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This is the continuation of a paper that was written for my Supervised Theological Field Education paper in 2006, called “My Operational Theology and Model for Theological Reflection”.

I’m happy to answer any questions if you’re happy to ask them…

Operational Theology

Al that I have posted may seem like a long-winded introduction to get to the heart of what this series is meant to be about! But looking back over the words, it does help explain what I have been drawn to and how I react in my ministry.

In my final year of secondary school, I was given a book by John Smith of God’s Squad fame. In it, he quoted a Henry Lawson poem entitled, The Christ of the Never, about a bush preacher. The last two stanzas read as follows:

By his work in the hells of the shearers,
Where the drinking is ghastly and grim,
Where the roughest and worst of his hearers
Have listened bareheaded to him.
By his paths through the parched desolation
Hot rides and the terrible tramps;
By the hunger, the thirst, the privation
Of his work in the furthermost camps.

By his worth in the light that shall search men
And prove—ay! and justify each—
I place him in front of all churchmen
Who feel not, who know not—but preach!

Much of Smith’s book has long faded into the depths of oblivion for me, but the image of the bush preacher remains as strong as the day I first read it. Church is never mentioned as an institution that made a scrap of difference to the lives of the bushmen. But a faithful man of God, walking and working in the heat of the Australian outback sun, commanded their attention and respect.

A few years later I read a novel by Jill Paton Walsh, set during the Spanish Inquisition of the fifteenth century. In the story, a man is washed up on a Spanish beach who neither claims to believe in a God nor calls himself an atheist. Because of his refusal to confess that there is a God, he is imprisoned and tortured. During this process, many monks try to convince him, through arguments of different approach, of the existence of God. None of the arguments change the man’s mind, but witnessing the torture, and eventual execution of the stranger, causes several of the monks to renounce their vows and walk away from the church. This heavy handedness of the church repulsed me, yet I wondered whether it was that different to the ‘torture’ that was going on in my church.

Hope, however, for what church could be was still alive. I saw many walking away in disgust, and even more refusing to be part of church in the first place. But somehow, things could change. My reading started to reflect a deeper understanding of what the call to be the body of Christ was about and, against everything that I had experienced to this point, I felt the need to ‘champion’ the cause of the church. Moltmann became my ‘pin-up’ theologian. His books were heavy going, but he seemed to articulate much of what I felt in terms of our responsibility of the church to the people of the world, the other animal inhabitants and to the world itself. Of the church he says, “If the assembled church is the confessing church, then it will represent the unity in Christ and the Spirit that makes all things new in the midst of conflicts of it’s social and political situation.” I believed (and still do) that this could happen, but had some things I needed answers for.

Continued tomorrow…