What Are We Really Trying to Do?

A Sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on November 6, 2022 by Revd Dr Sam Wells

Reading for address: Job 19: 23-27a

I wonder what St Martin-in-the-Fields means to you. To understand St Martin’s, you have to grasp three simply expressed but actually subtle assertions. Number one, we’re a church. Number two, we’re not a normal church. Number three, we’re suspicious of the whole concept of normal. In fact, we’re engaged in changing the whole idea of what’s meant by church.

The development of most flourishing human communities follows a bell curve. They start slowly and quietly, grow and thrive, then pass their peak, subside, and eventually die. If you were to draw a bell curve of the life of St Martin’s, I wonder where on that curve you’d locate us today. Are we on the way up, at our peak, or on the way down? I can tell you my answer to that question. But before I do so I need to describe the difference between three kinds of groupings to which St Martin’s may be compared.

The first is an association. An association is a bunch of people united around a common interest, who invariably find what else they have in common is as significant as their actual interest. Imagine a group of bird watchers. They go out together most Saturdays to find a new spot to view rare species. They combine to lobby landowners and councils about habitats and hedgerows. They often stop at the pub after a day out to compare notes and tell stories. Sometimes they get together even when there isn’t a bird in sight. They keep an eye out for each other and care for each other when one’s sick or in trouble.

Like an association, a church is a bunch of people united by a common purpose and commitment. Often those people become friends. Frequently they dispute the best way of going about things, balancing the desire for enjoyment with the need for sustainability. But an association has temptations. It has a natural inclination to stay small, so everyone can know each other and feel they belong. It has an inherent tendency to put meeting personal needs and group harmony ahead of any larger purpose. It can be hard to join, and struggle to recognise any vision that can encompass a whole life, let alone all existence. So a church may sometimes look and feel like an association in good ways, but it mustn’t lapse into being a self-serving closed interest group.

The second kind of grouping is an organisation. An organisation is a combination of people and resources to achieve a specific goal. That goal can be changing the government, saving the planet, or making a million-pound profit. If an organisation achieves its goal it disbands, like the Vote Leave campaign, or redirects to a new goal, like the movement to end slavery, which abolished the slave trade in 1807 but then continued till it abolished slavery itself in the British Empire in 1833. Successful organisations define achievable goals and ruthlessly orient their whole structure to realising them. They have no other purpose.

A church is like an organisation if you think it has a readily definable goal like converting the heathen or getting people into heaven or bringing about the kingdom of God on earth. But organisations have downsides. They have no respect for conventions, and in taking the direct route from A to B, often mow down precious things in their path. Employees can feel used, exploited, and tossed away. Achievable goals are, almost by definition, of little lasting value, so organisations can feel cheap and utilitarian. People who have a very specific idea of what church is for may try to turn it into an organisation, but if church becomes simply an organisation it becomes just a means and ceases to be an end.

The name for a grouping that aspires to be an end in itself, and not just a means, is an institution. An institution is a time-honoured embodiment of wisdom that seeks to enhance the common life of its members and society as a whole. It does that by cultivating the arts, providing education, holding professions to exacting standards, advancing health, or preserving and developing good ways of relating to one another. A good institution honours the past, dignifies the present and blesses the future.

For a very long time much of the church, especially a city-centre, visible church like St Martin’s, has thought of itself as an institution – indeed, perhaps the queen of institutions, cherishing revelation from the past, advancing the common good today and anticipating life with God forever. But the last 60 years have been a time of reckoning. Institutions have been denounced as exclusive, self-satisfied and complacent. Respect for academic achievement, deference to authority, and social conservatism have fallen out of favour. In some cases, institutions have been exposed as corrupt and deceiving, suppressing evidence of terrible crimes, concerned only to feather their nest and cover their back. No institution, be it monarchy, hospital, university or church, can any longer assume its virtues speak for themselves.

There are three loud voices in the church at the moment and the three groupings I’ve just outlined help us understand what’s going on. One is the voice of lament. This comes from people who treasure the church as an institution associated with grand architecture, fine music, high moral aspirations, a concern for the weak a welcome for everyone, and a commitment to truth, who despair as that institution is neglected by many, opposed by some, and misunderstood by others who seem bent on turning it into a garish, instrumental organisation.

Another is a voice of urgency. This comes from people who want the church to become more like an organisation, defining goals, targets and outputs, streamlining its bureaucracy and removing all elements that don’t market well. This group is infuriated by what it sees as complacency, entitlement and lack of drive among the first group.

Another, quieter voice is that of belonging. It’s not so invested in red lines of faith or ethics. It just wants to continue to meet with those it’s loved for decades, and values compassion, understanding, continuity and kindness. It’s very much drawn to the church as association.

