Contextual theology: Grounding our responses in reflective practice

Let’s do theology!
I remember at theological college doing the module preparing us for our parish placements, top of the ‘core texts’ list was Laurie Green’s ‘Let’s do theology’(1). I groaned. I already had a theology degree, I had read Augustine, Aquinas and Barth. Why did I need to read this book?

The truth is, I wished I had read the book at the start of my undergraduate degree a number of years previously, because it removed the idea of theology as a dusty, dry academic subject and brought it alive as a dynamic adventure that accompanies and informs our worship, prayer lives, activity and mission.

Experience, Explore, Reflect, Respond
At the heart of this book, which was originally written in 1989 and revised in 2009, is what Green calls his ‘doing theology spiral’. This reflective practice starts with our experience, an encounter that we have, perhaps with someone in our community who is experiencing loneliness or is struggling to buy food. We then move to explore this in more depth, analysing the situation and looking at how our Christian faith relates to the experience. The third stage of the spiral is reflection. How do we pray about the experience that we have had, how do we spend time reflecting and discerning what our Christian faith says about the experience and how we might be called to get involved. Finally we move to responding. We can’t just stay in the reflecting stage, we are called to have an apostolic faith, a faith that springs forward. The letter of James says ‘do what the word tells you and don’t just listen to it’ (James 1.22). In the light of exploration, prayer and reflection – how does God want us to respond?

For Green, this is process is a spiral, not a linear experience. Our responding will lead us to experiencing the original circumstances in a new way, which will lead us to re-thinking our exploration, reflection and responding. Or is may be that the responding leads us to a new situation with new experiences and the spiral starts again.

It is tempting to skip the steps in the spiral, to leap from experience to responding. But we need those steps of exploration and reflection, otherwise how can we be sure that our response is authentically Christian or flows out of discernment of what God is asking of us. It is also easy to get stuck in one of those phases, perhaps over analysing and not moving forwards.

God’s dynamic mission
We believe in and worship a dynamic God. The Trinity is all about dynamism and relationship. We believe in a God who is interested and active in our contexts – the places where we live and work and the people around us - and if God is interested in our contexts then so should we be. We believe in a God who took on flesh at a particular time and place, he pitched his tent among us, Emmanuel – God with us.

Our theology, our mission action plans, our schemes of work for social action and social justice shouldn’t be dry, academic exercises that we dust off occasionally to show the Archdeacon. But they should be rooted in the experience of our communities, explored through the scriptures and theology, and emerge from our lives of worship, prayer and practice, seeking to discern God’s will and wisdom.

That often used phrase attributed to Bishop Rowan Williams about ‘finding out what God is doing and joining in’, roots our prayer and praise in our context and gives our theology and missiology a dynamism focused on the apostolic faith.

CUF’s Look Up Tool, and other resources such as Growing Good, can be a key part of helping churches gain a deeper understanding of the context in which they are ministering. Gathering data and exploring the experiences of people in our churches and communities can inform our prayers and lead us into the responses that God is wanting us to make as we work with him to bring about the fulness of life that he longs to give each and every person.