Hope for the Community: the Promise of Anglican Schools

Archbishop Peter Jensen | 16 September 2006

Font size: + - | print | email to a friend

The key-note address delivered by Dr Peter Jensen, Archbishop of Sydney at the meeting of the National Anglican Schools Network at Shore School, Sydney on Friday 15th September, 2006.

‘Hope’ and ‘Promise’ are great words to bring together. A life without hope, a ‘hopeless’ life is misery despair and decay. To be deprived of food kills the body; to be deprived of hope slays the soul – it is hard to tell which is the more deadly.

And promises…what can we say about promises? Promises always look to the future; you cannot have backward-looking promise. Promises create hope: that’s what they are really good at doing. When you have promises in your life, you have hope.

Why does hope matter so much? Because we are prisoners of time, captured by a present moment that always seems so important but which we can never prolong or retain. Hope is one of those magical human capacities like memory and imagination which allows us to transcend time and dwell for a little space in another time where we may rather be. Hope feeds the soul.

Of course the hope must be a good one. The hope must be worth having. And it is much better if it is a realistic hope. Indeed that’s one of the funny things about promises. They are only worth as much as the person who makes the promise. It is no good resting your hopes on the word of a liar. It is no good believing that an empty cloud will deliver rain. Indeed the best hope of all comes because you know that you can trust people, you can rely on them, you can have faith in them. In fact it is when the people who care most about you, promise you that they will sustain, bless and protect you and look after your best interests come what may. Hope comes from good relationships; indeed hope comes walks hand in hand with love.

Promises and the hopes that are built on them give purpose and meaning to life. Imagine being marooned and lost. You see a light flashing; you may simply conclude that it is a naturally flashing light with no significance. But if you recognise that the flashes represent a message, that the message has a significance, then you have meaning. And if the message is a word of promise that you will be saved, you have hope which gives a purpose to your life.

And that is exactly what we are finding so hard to give today’s children. They have food and material possessions in abundance. But at the level of spirit, at the level of hope and so meaning and purpose, these things are in short supply. Adults have found that promises are hard to keep; that relationships are hard to sustain; that time is hard to find; that love which is actually other-person centred is elusive. Where adults fail in these key relationships and manner of operating, children suffer.

The spirit of the age distorts child-raising. It is not as though most parents have suddenly become unloving or neglectful. It is just that we have forgotten some of the basic arts of raising children. No doubt you saw reference to an alarmed letter signed by 110 experts in childhood which appeared in the UK Telegraph this week. It is headed ‘Modern life leads to more depression among children’. They refer to ‘the escalating incidence of childhood depression and children’s behavioural and developmental conditions.’ They point out that in treating children as little adults we are compromising their development: ‘They still need what developing human beings have always needed, including real food (as opposed to processed “junk”), real play (as opposed to sedentary screen-based entertainment), first hand experience of the world they live in and regular interaction with the real-life significant adults in their lives.’ (Telegraph, UK 14/9/06).

I have no doubt that as educators you are fully capable of filling in these remarks with your own observations. I have talked to a number of you and I know how concerned you are about numbers of the students at our schools. I know also, that schools are being called on more and more to fill in the gaps and to provide what homes no longer seem able to provide. The intense individualism of our age is destroying relationships and the nourishment we draw from them. We have a serious hope deficit and an equally serious love deficit, and our students are suffering as a result. Can an Anglican school help the local community?

Let me be more specific. I am sure that many schools do much good; what is it that Anglican schools will deliver? What will make Anglican Schools more than empty clouds in a parched land? What is it which will enable us to address the problem of the community, of a shortage of hope and the decline of the quality of relationships? How are we going to help the students, the alumni, the parents, the local community?

I believe that it will be by teaching, modelling and experiencing the classic Christian virtues, faith, hope and love.

Faith
Anglican schools come in all shapes and sizes, but there needs to be a core commitment to faith. Now you can’t just manufacture faith; you can’t declare that this is a ‘faith, hope and love school’; you can’t acquire it by declaration. Think again of promises. You receive a promise by faith; the promise creates the faith, although sometimes a promise creates scepticism, depending on who is making the promise!

The Bible says, ‘faith comes by hearing the message’ (Romans 10:17). When we hear the message about Jesus, faith is proper response. We don’t strain and stretch to have faith, as though it is something we have to manufacture. Faith is the easy bit; attaching our trust to the right message in the right way is more difficult. It’s important, though, because the Bible also promises: ‘Anyone who trusts in him will never be put to shame’ (Rom 10:11).

