Editorial: Nurturing spirituality
Anna Rankin

From the[acting] director: New Shoes
Lynda Gould

Wholeness, Holiness & Wholegrain Spirituality
David Campton

Comment: Racehorses and Turtles
Stephen Cave

A Spirituality of Communion: The Benedictine Monks, Rostrevor
Dom Mark-Ephrem M Nolan, OSB

Interview with John Dickinson & Paul Symonds: The Shape of Spirituality
Derek Poole

Prayer 24-7
Gillian Best

In quest of living theology: A conversation piece on theological education and Christian formation
Ian Dickson

A Spirituality of Welcome
Katherine Poulton

Bible Study: Christian Spirituality
Bishop Donal McKeown

Review: How (Not) to Speak of God
Gladys Ganiel

Review: Spirituality and Transformation
Glenn Jordan

Difficult Conversations
Christian Spirituality
Lynda Gould

New Resource
The Theological Grounds for Advocating Forgiveness and Reconciliation in the Socio-political Realm

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WHOLENESS, HOLINESS & WHOLEGRAIN SPIRITUALITY

Spirituality is a word that I have difficulties with. First, because it is a weasel word that can mean so many different things in different contexts. It has been adopted by the world at large as a broad, all-inclusive, non-prescriptive catch-all term that embraces the various do-it-yourself ideologies and pseudo-psychological approaches that people now invest in (often literally, by buying books and CDs and candles and whatever) rather than the formal belief and behaviour systems of established religion. “I’m not religious, but I am spiritual…” Second, because it hives off the spiritual from the other dimensions of human existence – that is, the physical, the intellectual, the social – and separating spirituality from these other dimensions tends towards sterility. Third, because it is the area of my life that I, like many activist Christians, most neglect…

FOR THOSE WHO DON’T KNOW ME, I’m a Methodist minister, who, for the last 8 years, has been ministering in different areas of urban Belfast. That has led me into areas of social as well as spiritual engagement, addressing issues of community development and community relations. In many ways that has been a realisation of the vision that God set before me in my call to ordained ministry and in calling me back to a Belfast I had turned my back on in disgust and despair in the 1980s. Currently, I am the Chair of the Northern Ireland Reference Group of the Churches Community Work Alliance. I am not an expert in this field, rather I am one seeking the support and resources necessary to engage with the issues facing the people in my “parish”. For that, I need the insights and expertise of others, I need money and practical help and I need a spiritual framework within which to work – spiritual scaffolding imposing order on the chaos of really engaging with the world at large.

As a Methodist, I have drawn heavily on John Wesley’s emphasis on holiness. But not that “other-worldly” holiness that seems to have been advocated by so many Christian teachers down the years, a holiness that leads to withdrawal from this world and its messiness, setting apart for God a portion of what it means to be human, corralled off from all the other “stuff”. Rather, I seek to give over to God and his sanctifying Spirit, all that I am and am engaged with. A “whole person” holiness, seeking wholeness for myself and those with whom I work. A holiness that brings about wholeness and healing. For Wesley that was reflected in his pursuit and promotion of the twin doctrines of Social and Scriptural Holiness – conjoined twins.

Social Holiness
Wesley is oft quoted as saying that there is no holiness apart from social holiness, in contrast to the anti-social holiness that is often practiced, defined by a list of “thou shalt nots” that extend much further than the 10 that God originally gave Moses. Methodism has been as guilty of the latter as any down through the years, no matter what our founder taught. Yet, we cannot exist as Christians without relationships with other Christians. Realising that, modern programmes like Alpha and 40 Days of Purpose and the various house-churches, have, knowingly or unknowingly, reinvented John Wesley’s “class” system that he established for mutual accountability and care (and raising money, if truth be told). This is a vast improvement on what we have survived on for years – sermons of varying quality delivered to people en masse, who were then exhorted to have their “quiet time” daily. What was missing was the relational element, the small or cell groups, the spiritual peer support that encourages and challenges us in our walk with God.

As Christians our relationships with others (whether Christians or not) should reflect our relationship with God, as defined, not by umpteen “thou shalt nots”, but the positive commands to love God and love others emphasized by Christ. And what is true of us as individual Christians should also be true of us as churches. If we, as individuals, are to love our neighbours, then we as churches should love our neighbourhoods.

