Faith and Religion (1)

As I begin to consider the relationship between faith and religion, one thing I'd want to say straight away is that it isn't a simple matter of "faith good, religion bad". It's easy - too easy - to make that a default position in these Postmodern times when everyone seems to have the freedom to choose and create their own truth. In fact, for me, there is a necessary relationship between faith and religion that needs to be considered carefully and nurtured well, in order to keep things balanced and focused.

Faith without religion lacks coherence, discipline and purpose; the structures of religion provide the context within which faith may be shared, questioned, debated, enriched, directed, challenged, and find a use and focus in worship, outreach and social action. But religion can very easily become something that is essentially faithless; faith needs the space to breathe, to invent, to experiment, to travel, and where religion requires a fixed and rigid form of faith, it will become what most fixed and rigid things are - dead. And religion then becomes something that is essentially self-serving, rather than God-seeking.

Like any human organisations, religions are able to acquire power, wealth, prestige and all the other trappings of worldly success and status. This is a sickness to which all religions are vulnerable, upon which which faith can act as a disturbing, disruptive but ultimately cleansing and healing agent. Worldly and self-seeking religion has historically decided where it has wanted to go, and then chosen a reading of its holy scriptures to justify this, allowing God to be the uncritical source of blessing for all that was being done in his name. The faith of mystics, reformers and social pioneers has, in ways sometimes gentle, sometimes traumatic, been the necessary antidote, through which a real awareness of God at liberty among us, and no longer safely tucked away in a reliquary or a dusty library, has been restored.

This, at any rate, seems to be a continuing theme throughout Christian history. At present, in the Western Church, we have a religion that remains quite powerful in worldly terms, but which has been steadily losing the influence it has been used to having, and not liking that very much. It has enjoyed the powerful role it has been able to hold as a more or less unquestioned right in what is still a nominally Christian society, and now finds its sense of its own identity challenged as that status and role in society is being bypassed and eroded. The Church has attempted to deal with this by finding new ways of being powerful and holding influence, new areas in which it can carve out a role - when perhaps what we need to be doing as Christ's people is to learn how to be weak, how to live without power, how not to have a place.

I feel sure that as part of this process we shall need to discover how to be Church in a different way, with less emphasis on structure, hierarchy and ceremonial, certainly less sense of our place within society, but more emphasis on what it may mean to be a pilgrim people, and on the nurturing and encouragement of perhaps quite disparate expressions of faith. To those to whom the existing structures are all-important, this may feel rather like ceasing to be Church at all - but what I see here is a necessary rebalancing of the relationship between religion and faith. Anyway, that's a thought to which I'll return in due course. These are very much reflections in real time!