spoken/unspoken—

with the woman pushing a reborn doll in a silver cross pram...

I found myself thankful for the opportunity; for the people God sent our way; and for the fabulous team from the Minster who took turns on the stall.

I’m also struck by the number of people who walked by, took in what we were offering, and felt compelled to come back to us—the need for a bit of ‘processing time’ before doing so; and the way the nature of a shopping mall makes that possible...

Is there something we can learn here?

A parable

There was once a shepherd who had a hundred sheep. When one wandered off and lost its way, she left the ninety-nine in the open field and went searching.

On that day, the ninety-nine taught her nothing about being a shepherd—about herself, about her vocation in the world—that she did not already know (that is, that she had already learned through a hundred previous frustrations, failures, and triumphs).

But the one that was lost?

Through that sheep, she discovered just how far she would keep on going without giving up...

She discovered just how attentive she was, to footprints in the soft earth, and wool snagged on thorn bushes, and faint distant bleating...

She discovered just how joyful weary bones and scratched skin could be, and just how many others she could draw into celebration...

Death as exile

The lectionary readings for Holy Communion today are Jeremiah 17:5-10 and Luke 16:19-31.

‘Thus says the LORD: Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the LORD. They shall be like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see when relief comes. They shall live in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land.

‘Blessed are those whose trust is in the LORD, whose trust is the LORD. They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit.’

Jeremiah’s meditation on Psalm 1 seems naïve—and all the more so given that Jeremiah himself will later be imprisoned and even thrown into a cistern by the powerful men he spoke against (see chapters 37 and 38). But he has in mind the imminent exile, in which the elite of Jerusalem would be carried off into a far land as a consequence of their collective refusal to return to the LORD. The righteous and unrighteous alike would be swept away into exile; but there, those whose trust was in the LORD would flourish—the likes of Daniel, and his three friends, and Esther—while those whose hearts turned away from the LORD would whither.

Jesus told a parable—a provocative story—about two men, one rich and the other poor, one powerful and the other possessing less agency. The story starts in the world as we know it, and continues beyond death.

Death is the ultimate exile, being carried away from the land of the living. And all are carried away into exile, regardless of how they have lived. But the experience of the two men, both carried away, diverges: the one who had trusted in mere mortals and made mere flesh his strength experienced a parched wilderness wherein there was no relief to be found; the one whose trust was in the LORD experienced reviving, the absence of fear and anxiety.

Death is the ultimate exile. And like the Babylonian exile, exile is not the final destination. The Book of Daniel, itself set within the experience of exile, points to the resurrection of the dead, a physical resurrection within this world: the righteous raised to honour, and the unrighteous raised to shame.

Death is the ultimate exile, not the ultimate destination or state, reality, or end of the story. And the testimony of Jeremiah, of Jesus, of scripture, is that those who trust in the LORD do not need to fear exile, for even there they will be sustained.

But this trusting, and the kind of action that flows out from it—and, indeed, turning away from the LORD, and the kind of actions that flow out of trusting in our own strength and resources—starts here and now, grounded, as indeed the whole story is grounded, in this life in this world, so loved by God.

Jesus and the Iranians

Week 4 of our Iranian baptism preparation class, and the second week of listening to the candidates’ stories of how they met Jesus. Each person’s story is unique; but at the same time, there are certain recurring themes, or common threads. These include:

having a big problem, or problems, in their life, over an extended period of time—a problem they could not resolve in their own power—which may or may not result in anxiety or depression;

being evangelised, one-to-one—often (though not always) by a close friend or family member, someone they had known for a long time, and in whom they had witnessed a transformation in their personality;

having met Jesus, experiencing a noticeable transformation in their own lives, such as being notably less anxious or angry;

[This is not to say that Christians don’t experience anxiety or depression. Anxiety and depression are natural ‘healthy’ bodily dis-eases resulting from how off-kilter society has become, where we treat human beings as machines intended to make or spend money. Nonetheless, it is to say that meeting Jesus is somehow transformative.]

the central, and centering, experience of peace;

an ongoing experience of miracles—by which, in this context, I do not mean dramatic apparent violations of the laws of nature, but rather a world-view that recognises grace to endure the challenges of life that, again, is beyond our own power to produce. (Miracles are in the eye of the beholder.)

I find this interesting because so many people in my own culture live with anxiety and depression, and face overwhelming grief for a thousand different things, caught up, as we are, in ‘the collateral damage of life’ (Pavlovitz).

I find it challenging in regard to the extent to which Christians in this nation do not evangelise; and in regard to the extent to which those who have journeyed within the pilgrim people of the Church have not experienced noticeable transformation, in either the lives of their fellow-pilgrims or their own—and so, in many cases, have walked away.

I am convinced that God has sent these Iranian sisters and brothers to England because we need to learn from them.

I believe that one day it will be safe for them to return home. But not, I believe, until God has done through them the purposes for which he has brought them here in the first place.