Anglimergents return to the importance of Trinitarian Ecclesiology

[Ian Mobsby]

Some have asked what is the new thing behind Anglimergent. I want to argue that the new thing is the new old thing, it is a commitment to quest with the deep theology and Christian practice that comes from a Trinitarian understanding of the Christian faith. Many of the post-reformation traditions of church have travelled light to the Trinitarian basis of the faith in reaction to a culture defined by modernism. I want to argue that a Trinitarian Ecclesiology has much to assist us un how we do worship, mission and community. Mission becomes perichoresis - catching up with what God the Trinity is doing, prayer becomes joining in with the Trinity, and community becomes something modelled on transformation, radical justice and inclusion. All this gives Anglimergents and Ancient Future perspective, so rather than throwing the baby out with the bath water, we are challenged to seek the ancient reframed into the post-secular post-religious and post-modern context. Whether we like it or not, all post-industrial western nations run to the logic of spirituality and spiritual tourism. So our challenge becomes how do we shift people from being spiritual tourists to Christian pilgrims..... I want to argue this is the fundamental starting point for Anglimergents - that as with the Anglican divines who founded the faith as a form of unity in diversity drawing on a mystical communion and trinitarian ecclesiology, so must we engage with this ongoing tradition....

If you are interested in this subject in more detail, see my two books here

[Heidi Hileman]

I work at an Episcopal Conference Retreat Center featuring a labyrinth. We provide services for about half the cost of a modern convention center in Florida. Groups range from Christians to Buddhists to Peruvian Healers to Social Groups with a cause. It is very active and noisy. I do the exact opposite for my R&R. The prayer I have on my page is one I like to say while walking the beach, or at the center of the labyrinth after winding in, pray and meditate, then reflect on the experience as I wind back out.

[John Alchin]

G'day Ian,

T.F and J.B Torrance's Trinitarian works have been instrumental in changing both my theology and praxis in recent years. I was, for many years, a functional unitarian (to use J.B's phrase from Worship, Community and the Triune God of Grace), despite my creedal affirmation of the Trinity.

These days I'm in communication with Dr. C. Baxter Kruger of Perichoresis, Inc. I've found that he has made much of the Torrance's work quite accessible and is perfect for pastors to read or hear. I similarly recommend Dr. Ray S. Anderson of Fuller Seminary for pastoral application of Torrance's Trinitarian theology.

Kind regards,

John.

[Michael J Pailthorpe]

same

[Ian Mobsby]

I am really loving where this discussion has gone. A few further thoughts.

I think Anglimergent has done well at grappling with the values associated with imitating the Trinity, and the focus on perichoresis. I think the challenge (as Paul Fiddes book says more elequently) is to move from imitating to participating in. I think we need to dig deeper into what it means to have a spirituality centred on participating with and in the Trinity. In this way, we do catch up with the ancient future perspective, join in with a long tradition which was owned by mystics, monastics and contemplatives. I do think the future of the church requires this shift from orthodoxy to orthopraxis around living communities with a a deep christian faith.

To do this, I think we are going to have to shift majorly from 'attractional models of church' which is all about worship and getting people in, to something more around a 'missional model of church', which is more about being sent out and sharing our lives - much more demanding than worship services.... I think this is the major challenging question coming out of a Trinitarian vision - how should we live in a world addicted to consumption and over use of resources that are now destroying our world? How do we in this world catch up with what God is doing? How do we make our communities accessible to seekers? How do we do forms of Christian worship that are communal and centred on contextual expressions of joining in the with Trinity? These issues are the ones I think we next need to grapple with... seeking the sacred in the secular.... seeking to build communities that then become imperfect visible expressions of the invisible Kingdom of God... This requires us to apply the principles of perichoresis to how we do worship, mission and community, which is something we can learn from the premodern Friars.... to recontextualise and reframe into a postmodern context.

I have been reading again Rediscovering Christianity by Vincent Donovan, and I am really convinced by the process he followed. This is starting out with prayer, getting to know local people relationally without doing anything, then seeking discernment for some form of loving action (no where near trad church) which then hopefully will form community that then does discipleship/catachesis - which then births contextual forms of worship. This incarnational approach reflects the life of Christ, and requires us to seek the sacred in the secular in a commitment to relationality. There is going to be a great story on this by Rob Ryan a Pioneer Ordained Minister at Rochester Cathedral in the UK - see here from the beginning of June. So I think the Trinitarian call is not just a 'love in' but something that calls us to Kenotic mission activity. As the Creator Sent the Son and the Spirit - so we are sent to seek the reconciliation of all things to the Trinitarian God. Being Sent is the consequence of a strong Trinitarianism.

[Christopher Rushlau]

You ought to run all this you suggest by a few Catholics--Roman variety. They've never departed from trinitarianism, probably because they've never, for the most part, thought about it except as a prop of triumphalism. But you want to embrace it rationally, which I endorse, not just as a pew-filling device or even worse yet, as a pleasant fog.
Karl Rahner for one--and the method to detect there, to take away from it, is a fiendishly determined effort to define terms and use them strictly as defined.
The game shifts, you might say, from the merely ecclesiastical to the deeply personal. It may run straight up against an insularity that one person might consider a national cultural and another might consider the result of centuries of violence--physical, familial, artistic. In a word: "bloody-mindedness". Someone coming out of the culture of bloody-mindedness should be happy to achieve insularity--some protection--but health and wholeness are in the entire overturning of the bloody-minded culture--to where your neighbor's body is your body, so if he needs a pat or a rub, you rub him just as you would your own sore shoulder.
Perichoresis? Yes, I think so.

[John Alchin]

Hi Ian,

Graham Buxton is an Anglican priest in Adelaide, Australia, who directs the Postgraduate Studies in Ministry and Theology program at Tabor College. Graham has an excellent entry-level book titled: Dancing In The Dark: The Privilege Of Participating In The Ministry.... Very helpful in moving from 'imitation to participation'. It is the stripped down version of some of the chapters within his book The Trinity, Creation and Pastoral Ministry: Imaging the Perichoret.... It is part of the Paternoster Theological Monographs series, with a great foreword by Jurgen Moltmann.

[Graham Buxton]

Hi John

A short time ago I responded to your blog on this website focusing on some thoughts that I developed in The Trinity, Creation and Pastoral Ministry - see my response to you on http://anglimergent.ning.com/profiles/blogs/perichoretic-themes-in.

[Michael J Pailthorpe]

Thank you Ian. I'm glad to come across your thinking. It is quite refreshing. I am a reader of Barth, Torrance's, Baxter Kruger and have been wondering how the resurgence of Trinitarian theology has impacted Anglicanism. This is good news. I have get your book now.