Put your wetsuit on

It is not often I write out of a sense of frustration, and accordingly I have held off this post for a while. However I have growing sense that the majority of the missional conversation is still paddling in the shallow end and asking the wrong questions.

Norman Iverson blogged about a sense of a lack of real change around Fresh Expressions and church. It is interesting to see an insider raise some the same questions those on the edge have had for a number of years about the FE Movement, perhaps it is time to review those questions. My comment on the post was “The unwillingness to embrace death (of ideas, orthodox Ecclesiology , power) will mean a lack of interest on real change, so the sense of cognitive dissonance that things that FE bring will be embraced instead. But like the institution I fear they too are not really interested in real change.”
Another place of paddling in Fresh Expressions and the emerging church conversation is around the idea of relevance. As if we listened to the community we would discover how to become a relevant expression of church. But we will never really hear the community whilst we are so rooted in our current models of church and orthodox Ecclesiology . An example was a recent post Is your church too cool. My comment again was rooted in the need to practice a completely new way of being and engaging with the question. “Church can never be relevant in our understanding of the word whilst it remains rooted in a concept of gathering outside of the wider community for a supposed experience of worship. Articles like this are asking the wrong questions”
It is easy to fall into the trap of meeting with other christians and thinking we are doing something new, doing something differently. However this, gathering in an exclusive way (i think we often kid ourselves that we are more open than we are) outside of a wider community is part of the gravitational pull that produces the sense of cogitative dissonance that means a lack of real change and keeps us in the shallow end. It is rooted in our false history that we can suggests we can get closer to G-d through a worship service. There is a brilliant article here exposing this myth and its problems.

I am part of a number of emerging (note not gathered and most of which have christians as a minority) communities, and more and more I am convinced that we need to loose any ideas of coming together for a time of prayer, a time of worship, or a church service. They all simply produce a sense of security that stops us finding out what it really means to love and serve. That is not say we give up meeting together but we meet head on the myth that god is present in the gathering more than anywhere else and work out what it means to put our wetsuits on and ask better questions and swim deeply with G-d.

Best Guess typology of current church context

Jonny put me onto Arbukles book Refounding the church, and just posted today about several of his thoughts. As ever with these type of things they never quite fit the context I am in, but it had an interesting typology of church that I have adapted. I am not that worried about pinning down what I think about church but it did get me thinking enough to try and re-contextualize it into where we are now in the UK. This is just my best guess and I actually found the process a helpful follow on from the last couple of posts about sobornost.
A pdf of my best guess
Typology of church I think I am most closely aligned to the right column, but recognise that this is probably more a reflection of where I am than the emerging church, as I think many would have a higher view of orthodoxy and tradition, than me. Hence only using (emerging) and (FE) and using different titles.

church on the edge – community in practice

it was great to have people around last weekend, to see the young people who had come up through the project, linking with the professional people who help form the management committee, volunteers, their children and partners. building new forms of church isn’t rocket science, it is being real, open and relational.
People had space to be themselves, drawing away from the main group to chat, or smoke, or play. People had time to mingle over food and argue over which pudding was best, or education policy.
Here were a group of people journeying together from different startpoints towards christ. Helping to build kingdom (but not all understanding that sort of wording), and called together for a purpose. The practice of an open sobnoristic community meeting together around food, or if you want to get theological about it “a banqueting table”.

Space for newness

Following up on the last post and subsequent comments here and Pete’s post around radicals and conservatives and Kester’s on Newness I wanted to explore some issues around creating a space for newness.
I would be with James that very little new has emerged in the last few years and Petes post seeking definition on the terms highlighted for me that finding newness within our current context was highly problematic, due to the strength of the christian cultural context we find ourselves in. As I commented I am unsure if radical theology can emerge in such a context and as such maybe defining terms such as radical and conservative is a red herring as it reinforces the place of this cultural context, and thus hinders new voices from emerging. How many teenagers or children, people not coming from a faith tradition would want to part of that discussion?
Community organising suggests all action is in the reaction, and I wonder if this one of the things that has shifted. In the early experimental days there was plenty for people to react to, as people in community developed new forms of connection through the Alt worship ect it created an experience that people could react to, discuss and dialogue. As such there was far more equity, and I remember great conversations with children and young people or faith or none that I took to Greenbelt events, and their comments greatly informed my ecclesiology.

