Surfanthood: Learning to Serve by Learning to Surf

Preface

It is important at the outset for me to make something clear about myself: I am no expert — neither in surfing, nor in ministry. There those who train ministers, who speak at conferences and who write books — I am not one of them. I have learned a great deal from them and am deeply grateful to them. But if I am honest, it is infrequently that I can see my experiences in theirs. My hope is that you may resonate with what you read here; that this will be a place to find and recognise your own experiences and that I may offer language to them or gift you some means of understanding them.

Over the past 8 years I have been inspired by many stories of hope; events and people that have been personal to me, those that have been reported to me from friends and those I have read or heard about within various Christian media. And within the stories I found most compelling I began to see some patterns or repeated aspects that I have come to recognise as servanthood.

These inspiring stories include figures such as Mother Teresa or Paulo Freire; projects (for want of a much better word) such as Homeboy Industries or The Simple Way, writers such as Samuel Wells and Richard Rohr, scholars such as Walter Brueggemann and Tom Wright, activists such as Alastair McIntosh and Martin Newell. Within their stories, I have come to see a vision of the church that is beautiful and compelling but sadly unfamiliar to me as I embarked on my journey into ministry.

These stories have continued to make me profoundly hopeful about the future of the church, now more than ever in fact. But this hope comes from hearing, engaging with and participating in the intense labour of criticism that precedes every revolution¹. I am hopeful not because the evidence particularly points towards a better future but because these stories are creating new possibilities, opening, and stretching the imagination of the church.

I am saddened that colleagues and partners-in-crime have left ministry in the years I have served. The rate of drop out, burn out or fade out is troubling. Serving God is life giving, beautiful and exciting. It is joy itself. And yet there have been moments of significant frustration and grief in just my short ministry. And I have met others in ministry who have been deeply embittered, resentful and in pain. Because we are not doing it right. The shape of what we are doing is not right. The solid, heavy, and large preconceptions about ministry obscure a clear and simple message in Jesus’ teaching; that we are to be servants.

I write this after 8 years of full-time ministry, preceded by 4 part-time. I write it now before I forget my experiences. I write it as the transformation of our reality takes another lurching step onward during the COVID-19 pandemic. I write it now because I cannot go surfing, and so the time I would dedicate to that has been dedicated to finally writing down the insights I have gained about serving from the experiences I have had surfing.

These ideas are directed to anyone who has heard the call to any ministry; full-time or part time, voluntary or paid, within a church setting or ministering in other places such as schools, hospitals, local communities etc. It is directed towards those who have recently begun, towards those who are in the midst and towards those who are close to leaving. But I write it so that leaders and decision makers in our denominations, movements and organisations may listen in as well. So that perhaps together we can alter the shape of what we are doing to more adequately reflect what Jesus asks of us.

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. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks,

12

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Introduction

For me there has always been a deep connection between my experience of God and my experience of nature. Even from within a church that starkly overlooked this, discovering God in nature was what fed my faith for many of my early years. When I first began full-time ministry I was in the fortunate position to be close to one of the more beautiful surfing beaches in Britain. Surfing became the centre of my rhythm of spiritual disciplines — offering me silence, solitude, contemplation, repetitive prayer. Each Monday morning I scheduled a board meeting in my diary. Parallels quickly began to emerge between what I experienced in the water and what I was experiencing in my ministry. A simple but profound analogy presented itself that has remained with me and developed since. Almost every time I enter the water I am taken into a new insight within the analogy which has provided the content for this book.

The analogy goes like this:

The waves are God’s activity in the world.

The surfer is us.

The board is our activity/ministry/service.

This analogy has made increasing sense to me.

The sea is an awesome and generous reality for surfers, offering so much peace and joy whilst simultaneously ferocious and powerful. It is dynamic, generative, constant but not consistent, beautiful but unknowable.

Boards are personal to a surfer; almost no two boards are the same and the link between surfer and surfboard becomes a deep one. Like our boards, activities become personal to us; they feel like part of us. In ways they describe and define who we are.

At best our activities, and boards, join with God’s activity, the waves, to create something joyful, wondrous, and exciting. We submit to the wave and experience something beautiful. At worst we can wrestle and struggle becoming increasingly tired, frustrated and pained by what is happening until eventually the inevitable occurs; we get really hurt or we get out.

This simple analogy will flow through the book — waves, surfer, surfboard — paralleling God, us, and ministry in a journey of learning a new way of being.

Because we need to learn a new way.

The old ways are done. Most of the activity of those in ministry is orientated around a paradigm that has been steadily slipping away for decades. The skills of congregational maintenance and leadership will not be needed by many in the future as slowly our entanglements with the empire are severed and the last remnants and recapitulations of Christendom fall away. We are not ready for the reality before us. Few can imagine Christian ministry beyond what they have known and seen. Many will say we were better off before, at least we had shelter and food to eat

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. But we cannot go back. It is going to be difficult to learn — just like learning to surf.

Whilst I have been encouraged by so many examples of radical faith, extreme love, and profound hopefulness these seem inaccessible to those of us within institutional churches. Do we just leave? Many have, and perhaps this is the way forward. But we must be people who believe in redemption surely. Jesus body was resurrected, and so must the pattern be that the Church dies to itself to find new life?

