Mostly when we talk about the church we use qualifiers, missional church for example. Rowan Williams in the lecture I noted in yesterday’s blog, suggests an altogether different qualifier. In relation to the Bible and the breaking of bread he understands the church as a listening community. And perhaps listening is a spiritual discipline the evangelical church needs to rediscover, and even as C S Lewis long ago suggested, perhaps we need to repent of our talkativeness.
Listen – to the Word read and proclaimed
Listen to the invitation, this bread, my body broken for you…take and eat.
Williams brings Bible and eucharist together as means of grace, as sources of nourishment and spiritual vitality, as representing the summons and succour of God.
The Church’s public use of the Bible represents the Church as defined in some important way by listening: the community when it comes together doesn’t only break bread and reflect together and intercede, it silences itself to hear something. It represents itself in that moment as a community existing in response to a word of summons or invitation, to an act of communication that requires to be heard and answered.
Listening to the Bible, listening to the summons of Jesus to His table, is not a passive activity, it is an active alertness to that voice which addresses us. Listening is not a low energy alternative to action it is the necessary prelude to knowing what is required of us, what to do, how to act. Listening is therefore a strategic form of patience, a way of waiting to hear the One who speaks, in their time…and having heard what is required is response. In hearing and responding life is transformed, we are in more sense than one converted, turned again to the ways of Christ.
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