(I recognise the irony of continuing to write in the light of what I have said so far but want to pursue another reason about creating space for reason.)

Bourdieu who builds on an earlier ideas of Habitus – cultures way of behaving and norms making society possible, which we are socialised into. Bourdieu suggests that habitus was more than this and that through our participation we contribute to the unfolding “habitus” i.e. it is a two way dialogical or iterative process. Is part of our problem is that as we have moved from experience/activity to dialogue and discussion that not a wide enough people demographic are participating to allow something new to unfold. More than this as I explored in Reconnected that if as Elaine Graham argues “the task of rebuilding Christian theology in a more authentic fashion requires a critique of the points at which tradition has misrepresented the spirit of the gospel; and then a reconstruction of theology according to emancipatory principles”. It can equally be argued that when these emancipatory principles are told, or the tradition critiqued, that it must be accompanied by the liberatory story, and voices of those outside that initially gave rise to the need for change, if it is to have any hope of getting through the layers of misrepresentation that have accumulated over the years.
I think there is model for this- the russian concept of Sobornost, “Spiritual community of many jointly living people” or one that is rooted in practice, action, dialogue and community but that is for another post.

Transitology and emerging theology

As a practitioner and activist I have been fascinated by the idea of change for a long time, change on so many levels, and in so many ways. How individuals change, how communities change, how culture changes, how education changes, how young people change, how theology changes, how church changes and list goes on and on…..

For some time I have been questioning the depth of change, challenge and if any real transition was happening in emerging church thinking and theology, if we were on a road less traveled and willing to encounter G-d that can only be found in glimpses as we deny the false god we know. Often finding a sense of newness in some of Pete Rollins writing and in agreement with Kester Brewins post that there has been a sense of retreating. However I am unsure if this is conscious or circumstantial as the institutions catch up.

Kesters postthe backlash begins and the comments has prompted me to finally get around to this post.

At a basic level Transitology (derived from political science and initially examining change in latin america) identifies 4 elements to the change process. 1, structural factors are inadequate by themselves need actors to help make change, 2 change happens at times uncertainty, 3 Actors are assumed self interested, 4, Property rights of the wealthy need to be challenged.

I want to borrow from Transitology to say a few things about the change or lack of it, and current processes in the emerging theology debates.
1, The structures (and here I mainly mean the institutions and denominations) recognised the need for change and could not make the shift happen by themselves. They needed and still need actors on the edge of and preferably (in my mind) outside themselves to help make change happen.
2, The uncertainty and backdrop of the cultural shift to post (hyper) modernity is obvious, and the challenges it wrought both in terms of thinking and theological processes and in terms of subscription to institutions, commitment etc provided the climate of uncertainty needed for next shift, or as Phylis Tickle suggests the great emergence.

But it is the next two arenas of Transitology where I think we can draw some hope from and maybe build a bit of a platform to stop the retreat.
3, I think the backlash Kester mentions, comes from, and is coming from, a number of fields. Initial emergence was quite egalitarian, and practice driven by actors, working out what to do on the ground in the shifting context they found themselves. This flew in the face of self interest and created a platform for voices from the margin to be seen and heard. As the movement matured the voices shifted from the group to the individual, (which is needed as Actors play a key role), but in doing so could easily be seen as being less rooted in communities and practice or self interested. This will make it easy for people from outside emerging theology circles that are too lazy to get to know the actors to criticise them as self interested or unaccountable, as at a surface level they see people removed from their communities (or systems) and not practice orientated. I assume (like my own experience on the edge) that Kester with Vaux, and Pete with Ikon forged a depth of relationship created in the years of practice and risky experimentation that still remains. However, it may be helpful (particularly for the likes of me) to be given some pointers on grounding some of the thinking into our practice, and where actors are not involved directly anymore, to be dialoging with practitioners who are seeking to flesh out the christ they are speaking of on the ground, and to make these faltering attempts, and relationships public alongside the theological discourse. One of my greatest fears is that our key actors will be unfairly criticised from within (one field that the backlash may come from), and in doing so the movement will not embody the openess and acceptance, robustness and questioning that much of the emerging church is known for, and is certainly one of the changes worth protecting. This links to my final point, I do think the voices of the wealthy need to be challenged and this is two fold. There needs to be a challenge to the intellectually wealthy to root theological ideas on the ground. Secondly the growth of fresh expressions could be viewed as the wealthy institutions colonialising the grass roots, and in so (hopefully not intentionally) suppressing the voice of the actors and those on the edge who were and still are, key to helping make change happen. This may be the another field where the backlash comes from, but it will be disguised in many colors, as the tentacles of the wealthy and powerful are legion.

