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“What do you mean by renewal?”
I was driving a leading Canadian Theological educator to the airport yesterday. He is in the business of training future ministers of the United, Anglican and Presbyterian churches. We shared our concerns for our respective communions. Then I had told him about The Renewal Fellowship Within The Presbyterian Church in Canada. It was his first acquaintance with the organization. Hence his question.
Renewal means many things to many people. But I was able to share with him the vision that God gave the Board of the Renewal Fellowship as we met in the early summer. It is our vision of the kind of renewal within the church that we believe the Lord of the church is directing us to pray for, to encourage, and to model.
We need renewal in three areas. Each relates to the other. Each informs the other. Each develops its whole area of concern and involvement. All require the empowering of the Holy Spirit of God.
We need renewal in our worship. From a variety of churches right across Canada, and within those traditionally “evangelical”, our Board conceded one common observation. Our worship lacks the fire and the imagination of a Spirit-impelled praise. Drabness, routine, and custom dampen our ardor. And the recovery of what A.W. Tozer once called “the missing jewel of the evangelical churches” will not come by gimmicks or hype. It will come when there is a lasting work of God’s grace in the hearts of the worshippers. Repentance is the necessary preliminary to heightened adoration. Then and only then can there be a thrill to our thanksgivings, a lilt to our hallelujahs. We need to recapture the song of the soul set free.
And it will be a new song. One question the Board wrestled with was: how do we institute change in worship? And one ingredient (rising out of a session the final night of our 1984 Annual Meetings) was seen to be music. Music that represents the best of contemporary musicianship. Music that is biblical. Music that is God-honouring. Music that involves the entire church, as a witness to the unbelieving outsider, of our common exuberance in the glories of our salvation.
We have pledged ourselves as a fellowhip to attempt to recover this missing jewel. Such will be a costly, not a cosmetic, movement of the Spirit. Hearts must be changed before tongues can be loosed. For worship reflects the hidden depths of one’s personal “closer” walk with God. But there are ways that we can assist. Workshops on music, praise and worship. Making available in Channels some of the creative and contemporary developments in singing. Encouraging within our own churches a greater commitment to, and participation in, the worship of the people of God. We agree that this is a pressing priority.
Participation is the key word in our recovery of worship. And such reflects the second area we targetted as requiring renewal and recovery. The concept of community within our congregations is weak and needing not only reaffirmation but also revitalization.
What does it mean to us to affirm ourselves as communities of King Jesus? A costly commitment to the New Testament ideal of the church as the family of God, brothers and sisters together under a common Lord? That and much more. For our commitment is not only to a Biblical ideal. It is to each other.
“Building up” – Paul’s ideal of edification – is possible only when there is a true community of the Spirit. The Board of the Fellowship saw a teaching ministry as being the foundation of any true community. We need protection from error, from fads. We need, amidst the current pragmatisms which can too often beset even the best idealism of church growth expertise, the rock-like confidence that what we are doing together and how we live together reflects the teaching of Scripture. There is no substitute for the instruction of biblical truth for upbuilding the body in a love characterized by discernment and discrimination.
We need a greater commitment to each other. We need to be involved in each other’s lives. We need to share the reality of the Christ-life so that together, through our differing experiences. we can together mature into all that Christ purposes for us as His bride. At that point the community will become not an ingrown, complacent, and conforming “holy huddle” but an attractive and attracting magnet to those outside. The evangelistic imperative requires that we set our own house in order.
To achieve such a community life requires a new concept of ministry. The Board observed regretfully that with all of the talk about an “equipping ministry”, in many places repeated to the point of tedium, such a concept has yet to penetrate our Canadian Presbyterian congregations and sessions. The bottom line in all of our discussion was simply this single statement: If there is to be any renewal within our church, the eldership must be renewed. We need seriously to consider what it means to have leaders who are neither threatened by renewal nor unwilling to pay the price for such a renewal.
Such leadership, as in past renewals of God’s people, depends in its human dimension on a revolutionary rethinking of what ministry is all about. To see “the minister” a model for “the ministers.” To recover the priesthood of all believers in the wealth of its biblical imagery and diversity. To free the 90% of our people presently “unemployed” for the full exercise of their distinctive gifts. To encourage leadership to recognize such gifts, refuse to be threatened by their discovery, and to provide opportunities for their use – this is the point at which the church, so renewed, becomes the church as its Lord intended.