What does all this have to say to St Martin’s? St Martin’s is all of these things. On first sight it’s the epitome of an institution. It’s old, it’s got fine architecture, great traditions, deep-seated commitments. But on closer inspection it’s got significant organisational elements. We do, after all, have a business that in normal times generates a significant profit. But that’s not all. For all its commitment to professionalism, St Martin’s is at heart a voluntary community. It’s in many ways an association of people who find ways to rub along with one another, who want to embody beauty, truth and goodness, love, joy and peace together through sunshine and rain.

What we’re trying to do together is to harness the strengths of all these kinds of combinations, but at the same time avoid their dangers and temptations. We want the feelgood and belonging of an association; but if we restrict ourselves to a community where we can all know each other’s names, we’ll reduce our community to the size any one person can comprehend. That way we’ll never grow, never be open to the stranger and never fulfil our national and international mission. We want the gravitas and longevity of an institution, but we must constantly guard against the complacency, self-absorption and reluctance to change that often comes with it. We want the agility and boldness of an organisation, but we mustn’t start to instrumentalise people or lose sight of our transcendent and ultimate purpose.

It’s a commonplace for a church to want people to become Christians. The assumption that Christians always think they’re better than others, are basically hypocrites, and are constantly out to convert you makes many people nervous around churches. I’m not saying that St Martin’s isn’t glad for people to come to faith, but our emphasis is slightly different. St Martin’s is a diverse community, quick to recognise that faith means different things to different people. But more importantly, St Martin’s is a very pragmatic community, which wants to see the practical outcomes of faith and other value statements. So what people aspire to here is to become precisely an institution with an associational feel that integrates significant organisational elements: so we become personable and adaptable, innovatory and relational, inspiring and sustainable.

And here’s the real point. We live in a world where people feel let down by associations, failed by organisations and betrayed by institutions. What we’re doing at St Martin’s is to build a community of hope, one that restores people’s faith in what Christianity can lead to and what human beings are capable of doing and being together. Compassion for and solidarity with those on whom the world turns its back; thrilling and challenging cultural experiences; commercial activity that embodies and advances social good; all rooted in a fundamental conviction that in Christ God became flesh to be in relationship with us and heal our relationships with one another, ourselves and the creation.

In June last year the then Prime Minister took the leaders of the G7 nations to the Eden Project in Cornwall, because he wanted to show them what a community of inspiration looked like. I hope the next time the G7 leaders meet in Britain whoever’s Prime Minister will want to bring them here to St Martin’s, because I hope that in six years’ time we’ll have blossomed into the community I believe we are called and have all the potential to be: a true community of hope and source of inspiration to church and society, those who’ve been disillusioned by institutions, demeaned by organisations and depressed by associations. I want Christians to say, ‘This isn’t just church – this is the kingdom of God.’ And I want non-Christians to say, ‘If all churches were like this, I wouldn’t stay away; if this is church – give me a whole lot more of it.’ Where are we on the bell curve to becoming such community? With the marvellous efforts of volunteers and staff, I see us as still on the way up.

Right in the middle of the book of Job, amidst all the failed explanations for suffering and the clumsy expressions of sadness, comes a statement of astonishing clarity and conviction. Beset by agony and loss, Job gets up on his feet and proclaims, ‘I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and after I’ve been destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God, and God shall be with me, beside me.’ It’s like a searing rocket of joy rising from the ashes of misery. That’s how I understand St Martin’s: a lighthouse of hope that people from far and wide can see and say, ‘If all churches were like that, I’d go,’ or think, ‘However grubby and procedural my working life is, I can look at St Martin’s and see that it is possible to integrate business and faith, culture and compassion. I can be challenged by St Martin’s example to bring together all manner of people with every kind of background and do something beautiful we none of us could do alone. However narrow my regular world, I can join online or on site in a community that still dreams, that still bursts with energy and imagination and faithfulness and kindness.’

One theologian calls Jesus the impossible possibility. I believe we follow Jesus by together seeking to become an impossible possibility – impossible because no one ever sees a community that combines commerce, culture, compassion and congregational life, impossible because everyone right now has their head down looking sad, impossible because we’re human beings who get things wrong and annoy one another and shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves; but a possibility because Christ was raised from the dead, a possibility because the Holy Spirit transformed the dispirited disciples at Pentecost, a possibility because nothing is impossible with God.

I believe this community is called to be an impossible possibility. We’re called to soar up amid disillusionment and despair like Job saying, ‘I know that my Redeemer lives.’ We’re called to be a living, breathing miracle. Let’s do it together. Let’s live into that dream. Let’s be a community of resurrection. Let’s embody the impossible possibility.