Does Christianity have a future in a new shape?

After the programme does Christianity have a future? see iplayer here (our bit is around 37 mins in) I wanted to start a discussion about what I thought the programmes was going to be about which was more about the emerging shape of Christianity and how the values of Gen Y influence and change the way we do church. Ann Widecombe seemed to have an agenda around traditional approaches to faith, and how much she was involved in shifting the focus of the programme i am unsure. Dave Wiles summed it up nicely “Dear old Anne playing with red herrings”

SO am asking the question does christianity have a future in a new shape and what does that shape look like?

Heres one colour that I think the new picture will be painted with to get you started – it will be apologectic free, people will not bother about arguements like did God create the world in seven days, and whilst people may ask those sort of questions, answers will not be about justifying a defence but explaining that it doesnt matter and only giving their view as one of the options about what the truth may be.

A third confessional perspective.

At the moment I have a three sided mirror in which to reflect on some big questions about change and the nature of the christian message. I am reading Phillip Davies Whose bibe is it anyway for my post grad in practical theology, Reading Pete Rollins The fidelity of betrayal and the third mirror is my own practice side of church on the edge driven by the missiology developed over the past decade or so. All which are provoking me to look deeper at the meta-narrative I think the christain faith and Biblical text carry and the implications for mission.

Davies discusses the nature/approaches of biblical criticism and argues that there are esentially two perspectives, confessional (coming from a theological/faith perspective which he also uses emic, Bible studies and Scripture to differetate those who see the Bible as canon) or non confessional (coming from a humanist perspective where he also used the terms etic, biblical studies and non canonical). His typeology is good and useful but I find his understanding of the confessional perspective (a kind of fundemental/literalist to liberal) limted and dated.

From my third confessional perspective (which I would say borrows from modern emerging church perspectives that in themselves also borrow from traditions although reframed, post modern theory, and mission encounters) sees faith about the redemptive processes that consistantly ruptures our worldview (inc our faith paradigm) and is a series of revolutionary moves

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that form and shape a new (at the time) but growing (in hindsight) understanding of God.

So I have no qualms about Davies exegisis of texts as they may help us with the rupture, indeed I approach Biblical studies with this mind (part of the third confessional perspective) and may even argue that this is why we have the text, however Davies would argue that confessional perpectives limit. I would agree when looking at narrow confessional perspectives and that there is a danger of this within the third, but I would argue that biblical criticism from the third perspective more in line with etic approaches than the emic as it demands a rigour and openess that could even beyond a humanist perspective as this a truth understanding that may be less open than the third confessional perpective.

Rollins in both the fidelity of betrayal and how not to speak of God goes someway to underline both the need for a third confessional perspective (although he doesnt use the term) and identifies and develops (particularly in fidelity of betrayal) the perspective as he reflects on the place and notions of truth held within/by the historic confessional perspectives.

Davies exergesis of Abraham in chapter 5 Male bonding leads him conclude “there are no historical or theological truths that need to be won from this, only the wisdom and experience of the tellers.” and the writer may be suggesting that god is much like politican that makes promises that change, and not to be trusted, and that we shoud hold these lightly, esentially that neither Abraham or Yhwh are what they are cracked up to be. So what Davies does is very consistant with a third confessional perspective perhaps even biblical evidence for this perspective, and supports how Rollins develops the perpective as the God we know cannot be G-d as G-d is beyond, more etc.

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Fissures

I was chatting yesterday Iain about stories that break the narrative and creating fissures in the christendom/ corrupted christian worldview. Thinking about how both pressure from within and outside can help open the cracks up. However over the years there have often been stories that oppose the establishment eg anabaptist but cant get away from the thought that lots of people see the need to paste over the cracks hence the slow pace of change.Definitely, Maybe dvdrip

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