A Celtic Model for a Community Church

A recent study on church attendance found that only 6% of people in Wales regularly attend a church and the report shows a steady and apparently irreversible trend towards a secular society. However, although Churchgoing is an activity of a tiny minority, some 72% of people in Wales would still say they were Christian if asked about their religion on a form. With some notable exceptions, it appears as though organised Christianity is failing to be seen as relevant to most people’s lives.

 In a fascinating and practical book entitled The Celtic Way of Evangelism: How Christianity Can Reach the West Again (Abingdon Press, 2000), George Hunter explains how we might be able to reverse this trend by adapting the methods developed by the early Celtic Church. These methods were highly effective in reaching people and in ensuring that the Church became central to their lives. Although it was the predominant form of Christianity in Wales for 600 years after the Romans left, little is known about the practicalities of how the Celtic Church operated because it was replaced and extinguished by the more centrally organised Roman Catholic Church after the Normans took control of Wales in the 1090s.

Nevertheless, it was the Celtic Church that successfully Christianised Wales in a way that had not been seen before or repeated since. Importantly for Bethel, given our interest in community Churches, this was achieved through the development of local Christian communities which spread across the country. The evidence for these local Christian communities can still be to this day through place-names beginning with “Llan” which literally means Christian community or enclosure. Llandaff, for example means the Christian community by the river Taff.

If this sounds like an obscure history lesson, it isn’t meant to be, because the methods employed by the Celtic Church to reach non-Christians provide a blueprint for reaching people who have walked away from the Church because they see it as irrelevant to their daily lives. It is time that we recovered our own heritage and rediscovered how to re-apply the Celtic Model in the twenty-first century.

The Celtic Model was developed by St Patrick in the fifth century and was extended to Wales by St David, St Teilo, St Illtyd and others in the following century. Contrary to what most people think, Patrick was not Irish. He came from what is now Northumberland and was captured as a teenager by Irish sea-raiders and taken as a slave to Ireland where he learned the language and culture. He eventually escaped and returned to England, where he became a priest. Years later, when he was in his mid-forties, he received what he interpreted as call from God to return to pagan Ireland to convert the people to Christianity. He was made a bishop and was sent on his way with a team of around 20 people to get on with the job in 432. Over the next 25 years he succeeded in planting 700 Churches and ordaining over 1000 priests across Ireland.

The secret of his success was based on a radically different approach towards reaching people. The traditional Roman model, which is still the dominant model today across Western Christianity, was to present the gospel message, ask people to commit and if they did so, they would then be invited into the fellowship of the Church, on the assumption that they adopted and were assimilated into Church customs, language and structures. In other words, you could become a Christian “only if you became like us.”

Patrick’s approach was different and involved three key elements:
• Belonging before believing
• Development of a Christian Community that is active in all aspects of daily life
• Incorporating local culture and customs into the Christian Community

When a new Christian Community was established he invited people into that Community before they believed. On being welcomed in, they were allocated a person who acted as a one to one mentor and they were invited to join a small group where they could get to know a few people well. Through this personal approach they were engaged in what has been called the ‘ministry of conversation’involving discussion, questioning and prayer.

The Celtic Christian Communities where this happened were run largely by lay-people and have been described as beehives of activity, in that they were involved in a wide range of activities from education, healthcare, food production and manufacturing through to housing, libraries, social activities and worship. In contrast to the traditional model of Church which dealt with people’s spiritual needs in isolation from day to day life, the Celtic Model was much more practical in that it dealt equally with practical needs. Being invited to join such a community brought real practical benefits as well as an entry point to a new spiritual journey. They were places where Christian values could be seen in action every day and the authenticity of the people in these communities meant that over time, the new member of the community began to absorb these values. In effect, Christianity was caught rather than taught. Although 1500 years old, this model would be recognisable today as a Community Church.

The third key element of the Celtic Model was the incorporation of local customs into the Christian Community. For example, it was pagan practice to worship to the gods in fields, looking up to large standing stones. Rather than try to stamp out this practice, the Celtic Model meant that Church services were taken outside, and that tall stone Celtic Crosses replaced the pagan standing stones. Similarly, the pagans revered holy wells. Patrick simply incorporated the same wells into Christian practice, and there is even one of these less than a mile from Bethel, called St. Teilo’s well in Llandaff.

The key is that core Christian values are universal, and although Churches develop certain customs and practices with which we feel comfortable, most of these are cultural and do not determine the core Christian values in themselves. So it is possible to accept new cultural practices that come with the newcomers into Christian Communities without damaging our core Christian values in any way. It may feel strange to the people who have got used to doing Church in a certain way, but the newcomers and new practices developed the vitality of the Christian Communities and made them much more relevant to people who had no experience of traditional Church practices.

The relevance for this today is that rather than assuming that people must adapt to our customs and traditions before they can become Christians, it would be more effective for us to understand what secular people around us look up to and aim to adapt these customs to getting across the gospel message. Although we may not quite realise it, we’re already doing this to great effect in Bethel. “Revive”, for example recognises that social gatherings over coffee and music are where young adults meet and socialise, rather than in Church premises. By using this recognisable social practice, we reach people in new ways.

Similarly, our society has become very “monetised”, with traditional community support networks failing. Although many Christians are comfortable with the idea of doing voluntary work, most people are not, and only commit to doing things if they get paid. Rather than fight this way of thinking, it is possible to adapt it to community action through mechanisms like Timebanking, where an hour you spend cutting grass for an elderly person, for example, is “banked” and can be redeemed by you asking for another person in the Timebank to do an hour’s ironing for you. This concept of Community Currency is instantly understood in a monetised society in that it is similar concept to real money and can be adopted as a key mechanism for developing community.

In many ways, the decline of the Church in the West relates to how out of synch our practices and customs have become with those of wider society and this might explain why the 72% of people who would classify themselves as Christians never go near a Church. The Celtic Model gives us a practical approach for how we might reach people in a whole new way, through allowing people to belong before they believe, through the development of a vibrant Christian Community involved in all aspects of life and through the incorporation of practices and customs that secular people can relate to and recognise.

Without fully realising it, Bethel has already started to do some of these things and the strength and flexibility of our community would suggest that we could use some of the Celtic Model as we continue on our own journey towards becoming a Community Church.