|
Blog
Is there a significant difference between Rev. Jeremiah Wright's "God damn America," and what Rev. Billy Graham has often said: "If God does not judge America for its sins, He will have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah."? Labels: Christianity, church, ideas, politics, theology Today AKMA posted the good news that he will be joining the faculty of Duke Divinity School for a year as Visiting Professor of New Testament. Congratulations! This is pretty cool, Rob McAlpine's book Post Charismatic is available in the U.K. and is coming to a North America near you soon. Labels: theology David Fitch challenges Mark Driscoll's assertations that the emerging church does not have converts. Labels: emerging church, evangelism, theology From Slate and their review of Daniel Radosh's new book, Rapture Ready! At some point, Radosh asks the obvious question: Didn't Jesus chase the money changers out of the temple? In other words, isn't there something wrong with so thoroughly commercializing all aspects of faith? For this, the Christian pop-culture industry has a ready answer. Evangelizing and commercializing have much in common. In the "spiritual marketplace" (as it's called), Christianity is a brand that seeks to dominate. Like Coke, it wants to hold onto its followers and also win over new converts. As with advertisers, the most important audience is young people and teenagers, who are generally brand loyalists. Hence, Bibleman and Christian rock are the spiritual equivalent of New Coke. Christian trinkets—a WWJD bracelet, a "God is my DJ" T-shirt—function more like Coca-Cola T-shirts or those cute stuffed polar bears. They telegraph to the community that the wearer is a proud Christian and that this is a cool thing to be—which should, in theory, invite eager curiosity. Straightforward, if somewhat crude, merchandizing so far. But there is also another level of questions, which the creators of Christian culture have a much harder time answering: What does commercializing do to the substance of belief, and what does an infusion of belief do to the product? When you make loving Christ sound just like loving your boyfriend, you can do damage to both your faith and your ballad. That's true when you create a sanitized version of bands like Nirvana or artists like Jay-Z, too: You shoehorn a message that's essentially about obeying authority into a genre that's rebellious and nihilistic, and the result can be ugly, fake, or just limp. Labels: Christianity, culture, religion, theology For those of you who follow AKMA's blog, we have been reading some bad news about Seabury and it's future. Today's post makes the future look a little brighter and hopefully Seabury's students and the Episcopal church will see the fruits of Seabury's reimagined future. Scott is writing on Christianity becoming a sub culture far removed from the rest of Canada The problem is that few people are willing to admit that Christianity has become a sub-culture. In many ways it is as foreign to the average Canadian as being a Seik, or Amish. Virtually all church growth strategies still mistakenly assume that the average non-churched person understands the language and culture of evangelical Christianity. The sad fact is, they do not. They don’t use words like “blessings” and they don’t “trust you’ll have a good day”. They are not even marginally interested in hearing some guy talk about an issue that is wholly irrelevant to their lives; let alone in a time slot that is inconvenient with music that they don’t listen to… repeated over and over and over. I met with a denominational leader this week who admitted that he feels the denomination he belongs to, and the Christian world in general, has lost it’s poignancy and is probably obsolete. This is undoubtedly a hard admission from an individual whose entire career is built on encouraging churches to grow. We wondered together if there was any hope of the church actually connecting on a macro level with its community, based on what is happening now. This denominational head told me he doubted it would happen. The solution, it seemed at the time, was for the church to finally come to grips with the brutal and almost ugly reality of incarnational living. Jesus Christ was far less mainstream and far more controversial than Christians are willing to be. His lifestyle was well beyond the acceptable range for behavior in your average Baptist or Free Methodist Church. He was accused, apparently in light of some supposed evidence, of living flagrantly and with moral license. For my entire religious life I have heard the argument that as a Christian I must be careful when playing with fire, morally and culturally speaking, lest I get burned. The unspoken truth of that statement may be that most Christians are so afraid of being burned by the fire that they don’t even come near the heat. Some of the comments on his post suggested the Christians were supposed to be irrelevant and the church is two worldly already but that isn't really what Scott is getting at (I will say that since we have talked about this for years). It is a church that is so far out of the world that many congregations have to get consultants in to find out what is going on in their neighborhoods. How does it get this way? This is going to make some of you madder than usual but when I read Ron Sider's The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience and see those going to church and professing to be Christians to be no different than anyone else, we know something must not be working. Is it fear of sin or just fear of the world? Scott mentions incarnational