If the 21st Century is to see an emergence of grassroots expressions of Church on the kind of scale needed to match the needs of the hour, existing denominations and pastors will need to learn new lessons and adopt new paradigms to be in the flow of what God is doing. But all is not new. We have learned some of these lessons before…

King George III and Queen Charlotte were early members of the German dynasty that still holds the British Crown. When they came in they brought in laws forbidding gatherings of more than five people unrelated by blood. British subjects could be imprisoned and fined for being out after 9pm. And all Anglican clergy were required to make a pledge of obedience to the Crown before being permitted to pastor their parishes. For the sake of this new royal family, all was order and control. This made them unlikely lchampions for the liberation of grassroots leadership and initiative. But they were.

Revival was swelling in Britain and the U.S.A. Clergy who were embracing the new “enthusiasm” were being pilloried and frozen out of the institution. Bishops and Archdeacons were circulating letters forbidding the giving of pulpits to great preachers like Wesley and Whitfield. Evangelical converts were made unwelcome in the parish churches and new structures of discipleship  were emerging. New locations, new preachers, new patterns of associating were springing up as the Methodists and other Evangelicals sought to run with what God was doing. Almost everything they did was illegal - if the law was pressed. Christian leaders, like John Wesley, found themselves often called up before local magistrates.

Into this arena stepped Selina Hastings. Selina was a shrewd cookie. She knew that the law of the land and the canons of the Church of England permitted landowners of a certain social rank to build their own chapels and licence their own clergy to serve in them. Though originally intended as a way of providing churches on privately owned land, Selina saw it as a way of planting new churches all over the country. So she did. She bought new parcels of land, and built chapels for the preachers, pastors and people of the new move. She used her advantages of position and wealth to open up places of refuge and discipleship for many whose new-found faith saw them excluded from the mainstream, state-controlled churches. She did not exercise bishop-like authority over the running of the chapels. Her goal was simply to get behind and support the burgeoning grassroots revival.. Selina was a countess. The law allowed her six chapels and chaplains. By the time she had planted thirty her peers took her to task, insisting that King George intervene to arrest this subversion of good order.

The King and Queen heard Selina carefully and with a heart for “true religion” blessed Selina for what she was doing and encouraged her to return home with a dispensation to continue stewarding her advantage to the benefit of the Kingdom of God. For the royals and for the countess this was a way of serving without controlling. For an era and a regime so built on order and control this was a very bold move indeed. Recognising the character and godliness of what was being done, this trio found a way even within their own frameworks to embrace the experimental and the genuinely new. (Today if you see a“Countess of Huntingdon Chapel” you are  seeing a small testament to Selina Hasting’s wonderful work!)

Meanwhile in Cambridge a famous Anglican churchman, Charles Simeon, was preaching agains the “evils” of going outside the Anglican chain of command in pursuit of converts and revival. Simeon believed that “dissent” and the setting up of new churches outside the parish system was “unwarrantable” and very far from the ideal. But Simeon had a heart for “true religion” and so, while preaching the “ideal” of devout parish life, he quietly paid the wages of the “ranter” preacher at the Green Street Chapel in Cambridge. Hypocrisy? No; he did it because he recognised that Green Street was reaching a demographic that his own denomination, for all its efforts, was leaving untouched. At a time when other Anglicans were terrified of losing more and more people to - they knew not what -  Charles Simeon was content to serve the kingdom of God, enjoying the priviledge of input without control for the sake of reaching people for Christ. Indeed, Simeon took this approach to numbers of ministers and missionaries all around the world who enjoyed Simeon’s amazing pastoral and financial outreach.

In my post - “Stories from the Field” - I tell a more recent story; that of the “Black Bull.” (name changed) A group of young people from an Anabaptist fellowship obtained a lease on an uneconomic old pub and decided too run a short-time (dry) pub mission. Once a week the pub would open, packed with unchurchy looking young people and open to any comer. It was an overtly Christian environment with low-priced food and drink, with musical and spoken interludes through the evening. The program was similar to many short-term coffee-bar ventures. Young people from other churches caught the vision and joined in and a body of local “people of peace”, seekers and people in need began building up as part of the regular crowd. After the short term expired, the team felt they were only just beginning to make headway. So they decided to run with what was happening, indefinitely.

Father Allen (name changed), the High Church Priest of the local Anglican church, took a very old fashioned view of his parish. This was his parish - but he felt that as a father rather than a proprietor and so took to the habit of loitering in the Black Bull, befriending the workers and guests. Naturally, he took on a chaplain-like role to a demographic he would never have reached through the structures of his own church. Once again a willingness to extend the open hand of friendship and enjoy the priviledge of input without ownership or control enabled a valuable and effective symbiosis in ministry.

TODAY established churches and denominations are feeling profoundly anxious at the prospect of losing more and more people to -they know not what. Anxiety may consider the idea of input without ownership or serving without controlling as a luxury it can ill afford. Anxiety says, “But how will that help us?” But history - such as the stories I have shared in this post - should confirm in this matter the truth of Jesus’ words in the Gospel: “Give and it will come back to you, pressed down, shaken together and running over.” The stories of these exemplars remind us that there is always reward for open-handed giving. In the end it is only rational to go the way of God’s kingdom if we want to follow the way of His blessing!