Читать книгу Witness - The Faith and Order Commission - Страница 5

It is sometimes said that Church of England reports have a short shelf life, but for some of them the opposite is no less true: they end up sitting on a shelf, their spines gently fading, making no difference to anybody.

This report has a different purpose and we hope it will find a different use. It is intended to offer a picture of the great joy of Christian witness in the world, to help readers imagine how they and their churches might witness more richly, and to inspire readers to put what they have imagined into action. Read it, yes, but read it with intention, asking, ‘How are we going to respond to this?’

To help you address that question, at the end of each of the three Parts that follow you will find some material for discussion and reflection. It includes invitations to ‘immerse’, ‘inhabit’, ‘imagine’ and ‘experiment’. You could use it to help you as an individual to digest what you’re reading as you go along. This is not simply a report for individual readers, however. It is also one for church communities. Witness is not something that we do in isolation from others, and the case studies in Part 2 show how, in their very different contexts, a wide range of church communities are seeking to be God’s witnesses together. We therefore hope that you might want to study this report together with others, perhaps in your own church, or as a PCC, or with people from other churches. You could use it as the basis for three separate, shorter sessions or tackle the material from all three Parts in a single day.

At the end, you’ll find an invitation to share what you’ve learnt more widely. We want to hear from you, and to be able to share more stories of the different forms that witness takes around the church. We want what we have written here to be the nucleus of something that grows – not simply another report gathering dust on a shelf.