living which is kingdom values and living them out in the world outside the church walls which is difficult when many churches have to hire a consultant to see what their neighborhood is thinking. In some ways it goes back to the turn of the 20th century with evangelicalism's struggle then to deal with modernity and we secluded ourselves in Christian camps, t-shirts, music, politics, and art. Also while struggling with engaging culture, we have tossed aside Kingdom values and exchanged them for the values of power, control, and money which even the most committed opponent of the faith will say are the ways of Christ. As John Wimber wrote, everyone seems to be able to see this except those of us in the church. Folks, the world knows what this is supposed to look like. Years ago in New York City, I got into a taxi cab with an Iranian taxi driver, who could hardly speak English. I tried to explain to him where I wanted to go, and as he was pulling his car out of the parking place, he almost got hit by a van that on its side had a sign reading The Pentecostal Church. He got real upset and said, "That guy’s drunk." I said, "No, he’s a Pentecostal. Drunk in the spirit, maybe, but not with wine." He asked, "Do you know about church?" I said, "Well, I know a little bit about it; what do you know?" It was a long trip from one end of Manhattan to the other, and all the way down he told me one horror story after another that he’d heard about the church. He knew about the pastor that ran off with the choir master's wife, the couple that had burned the church down and collected the insurance—every horrible thing you could imagine. We finally get to where we were going, I paid him, and as we’re standing there on the landing I gave him an extra-large tip. He got a suspicious look in his eyes—he’d been around, you know. I said, "Answer me this one question." Now keep in mind, I’m planning on witnessing to him. "If there was a God and he had a church, what would it be like?" He sat there for awhile making up his mind to play or not. Finally he sighed and said, "Well, if there was a God and he had a church—they would care for the poor, heal the sick, and they wouldn’t charge you money to teach you the Book." I turned around and it was like an explosion in my chest. "Oh, God." I just cried, I couldn’t help it. I thought, "Oh Lord, they know. The world knows what it’s supposed to be like. The only ones that don’t know are the Church." When you joined the kingdom, you expected to be used of God. I’ve talked to thousands of people, and almost everybody has said, "When I signed up, I knew that caring for the poor was part of it—I just kind of got weaned off of it, because no one else was doing it." Folks, I’m not saying, "Do some-thing heroic." I’m not saying, "Take on some high standard, sell everything you have and go." Now, if Jesus tells you that, that’s different. But I’m not saying that. I’m just saying, participate. Give some portion of what you have—time, energy, money, on a regular basis—to this purpose, to redeeming people, to caring for people. Share your heart and life with somebody that’s not easy to sit in the same car with. Are you hearing me? That’s where you’ll really see the kingdom of God. Labels: Christianity, church, emerging church, theology Consumerism in the church has been a weird topic for me the last little while. On one hand a lot of church leaders admit to me that they know their church is based on very consumeristic ideas and that is wrong but on the other hand, most don't know what to do about it or fall back on the "good things are still happening" which may be true but it kind of stops the conversation about if another way could produce even more good things or what if the bad things about it are worse than the good things. A couple of weeks ago I posted about The Blind Side which generated some good discussion in the comments. What caught me off guard were a couple of e-mails that were sent about the post and the hypocrisy in me posting it and advocating the position that I did. Apparently because I haven't raised any NFL prospects in my house, I ought not speak of such things. Even if that made sense, it is ignorant of the fact that Wendy and I have had someone living in our home for a couple of years after a particularly brutal time in their life. While I never did get a NFL tryout for him or even a scholarship to a major U.S. college, it has been a big change for all of us. It also suggests that perhaps a blog doesn't tell everything about a person or maybe a search of the archives may be helpful. The accusations also got to me because one of the things that I have been working on/obsessed with is setting up a safe house for 10 or so teen boys in Saskatoon who need a place to figure out life. We have some emergency facilities at work for keeping youth on an emergency basis. While we are doubling that capacity, it isn't enough and there are youth who are either on the street or in really awful home situations. It is a complicated and long process which is a ways away an official start let alone finish but I think it is the right thing to do. While speaking of work, I have some interesting stuff going on right now that will help guys with the transition out of the shelter and into their own place. Saskatoon has a tighter housing market than New York, Toronto, Vancouver, and Calgary at 0.4% and if you aren't making much money, are illiterate, or just feeling overwhelmed, guys tend to end up at flophouses which are called, "shooting galleries" for a reason. I have been in some of them and I almost threw up. My first apartment was a small studio