Many years ago I heard a lecture on missionary work by Lynn
Green, the then International Director of Youth with a Mission. Lynn outlined
the work of Don Richardson an American Evangelist who worked from the principle
that God is always ahead of a missionary and it’s the missionary’s role to
identify where God is already working and to connect with this and interpret
these as signs of God at work to the community.
See Don Richardson’s books: Peace Child and Eternity in Their Hearts.
One example of this is the concepts of redemptive analogies;
these are stories and traditions embedded in a culture which speak of the Trinitarian
God of love. For example Don Richardson
refers to Saint Paul on Mars Hill using the altar to an unknown God as the
starting point for his proclamation of the good news of Christ. He goes on to recall stories from his missionary
work of various cultures and different redemptive analogies and how building on
these has resulted in the successful proclamation of the gospel.
In many ways the work of Don Richardson is similar to the
work of the Catholic Missionary, Vincent Donovan, who engages in a process of
dialogue with the Masai people of East Africa.
Donovan finds that in Masai culture there are many stories; which can be
used to point to the one true and living God. Donovan’s work is outlined in his seminal book
“Christianity Rediscovered”.
Since I heard Lynn Green lecture I have always been asking
the question: what are the redemptive analogies in English Culture that speak
of the Trinitarian God? It’s taken me
many years to start to identify these and in many respects I am only just
beginning but I do believe if we seek and look hard enough we will find examples
and, as ever, it’s often in the most surprising of places that we find that God
is a work.
May Pole Dancing
Looking for signs of God at work in English culture we
perhaps should start with one of the
customs that can be seen and experienced in some rural villages today; perhaps
frowned on by some as being of “pagan” origin or having aspects of fertility
ritual is Maypole dancing.
I can still remember children from the village school
performing a Maypole dance at the village fate in rural Worcestershire and on
arriving in the Yorkshire Dales finding that a number of villages still have Maypoles.
Those villages include Kettlewell, Kilnsey, Burnsall and Thorpe and in starting
work for the Diocese of Ripon and Leeds noted that some villages have incredibly
tall Maypoles. It almost seems that they wish to outperform one another by
having a taller Maypole. These villages
include Nun Monkton, Aldborough and Barwick-in-Elmet Maypole who have their own
Maypole Trust and Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/barwickmaypoletrust
The Dance of the
Trinity
One of the ways that theologians describe the Trinity is as
a dance, with each person of the Trinity being in motion around one another so
although they are three persons they are also one as they are in in a dance
with one another like particles in an atom; held together like gravity by love
yet moving in dynamic relationship. In our Christian life we are also called to
enter in to this dance with the Trinity and with others in relationship in community.
So in looking for redemptive analogies in our English
culture we can look at the tradition of Maypole dancing and see the patterns of
interrelationship weaving a beautiful design as the brightly coloured ribbons
are woven as the dancers dance around the Maypole. None of the interact patterns
being possible unless the dancers where moving and responding to the moves made
by other dancers.
