Abstract
This is a delightful collection of writings by Bob Jeffery, former Dean of Worcester, parish priest, ecumenist, member of the Standing Committee of the Church of England’s General Synod, contributor to the Expository Times, raconteur, cook and family man. He was, as shines through the sermons, papers and addresses collected here, imbued with a spirit of liberality, profoundly interested in the world in which he lived, whether this was the Sunderland parish where he served his first curacy, or the world of Worcester Cathedral, or the parish of Tong in Shropshire, where he was based as Archdeacon, whose history he wrote and where he is buried.
That liberality of spirit is grounded in a deep faith and belief in our shared humanity which finds its exemplary expression in Jesus. As Jeffery had wanted to tell a meeting at the Tory Party Conference in Blackpool, the year after the IRA attack on the Brighton Conference: Man is made in the image of God, so man owes everything to God and finds his significance in God. The obligations of citizenship are part of our discipleship. To say that everything belongs to God radically changes the way we look at the world. As Christians we believe that the nature of God is most fully revealed in Jesus, so that the nature of humanity is best expressed in the person of Jesus. This means that the closer we become to Jesus, the closer we come to our real nature. That is the fundamental motive for the imitation of Christ and for our Christian discipleship’ (pp. 51-52).
That humanity is corporate, not individualistic. He was unfortunately prevented from giving the address (as his short piece on Kafka in Blackpool explains) by the very elaborate security procedures in place at the Conference. It’s a shame: he would have told them a good deal: ‘I do not believe that I can opt for private schooling or private medicine unless that is a real choice for everyone and while it is only an option for 10% of the population, I have no moral right to follow that path.’ He emphasises the contractual nature of morality. What, he asks, ‘is the morality of building up an economy by encouraging the arms trade?’ He tells of his visit to squatter camps in South Africa. ‘It is profoundly unjust but it is really only a picture of the whole world. We are in relation to the rest of the world like the dominating whites in South Africa’ (p. 56).
This deep engagement with political and social issues was without doubt inspired by his life-long attachment to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The latter’s Letters and Papers from Prison and Life Together inform much of what we read. Christian discipleship must lead to engagement with the world. This is not to say that it is all about politics. The church needs to be both a community which is there for others and also a place where disciples can stand back from their engagement to find perspective and balance. Bonhoeffer’s time at Finkenwalde with ministerial candidates is a model of retreat and reflection. For Jeffery the religionless Christianity which Bonhoeffer advocated was not simply a form of activism. ‘We will see the world far more clearly when we look at it from inside the Church, and we see the Church more clearly when we look at it from our place in the world. We will see ourselves more clearly when we look at God, and God more clearly from our knowledge of ourselves.’ (p. 5).
What he criticises under the phrase ‘religionless Christianity’ are forms of prayer and church life which lead to an inward-looking church, where prayer is in danger ‘of becoming an escape, rather than a withdrawal’, where it becomes ‘a form of self-satisfaction rather than an inspiration for living.’ (p. 5). As many of the addresses and sermons make clear, he was someone who gave huge amounts of his time and energy to the management and ordering of the church (a nicely reasoned piece on church pews and their removal), to the restoration of Worcester Cathedral, to the business of General Synod, to ecumenical dialogue, but he did so in order to make the church more open to the world, more aware of its own standing – or lack of standing, of the need for greater openness, of the need for prayer and reflection in order that Church might draw on its real resources for its own transformation. This will require rigorous thought and the willingness to explore the theological tradition and to find new ways of formulating our faith. ‘This we can only do through our own encounter with the Christ of the Gospels, and our common life in Him [again the echoes of Bonhoeffer’s Life Together]. That is why the search for new expressions of the faith is an essential part of Christian living. For most of us this will not be in theological formulae – but in asking ourselves what is the best way to express our faith in life and in the world today.’ And he adds, crucially for his own mixture of strong faith and humility: ‘But just because faith is not knowledge, and because faith and doubt go together, that expression can never be authoritarian and arrogant. To say “I believe” expresses a humility before the mystery of God’ (p. 9).
These reflections on prayer and belief are taken from the ‘60s and ‘70s. There is in his later writing a growing frustration with an over-confident but inward-looking conservative Christianity, which does not have the courage to rethink and formulate its faith, which thinks it has a firm grasp on faith and is neither open to change nor to the workings of the Spirit. In an important piece entitled ‘The Time of Religionless Christianity has come’, referring to Bonhoeffer’s notion of ‘Jesus Christ, the man for others’, he writes: As Christ died for us, so we, both as individuals and as a Church, must live for others. There can be no sense of Church living to itself or seeking self-preservation. That is what I see around me today, expressed in phrases like ‘a mission-shaped Church’ or ‘fresh expressions’ which seem to me simply devices to preserve the institution. No; whoever will save his life must lose it.’
Such a church requires its own special discipline (what Bonhoeffer calls a disciplina arcana), ‘people sharing their own and each other’s faith through prayer, common worship, meditation and confession. … It is through its discipline that the Church engages with the God who lies at the heart of all things’ (p. 77).
That last phrase, the God who lies at the heart of all things, says much about what lies at the heart of Bob Jeffery’s life and ministry. Religion for him is not about an exclusive relationship between the believer and God, between an alone and an Alone, but rather between the believer and the One who is the heart of the world, whose care and love is for all. It is with a God, whom we come to know through Jesus Christ, who became poor that many may become rich, who poured out his life for the world. A Church which worships such a God has to be open to the world, at the service of the world, ready to be transformed in that service. There is much we need to learn from this wise counsellor.