In recent years, the in vogue social science theory has been Social Capital, an attempt to measure the wealth of relationships and the level of trust within a community. This theory has rung bells with me, not just because it is the current favourite of government and other funders (though that never does any harm). On the one hand, I believe it offers a framework that might help to unify the sometimes contradictory disciplines of community development and community relations, on the other, it has a certain harmony with my Christian philosophy, which is dependent upon, and works itself out through, my relationships with others. I learned that not primarily from reading Wesley or even Scripture but from practical experience. I am not by nature a gregarious or even particularly social animal yet from my earliest days, I was encouraged and challenged in my walk with God by caring peers and wise elders. I would not be the Christian I am today without that solid bedrock of relationships laid down early in my Christian life. And in latter years, in times of trouble, I was sustained, and again appropriately challenged, by fellow brothers and sisters in Christ working in the community sector. The Church should be made up of local supportive and challenging communities that enable us, as individuals and as a corporate body, to effectively engage with the world in which we find ourselves. In social science terms, the church should be a reservoir of Social Capital for the surrounding community. In reality, this is often not the case.Not only is the church disconnected from its local geographical community, but often it cannot truly be described as a community in its own right; it is merely a group of people who go to the same place at the same time, theoretically to worship the same God in the same way. But whatever their relationship to God, they have no real relationship with each other. Any church which cannot truly model community within its membership, will never make a sustained social or spiritual impact on its local geographical community. And then there are those, who have a very strong relationship within their fellowship, but have (sometimes for very clearly articulated, but frankly wrong-headed, reasons) no desire to engage with their local community. Or if they do it is for overtly evangelistic reasons.

This is not the time or place to deal with the hoary old issue of using community engagement programmes as an evangelistic Trojan Horse, with success measured in numbers of people who are gloriously saved and sitting in the pews of the local church. Suffice to say that social holiness requires an honesty about our reasons for engaging with our communities. Yes, we want people to come to know Jesus as their Saviour, but before that is really likely to happen they must know that we are truly interested in the issues that affect them here and now. There is no point in offering them eternal life, when this life is unbearable. Which brings me to the conjoined twin of Social Holiness…

Scriptural Holiness
Christian community engagement should never be merely sanctified social work. It comes from a scriptural imperative, and I believe that it is to Scripture that we must look for our inspiration and our guidance with regard to the many moral decisions we have to make in engaging with a murky world. However, we need not expect to find an ABC of Social Engagement in Scripture, nor indeed a straightforward rulebook on any of the moral or ethical issues we will face.

My attempts to interact with the issues around me are firmly founded on the authority of Scripture. As a child I missed out on the “memory verse” phenomenon and I am frankly jealous of some other people’s ability to quote chapter and verse in different situations. However, there is a danger, I believe, in trying to abstract from Scripture a memory verse for every occasion. My reading of Scripture has less to do with chapters and verses, than it does looking at people and stories. Looking at the relationship (that word again) between the text and context, then and now. Drawing out principles rather than proof texts. And reading each story within the whole story of God’s salvation history, focused around Jesus. So it is through Jesus’ life and words, stories within a story, that I seek to understand the rest of God’s story. In fine Methodist tradition, I use the historic teachings of the church, reason and my personal experience to inform that reading, as three windows offering different perspectives on Scripture. But Scripture, and Christ within it, remains central. And central to that is the paradigm of love, for God and others, advocated and exemplified by Jesus.

God’s story and his story in human form, Jesus, helps me as I listen to and seek to shape the story I find myself involved with day by day. Not moral, social and political issues, but the life stories of real flesh and blood people. Because of that I am wary of making sweeping, dogmatic statements, from the safety of the pulpit, that portray the moral decisions that people must make as being black and white. Frankly, such an approach would make my life simpler as it would dissuade those with messier stories from having anything to do with me. But, attempting to follow Jesus’ example, I reserve my sweeping condemnations for those who see themselves as soundly saved and seek to be open to people who feel that they are lost. And that gets me into trouble, wrestling with issues like homosexuality, paramilitarism, substance abuse. My approach may not always be the same as some of my colleagues, but I can live with that because, despite how it may appear at times, I know I am not always right. I try to learn from others, seeking what is right, rather than falling into a comfortable self-righteousness.

Wholegrain Holiness
But we do have a tendency to simplify things, to make things monochrome. Yet, that prevents us from appreciating the richness of both the Bible and the world in which we live. Seeing things in shades of grey is an improvement on this, but what we should be striving for is to see that polychrome range of colours that God sees, to see both Scripture and society in glorious Technicolor. That does not make our decisions easier, but it does allow us to make them based on the maximum amount of information.

