The Beheading of John the Baptist

I have for a long time, probably since I was an ordinand myself, thought that the role of clergy contained an element of the ministry of John the Baptist. This has been traditionally crushed out of the role because the priority has been placed on a certain pastoral model of ministry in which notions of care and politeness have tended to trump any sense of being prophetic or radical. The danger for the church is that it so seeks to appease society that its message lacks anything that is uniquely of God, and so it becomes bland and irrelevant.

In the post-Christian context of the modern Western world there is a need for us, as the church of Christ, to again discover a prophetic voice that speaks out into our society. John the Baptist provides a model of one who is a fierce critic of the abuses within a society, and one who also points to Christ as the one who is the solution to the ills of that society. Today, in modern Britain, we live in a society that is utterly confused about what it believes to be important to the extent that as a national community we seem to be politically dysfunctional.

The root of our problem is that our nation no longer has a meaningful narrative. During the world wars we portrayed ourselves as a Christian nation fighting the forces of neo-paganism, and it was this Christianity that marked the setting up of the NHS and the educational reforms of 1944. Today no such narrative is advanced by government, and so it is unclear what undergirds our national thought process beyond materialism, consumerism and self-interest, with political parties competing to sell us an infantile and unrealistic vision of ever more provision at ever decreasing cost. The results of such a vision are clear: outsourcing, and a race to the bottom in terms of a wage structure that exploits the poor.

The church has a real role in reminding our society of another narrative in which society, community and mutual concern matter.