In a couple of contexts recently I have been interested to read about the challenges and benefits of blended learning; this is the mixture of on-line and face to face teaching which is part of life for children and teachers in the primary school where I am a governor and for students and lecturers at the university I attended.
At my old university, then a college, I learned about the concept of hybrid vigour. The significant benefits that often accrue from crossing plant varieties or animal breeds. Farmers, gardeners and many more people work with the benefits of hybridisation and understand them.
Cultural mixing strengthens society, for all its challenges of integration. In human families that have married locally for generations, great enrichment can come from widening the catchment. My mother’s family was Essex born and bred from about 1066 onwards; bringing in Cornish stock did enormous good. Some of the cousins looked to Canada, others to Australia and in two generations we changed our dynamic completely. It was invigorating.
Talk of blended church is starting to gather pace; mixing on-line with in-church worship may solve the long standing problem of worship and fellowship for the housebound in real time. This too will be energizing and arrest our apparent numerical decline and cultural influence.
Jesus lived and worked amongst Jews; as God Incarnate in human flesh he was limited to time and place; History and Geography which alter with movement. Jesus knew he was in the world for more than a single generation of Jews and, without diminishing what he was to them, he knew he was here to bring new energy and experiences more widely and beyond his own time and death.
In the Gospel reading for Passion Sunday we read [John 12:24] ‘unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds’. Jesus was talking about his death and resurrection when his timeless, unconstrained form would burst on the world with new vigour and energise a whole, new, culturally all embracing Church. His body on earth.
That Body has been changed by the past year’s experiences but thanks to the vigour generated by new ways it has reached new people. What next…we cannot know but let us not stultify change by narrowmindedness as we emerge into a different world over the coming weeks.
A prayer
Lord as new experiences broaden our minds so may we have the wisdom to allow new ideas and technologies to expand our Worship, Work and Witness as we seek to be Church in the world. Let us embrace ‘hybrid vigour’ and build on it for the sake of all whom we touch and who will come after us in your timeless Body on earth. We ask this for Jesus Christ’s sake, who is the Head of the Church.
Amen