Journeying

Journeying

The thread of journeying, of people living away from their homeland, is a theme that runs through the Bible, in both the Old and New Testaments.

The story of the Prodigal Son that Jesus tells in Luke 15 about the younger brother who squanders his inheritance on wild living in a foreign country is an early example of men behaving badly away from home. Modern parallels might include drunken English football fans at away games or western sex tourists in south east Asia.

More positively, the Bible is full of people making journeys at God’s bidding.
The supreme example is the story of Abram in Genesis 12: a man who leaves behind his people and his culture and sets off to travel to an unknown destination. His only security on this journey into the unknown is God’s promise that God will go with him.

In spite of close Biblical connexion between God’s promise and the Promised Land:

* Joseph and his brothers find salvation in Egypt
* the people of Israel are renewed in exile in
modern-day Babylon
* the baby Jesus flees with parents to Egypt to escape Herod.

There is a strong tension in our Christian calling (cf the calling of Jeremiah in Jeremiah 1: 9-10). We are called to be rooted, to be secure in God’s love and provision for us; and at the same time we are uprooted, taught that our security does not lie in earthly possesions or familiar surroundings.

As Christians we are called to live in this world as aliens and exiles; or, in traditional biblical language, to live as sojourners, as people passing through to another place.For many of the people in the Lyon International Anglican Church. this is a richly resonant theme. Our prayer is that we may sense God’s presence even as we are away from home.


Chris Martin,
September 2009
Lyon International Anglican Church

Lyon International Anglican Church

English language services have been held in Lyon since 1843. In 1873, Holy Trinity was consecrated for use as a church building. Services were held there until 1969, when the building was sold and demolished. Since then the congregation has worshipped in a variety of centres. In December 2008 we moved to a delightful, modern chapel owned by French nuns, situated in the 7ème arrondissement, the proposed international pole of Lyon.

It would be easy to imagine the congregation as a small group of expatriates huddled together for common comfort, clinging on to the Book of Common Prayer and the Anglican church of their childhood. That may have been true once, when the church comprised a small number of long-term British expatriates, such as the bank manager and the Consul. Within memory of one of our members the church was recommended to a visitor as a place where he might meet “the better type of English person.”

But that cosy expatriate image, the Anglican church in pastoral mode but in a warmer climate, is long gone. In 2008 the church community was roughly 35% British by nationality, 25% French, and 15% Nigerian with another twenty nationalities on a Sunday morning. And card-carrying Anglicans are a small minority within the congregation.

The Lyon church remains an Engish-speaking ministry in a French-speaking city. But we are a multi-cultural, multi-confessional, highly transient community seeking to work alongside other French-language churches and to understand more clearly what our mission and priorities should be.

Chris Martin,
September 2009
Strangers in the City

Strangers in the City

How do we deal with strangers ? How do we deal with those people who are patently from a different culture and who speak a different language ? More revealingly, how do we deal with the ‘proximate’ other ? The person who is both quite like us and not like us ? The relationships between Jews and Samaritans, Glasgow Rangers and Glasgow Celtic, Lyonnais and Stéphanois illustrate the kind of tensions between near neighbours.

Dealing constructively with difference is the major question for our time, both for political and community leaders and for the mission of the church. In the past human differences were hidden by geographical distance or by religious and cultural imperialism. That is no longer true in the globalised city. “Encounters with diversity that were once the province of the missionary”, notes Herbert Anderson, a North American Catholic writer, “are now an irreversible fact of daily living for more and more people.”1

There is a growing recognition in Britain that what politicians called ‘multi-culturalism’ simply has not worked. Different ethnic communities and successive generations of immigrants preferred to create their own communities within the larger urban area, and to live within this self-created ghetto building relationships only with those like themselves.

Melanie Sandercock, the Australian sociologist, insists that fear of the Other is a significant factor in the globalised city. Against this, Herbert Anderson offers Jesus’ encounter with the Syro-Phoenician woman (Matthew 15: 21-28) as a Christian model; a constructive engagement with the other. We need to learn to honour difference without fear; to be open to what St Thérèse de Lisieux called ‘the evangelist’s gamble’, the notion of being transformed by the stranger. Offering hospitality to the stranger is a metaphor for the gospel, a reminder of the generosity of God, and a prelude to reconciliation. Hospitality, as Henri Nouwen teaches, is “the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend.”

Chris Martin,
September 2009
Tourists and Vagabonds

Tourists and Vagabonds

“Nowadays we are all on the move” declares Zygmunt Bauman, emeritus Professor of Sociology and prolific author.

As is frequently acknowledged, we live in a consumer society. Our primary role in society is as consumers. Consumerism encourages gratification; and stimulates restlessness. To be a consumer means to be a person on the move.

But not everyone can be a consumer; not everyone can be on the move. Mobility in our world is an elitist attribute. There is polarisation between:

* the first world: inhabited by global business-men, global managers, global academics. For them state borders have been levelled down; space is easily traversed; their lives involve frequent international travel.

* and a second world of the under-privileged: for whom walls are built of immigration controls, residence laws, of ‘clean streets’ and ‘zero tolerance’. For many of them mobility is an impossible dream.

Zygmunt Bauman postulates two categories of travellers:

* tourists: such as the international business-woman with three apartments, speaking five languages; enjoying a similar culture and experiences in different countries, and a kind of postmodern freedom

* vagabonds: habitually involuntary travellers; frequently forced to move on by an inhospitable world or a uniformed policeman; travelling because they have no other bearable choice.

Very challengingly the Lyon International Anglican Church deals with people from both camps:

* with high-flying business leaders and academics

* and with refugees; from Nepal, and Sudan, and above all Nigeria.

This mix of people is both a challenge and a blessing.

Chris Martin,
September 2009