apartment but it was a charming shoe box sized studio and was safe to roam the hallways. The goal is to help guys find safe places they can afford to live on. Having a little extra money in the bank makes a world of difference. I was reading an article from the New Year with the mayor who pointed out that people making $40,000 can't afford a home in the city which is true. I can't fix that but I hope to help those making around $20,000 a year a decent apartment. Outside of work, a group of us is taking some small steps toward create an alternative seminary in Saskatoon. We met Monday and those there had some excellent ideas. It was good. For those of you who have no idea what is so alternative about theological education, check out the Disseminary which was the inspiration for the idea as was the Invisible College in Kingston. So now you know. Labels: Christianity, community, discipleship, education, emerging church, ideas, theology From ASBO Jesus. Also, if church was an airplane. Labels: Christianity, church, theology Darryl is engaging with Frank Viola and George Barna's latest book, Pagan Christianity. I'm pretty much prepared to accept the core of these points with some reservations. They don't always get the history right, and they overstate the case. I accept that many of our practices are non-biblical but "inconsistent with those of the early church" is another matter. But still - they do have a point that some of our practices today can be held sacrosanct when they can and do get in the way. But it's when you get to today's assertion that, in my view, the wheels fall off. Viola and Barna argue: Wow! There's a bit of a jump to get to this point, and I'm not sure if I missed a step somewhere. It could be that Viola and Barna are correct, but I don't think they've proved their case. Pointing out problems with a model means that the problems need addressing. It doesn't necessarily mean that the entire model must be scrapped. The idea of having a right to exist is an interesting one to me and here is a just a quick idea, maybe no churches have a Biblical or historical right to exist based on any structure. The church is a church when it acts like the church. The tag of church is as ephemeral as the action that it is taking at that time. One of the struggles that I have had with Steve Collins' ideas of church is that it sees to fragile and ephemeral. Maybe structural is completely irrelevant to our actions today and we are the church tomorrow, when we act like the church tomorrow. It reminds me of a couple of quotes by Karl Barth “No, the church’s existence does not always have to possess the same form in the future that it possessed in the past as though this were the only possible pattern. He also mentions this in Evangelical Theology Theological work is distinguished from other kinds of work by the fact that anyone who desires to do this work cannot proceed by building with complete confidence on the foundation of questions that are already settled, results that are already achieved, or conclusions that are already arrived at. He cannot continue to build today in any way on foundations that were laid yesterday by himself and he cannot live today in any way on the interest from a capital amassed yesterday. His only possible procedure, every day, in fact every hour, is to begin anew at the beginning... Yesterday's memories can be comforting and encouraging for such work only if they are identical with the recollected that this work, even yesterday, had to begin at the beginning and, it has to be hoped, actually began there. In theological science, continuation always means "beginning once again at the beginning". I think that any church that is living out the Gospel is the church. I think most churches (or at least their leadership) knows when they are just going through the motions whether because they are more interested in institutional survival or are more interested in being cool, we know we are faking it. It may not be apparent right away but eventually the truth comes out and it is either a vibrant community or just another social organization. Labels: Christianity, church, theology Here are my notes from my session with N.T. Wright at Soularize. I was running video during the session but then Spencer fired me and had Adam Klein run the video so I was able to take some notes. The entire talk will be for sale in a while on Soularize Feedlive and in Soularize-In-A-Box via TheOoze. I hesitate to post these notes because I was tired after a long day and was busy with other things. If they reflect poorly on N.T. Wrights theology or his talk, make the assumption that is it my fault and not his. I did borrow some of this from Kyle Martin who took some excellent notes of all of the sessions. We gathered at New Providence Community Church for a reception and a wine tasting. After the worship band warmed things up and Spencer introduced Bishop Tom Wright, things got started. Acts for Everyone Bishop Tom spoke on Acts (his book Acts for Everyone is coming out in December) and began by saying how we need to read through Acts in large sections as opposed to a verse by verse study (Frank Viola made some of the same points the next day -- I'll blog some about his seminar tomorrow). It is a story and must be read that way to understand the whole. He also made the point that the book was probably written as a part of Paul's legal defense. He spoke about the nature of Acts being a riot a day influenced by the actions of believers. He also talked about how a fellow Bishop who remarked that when Paul spoke, the people rioted and when [the Bishop] spoke, people