By Jody
Mark 7:24-30
“Inclusive” is a word the deacons, our elected leadership team, started using more intentionally a couple of years ago, to describe our church and our values.
Certainly same sex marriage was part of this, but so was our theology around and attitude to children, our desire for wide participation and perspectives and discussion, our understanding of mental health and wellbeing, and our meetings and meals and Communion. Not only is anyone welcome to come to the Communion table – anyone might offer the bread of life.
Selfishly, the word became extremely important to me once we had a child carrying the official label “disability”. I didn’t just want him to be tolerated, benevolently allowed in to frolic on the edges, while the important stuff happened in the centre. I wanted his way of being human, his needs and his gifts, to shape what was done and how. How would he be received in the future when I wasn’t there to mediate? How many brothers would be enough for buffer and protection? And what was I going to do about inclusion in the places where I had some influence?
But enough about me. We all have some kind of relationship with the word “inclusive” – whether it’s embrace, suspicion, hope or dismay. And even though we’ve applied the word round here with increasing intention, it’s not like we forced it into being. Ponsonby Baptist has inclusion in its DNA – friendship between our minister and a Catholic Priest when that was a great religious divide, determination via CORT housing trust to keep struggling people sheltered in a gentrifying area, actively encouraging kids to fully participate in rosters and services and sacred practices and ancient organ playing.
But at some point it’s worth asking: Was Jesus inclusive? Is inclusion the calling of those who follow Christ? How should we discern this?
You heard the Scripture reading. It’s particularly jarring, talking about a human woman as animal sniffing for scraps. But it alerts us to factors in tension when we try to follow Jesus’ teaching. He’s on record excluding some (goats, chaff, excuse makers, self righteous, seekers of the wide gate, and, possibly according to one parable in Matthew, a guy not dressed right for a wedding feast he was compelled to come to in the first place (Matt 22)). And yet Jesus is also on record being inclusive with others (the poor, the mourners, the meek, the children, seekers of the narrow gate, those who welcome and serve him, those who take up their cross and follow him, a dying criminal who asks to be remembered).
I think it’s fair to say, Jesus is not entirely clear on his inclusion / exclusion policy. Certainly not as clear as I’d like.
So we all interpret, and we find various ways of making sense of Jesus and his stance. The Inclusive Church network states:
"We believe in inclusive Church – church which does not discriminate, on any level, on grounds of economic power, gender, mental health, physical ability, race or sexuality. We believe in Church which welcomes and serves all people in the name of Jesus Christ; which is scripturally faithful; which seeks to proclaim the Gospel afresh for each generation; and which, in the power of the Holy Spirit, allows all people to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Jesus Christ."
Meanwhile The Gospel Coalition, a group of pastors and churches that have become deeply concerned about some movements within traditional evangelicalism that seem to be diminishing the church’s life and leading us away from our historic beliefs and practices have a blog post (How to Really be Inclusive like Jesus, Derek Rishmawy) explaining:Traditionalists are often accused of being gatekeepers trying to keep people out of God’s kingdom. But if they are right ... then ultimately the danger is that people won’t be called to repent from the kinds of behaviors that Christ and his apostles say lead to self-exclusion from the kingdom of God. It’s precisely the traditionalists’ desire to include people in the kingdom that drives their opposition to the wrong sort of inclusion. It’s precisely because they hate the idea of seeing anyone excluded from the kingdom of God that they insist we not offer inclusion on false premises.
You can maybe get a sense that while these appear to be opposite views, they are not quite talking the same terms. One is about whether to include or exclude people. The other is about whether to include or exclude “pernicious ways”.
(To lay my cards on the table, I’d be more convicted by the second perspective if it came from impoverished pacifists challenging the inclusion of rich power mongers like me in the Kingdom of Heaven... but it comes overwhelmingly from straight-cis men directed at the sexuality and identity of people who aren’t them.)
Laura Turner writes in The rise of the star-studded, Instagram-friendly evangelical church: Chris Pratt, Justin Bieber, and the “cool” Christian celebrity... (This is a collection of quotes I'm using from the article, please see original for author's flow and argument.)
[A] tonal shift within evangelicalism away from the dour restrictions associated with religion and toward the freedom and dynamism of a relationship has been ushered in by this new breed of Instagram-friendly, celebrity-surrounded pastors.
[The] “seeker sensitive” approach to church has its roots in the megachurch movement of the 1980s and ’90s — churches like Saddleback and Willow Creek — that sought to make church more attractive to nonbelievers by playing songs that weren’t hymns, offering preaching that was relevant to daily life, and designing churches that didn’t look particularly religious, including no crosses or stained-glass windows, no pews, and pastors wearing street clothes instead of collars.
