Heresy & Reform
Dear Friends,
I hope you enjoyed Graham Handscomb’s reflections over the last week. We now turn to the fruits of my sabbatical earlier this year.
The URC offers a wonderful gift to ministers every seven years with a 3 month sabbatical; it also offers some funding to ensure the time is used well. Sabbaticals are for reset and renewal but also for study and often involve trips. As you may know in the Spring I took a sabbatical and decided to look at some medieval reform movements in the Church and to see what lessons we might learn for today. To this end I spent an extended period of time in South Eastern France and Italy in the steps of Cathars, Waldensians, and St Francis.
The medieval Church had its problems, and the main solutions seemed to involve an embrace of poverty and to live as people imagined Jesus and the apostles had lived. The Cathars had theological positions at variance with the Church but lived exemplary lives and many were drawn to these “good Christians”. Peter Valdo, and later Francis of Assisi, also lived lives of apostolic poverty and engaged in itinerant preaching ministry to counter the spread of Cathar ideas. Francis’ genius was to stay within the Church; Waldo’s followers could not accept the rules and left leading to around 700 years of persecution during which time they became part of the Reformed Church and now exist in a federation with the Methodists in Italy.
The Cathars are long gone but their ideas are still around in our contemporary New Age movements; the Waldensian Church is a partner church in the wider Reformed family, and Francis’ simple message and life inspires folk today. The great Reformed theologian Karl Barth noted that the Reformed Church must always be reformed under the authority of the Word of God. The movements we will look at over the next month were all attempts to reform the Church in the hope it would be more faithful to its Lord, Jesus Christ.
Of course, one person’s reformer is another person’s heretic and so, before we explore the three movements mentioned above, we’ll have a week on heresy!
With every good wish
Andy
The Rev’d Andy Braunston
Minister for Digital Worship