made tea. Bishop Tom talked about how the Kingdom of God is the overlying theme of Acts. It begins in Acts 1 and extends after the 28th chapter. Acts is the story of the kingdom of God breaking into the world…living this Kingdom life will cause riots and those that will carry out this message will face persecution. Acts 1-11 says nothing about going to heaven when you die. It is about the restoration of Israel but it looks different than the Jewish people originally thought. The Kingdom of God looks like a community hanging with people from all worlds, with God living out his promises, as God claims the world as his own. The Second Coming of Jesus is Jesus coming to earth to rule and reign and to ultimately renew it. Not us being taken away to heaven which contradicts what most evangelicals believe and partly explains the lack of a theology of earth that has played a part of global warming. Wright then spoke on the ascension which confuses many because it is not a literal ascension upward. It reminded me a story of my brother coming home from Sunday School and learning how Jesus went to heaven on a Popsicle stick. Instead it is the place where heaven and earth intersect/overlap/interlock. Jesus didn’t go up, he went into God’s space. Jesus is at home in the space we call heaven. Jesus was already transformed and this ascension leads us through Acts. To the Jew the temple was this overlap (inside the temple was heaven, and the temple was on earth). But Jesus was a human not a building and its for the whole world. Acts 1-13 has a Jewish focus where we have Jesus community lived out in the temple in the outer courts attracting Jews. Jesus is announced as the Messiah. Acts 13-28 Jesus is announced as the Lord of the world and Caesar is not. The early Christian community is the church the place where heaven and earth collide. Bishop Tom mentions 1 Kings 8 and Isaiah 6 = connected to Acts 2. It is the place where the spirit comes alive and the community is equipped to share to everyone in the culture and provided opportunities. the name of Jesus carries power. Acts 7 has Steven preaching in the temple as a marker to Jesus and he is martyred. Acts 4-5 leads into this by sharing how we must obey God rather than men, not looking for trouble but allegiance brings trouble at times. Jews see water, sea as dark and evil. Look at Noah, Jonah, Moses and the sea as the dark chaos of creation. In order to bring the message of hope Paul must go through the dark and evil sea. Wright connects Luke to Acts through the crucifixion and the shipwreck Paul goes through. Jesus going to Jerusalem, Paul to Rome; climax of cross and shipwreck for the ultimate message to be declared. Luke’s theology is woven into narrative. People must go through fire and water (cross) in order to show Jesus as lord which happens over and over to Paul. Paul utilizes Roman citizenship and political powers. It is not our job to get the right people in, it is to keep accountable the people in positions of power. Acts has been thought of as a document to help Paul on his trial at end of Acts. Wright finished up with Luke having justification as a woven theology in his narrative. One day God will sort it out, and we should live in anticipation in the present for the the future. To be saved is to live out the Jesus way of life as heaven and earth intersecting. Jesus is powerfully present in Acts through faithful battered followers - Acts 2:42. Again, you will be able to get the full video in a short time from Soularize Feedlive and later in Soularize In a Box II. I am looking forward to reading Acts for Everyone and hope to explore the topic more. Here are all of my photos from the session with Bishop Wright. Labels: Christianity, church, emerging church, Soularize, theology I am spending the day at a private home in the Bahamas with the lads from the Soularize HQ, Father Richard Rohr, and other invited friends and guests for a workshop and day of learning. (Todd has some photos) Before that Todd, Jim, and I managed to escape to downtown Nassau for some touristy sightseeing and buy Nassau branded things made in China. While I was downtown, I saw the ugliest shirt while in a market. The storekeeper saw me and grabbed my arm and she told me I needed it. After saying it was something that a crazy member of royalty would wear, she named me Earl of Nassau III. We weren't sure that she was able to bestow me that honor but I did get a good deal on the ugliest shirt on the planet. How ugly was it? When I put it on, a couple of guys had seizures, three whales beached themselves, and one container transport ship set itself on fire. It isn't so much a shirt but a weapon of violence. After wolfing down some food, we ended up on the other side of the island in the same gated community as Sean Connery (he lives across the street) and am listening to Father Richard Rohr who is talking about... Father Richard talked a little longer and then we were set out to find a quiet spot for a while to listen to God and quiet the chatter. More about that later. More Father Richard People like Dallas Willard have been saying this for years, increased level of church activities do not produce disciples, it just produces people who spend more time at the church (and out of their communities where they could be making a redemptive difference). The reason we default to activities can be explained by Lyle Schaller in his book, Reflections of a Contrarian where he talks about the kind of statistics churches and denominations count. Because it is easy to count participation in activities, we count that and therefore do things to increase those