I should expand this just a little further. It is well-acknowledged that we are in the midst of one of those periods in history when everything is shaken up. It has been described in many ways, but I think my favourite is the rummage sale

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— everything is up for critique, renegotiation, and rejection. For some time now, within the Western church, the priority has been on particular models and paradigms of leadership that seem heavily influenced by the corporate and commercial world. There have been large global conferences dedicated to it, plenty of books, there are speakers, training schools, courses — a whole industry has been growing to peddle Christian Leadership. This hermeneutic has been applied to Scripture and has widely been accepted. Leadership has saturated our imagination, permeated our minds so fully that it is the default of most. Yet it seems to relegate a key message of Jesus; that the Son of Man came to serve, that the greatest is the one who serves

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; that it is in servanthood we must find our pattern for living.

Within this rummage sale it can be easy to appear dismissive or overly critical of what has come before: the analogy bears out as we can all imagine a treasured family heirloom being sold for pennies if not properly valued by the seller. However, someone must have the courage to put it on the table in the first place: To inspect it and appraise it. It is good for us to read the edifying of the academic or the comfort or challenge of the pastoral; but there are rarely books that ask us to listen to the disquieting voice of the prophetic: Voices that force us to put things on the table and really scrutinise what they mean to us. And, to depart from the analogy, imagine what could be instead.

No change comes from a just a single voice. There is always a plurality of voices that shape new things and I do not anticipate what I am outlining here to form a new orthodoxy or a new paradigm. Instead, I am hoping to add the voices that are naming what has been with increasing accuracy and nuance and who can see something new coming that they are beginning to describe. I suspect that those who have thrived in what has been will be uncomfortable; those who have enjoyed the congregational focus of the passing paradigm will feel deeply uneasy about welcoming a new one. But we must allow ourselves to be disturbed; to treasure the disquieting so that we may re-find peace. That seems to me one of the important roles of the Psalms

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. And it is ok if you are unpersuaded at the end; it is not my intention to recruit, merely to offer some thoughts.

Using Luke’s gospel as a guide, we will look at what servanthood may mean in our context; reflecting on the process of learning to surf/serve to help us understand experiences and imagine how servanthood can inform and shape us.

Why Luke’s gospel?

Before answering this I must first acknowledge that I am reading Luke, within this book, in a way that draws out that which I believe is there. I read it in a way as to interpret the actions and dialogue within the Gospel, as well as Luke’s sophisticated constructions of the Gospel, in the light — or through the lens — of Surfanthood; it is the hermeneutic in play here. At points this may seem to stretch or manipulate Scripture to some readers. However, it is important to note that we all bring a hermeneutic to Scripture, we all read it through a particular lens. We do well to acknowledge and explore our lens, even deconstructing it entirely to assess its validity. But we must be very wary of those who claim that they just read the Bible; those who are unaware, or even in denial, that they bring much cultural, social, philosophical, political, and emotional material to bear when they are reading and interpreting Scripture. At best they can be poor conversation partners, at worst they can be quite dangerous people.

The Gospel of Luke is written to a broader audience than the other synoptic gospels. Whilst addressed to Theophilus, who is probably a fictive character, Luke writes generally to those members of the Way, Theophilus meaning Lover of God, who were spread over eastern Asia and southern Europe by the time of Luke’s composition. These small groups were being systematically uprooted during the period Luke writes. The Pharisees, now the default leaders of the Jewish people after the destruction of the Temple, were tightening the boundaries of their tribe. Those Jews who believed the Messiah was still to come were the faithful and could remain, but this strange new sect of Jews who were including Gentiles and declaring the Messiah had come in the person of Jesus had to go. They were a liability and threat to the whole community.

So Luke’s audience suddenly found themselves on the outside of the community; viewed with suspicion and distain whilst still they were seeking to be faithful to Jesus’ teaching and develop in their vocation as his followers. I need not labour this point but there are many who will feel a strong resonance with this feeling today: Those who have followed Jesus outside of their tribe, beyond the orthodoxies of their kin and found themselves viewed with similar suspicion and even, perhaps, distain. Luke writes to make those early followers, and those who share that experience today, aware that they are included in something new and that there is a way Jesus set out by which they can find peace with what has passed and joy in what is to come.

Collectively the Gospels address four key questions about being human. Matthew’s gospel equips the reader to face change: Written primarily to a Jewish audience Matthew is littered with overt references to Scripture and works hard to bridge the gap between traditional Israelite faith and the belief that Israel’s story had reached its fulfilment in Jesus. Mark’s gospel supports the reader as they endure suffering: Written after the destruction of the Temple and to followers of Jesus facing persecution within Roman contexts Mark dedicates almost half of his swift and concise Gospel to the Passion narrative. John’s gospel opens the reader to experience joy: Written last and very differently to the other Gospels John’s use of feasts, gardens, poetry, and symbolism constructs a beautiful gospel entreating its reader to rest in joy and peace. And Luke’s equips the reader to mature through service

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Often, when beginning any Christian ministry, we are directed straight to Paul and his letters, or to Moses and his leadership. Sadly, we have coloured Paul’s letters so heavily with imposed meanings and shallow understandings of prooftexts we have extracted that we can only hear his voice pertain to