I’ve talked about faith, but actually there is two sides to this. There is ‘faith’ and there is ‘the faith’. ‘The faith’ is the content; it is the indispensable teaching about God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit and us and the world; if you like, it is ‘the message’. Faith occurs when I believe the message and entrust myself to it. There is no short cut here. There is such a thing as doctrinal Christianity: indeed it is the only Christianity there is: indeed it is the only Christianity there is.

If we want to see faith come into existence and blossom and flourish, we need to send the message. I am not talking here about any old faith; we can have faith, we do have faith in all sorts of things. We could not survive in the world without faith. I am talking here about faith in Jesus Christ, faith that is shaped by, is founded on the message about Jesus, the faith that takes him at his word and trusts him. That’s faith.

Now the birth of faith, especially adolescent faith, can be a very disturbing matter. It disturbs families, it disturbs churches, it disturbs schools. It can be loud, noisy, enthusiastic, ill-mannered, excited, engrossing, aggressive, judgemental. For that reason we do not always welcome it; indeed we take steps to make sure that it does not happen too often in our schools – for a start we do not want to frighten the parents. A little bit of religion is genteel; too much is alarming. No one could say that we are against faith: we just don’t want it to come to birth too frequently in ways which make a noise.

Now all sorts of babies are born into this world and there are all sorts of ways of expressing faith. But if Anglican schools cannot encourage and cope with the noisy ones, I don’t know why we exist. After all, we do understand when students fall in love – with other students, with teachers, with sport, wit poetry, even with their studies. We understand the madness of a passion awakened and we even think that such disturbances are actually good for a school. Some faith expresses itself with the quietness of the dawn over a flat sea; other faith expresses itself with the tumult of a storm. Neither sort will exist if we do not teach the faith and model faith and welcome faith in the school community.

If we think that it is essential to the true ethos of Anglican schools that we teach students to be respectable and to have a conventional religion, I think we have missed our calling and we will not fulfil our role in the community. The community itself is spiritually so hungry and thirsty; the community is so gripped by materialism and the false promises of the shopping mall, that is has become desperate for spiritual experience. There are plenty of pseudo- experiences on offer; why should we not foster true faith by teaching the faith? Why should not we Anglicans regain confidence God, and let it be known?

Well I’ll tell you one reason why: fear of fundamentalism. Or to be more precise, fear of being regarded as a fundamentalist. Amongst the many spiritual experiences on offer there are varieties of Christian experience which we would label, rightly or not, ‘fundamentalism’. We fear it because of its enthusiasm; we fear it because of its certainties; we fear it because of its anti-intellectualism; we fear it because of its politics; we fear it because of its violence; we fear it because of its outdated social mores; we fear it because of its success; we fear it because it is so opposed to the culture in which we live and move and have our being.

Thus in education we fear lest a fundamentalist approach may lead us into creation science and intelligent design; or it may leave us insisting that there is a Christian maths and a religious way to teach French; or so narrow a way of living in the world that there will be no contact with out own culture. But an Anglicanism confident of its own credentials does not have to fear fundamentalism. On the other hand, it does have to be confident in what the Bible calls. ‘the faith once for all delivered to the saints’ (Jude 3).

All this fear has done us little good. Leaving aside the caricature of fundamentalism which our fears have created, instead of doing better, there has been an over-reaction. It is as though having no theology at all is a better way of being Christian and Anglican than having an over-confident theology; as though having a quiet and objective spirituality is better than allowing the wind of the Spirit to stir our hearts and emotions. We so prefer ‘cool’ that we have become frigid. But I believe that there is a better way for Anglicans and a better model for our communities.

We have a great resource in the Bible itself and its attitude to the created world. I am no expert on scientific matters and do not believe that I have to arbitrate in this area. The Bible does not teach us science; more importantly, it lays the groundwork for science. Our doctrine of creation teaches us that the one God made the world and everything in it and that he continues to rule over it in a faithful and consistent manner. He made it through his Son the Logos, or Word of God. He declared it to be ‘good, very good.’

It is his ongoing, positive and intimate involvement with the world which sets us free us to look at it objectively. Many accounts of the world see it as filled with different spirits, competing with each other; the business of religion is to put you in touch with the right spirit. But in the Biblical account we are dealing with one will that is ruling the world consistently and faithfully. We can assume that one Will, and begin to study the world in its own terms rather than as a place of competing Wills. In other words the Biblical religion sets you free from religion by faith and for faith. It enables you so to set God at the centre of everything that we need not fear the exploration of anything – except what he forbids.