stats. On the other hand it is really hard to quantify a person becoming a better disciple of Christ which in turn gets put aside. Especially when almost every Labels: church, discipleship, theology Labels: church, community, emerging church, Resonate, theology This quote comes from Kester Brewin I think the Western Church has become something even worse than the “buddy of Christ” I think we’ve become the no-longer-interested-spouse of Christ. The partner who is so disengaged in the relationship that they are dissolved in apathy and not even interested in divorce but have resigned themselves to a love-less, passion-less living out the rest of their days. I don’t mean to be a doomsayer but I must say that is what strikes me when I interact with most people in normal American churches, not to mention the feeling that I get when I have to sit in a service. This speaks quite loudly to me and when I first read it, hit me quite hard. Christians who are "faithful" and apathetic at the same time. What a horrible yet accurate metaphor for many in the western church. Similar to the Onion article, I'm in an Open Relationship with God. Labels: Christianity, church, theology Labels: Christianity, church, church planting, emerging church, ideas, theology, video Labels: books, church, Church of the Exiles, Saskatoon, theology Labels: Christianity, evangelicals, politics, theology Labels: books, Church of the Exiles, theology Labels: church, community, conferences, Emergent, emerging church, environment, Soularize, theology I got the North American release of the book the other day and I was blown away to see an endorsement by me for the book. It wasn't shocking that I endorsed it but for the first time in print, my name was spelled correctly :-) If you don't own the book, go out and get it. A couple of years ago when The Complex Christ came out, I plopped down some puny Canadian dollars, exchanged them for British pounds and bought the book from Amazon UK and eagerly waited for it to be shipped across the Atlantic. When it did arrive in Canada, I had to plop down some more Canadian dollars, this time to the Canadian Borders Services Agency to free it from them. After paying three times what the book cost in shipping and duties, I sat down and started reading. The book was worth the cost and the wait. The good news is that the book is being released in North America by Baker Publishing under the name Signs of Emergence with the easy to remember subtitle, A Vision for Church That Is Always Organic/Networked/Decentralized/Bottom-Up/Communal/Flexible/Always Evolving which means no more British pounds, no more voyages across the Atlantic, and no more donations to the Canadian treasury. The author, Kester Brewin is blogging at the official Signs of Emergence weblog so you can get a feel for his thinking and writing while you are waiting for your book to arrive (it doesn't ship in North America until July 1st). Since my copy is still The Complex Christ, I am going to refer to it as Signs of Emergence in this review but when I quote from it, it will be from The Complex Christ and use those page numbers. The book is as complex as the topic he covers and each time I have read the book, different things have hit me. Because of my context of involvement with Resonate and Church of the Exiles right now, I'll concentrate on the ideas that from those perspectives. Revolution vs. Evolution What I was younger, I loved the idea of the revolution. One of my favorite books still is Rules for Revolutionaries by Guy Kawasaki and Gary Hamel's book Leading the Revolution had an early impact on me (for good and for bad). My own neighborhood has seen church closings and no new church plants coming in to replace them so it seems like a perfect time for a revolution to me. However Signs of Emergence reminds me that there is a different way to go and that is the path of evolution. It reminds me that we need to take a closer look at what kind of change we are asking for. Revolution brings about change but they also seed havoc, pain, and suffering as well. Is that the kind of change that the church needs to be looking at? Brewin says no and starting on page 25, he makes a powerful cause for evolution. Our history, both ancient and modern, has been transfixed by the idea of revolution, of radical change precipitated quickly, requiring an uprising, an insurgence, a head of pressure and a focusing of force; demonstrations, coups d'etat, armed struggles, wars and regime changes. Warriors, dictators and their critics have been clear about it for centuries. Chairman Mao Zedong wrote that 'a revolution is not a dinner party. It cannot be so leisurely and gentle... It is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another'; Paul Virilio in Speed and Politics that 'revolution will soon be entirely reduced to a permanent assault on time. The man on the battlefield has no safety other than in suicidal entrance into the very trajectory of the speed of [the guns]'; and Napoleon that 'the strength of a revolutionary army should be evaluated as in mechanics, by its mass multiplied by its speed'. Through all their blood and violence many of our politicians seem to believe that these revolutions bring genuine transformation. Yet it is abundantly clear that materially, politically, psychologically and spiritually, violent change tends to shear, to break the whole as one surface part moves and leaves the rest of the body behind unaltered. In his seminal work Future Shock, Alvin Toffler describes the psychological damage that occurs to people when they are overwhelmed by intense change. He talks about 'future