What we believe.

The journey of transformation is a journey of participation and partnership. It is our belief that no transformation is possible without God. It is the Holy Spirit who transforms us (divine activity), and yet, we believe Scripture, church history and our own experience show us that we must play our part (human agency) in that process, however simple (yet possibly still very hard) that action is. Can God act without us? Of course! Does He choose to? Often it seems not. The Christian life of faith is one of participation and partnership with the Holy Spirit. Some of it is active, where for our formation there are things we must do out of faithful obedience to Scripture, and some of it is passive, where for our transformation we simply need to open our hearts up to the Holy Spirit to work in us. All of it, though, is always powered by grace.

The Christian life of faith, it seems, is often a question of keeping our balance when faced with what can at first appear to be some sort of paradox. It is important for us to be intentional in what we do, but a large part of that is remembering why we are doing it. Our desire should always be to seek God first and His Kingdom, which means we need to walk the narrow ridge line as we balance between lunging into legalism on one side and lapsing into lethargy on the other. That intentionality and that desire come from the grace of God. Whatever we do, therefore, we do by the grace of God, for the glory of God, not because we have to do it for any sort of reason other than because we love the God who first loved us, and it is precisely because we love God that we have to act. Keeping hold of this dynamic tension is hard to do, which is why we all need the support of a faith community to keep us balanced!

Two of the key principles behind ABC are that of invitation and intention. Once we have become a Christian, God gives us the dignity of choice. We are invited to follow Jesus, but we must choose to accept that invitation. We are invited to grow from our spiritual rebirth into spiritual maturity, but we must choose to put off the old and put on the new. The desire to do this comes from the grace of God when, through prayer, we set our minds and our will to seek Him and His Kingdom. So, invitation goes hand in hand with intention. We must be intentional in following Jesus, choosing to do what is good in God’s eyes rather than our own. As the saying goes, grace is opposed to earning, not effort. Intentionally accepting God’s invitations takes effort on our part, but through this effort we are not seeking to earn anything, since we already have everything we need because of the grace of God that is given to us in Jesus.

Or faith and works if you prefer! That’s the message of James. “So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.” (James 2 v17, ESV). We aren’t saved just for ourselves, we’re also saved for God and others. When we are saved through faith, by grace, we are saved for good works (Ephesians 2). We are saved into the Family and the Kingdom of God and we must take up our role(s) in the Family and Kingdom, both in the church and for the world. The reality of our faith, the thing that shows we have understood it and what it means, is evident in our desire to do good works, in the fruit we actually bear for God. Note this is not the same as works-righteousness; we are not working to earn our salvation — we are already saved! No, the works we do, we do for the good of others by the grace of God and all to bring glory to God our Father.

Bishop NT Wright calls each human being a ‘differentiated unity’. This means that we are, in essence, only one being, one person, rather than made up of separate constituent parts. Sometimes, when we think of concepts like ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’, we can forget that we are embodied beings designed (at present) for life on this earth; God created us as material beings and brought us to life by breathing His breath of life into us. This is the amazing fact of the incarnation of Jesus. God came to earth as a human being, Jesus, fully God and fully (hu)man. So, to pay attention purely to the ‘spiritual’ in this life is to miss the point. To become Christlike, we must become whole as a human being, which means we should ASPIRE to maturity in all aspects of our being, Aspirationally, Spiritually, Physically, Intellectually, Relationally and Emotionally. Like the quote by St. Teresa of Avila on our home page implies, we are to be the embodiment of Jesus in the world today.

There are two sides to this. Firstly, since God as the Trinity is fundamentally relational, we need to overcome our culture’s tendency towards individualism and realise that we are both a part of, and also have a role to play in, the Family and Kingdom of God. We are not saved for our own sake. We are saved for fellowship in community together and for the good of others. Secondly, however, we must also come to realise that we can only get so far in our own formation and transformation by ourselves. Indeed, it is only in taking up our ministry in the church and our mission in the world that we can progress to maturity in our-selves. We are only fully shaped into Christlikeness by the grace of God through our interaction with our Family and our action in the Kingdom. Others need us and we need others…