Interview: Rev Steve Hollinghurst, Church Army’s Researcher in Evangelism to Post-Christian Culture

|PIC1|A new tour by the Group for Evangelisation, a coordinating group of Churches Together in England, has revealed how despite the continuous reporting of Church decline and falling numbers in church congregations, people in the country are becoming more aware of the spiritual nature of the world.

The tour, entitled ‘Equipping your Church in a Spiritual Age’, explained that in 2000 a survey revealed how 70 per cent of the population testified they prayed, as well as 76 per cent saying that they have had a religious experience, compared with just 48 per cent in 1987. However, instead of turning to the Church to find explanations for their spiritual experiences, many are moving to New Age movements and ‘Mind, Body and Soul’ initiatives.

Addressing these facts, and looking to find ways in which the Church can make people realise that the Church is in fact spiritual, Rev Steve Hollinghurst, who is Church Army’s Researcher in Evangelism to Post-Christian Culture, and is heading the tour, spoke to Christian Today.

The full text of the interview, held at the Salvation Army’s UK Headquarters in London on Nov. 14, 2005, can be read below:

CT: Please tell us what you want to achieve from this tour?

SH: I think for me what I want to achieve is to make people more aware of what is going on in culture with regards to spirituality. So that people realise that rather than necessarily feeling with a world in which people aren’t religious and where people are un-spiritual, that actually that there are a lot of spiritual things happening out there.

Also I want people to have an awareness of how spiritual people in our culture think that Christians are not spiritual, and from there get people to start thinking about what this means for ambition in evangelism and how we can interact with people.

CT: People say that the church are only on the cusp of this issue and have not grasped it – would you agree with this?

SH: Well some have grasped it, as we have gone around on the tour we have met with some that are already doing things, but it is true that probably these are only a handful of people, so I think it is true that there are many others that need this message to come to them, and that we need to engage with these people.

CT: So how does the Church go about engaging with these spiritual people, but in a way that does not compromise the church?

SH: We have to actually make connections with people, and it is similar to the way that we see the task of a foreign mission. If someone is to go out they need to learn the culture and language, and then go and live among those people and engage and converse with them and find ways to connect their faith with them. So I think that is the starting point.

But the point in not losing the Christian faith is an important one. As if you go in a cross-cultural way then you have to partly adopt the culture in which you live, and basically live among them as one of them rather than as an outsider, and of course this throws up challenges.

It is not always easy to do, so I think one thing is that Christians have to stay connected to somewhere. You don’t go out alone but with others, and also in the mission always have to find ways to relate it to the Church.

Also the relationship with God is key. You have to keep a close relationship with God through worship and scripture and prayer. So you have to ask these questions and find what the core is. And when we ask this then we can broadly say that Christ is the centre. Christianity is centred around Christ and it is about following him. So you want him to be central and you always relate things to Christ about his teachings and also draw on the traditions of the Church, but always think “was this piece of tradition here for just that time and place”; you have to be flexible – it is not easy but I think it must be done.

CT: Do you think Jesus is a sticking point in trying to reach the people in the UK?

SH: In once sense no, as most people who are spiritual think Jesus is a good spiritual person and they respect him greatly, but the sticking point may be the Church’s understanding of Jesus. Anything that tries to say that Jesus is unique may make it more difficult for people, as they do not see Jesus as fundamentally different to other spiritual people they have heard about in history.

So in Christianity, the fact that Jesus is a member of the God-head is a unique position and may be a stumbling block – this is an issue but we cannot shy away from this. The challenge is how we debate them and use it to open up a conversation rather than close down the conversation. Sometimes when Christians speak about their faith, they are almost more concerned to defend themselves than communicate effectively with the people that are around them.

As I spoke to one person at a fair recently I said that I see God at work in many different places, but that for me Jesus is the place they all come together and they are all found in Jesus, and she could understand that. I also used the image of a rainbow and said that Jesus is the place where all the colours of the rainbow come together, and in this way he fulfils everything and takes it all forward, and so this is why I will always speak of Jesus.

It is a difficult balance to work actually, as historically Christians have often, even if they did not intend to, come across as a bit imperialistic and as dismissing others’ opinions. But we need to find ways to engage with people of all kinds.

CT: It was mentioned in the talk that many people these days are not even looking for the spiritual answer in the Church anymore – do you think the Church has lost its spirituality?

SH: Well to some extent it may have done, as what the Church has been called to do, from my position in an Anglican tradition, when we ordain someone we say that your calling is to proclaim the gospel afresh in every age. In a sense this is what we are talking about.

We have now been through an age where science and rationalism was driving out the whole understanding of the spiritual, and so the Church found itself engaging in the world that wanted scientific reasoning and arguments. And to an extent the Church did adopt this way of speaking about Christianity, and so many of the mystical sides of the faith were driven out. I don’t mean to say that this is true about everything in the Church as there are still sources to draw from, but I think the church did drive it out to engage more, now only to find it all coming back in again.

CT: So what is left for the Church to do then, and what action can the Church make to move forward and bring people to their churches?

SH: Well I would advocate taking the church to the people, and it is an important difference. As Christians, we tend to lay on our events and say come to this and say it will be good. But we have to actually get out and be with people.

We also have a great amount of spiritual people in the Church itself, and I think people will find the things they are searching for here. However, to a certain extent I also think that we have to relearn our own faith and learn to be more comfortable to speak about it rather than be embarrassed about talking about spiritual things, and do this alongside them. So when they speak about their spiritual things we can also talk about ours but then reveal that God is at work in the process. So God is present, and as I share God is working in that.

Also as I have done, Christian can set up stalls at some New Age fairs. There are over 150 of them in UK now, and you will find most communities have them. So churches, of course after investigating them fully, can go to them. People are often stunned that Christians are there and then they come to see that Christians are in fact spiritual and find there are things in the Christian traditions they can relate to and find attractive, much to their surprise. So even if you only go this far it is good.

But also we need to find ways to worship and use language that really engages with people. It is a learning process, unless it comes with real engagement to the people we preach to then it will only be our idea of what is effective, and it will not really connect.

But Christianity and the Church has done this before, it is a global faith as it has successfully gone out and gone into other cultures and made itself relevant, and I think there are many things we can learn from this as we go into our own cultures today.



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