shock' being a disease of change, a sickness that people suffer that not so much about the direction of change as the rate of it. Future shock, he says, 'grows out of the increasing lag between ... the pace of environmental change and limited pace of human response'. In other words, for our own health, we need change to occur not at revolutionary speeds demanded by power-wielding dictators or company board rooms, but at the evolutionary speeds of the empowered human body. Party in response to Toffler's concerns, people have begun to see that the nature of change has been itself been required to change. If we are to transform the whole, and truly alter the very nature of things for good, then the mode of change cannot be revolution but evolution. A gradual development over a long period of time. As Robert Warren notes, 'A good case can be made for evolution being the best single word summary of an Anglican approach to change. It suggests creativity [and] responsiveness to present environment'. The slowness of evolution certainly has a divine beauty about it with its gentle, unseen transformation so hard to plot yet so undeniable in its force. We would like change immediate effect -- we want revolution -- but God's ways are not our ways and God's thoughts are higher than our. Despite this, as we will see in the next chapter, we have projected our revolutionary tendencies onto God, and it is only as revelation has become clearer over time that we have seen that ours is not a God of violent uprising, but of slow, slow evolution. So since forever, and until whenever, those that have sought to change God's way have had to endure a prefix of... Waiting [from the Vaux website] As Sarah waited: Ninety years for a son to fulfill God's promise.We wait in hope for what we thought had been spoken to us. As Moses waited: 40 years in the desert, being prepared by God to lead his people.We wait for emptiness and humility; for bravado to wither. As Israel waited: 40 years of wandering, hungry, depressed, thirsting, unsure.We wait for the right time to act As the Prophets waited: 1000 years of promises that God would raise up a Saviour.We wait for the signs that God has not forgotten. As Mary waited: 9 months of her 14 years for the child of God.We feel the birth-pains, yet fear for the child. As John the Baptist waited: Scanning the crowds for the one whose sandals he would not be worthy to untie.We long for an experience of the Divine As Jesus waited: 30 years of creeping time.40 days in the desert of temptation.3 years of misunderstanding.3 days in the depths of hell.So we wait for God's time. Preparing the way. Our turn to toil on leveling mountains and straightening paths.Our turn to watch the horizon. Our turn to pass on the hope that He who promised is faithful and will come back. What do we do as we wait. Signs points us to Walter Brueggemann's reminder that the first stage in this is grief which is not often popular in today's church culture where assurance and vision outweighs the acceptance that society no longer cares what is happening in most churches. Brewin asks and answers the question of where are the Jeremiah's of today, those to help us confront our grief in today's church. The answer is those are found on the fringes of the church culture. Signs asks us another hard question and that is what if God no longer is interested in what we are doing? From pg 35 and 36. Once we have grieved, our tear-washed eyes can then properly open to the shocking fact that God allowed this to happen. God allowed us to climb this little peak. The denial may be over, and the cover-ups exposed, but a deeper resistance still remains. How could God do this? In the midst of our waiting for the news, we meet this intractable issue: if we are seeking the new, then what we practicing was the old, and therefore God was not in what we were doing any more. God has moved on back down the mountain while we stayed up our comfortable hillock. Such a divine departure is rightly shocking to us. We see an example of it described in Ezekial 10: God ups and leaves the temple. To a people that had become over-familiar and blase about God's presence with them in the temple, to a people who had become complacent about their special status as The Chosen, God showed God's holiness. God got us and left. Bored by our ramblings, navel gazing conversation about internal tinkering, God hung up. God walked off, displacing a true, holy freedom that shouts clearly over its shoulder that no temple, no place, no people, no box, no church, no agenda, no theological position will ever require me to stay where I don't want, be co-opted into something I only half agree with, be pressed into the service of some cause you made up because I AM who I AM. And SLAM, the door shuts and we left alone to wonder about God's holiness, God's transcendence, God's otherness, God's separateness, God's difference. As we enter this dangerous place of stopping and waiting we must face the possibility of experiencing God's disinterest. Where we have proclaimed "God is in this" we must be prepared that God can and does leave. One need only consider for a second the other point where God was unable to leave any ministry, any place, any attempt at work, and we see that it would quickly draw us down the same path to the god who, not being allowed to permit suffering, intervened every time a child stepped toward a sharp object. God will not be co-opted into our programs. And this actually turns out to be the foundation of huge hope. For if God could no leave, then we would be bound and trapped for ever inside structures that God "might