More concerned with inclusion and welcoming, less rigid about drawing lines around who’s in and who’s out (or, at least, less explicit about those categories).
One pastor is quoted“It’s just, ‘Let’s befriend people.’ The goal is to be like Jesus, and I think Jesus would show love and grace to anybody in his path.”
But Turner concludes ...the welcoming patina of [these places] can easily be dented when you scratch the surface. Justin Bieber may have told a gay fan to join him at his Hillsong church, where he insisted they would love to have her, but the leaders of the church tell a different story. In a 2015 blog post titled “Do I Love Gay People?” ... the founder and senior pastor of Hillsong in Australia, wrote, “Hillsong Church welcomes ALL people but does not affirm all lifestyles. Put clearly, we do not affirm a gay lifestyle and because of this we do not knowingly have actively gay people in positions of leadership. ...”
Many of us have probably internalised parts of both inclusive and exclusive mindsets. Are we completely welcome, as we are, today? Are we unwelcome until we change something about ourselves? Or are we occupying precarious ground, where our welcome and worth will be reveled to us piece by painful piece?
If there’s one thing I’ve learnt at PBC it’s that when the people God loves come in, and when their voices are heard and their gifts are seen, the community is reshaped.
This is why shared practices – engaging our sacred texts, listening in prayer, listening to each other, breathing fire, shedding tears, walking the earth, feeling deeply, thinking carefully, sharing bread – are so important. (Does that mean that not agreeing to value those shared practices is an excluding principle?! I think I’m willing to trust the practices are so life giving, they would always bubble up.)
I don’t believe inclusion works unless everyone involved is open to it changing them. You can’t welcome people to join you and not run the risk of being changed, just as you can’t respond to a welcome and not run the risk of being changed.
Heck, you can’t even unwillingly bump into people and not run those risks – which is exactly what Jesus found when the Syrophoenician woman challenged him, and what she found when he listened to her.
She sees that there is enough to go round. That she doesn’t have to be pushed out, or made to wait, because even the crumbiest crumbs of heaven are an abundant feast for those who need bread. But she needed access to the table to bear witness to that.
Mark 7:24-30
“Inclusive” is a word the deacons, our elected leadership team, started using more intentionally a couple of years ago, to describe our church and our values.
Certainly same sex marriage was part of this, but so was our theology around and attitude to children, our desire for wide participation and perspectives and discussion, our understanding of mental health and wellbeing, and our meetings and meals and Communion. Not only is anyone welcome to come to the Communion table – anyone might offer the bread of life.
Selfishly, the word became extremely important to me once we had a child carrying the official label “disability”. I didn’t just want him to be tolerated, benevolently allowed in to frolic on the edges, while the important stuff happened in the centre. I wanted his way of being human, his needs and his gifts, to shape what was done and how. How would he be received in the future when I wasn’t there to mediate? How many brothers would be enough for buffer and protection? And what was I going to do about inclusion in the places where I had some influence?
But enough about me. We all have some kind of relationship with the word “inclusive” – whether it’s embrace, suspicion, hope or dismay. And even though we’ve applied the word round here with increasing intention, it’s not like we forced it into being. Ponsonby Baptist has inclusion in its DNA – friendship between our minister and a Catholic Priest when that was a great religious divide, determination via CORT housing trust to keep struggling people sheltered in a gentrifying area, actively encouraging kids to fully participate in rosters and services and sacred practices and ancient organ playing.
But at some point it’s worth asking: Was Jesus inclusive? Is inclusion the calling of those who follow Christ? How should we discern this?
You heard the Scripture reading. It’s particularly jarring, talking about a human woman as animal sniffing for scraps. But it alerts us to factors in tension when we try to follow Jesus’ teaching. He’s on record excluding some (goats, chaff, excuse makers, self righteous, seekers of the wide gate, and, possibly according to one parable in Matthew, a guy not dressed right for a wedding feast he was compelled to come to in the first place (Matt 22)). And yet Jesus is also on record being inclusive with others (the poor, the mourners, the meek, the children, seekers of the narrow gate, those who welcome and serve him, those who take up their cross and follow him, a dying criminal who asks to be remembered).
I think it’s fair to say, Jesus is not entirely clear on his inclusion / exclusion policy. Certainly not as clear as I’d like.
