What follows here is the summary of a booklet in the ‘How then shall we live?’ series written by Trevor Miller, one of the leaders in the Northumbria Community, about an essential part of the Community’s Rule. Click here for more information about the booklet.

We are called to intentional, deliberate, VULNERABILITY. We embrace the responsibility of taking the heretical imperative by:

speaking out when necessary or asking awkward questions that upset the status quo,

making relationships the priority, and not reputation.

The Rule of the Northumbria Community

Heresy is a powerful word. It has often been used to make severe condemnations of those who lead others astray – possibly to their eternal destruction.

So is it not startling to find a group of Christians who ‘embrace the responsibility of taking the heretical imperative’? Maybe. But if we look back through history we find that the accusation of heresy was made against many Christian leaders – most notably against Jesus himself, who made it clear that to speak out God’s truth you must sometimes refute what is taught by those who regard themselves as guardians of orthodoxy.

The heretical imperative emerged as a concept in the formative days of the Community as deep thought was being given to the formulation of the Community Rule. Those key questions ‘Who is it that you seek?’ ‘How then shall we live?’ and ‘How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’ demanded radical approaches; and the comfortable, unchallenged assumptions we have all grown up with demanded searching review.

As the Community has grown – from the Founders to the Few, and from the Few to the Many – we have recognised the need to ‘Build the New on the Foundations of Old’. But how can we build the new if we do not understand how the foundations came to be as they are? The aim of this booklet is therefore to help today’s Community builders to understand one of the key foundation concepts more fully; and to enable all who journey with the Community to understand why we need to embrace the heretical imperative – and what it means to express this way of thinking in our daily lives.

The booklet reflects Trevor Miller’s own journey from Baptist ministry in a very conservative evangelical mould to being a leader of a community embracing a wide diversity of expressions of the Christian faith. It has been reworked from his talks to the Community’s Easter Workshop in 2002. He describes three methods of approach to our faith, advocating a middle course (the Inductive method) between the Deductive method (and its dangerous rocks of exclusive absolutism) and the Reductive method (with its whirlpools of woolly relativism). He also outlines five practical ways in which we can live out the principles of the heretical imperative in our daily lives.

Simplistically summarised, the heretical imperative is: To choose to seek God in Christ and to discover His Truth in a pluralistic, secular and materialistic world, being unafraid to listen or to ask awkward questions, of others and ourselves, as part of the quest.

If you would like to know more about this intriguing and challenging subject, click here to obtain a copy of the booklet.