Renewal in worship. Renewal in community. Renewal in ministry. Each impinges on the other. Each is impossible without the other two fitting into place. Together they involve sacrifice and commitment. Renewal in all three areas could reshape the direction of our denomination, of our congregations, of our lives.
The Board shaped the programme of the Renewal Fellowship for 1984-5 only after it had considered these three objectives. Beginning with a Renewal Day in Cambridge, Ontario, October 13 which will feature Dr. William Showalter of the Presbyterian and Reformed Renewal Ministries, Inc., speaking on “Leadership and Renewal”, through to our March 1 and 2, 1985 with Dr. Donald Williams and the full-time worship leader from his La Soledad Presbyterian Church in La Jolla, California, we will be providing opportunities for just that kind of renewal.
Pray for us. Pray beyond us. Pray for the Presbyterian Church in Canada. And pray for your renewal, your personal renewal, your congregation’s renewal, our denomination’s renewal. And pray for renewal in each of these three areas: worship, community, ministry.
ADM
“I would like to say a few words about the Spring issue of Channels. I found it excellent. Elizabeth Zook’s article on Pastoral Care as a Healing Ministry so very concretely told of Christ’s call to incarnational ministry. Jack Mills so rightly emphasized the role of the eldership in praying for the sick and being part of healing ministry. This seems to me to imply the importance of careful training of eiders for their ministry, and I envision the day when Presbyterian elders, under the guidance of Session and having been taught by their minister and other qualified persons, give the kind of care to congregations that is assumed in Jack’s article. It also assumes a willingness to work with medical professionals.
James Packer’s article on Renewal & Revival was so timely and well balanced that I shall encourage my whole congregation to read it and discuss it. I appreciated especially his emphasis on the similarities between charismatic and non-charismatic devotion ….
The positive outlook of Channels is heartening. Surely it, and the Renewal Fellowship are positive signs of the Spirit’s moving in the P.C.C.”
Bill Steele, Pastor Burch Church, Fort St. John, B.C.
“The other day I received a sample copy of Channels and thought it was a very good production.”
W. Stanford Reid, Guelph, Ontario
“We have met the enemy, and they is us’ is the line from the old comic strip Pogo that became a common reference point in a dialogue facilitated by Richard Hutchison, author of Mainline Churches and the Evangelicals. A certain amount of tension, fear, and distrust that was brought into the dialogue was dealt with frankly, lovingly and with good humour to the point that new insights were gained by those sharing in the discussion. Mistaken assumptions held by and about groups such as the ‘Renewal Fellowship within the Presbyterian Church in Canada’ were admitted and corrected. Revelation and some conciliation took place. Another ‘ah hah!’ experience.”
Harry E. Waite, General Secretary, Board of Congregational Life
“Thank you so much for sending me a copy of Channels. I have enjoyed reading it. I think that it will make a good contribution to theological discussion within our Church.”
Dr. William Klempa, Principal Le College Presbyterien/ The Presbyterian College, Montreal, Quebec
’’. . . I am sure it was providential that the direction of Channels is in B.C. and is thus portraying a significantly different face of evangelicalism to the Presbyterian Church at large than to be given by the Confessionalists of eastern Canada, who although they are only a minority in the evangelical forces here, nonetheless have such a clear-cut and articulate profession that they are often assumed to represent the whole. How delightfully you are disabusing people’s minds of this notion.”
Ian Rennie, Dean Ontario Theological Seminary, Willowdale, Ontario
“. . . I was very pleased to see the articles of ‘Healing’ in there: the one: ‘Healing Values of Art’ is about my son!! I felt a lot of mixed feelings when I saw it, but at the same time I realized that maybe in this way Christian can still be of ‘help’ to others. It provided me with a good opportunity to show the magazine to non-Christians at work (I work at the P.G. Reg. Hospital). They read it gladly – and who knows, maybe by reading the magazine it might have planted a ‘seed’, maybe they will start questioning ‘life’ and ‘life-after-death’.”
Conny Baran-Trommel, Prince George, B.C.
“It was very encouraging to read the Channels. The articles were excellent, especially the one by James Packer on Revival and Renewal. It is also wonderful to see the wide spectrum of men in the church who are participating in the Fellowship.”
Cal Chambers St. Paul’s Reformed Episcopal Church, New Westminster, B.C.