7. One-Way

By John Cole

Three churches to be found in Leeds city centre illustrate three of these ‘Seven Facts of Life’.

3.

A ‘one-way street’ sends traffic swirling past St Peter-at-Leeds, the city’s historic ‘parish church’, with its fine tradition of choral worship. The church now stands adrift from the city centre, the ‘wrong’ side of a railway viaduct.

But ‘one-way’ traffic can have other connotations in the life of a local church.

7. A one-way street

The final ‘fact of life’ is a word of warning to those local churches who did the exercises in the last chapter and were pleased with the results! Even if the map of your church activities showed a perfect balance across the three circles of relationships, there could still be a problem.

We live in an age when God is knocking away ‘crutches’:

	‘Impresario’ church leaders are now a rarity;
	Integrated local community life is even rarer;
	Rigid certainties, unquestioned authority and strict discipline are features of fundamentalist sects;
	Mainstream ‘Christendom’, a Christian consensus across society which once gave unity and stability to the whole, is no more.

Whenever churches have depended on these things in the past they have been looking for alternatives to the only thing that matters: depending on the grace of God.

It is strange, then, to find that many lively churches, some avowedly Charismatic, have not entirely grasped the point. Church members still look for their energy to be the church from within themselves; and they work at all three relationships from an entirely human perspective.

It is as though there is only a one-way communication between them and the Almighty; from them to God - a one-way street, not wide enough for the two-way traffic which is essential if the Spirit is to get to work.

	From the human perspective, our relationship with God is praise.
	In relation to one another our human interest is belonging, along with the satisfaction of contributing to a shared task and the opportunity to learn. One-way traffic is evident when Bible studies and meditation classes are done solely for the benefit of those taking part and do not lead on to anything else.
	When relationships with those outside the church are humanly motivated, work with outsiders is likely to be mainly directed to drawing people in - evangelism re-defined as recruitment. outreach re-expressed as ‘in-grab’!

Each of these activities has its proper place in church life; but each is only justified or given any validity when they are counter-balanced by a recognition of the energy of God working in the opposite direction.

	So praise towards God has to be balanced by an attentiveness to the nature and presence and activity of God. This is the proper function of prayer (see page 75).
	Our edification and nurture, where we work to learn more about God, have to be balanced by our being open as a consequence to let God direct, challenge and call us whether into action or into suffering.
	And a process of evangelising which focuses only on the winning of new Christians (and new members for the church!) will be selfish, dishonest and manipulative if it is not overwhelmingly counterbalanced with an outgoing expression of God’s selfless loving - which goes on whether or not people choose to make any response to his love.

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