Pentecost and Church of England schools

This is going to be a bit speculative as a blog post, but having given over three years’ thought to what the prophetic ministry of a church school might be, I have been thinking this week, following Pentecost, what the implications of the gift of the Holy Spirit might be for Church of England (CE) schools.

Because there has to be an implication, one at least of which being that without Pentecost and the events that followed, there would be no church, and thus no CE schools – or any Christian religious educational enterprises.

CE schools in their current form owe their foundation to Joshua Watson and the National Society in 1811, but prior to that they exist directly due to the willingness of YHWH, the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, to entrust a bunch of not-terribly-well-educated Jewish artisans and their womenfolk with the gift of His own presence in the form of the Holy Spirit.

And whilst we are keen to honour the “Christian foundation” of CE schools in such documents as the trust deed and the founding articles of the National Society, the real foundation and identity has to be here, in Jerusalem in 29 or 30 AD, where the full implications and equipping of the church were made manifest following the resurrection and ascension of Jesus the Messiah.

Hence, CE schools, like the church itself, have to sit under Peter’s preaching on that day, as recorded in Acts 2, and allow it to form us and challenge us. This is some of what he said:

Let me explain this to you; listen carefully to what I say…..this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel:

In the last days, God says,
    I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy,
    your young men will see visions,
    your old men will dream dreams.
Even on my servants, both men and women,
    I will pour out my Spirit in those days,
    and they will prophesy.
I will show wonders in the heavens above
    and signs on the earth below,
    blood and fire and billows of smoke.
The sun will be turned to darkness
    and the moon to blood
    before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord.
And everyone who calls
    on the name of the Lord will be saved.

Fellow Israelites, listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know. This man was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him. David said about him:

I saw the Lord always before me.
    Because he is at my right hand,
    I will not be shaken.
Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices;
    my body also will rest in hope,
because you will not abandon me to the realm of the dead,
    you will not let your holy one see decay.
You have made known to me the paths of life;
    you will fill me with joy in your presence.

Fellow Israelites, I can tell you confidently that the patriarch David died and was buried, and his tomb is here to this day. But he was a prophet and knew that God had promised him on oath that he would place one of his descendants on his throne. Seeing what was to come, he spoke of the resurrection of the Messiah, that he was not abandoned to the realm of the dead, nor did his body see decay. God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of it. Exalted to the right hand of God, he has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what you now see and hear. For David did not ascend to heaven, and yet he said,

The Lord said to my Lord:
    Sit at my right hand
until I make your enemies
    a footstool for your feet.

Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah

It is always worth reading this speech of Peter’s not just because of what it says, but also because of what it does not say. Right here at the start of the life of the church, there is little doctrine, nothing of the theological material that would later become a commonplace in the work of Paul.

Instead we get a narrative, linked deeply to Jewish experience and expectations, explaining the significance of three things: firstly the crazy events of that morning, secondly the death of Jesus Christ (note there is nothing here about Jesus “dying for us” or being “a personal saviour”) as a political and communal act at the heart of civic Jewish life, followed by the public resurrection of Jesus by YHWH before his ascension to YHWH. Essentially it is an explanatory news report: this is what you have seen today, this is what you will recall from the recent events in Jerusalem, this is what it means, and here’s the documentation to prove it. Laura Kuennsberg could not have done it better.

Evaluating it as narrative (rather than as doctrine or direction) is helpful. Certain things stand out as a result:

1. It is rooted in public historical events, that bore certain significance both to the speakers (the apostles) and to the hearers (the community of Jewish believers gathered for the feast). As one of the key historical documents of the early church, this speech is well-attested, and cannot be “spiritualised” or robbed of its historic significance.
2. The speech is situated in the narrative of the Jewish people: it is therefore both particular to the time, and through the impact on those who heard Peter and subsequently converted, it reaches out to those who need to remember the events it described. It has the same purpose and impact as, say, the Gettysburg Address had for the postbellum USA: something to refer back to as historical and real, yet an inspiration for an imagination of a greater future.
3. It situates the event within a prophetic narrative that derived from the 8th century prophets and David’s own prophetic gift, 1000 years earlier. There is no reason to think that this narrative is coming to an end.
4. It establishes Jesus as the Jewish Messiah unequivocally, and with it, the authority that God anointed the Messiah with: to rule over the enemies of God, and to be exalted to the right hand of God, His Father. That this political and kingly role is one of the very first attributes to be publicly spoken about Jesus after his ascension is significant. The first thing we know about Jesus in Acts is that he is Lord and King. Salvation, which follows immediately after Peter’s speech, in v.37-39, is driven in part by an awareness of the guilt in killing the Messiah and his subsequent resurrection and calling his people to account.
5. The gift of the Holy Spirit, given spectacularly to the apostles in the morning of that day, is promised to all who follow, thus sustaining the narrative. It thus becomes a narrative of the Holy Spirit, from the act of Creation and the guiding of the life of Israel through kings and prophets, through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, to this amazing Pentecost outpouring, and on into the future where this gift will have even more impact.

The thing about seeing this as narrative is that it is inclusive. A modernist evangelical approach, such as that of RA Torrey, author of What the Bible Teaches, situates truth as propositional. The structure of his work, and of those like him, is to use biblical quotations to erect and then defend a series of propositions. This can be helpful when asserting and defending doctrine, but as some recent struggles of church leaders have shown us, a doctrinal approach does not necessarily lead to a life of love and goodness, and ultimately it leaves us, as humans, outside of the story, clutching a clipboard or a concordance. The longing of God, in the story of Scripture, is to show us that we can be in this story too.

And this points to the kind of gospel narrative that church schools might usefully live out as a reflection of the prophetic yearning of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

To see themselves as part of an invitation to life, an invitation to their communities to learn about and to take their place in following Jesus as Messiah, seems to me merely a natural stance for Church of England schools. This invitation is to a discipleship, a following, of the resurrected Jesus Christ. It can’t be less than this, and might be more.

Howard Worsley writes of the liminal and narthical idea of CofE schools, that they form a sort of porchway into the church. This idea has been taken up by Ann Casson in her Faith in the Nexus report that came out in November last year. I quite like the architectural analogy, though I don’t think it fully sustains the sense of mission flowing into their community that churches mostly seek to own.

The Holy Spirit, being an outdoor type in the Scriptures (on the basis of quite a lot of New Testament evidence), might be expected to have a rich impact well beyond the door of the church. Either CofE schools are mission bearers on behalf of the church of God, or they are legitimate foci for the mission of the church. Either way the Holy Spirit will have a deep interest in what happens there, and we as Christians working in and around CofE schools, will have an expectation in faith that we might see the work of God made manifest, by the Holy Spirit, in ways both natural and supernatural.

This too has implications, of prayer, faith and expectation, of facilitating, explanation and articulation, and of publicising and teaching that the Holy Spirit is at work in and through us in our schools. And of watching and discerning together what it is that He is doing.