just be blessing". Power and the City Power and influence is a huge part of the evangelical church. Robert Webber said in an interview with Vineyard's Cutting Edge magazine years ago that evangelicalism was about two things. Big buildings and influential pastors. A couple of weeks ago, I read this Washington Post story on Baltimore Raven's head coach Brian Billick. Here is the quote that stuck out in my mind, "But for generations, the mandate of the NFL coach had remained unchanged: Get as much power as you can and don't let go." Brewin is calling us to do it differently. How do we walk away from power and re-orientate ourselves as the church in the world. On page 45 Kester's call is for us to become born again. The Church now seems to stand in the same place as God stood 2500 years ago: misrepresented, accused of bigotry, portrayed as narrow minded and in love with power, only interested in buildings, ready to smite the dirty and sinful, over-occupied with sex, and ready to lend support to unjust wars... And so we must do as God did, as Christ commanded and exemplified: we must be born again. Become nothing, removed of strength and power and voice and means and language... We must re-emerge and grow up again in the place we are meant to serve. Understand it, learn from it, be in it, love it, listen to it, wait 30 years before speaking to it. We must, like God, discard any thoughts that revolution is going to effect change in the Church or our world, and become dedicated to change by evolution. Brewin's advice to the church is to leave power behind and take a different path forward. In that he is calling those in North America anyway, to take the path less followed. How do we do that? According to Kester, one of the ways is to engage in an urban theology. He reminds us that over half of us in the world live in the cities, our theology remains quite rural as it was developed largely before urbanization. My own tradition of Methodism early history was dominated by John Wesley and his horse as they traveled from town to town across England and most of my current tribe's congregations are located in small cities and towns across Canada (well from Quebec west). It is going to take a major rethinking of what urban theology is going to look like. In his discussion of how the cities have changed into complex, bottom up systems, Brewin says this (pg 63), There are still those who cry for revolution, for a revival that will change things in a snap, make everything OK as thousands flock to church... But the days for revolution are over. The cry for revival is too often a cry for abdication: you do it all, God. Well God has done God's bit, it is the systems that now need to change. This is the faith we have signed up for: the Church as the body of Christ where we have real parts to play, real responsibilities. We must not act rashly--diving in to this or that. We must do as God did. Stop. Wait. Grieve. Strip away power, might, pretence at knowledge, riches... and be born again. As Einstein famously said, "The same consciousness that created a problem can not solve it." So will we be the ones to solve the problem? My ego wants me to say yes but deep down I know better. What is the impact of the things like Vaux that have come out of the period of waiting and grieving? Brewin offers an interesting comparison. Punk music. As he says (pg 71), punk was never going to be the future of music but what it did was the give permission to those who did create the future of music. He points out the unsustainable energy needed to create alternative worship (something that I can relate to with the worship.freehouse) but does point out that even if like the Sex Pistols and it does implode and burn out, it has (along with other expressions of the emerging church in the west) clear the way for other things to come along and pick up the torch. For whatever the future will look like, the book does call us back to the present. For many of us that is in the city. (pg 106). We must learn to penetrate our communities and penetrate our workplaces. We must learn to penetrate our cities and find God in them, for the cities are our true destiny. They are where it will not be God alone, but god and us and him and her and white and black and rich and poor and illiterate and abused and day and straight and Protestant and Catholic and the whole feast of life. And only in the city can we get that message. It is not an easy message to tune into with so much white noise and hatred and difficulty and screwed up and transport and mugging and division...But with practice, with a commitment to engaging positively with the city and looking to catch it doing good rather than always on the lookout to knock it down, we can begin to see glimpses of why God is committed to the city as our future: because the redeemed city is the final expression of humanity and divinity in co-operation. It is the conjunction of God's creation with our creativity, where we are building something together. How do we interact in the city? There are a couple of ways we can interact with others around us. Perhaps the most popular is in a market economy. Just a grocer sells you ice cream and vegetables, churches offer you up religious services and goods for a price (tithe). Before one mocks that idea, I worked on a staff where we articulated it in those terms and so do many other churches across the western world. As Brewin points out, the most pernicious part of the market exchange is that every person needs to justify their existence and contribution to the market economy or in the lingo of the church, be aligned around the