To change the metaphor, we need a wholegrain spirituality – the bread of life with all the bits left in – to enable us not just to survive but to thrive spiritually in this world of ours. We increasingly rely on different “programmes” (or more often American “programs”) within the church to stimulate personal and numerical growth, be they 40 Days of Purpose, Christianity Explored, Alpha or whatever (and, having used two out of the former three, I am not knocking them), but there is a danger that if they are not supplemented or succeeded by more “wholegrain” material, they can have the same spiritual effect as the “generous donation” of powdered milk does on babies in the developing world. It is great at the time but it is not what God intended us to live on. It is highly processed and may be what is needed to wean us onto solid food, but to see such programmes as the be-all and end-all of our spiritual development will lead to spiritual dietary problems and eating disorders – irritable spirit syndrome, spiritual bulimia and anorexia – and pure spiritual malnutrition.

As churches, we need not only to feed the spirit, but also the mind and the body. We need to encourage people to use the grey matter in their heads as something other than packing material for their skulls. We need to encourage people to think rather than doing their thinking for them. Why did Jesus tell stories rather than give us a “How to…” guide to human existence? His stories forced people to think. But now we think we have got Jesus’ stories sussed out, so we don’t need to think any more. We also need to encourage people to put their faith into action, exercise other muscles apart from the biggest and the strongest (the bottom and the tongue), not necessarily by doing new things, but by doing the old familiar things in new ways, with a new attitude.

Holistic Well-Being
As an individual Christian, I personally have to pay attention to my holistic wellbeing: in spiritual, mental and physical terms. Mentally, I do seek to read widely and deeply about subjects that have nothing to do with “theological” issues, but on the other two dimensions I am a disaster. I have already confessed my failings in the spiritual realm; and there is no doubt that when I diary in “time with God” it makes a big difference to how I handle the rest of my packed schedule. What form that “time with God” takes varies from time to time and it will differ from person to person, but it is a non-negotiable. I do get depressed with stories of Wesley and others spending four hours per day in prayer and reading their Bibles and other Christian literature for hours at a time. But then I remember that he and the other spiritual giants of the past didn’t have to cope with the instant expectations of internet communication and the constant contact that others expect of us. He also rode a horse (with a specially designed reading desk) and, although traffic speeds today are little faster than those of Wesley’s day, I doubt that the Traffic Branch would appreciate me placing a specially designed reading desk on my car’s steering wheel. If we are really going to have time with God we have to make it, because we won’t easily find it. We need to stop doing and concentrate on being – a difficult thing for an activist such as I to do. But we also need to be open to hearing God at other un-scheduled times, sometimes speaking from the strangest of mouths. For example, over recent years, sitting in traffic jams, I have heard God speaking powerfully to me from CDs I have been listening to. Not “Christian” CDs (I have relatively few of those you will not be surprised to hear), but from artists including Eddi Reader, Divine Comedy, Coldplay and Paul Simon.

Mind you, my failure in the sphere of nurturing my spiritual self is only surpassed in my abuse of my physical self, neither eating nor exercising as I should. If my body is a temple, it is in danger of going the way of the Temple in Jerusalem. But recent attempts to address my exercise deficit by joining the lycra-clad lovelies at the gym and retraining my appalling eating habits, have undoubtedly had psychological and spiritual benefits. But as a fully paid-up member of a gym I still have problems with what happens there. People go to exercise their bodies alongside others, staring at a screen, with earplugs in. No talking to their neighbour, no relationships established, it is all sadly reminiscent of what tends to happen in most churches, Sunday by Sunday. What is much more healthy, in my mind, is how I spend my Monday nights. The only fixed, unalterable date in my diary – five-a-side football – with a group of guys I have been playing with for years. It isn’t pretty; indeed at times it can be downright unpleasant. I’m not the best footballer in the world, in fact I am probably much worse than average, but I am committed to being there week by week, where together, as a team, we help each other to be much more than we could possibly be on our own. That is probably a better metaphor for my personal spirituality than anything else I do. And it probably sustains me for my work more than I would care to admit…

DAVID CAMPTON is a 41-year-old father of two boys, married to Sally, a community development worker in Ballybeen, where David is also a Methodist minister. Among his other hats, he chairs the Churches Community Work Alliance (NI), convenes the Faith and Order Committee of the Methodist Church in Ireland and participates in various other committees, boards and networks.

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