The Gentle Fire of God
2026 Michaelmas Essay
Unlocking Missional Power at A Parish Level
Acts 2. Exodus 3.1-15. Matthew 16. 21-28
Immediately after the Ascension, and before Pentecost, the eleven set about choosing Matthias to fill the empty place left by Judas. Their criterion was that the one chosen should have accompanied Jesus and the twelve original witnesses through the whole of Jesus’ public ministry, up until his Ascension. It was understood, that is, that fundamental to what Jesus wanted to do was the bringing about of some sort of new symbolic Israel.
And that understanding — maybe lost on us — included a kind of peripatetic dimension to following Jesus. Discipleship is an invitation to a journey. On that journey there will be mistakes, detours, wrong turns, oases to be refreshed by, deserts to endure, and — a cross.
Let me talk, then, about the journey God has invited us to go on.
So far in my ministry I have been quite taken with the trips and holidays my older parishioners go on. The destinations fascinate me. One is off on a botanical tour of the Amazon basin; another to Moravia and Transylvania — isn’t that where Dracula lives? Another is bound for Russia, and so on. Such fascinating places. Before Covid closed the world, I passed a travel agent’s window on a local shopping street; taking pride of place were promotions for “The Middle East,” Myanmar, Iran and Indonesia.
Sometimes we would rather go on a journey of discovery — guaranteed to show us something interesting, to give us an adventure — than go somewhere safe and predictable. It depends, I suppose, on what we want from a holiday: relaxation, or the adventure of fascination.
There is an invitation in the gospel, too, to come on a journey, isn’t there? Perhaps we find that call exciting, like one of those exotic destinations. Perhaps we also find it a bit daunting.
And that is there in the readings, isn’t it? The trouble with being filled with the Holy Spirit is that — if the biblical experience is anything to go by — it is normally in order to make us brave enough to go and tell a crucifying kind of crowd that God loves them. As The Message renders it, there is a great irony here: proclaiming such love, experiencing so much hate.
Diverse Christological writers, Jon Sobrino among them, recognise this at once. There is a virtual inevitability — a cross on the horizon — for everyone who dares to love and renounces the taking of vengeance. And this is precisely the danger of a gospel that fixes on the cross and its more or less “dread” inevitability: it invites us to be nothing if not “crazy heroes.” And “wherever there is the hero, there tragedy is lurking.” If discipleship leads to death and not to life, we ought to ask not only who on earth can possibly do this — but who, in their right mind, would want to?
So I think about my own fears, and my reluctance, at times, to follow Jesus. It is a following I know to be worthwhile. But I know, too, that I cannot be faithful except so far as the Spirit who fell on the Church at Pentecost empowers me to be.
I once attended worship at what was then our diocesan Cathedral — a service of ordination, two priests and a deacon in the Church of God. At the high point of the liturgy the deacons knelt before the bishop, and we other priests gathered round to lay hands on them and pray, “send down the Holy Spirit upon your servant N whom we set apart for the office and work of a priest in your Church.”[1]
The bishop’s flame-red mitre, together with the prayer, made me think first of the description in Acts of the coming of the Spirit upon the gathered apostolic group: “Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them”;[2] and then of a comment James Alison makes on that verse in Broken Hearts and New Creations. Alison notices that Luke locates the flames of fire “in the temple.” Of the once-frightened disciples, now made emboldened apostolic preachers of the resurrection, he writes:
It is clear that they are not only priests in the New Temple, but also living burning offerings.[3]
We were calling down the Holy Spirit on lives offered up to ministry. And if Alison is to be believed, part of what we were asking for these two — and part of what, as they came to a consciousness of what they were doing, they were asking for themselves — was to be consumed in sacrificial fire. Suddenly the service, which had been (for me, anyway) chugging along — the music, the homily, all good in their familiar way — became only the background. The gravity of the fiery trials we were asking for these two more or less naïve and innocent lambs in holy orders seemed, in that moment, all foreground.
I reached out to touch the shoulder of the nearest deacon. I knew this man. He had trained for a while in our parish and had endeared himself to me. Who was I to ask this terrible thing for him — to offer him up for an immolation that seems to be the destiny and signal experience of true ministry?
My mind sorted through the stories of God’s fire consuming people, and generally burning things up, in the Bible. There was the warning in Hebrews that “our God is a consuming fire,”[4] and the story of Elijah, whose brave defiance of the prophets of Baal and faithful prayer so moved God that “the fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt-offering, the wood, the stones and the dust, and even licked up the water that was in the trench.”[5]
But there were other, less pyrotechnic stories too. What about Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego? Nebuchadnezzar orders them into the furnace, and they are seen with a fourth man “walking in the middle of the fire,” and they are not hurt.[6]And one picture in particular stayed with me as I let my hand rest on my friend’s shoulder — the bush “that was blazing, yet it was not consumed.”[7] Moses is called to ministry by that sight — not simply because there was a bushfire, a commonplace of hard, dry country, but because he said to himself, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.”[8]
It made sense to me that God does want us to offer ourselves to the fire of the Holy Spirit — but that, once experienced, this fire scorches without consuming. It burns without burning up.