purpose/vision/mission... There is another way and that is the idea of the gift. His tie of worship to a gift was breath of fresh air for me. For too long the church growth movement has seen worship as a commodity which was to be traded for attendance and tithe. I remember talking to one worship leader who unabashedly would boast that if you gave people the worship style they wanted, the more money they would give. He was probably right in his analysis of the "transaction" but as Kester reminds us, there is another use for worship other then generating revenue and that is the metaphor and idea of the "gift". Looking back at to the reasons why a number of us started Vaux in the first place, it was because the churches we were part of gave no opportunity for us to give. Sitting a huge church full to the brim with about 600 people, mostly in their early twenties, many of them working as actors, writers, directors, graphic artists, and musicians, it seemed extraordinary that unless they were able to preach or play the guitar, their gifts were not welcome. There was no space within the normal weekly services for any of these other talents, yet it was these talents that were talents that were put to use in the marketplace week in, week out. Perhaps it was not less surprising that people were coming to church with an attitude of getting rather than giving, because there was actually no room in the highly structured, highly dictatorial services fortheir gifts to be given. Speaking more on the idea of gifts and worship, Brewin captures what I think is a lost truth in the emerging church and our existence in a market driven church economy. "Alternative worship" is not multimedia worship. It is about allowing people to use their gifts so that they can worship with integrity. It would be folly to pretend that by installing PA systems, video projectors and screens, and shipping in tea-lights by the tonne every church would suddenly be "doing alternative worship". Buying a labyrinth or some ambient music and video loops doesn't get you any closer to the original spirit of the movement, because what Vaux would call "alternative worship" cannot be bought into; it is not about commodity but gift, and gifts must come from those taking part, not be bussed in from outside. In the Emergent Church, acts of worship will spring from the economy of gift. They will not be products that can be bought or sold, or commodities to be consumed in exchange for some devotion. However, we must not restrict our thoughts on gift to services. Thinking more widely about cities, they are massively dominated by market exchange - economic beats driven by capital and profit in ways that small villages a not. The Church would be foolish to try to play the city at this game and boost its "market share", "reposition itself itself in the market" or "rebrand" its message with modern advertising and marketing methods, for the essence of what we have cannot be bought or sold. It is not to be consumed and is not a lifestyle choice. Its truth will not be fully told by glamorous girls with smiley pearly teeth, and eight out of ten people who express a preference will not express its depth and pain with richness or sorrow. In the face of the saturating and all encompassing urban market, which Hyde rightly associates with empty death that leads nowhere, the church must stand as a beacon of generosity, as a hub for gift exchange and all the relational enrichment that brings. Of course he does cover the topic of dirt which gained notoriety after Steve Collins wrote about it in a 2002 column in Ship of Fools. I never found that much offense in the service (although back in 2002 when I first posted about it many did find a lot of offense with it). While the chapter was something to reflect on it, it does tie back into all of the other themes and ideas of the book and that is that the church finds itself in a different world and place than it has been for 2000 years and that is a missional movement that is often underground and back in amongst the city. Life is not as black and white as it once was (or perhaps as some in the church saw it then) and the nuances to live in the city are many at times contradictory. I think I have read the book probably 20 times and I will soon retire the book as soon as Signs of Emergence comes out in North America for no other reason to give it's battered binding a must needed break. If I had a list of the ten most important books for the emerging church and for the church in general, I think this one would definitely be on it. You can pre-order your copy from Amazon.com now, you will be glad you did. Related Links Labels: alternative worship, book reviews, books, Christianity, church, Emergent, emerging church, environment, Resonate, theology, TheOoze Labels: culture, globalization, quotes, theology I have been reading Rebecca Blood's excellent collection of Summer Reading Lists and after putting in a big order to Amazon.ca, I decided to create my own. In no particular order... |
It’s easy to talk about religious people reaching out to their communities, or about churches making a difference. There are scads of books being written about “being Christ in your community”. The pathetic reality is though, most don’t really even come close. Neither do churches’ attempts to reach into their communities, neither do outreach driven services. [Emerging] churches do little better.
Sings of Emergence is now out in Canada and the United States. I reviewed the U.K. version of the book on my blog but with the American release of the book, I thought it was worth a repost. I also submitted a review into