Now there is much to think of here. This is not the time or place to pursue it further. What I am trying to indicate is that the answer to poor theology is not no theology at all: it is better theology. It s a theology which enables us to recognise and embrace the wonder of the creation on its own terms by also recognising that it also expresses and manifests the glory of God. It offers us a way of putting God at the centre of Anglican education without feeling that we are somehow capitulating to barbarians. Furthermore, by speaking so powerfully about the preciousness of the human person and yet the deep sinfulness of the human person as well, it offers us a way of being positive to human culture without being deceived by it.

Hope
There is, of course, no possible account of Anglicanism which does not centre on Jesus Christ. Without him there is absolutely no point in being Anglican or running such schools! That is to state the obvious.

But what impact does he have on our education and our schools? This is an all the more vital question if we consider that our schools are to be light and salt, influencing students, old students, parents and the local community.

The chief theme of the words and deeds of Jesus was the kingdom of God. He announced that the coming of God’s kingdom was at hand and that we should get ready for it through repentance and faith. That was his message and it became the message of the apostles too, though they preached it in terms of his Lordship, for they found that the kingdom of God came into human history through the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus. The coming of the kingdom, then, was to be in two stages: the first and the second coming of Jesus Christ. It means that we are located in the history of the world between the first and second comings of Christ.

Thus great truth of history enables us to get our bearings at any point in history. We can look back and we can look forward. What we see behind us determines what we will see in due course, what we can see before us. This world will not last forever; it is due for an end; the end is an End, a purposive conclusion, not merely a whimper and an extinction. The pain and suffering of this world is not the last word; death is the last enemy, but it is due for destruction. Our true freedom is not infinite choice and five star holidays, but the freedom of finding and following God, the real centre of human existence.

All this creates our hope. As we look back to Jesus Christ we see the one who fulfilled the Old Testament promises of God and who made deep and true promises of his own. As his promises create faith in us, so they create hope. This hope is so powerful that it cheers the lonely, steels the sufferer, holds the dying, assures the guilty of forgiveness. More than that, hope fir the future fills the present with meaning and purpose: it feeds the very hungers of modern people; it supplies the very thing which they so clearly lack. In a world which has no ‘big story’ into which our lives may be fitted, here is the last and greatest true story, the story beyond the Lord of the Rings, if you like.

Relativism in ethics is part of that which has robbed our communities of the sense of meaning. We have been given nothing with which to discriminate, to distinguish truth from error, right from wrong. The mere reiteration of rules does not help create a moral sense; talk of values seems only to allow us to be the measure of our own lives; the pictures we paint of what our students will do with their success in the world sometimes seems reminiscent of the paganism of ancient Rome. The coming of the Kingdom of God in Jesus Christ and its consummation in his return, provide the fixed points, the absolutes by which our experience may be analysed and assessed. In the End that lies ahead, there will be a judgement and the demonic spirit which is relativism will be forced to yield to the truth.

Jesus’ talk of the coming kingdom means that Christianity is about more than individual salvation, though it is a religion of the salvation of individuals. Its real End is the destruction of evil and the coming of justice and peace; and the End for us is community. Christianity is not a solitary religion; you do not become a Christian to enjoy a life of lonely spirituality. Christian faith joins you to your fellow-believers and it turns you to the world and the service of the world.

That is why Christian hope is not quietistic; it is not passive and other-worldly; or, to put it differently; it is this worldly precisely because it is other-worldly. Hope for the future fills the present with meaning and purpose, and gives you endurance to keep serving your community. One of the greatest gifts we could give our communities would be Anglican students alive with hope for the coming of the kingdom of God, instead of ambitious for the false values of prestige, professional fame, power and money. Of course, they may not be attractive conformists and malleable citizens.

Love
According to Hugh Mackay, the true values of the Australian community have become materialism, pragmatism and nationalism. You could say that materialism is the all-consuming love of money and the things which money can buy, pragmatism is the attempt to measure the truth of things by asking merely ‘does it work?’, and nationalism is the worship of the tribe, the vail-glorious pride in a people. He is surely not far wrong. Here is a new trinity. The promise of Anglican schools will be measured by whether we endorse this trinity, or the actual Trinity, the real Trinity, God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. If we worship God, the results will be seen in our commitment to truth, to justice and to love.