So, if we kept that flaming bush in our mind’s eye, there is something in the scene we can rush past, if we’re not careful. When God calls him, Moses is not at prayer. He is at work. “Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro … he led his flock beyond the wilderness.”[9] He is a shepherd — and not so much of his own sheep. He is busily minding another’s flock, a few animals, in the rear of the desert. That is a summation the vocational life he is leading on the day God turns him aside to the bush, has him remove his shoes.
And the fire that does not consume is also the fire that fascinates, that will not leave his imagination content with where it found him. “I have observed the misery of my people … So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.”[10] Moses tries, understandably, to decline: “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?”[11] Who indeed. Also, it might be important for us to notice, as that the bible is sure to mention, Moses is not young when he is called. Had he won that argument, we may be sure of one thing — he would have gone back to the few sheep. He would have finished his days a careful shepherd of a small and borrowed flock, in the wilderness, behind the wilderness: safe, and forgotten.
Maybe keep a hold of that picture.
Because the fear I felt with my hand on that deacon’s shoulder is based in both observation, the teaching of the Church and, sometimes, experience. Of course, few of us will be asked to die ‘all at once’. The fear is subtler than that, and more chronic. It is, at least for many, the fear of being used up. Of being burned up rather than merely burning. It is, or can be, the fear of burnout.
And it is a fear that grows as we age. I notice it in myself, and I notice it, more poignantly herein this essay, in the parishes I love. There is a particular grief that settles on a congregation as it ages — a underlying awareness that we are fewer hands than we once were; that the people who used to do the work can no longer do it, or at least not so well. To such a congregation, the gospel’s call to take up a cross does not usually sound like an adventure sounds like one more demand upon a body already worn down and tired. It sounds like a request to be immolated — alone.
And here, I want to suggest, we have been making a mistake in how we read. And not at all a small or inconsequential one.
We have almost always read Jesus’ bracing, even acerbic, sayings about discipleship as though they addressed us as individuals — each of us, alone, making up our minds to devote what remains of our lives to following Jesus, however sacrificially. It is the reading of my younger self at Easter camp, resolving after some stirring preaching to give my life to unselfishness and the service of God and others. It is the reading of the confirmation vow — “Do you turn to Christ? Do you reject selfish living and all that is unjust?” — to which we answered, even at that tender age, and with feeling, “I reject them all.”
Let me put a hermeneutic proposal to you. Might these injunctions to the human soul apply, just as readily, to other entities that are human — human things that are not, strictly speaking, an individual person? Is it not biblically true that the Church is human? Not an impersonal collection of humans, but a body, possessed of faculties: a mind (the mind of Christ), a heart that may be appealed to in moral terms, a collective will, a capability, a responsibility — a discernible agency in the world. Is this not only true, but one of the discursive foundations of the New Testament, and of the letters that surround the ministry of Paul?
If we allow it, something startling happens to the reading. Hear the saying again, with the Church as its subject:
The Church that wants to save its own life will lose it. But the Church that loses its life for my sake will find it.[12]
Sit with that a moment. Roll it around, along with all our conferences and essays — this one included, of course — the compliance talks, the professional development, the sermons and programmes on outreach and stewardship, the meetings, and so on, and so on.
There is a figure in the very same passage who models the wrong reading exactly. When Jesus first speaks of the cross ahead, Peter takes him aside and rebukes him: “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.”[13] It is a loving instinct. It is also the instinct of self-preservation, and Jesus names it with startling severity — “Get behind me, Satan … you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”[14] The Church that says, of its own decline and dying, this must never happen to us, and organises its whole common life around not letting it happen, is Peter here. It is trying to save its life. We know what our Lord says becomes of that.
There are reasonable arguments that the experience of churches in late-modern capitalism is not very different from that of other incorporated voluntary societies. As people have less and less time for community and for meeting together outside of work, the whole volunteering sector feels it in much the same way.
Take an Apex club in a country town. When I moved to such a town, younger then, I was a bit of a joiner; one ought to contribute to the common good, I felt. Suppose I turned up to a meeting, and someone said at the door: “Wonderful that you’re here. Now we have one more member, which we sorely need — our numbers are so depleted, and there’s work our ageing members can’t manage any more. How would you like to be treasurer?” And suppose I said: “Well — what are we doing? What are we working on just now? Are we building a park, a barbecue area for the town, something nice like that?” And suppose the answer came: “Oh, no. We used to do things like that. When we were younger. When there were more of us. When there was a surplus in the accounts. Perhaps, if you joined — and, I don’t know, twenty more or so like you — then we could begin again to do the things we were constituted to do.”
I suspect the experience of many people who try to join a church is not far from this. We ask them to help us survive. We had rather hoped they might help us live.