So we all interpret, and we find various ways of making sense of Jesus and his stance. The Inclusive Church network states:
"We believe in inclusive Church – church which does not discriminate, on any level, on grounds of economic power, gender, mental health, physical ability, race or sexuality. We believe in Church which welcomes and serves all people in the name of Jesus Christ; which is scripturally faithful; which seeks to proclaim the Gospel afresh for each generation; and which, in the power of the Holy Spirit, allows all people to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Jesus Christ."
Meanwhile The Gospel Coalition, a group of pastors and churches that have become deeply concerned about some movements within traditional evangelicalism that seem to be diminishing the church’s life and leading us away from our historic beliefs and practices have a blog post (How to Really be Inclusive like Jesus, Derek Rishmawy) explaining:Traditionalists are often accused of being gatekeepers trying to keep people out of God’s kingdom. But if they are right ... then ultimately the danger is that people won’t be called to repent from the kinds of behaviors that Christ and his apostles say lead to self-exclusion from the kingdom of God. It’s precisely the traditionalists’ desire to include people in the kingdom that drives their opposition to the wrong sort of inclusion. It’s precisely because they hate the idea of seeing anyone excluded from the kingdom of God that they insist we not offer inclusion on false premises.
You can maybe get a sense that while these appear to be opposite views, they are not quite talking the same terms. One is about whether to include or exclude people. The other is about whether to include or exclude “pernicious ways”.
(To lay my cards on the table, I’d be more convicted by the second perspective if it came from impoverished pacifists challenging the inclusion of rich power mongers like me in the Kingdom of Heaven... but it comes overwhelmingly from straight-cis men directed at the sexuality and identity of people who aren’t them.)
Laura Turner writes in The rise of the star-studded, Instagram-friendly evangelical church: Chris Pratt, Justin Bieber, and the “cool” Christian celebrity... (This is a collection of quotes I'm using from the article, please see original for author's flow and argument.)
[A] tonal shift within evangelicalism away from the dour restrictions associated with religion and toward the freedom and dynamism of a relationship has been ushered in by this new breed of Instagram-friendly, celebrity-surrounded pastors.
[The] “seeker sensitive” approach to church has its roots in the megachurch movement of the 1980s and ’90s — churches like Saddleback and Willow Creek — that sought to make church more attractive to nonbelievers by playing songs that weren’t hymns, offering preaching that was relevant to daily life, and designing churches that didn’t look particularly religious, including no crosses or stained-glass windows, no pews, and pastors wearing street clothes instead of collars.
More concerned with inclusion and welcoming, less rigid about drawing lines around who’s in and who’s out (or, at least, less explicit about those categories).
One pastor is quoted“It’s just, ‘Let’s befriend people.’ The goal is to be like Jesus, and I think Jesus would show love and grace to anybody in his path.”
But Turner concludes ...the welcoming patina of [these places] can easily be dented when you scratch the surface. Justin Bieber may have told a gay fan to join him at his Hillsong church, where he insisted they would love to have her, but the leaders of the church tell a different story. In a 2015 blog post titled “Do I Love Gay People?” ... the founder and senior pastor of Hillsong in Australia, wrote, “Hillsong Church welcomes ALL people but does not affirm all lifestyles. Put clearly, we do not affirm a gay lifestyle and because of this we do not knowingly have actively gay people in positions of leadership. ...”
Many of us have probably internalised parts of both inclusive and exclusive mindsets. Are we completely welcome, as we are, today? Are we unwelcome until we change something about ourselves? Or are we occupying precarious ground, where our welcome and worth will be reveled to us piece by painful piece?
If there’s one thing I’ve learnt at PBC it’s that when the people God loves come in, and when their voices are heard and their gifts are seen, the community is reshaped.
This is why shared practices – engaging our sacred texts, listening in prayer, listening to each other, breathing fire, shedding tears, walking the earth, feeling deeply, thinking carefully, sharing bread – are so important. (Does that mean that not agreeing to value those shared practices is an excluding principle?! I think I’m willing to trust the practices are so life giving, they would always bubble up.)
I don’t believe inclusion works unless everyone involved is open to it changing them. You can’t welcome people to join you and not run the risk of being changed, just as you can’t respond to a welcome and not run the risk of being changed.
Heck, you can’t even unwillingly bump into people and not run those risks – which is exactly what Jesus found when the Syrophoenician woman challenged him, and what she found when he listened to her.
She sees that there is enough to go round. That she doesn’t have to be pushed out, or made to wait, because even the crumbiest crumbs of heaven are an abundant feast for those who need bread. But she needed access to the table to bear witness to that.