If we worship the false God we will glory in the material and professional successes of our students. Let me put the question in a stark way: would you be happy for your students to be prison officers, knowing how important it is that we have prison officers with a keen sense of love and justice? Is that an ambition which you would never endorse for your students? Why not? Could they do the job well, knowing how important it is?

The Bible tells us that God is love. First and foremost, in himself, God is love. We do not worship a unitary God, a lonely monad; we worship the one God in three persons, a God whose splendour it is to be love from all eternity. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity is not an embarrassing appendage to the faith; it is of the very essence of the faith. It shapes our faith, and hence shapes our conduct, the way we treat others. The Bible tells us that ‘This is love not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.’

In other words, the very test of what love is, is the love of God. And the love of God has been demonstrated in a mighty and decisive way among us by incarnation and especially by the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ for us. It is not as though the death of Christ was for the lovable; it was a gracious act on behalf of a fallen and rebellious race. As the Christian faith is taught and experienced in the school in word and sacrament and in the lives of those who know the love of God, it will look like this.

‘We love because he first loved us’, says the Bible. Love awakens when it becomes aware that it is the object of love. We love our parents because they first loved us; that is, the family is the fundamental place where the lessons of love are taught. The unloved person finds love so hard. Humanly speaking there are unloved persons, even from families which may appear to be marvellously put together. But the message we have is this; at the very heart of things there is a love that has demonstrated itself by sacrifice for the unlovely. Not even God is love; rather God has loved, and so God is love.

An Anglican school. With a commitment to the Trinity, to the Biblical God, is a school which also has a commitment to such love; ‘Dear friends, because God so loved us, we ought to love one another’. Is this love ‘unconditional’? Yes, in the sense that it is prior; it initiates a relationship with those who are unworthy, undeserving of love. But no, if by that we mean it expects nothing out of the relationship. For the love of God is transformative; if we truly grasp its immensity and its focus and its cost, we cannot be left as we are. To put it another way, our love for God and for one another is our mark of our understanding of the love of God.
And that is where justice comes in. Love is of the emotions, of the heart, but it is not merely emotional. You do not know God’s forgiveness if you do not forgive others. You do not know the love of God if you do not love others. A fundamental part of this love for others, and immensely important in any community whether school or home, is fairness, consistency, justice, a right and proper discipline. If your community, your school does not exhibit justice in its dealing with people, it has failed one of the key tests of Christian love. But we will serve and exhibit the love of God if we are just, for God is just in his dealings with us. A just love does not ignore the need for repentance. Love expects transformation for our sake.

God’s love is for the whole world, not merely for our tribe or our nation or our section of the human race. Knowing the love of God should force us away from an ugly and superficial nationalism and remind us that we are citizens of the world, with responsibilities which go far beyond our family, our school or even our nation. It is the love of God which makes us care for the Sudanese refugees in Cairo and the dwellers in the slums in Nairobi and the blind in Afghanistan. The promise of an Anglican school is fulfilled when its graduates have a compassion for all people.

Conclusion
The Australian trinity; materialism, pragmatism, nationalism. What strikes me is how ugly this trinity is and how much misery, sterility and heartache it brings. It is not a question; it is a fact that we are suffering from this worship, and that our children are in the front-line of the pain. In the midst of this, what is the promise of the Anglican school.

A school is not a church and ought not to think that it is. Nor is a school a family. But such is the power of individualism in our culture that the very clubs, societies and gatherings which have helped sustain community and relationships are struggling to survive. Churches and families have been the very backbone of the community. Now they too are threatened, and the culture which they used to transmit and confirm is struggling to re-establish itself in this generation. But schools are still visible and still respected and still touch countless lives. In this context, the Anglican school has an essential role to play in supporting families and churches by telling the same story, by providing something of what is lacking in the experience of those for whom church is completely unknown. It can reach out in pastoral care to former students; it can help the community around it simply by being Christian in a truly Anglican way. The promise of Anglican schools is to bring hope.

Are we going to be full of promise without delivery? If we fulfil the caricature of Anglicanism as a rather respectable, tepid, safe church with ineffectual leadership, captive to its middle-class culture, without any inconvenient theology, then yes, we will be empty clouds in a barren land. But this is not genuine Anglicanism. We have so much more to offer than that. Our task is to be confident in the gospel of Jesus Christ and to put it into practice. In this way we will be salt and light, we will communicate hope in a world which is increasingly without God and without hope.