So here is the choice, and I want to name it plainly, because I think it is the choice our moment is actually asking of us.
We can be individual disciples. And there is nothing false about that discipleship — Moses was called by name; the deacons were ordained Priest one at a time; an individual tongue of the whole fire rested on each of them. But the individual disciple, taken alone and left alone, is, or tends to be, the seemingly crazy hero; and wherever there is the hero, tragedy is lurking. Alone, the call to take up a cross really close to a call to immolation. Alone, the ageing and the faithful really are being asked to be burned up. Alone, it is tragic, and it is traumatising, and — let us be honest — it is not working.
Or we can do it together. And this is not merely the safer option, though it is safer: no single member need be consumed for the body to give itself away. It is not merely the more fruitful option, though it is — a body can spend itself in a way no lone hero can, and the Church that loses its life in this manner is precisely the one that finds it….
It is also the more charismatic option, in the truest sense. Because a movement that is visibly alive, visibly kenotic, visibly deploying its strength for the sake of the poor and the marginal, is a movement people want to join. Nobody is drawn to a rearguard. People do not enlist in a story of exhaustion. But a bush that blazes and is not consumed — that will make a person turn aside from the busy road, take off their shoes and stand there, waiting for God’s direction on holy ground.
Which means the locus of mission discernment is not, after all, quite where we assumed it was. It is not, in the first place, the individual at their knees. Or rather — it is not only there, and not most decisively there. The most decisive place of discernment, for a body that means to lose its life and so find it, is the parish council. It is the vestry. It is the room where the corporate ‘person’ of the Church deliberates, and decides, and commits its shared life.
And it is — I will say the unspiritual word — the balance sheet.
Michaelmas is, among other things, an old day of accounts: a quarter day, when the books were settled and what was owed was reckoned and paid. It is a fitting season to ask what our churches are doing with what resources they might have in actual fiduciary terms. A parish’s love is not, finally, an abstraction. It has a ledger. It has reserves, trust funds, endowments, buildings estate real, a bank balance built up, very often, by the faithful departed — by generations who gave so that the mission might go on. I am not recommending a wanton spending of capital funds, however, I think that we can-and must-insist on a deliberate and disciplined spending on mission of the earnings on those funds. When these, even these, are devoted to our own comfort survival or maintenance, or, the maintenance of the funds themselves, I think a point may have been passed which becomes problematic for our identity. The question Michaelmas puts to us is whether those resources are being deployed to Love.
Let us not be squeamish about this. Yes, even a parish can treat its reserves as private wealth — the early Church did that too. It had its wealthy patrons and its Ananias and Sapphira’s, quietly holding back.[15] But that is not the impulse the Spirit blessed. What the Spirit blessed was the other thing the early Church did: it discerned ministry imaginatively, generously and together.
The strength-based question — the more affirmative, imaginative, missionary question — is not “how little can we spend and still keep the doors open,” but “what is the most Love we could do with what we have been given, and for whom, on the margins, could we do it?”
The alternative is to keep the corporate purse as an engine of a more or less ‘private’ wealth: utilise it to conservatively steward the flock. And here we arrive back at Moses and his few sheep. A parish that clings to its endowment and its dwindling roll, that reckons its faithfulness in terms of financial survival, has chosen — whether it knows it or not — to keep minding a small and borrowed flock in the rear of the desert. Safe. Predictable. Slowly forgotten. Had Moses refused the fire, that is exactly where he would have stayed: a careful shepherd of a few sheep, while a whole people waited, unliberated, in Egypt.
—
So this is my Michaelmas prayer, and I offer it not for the lone disciple at prayer but for the gathered body in council.
God, give us courage — as parishes, as councils, as a Church — to surrender to your holy fire; and be gentle with us in the midst of the flames. Let others see in us not a terrible warning, but the wonder that stopped Moses in his tracks. Teach us to spend on Love what we have been given, and not to simply hoard it; to reckon our accounts, this Michaelmas, not by what we have kept, but by what we have had the courage to give away.
You do not call us to be individual heroes. You call us together to be an evergreen burning bush.
[1]A Prayer Book for Australia (Alexandria, NSW: Broughton Books, 1995), 796.
[2]Acts 2:3 (NRSV).
[3]James Alison, Broken Hearts and New Creations: Intimations of a Great Reversal (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2010), 255.
[4]Hebrews 12:29 (NRSV).
[5]1 Kings 18:38 (NRSV).
[6]Daniel 3:25 (NRSV).
[7]Exodus 3:2 (NRSV).
[8]Exodus 3:3 (NRSV).
[9]Exodus 3:1 (NRSV).
[10]Exodus 3:7, 10 (NRSV).
[11]Exodus 3:11 (NRSV).
[12]Cf. Matthew 16:25 (NRSV).
[13]Matthew 16:22 (NRSV).
[14]Matthew 16:23 (NRSV).
[15]Acts 5:1–2 (NRSV).