Category Archives: Zzzz … Old Stuff

Snow creates a mystical agnostic encounter

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Isn’t it wonderful – a winter wonderland ! – The earth has been wrapped in a blanket of snow, a free universal gift. The snow changes and disrupts our normal activity, plans and ways of seeing things. It creates uncertainty and reminds people of their powerlessness. This gift breeds community, fosters togetherness and slows busy people down.
The snow has created chaos , roads are blocked, people need each other, they talk to strangers, help each other and commonality is fostered. Classically snow creates space for play, snowball fights, building snowmen/women/objects, sledging in which the whole family and community can particpate.

The gift , the simple snowflake enables people to break out of their boxes,(cars/ culture/ selves) and are given a glimpse of togetherness, wonder and awe. Feels like an Agnostic advent moment!

And the other side of the story is….

In true agnostic fashion – there is always another side to the story and is impacted by listening to the other. My perception and my present circumstances dictate how I see the world – but agnosticism creates social empathy and an ability to listen to the truth of the other. The poor struggle to keep warm, old people die, small businesses go bust, people get hurt, animals go hungry, hardship is caused for many.

And another side of the story…

I am self-employed and work in schools – I only get paid if I can work. I have not been into work this week because of a virus so I have been unable to earn money. However the schools were closed so I couldn’t have worked anyway. I haven’t felt like doing any work at home, but I have enjoyed playing around with the Agnostic Advent. You may have wished that I had been well!!

There are many ways to perceive the same event.

Being pregnant – the waiting begins..

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For many in our society conception is not guaranteed, leaving many women, men and couples bereft, sad and disappointed. Likewise with pregnancy, the mother embraces a fragile process and begins a journey into an unknown, unsure and often difficult wait including enduring morning sickness. So many questions, Will the baby reach full term? Will the baby be alright? Will the mother be alright? Will there be complications? , Will I eat the right things? Will the father be supportive? Will it be a boy or girl?

Is life just one big agnostic advent? Most of us wouldn’t claim to know what the future will bring and so in life we embrace a not-knowing way of being. There is so much we don’t know? So many things we can’t be sure of – there are no guarantees!! We don’t know what the future holds, we can’t be sure of outcomes? We can’t guarantee that we will make the right choices or that we will be happy? We can’t prevent struggles and difficulties entering into our life.

And so back to Mary, How was she to prepare herself for this new life? She carried this life within her, fusing feeling full with being uncomfortable. Her life was no longer just hers; she was protecting the fragile new life within. The tension between it’s vulnerability with her anxiety. It is meant to be a boy – what if it is a girl? Her life would never be the same again – would the child be alright? Would he and she survive the birth? (it wouldn’t be uncommon) What would the child look like? How would he change her? How would she cope with looking after a baby, would she be good enough?

The Conception

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How did Mary and Joseph understand and feel about what was happening to them during the huge surprise and news of Mary’s pregnancy?

How did Mary Feel? Mary is visited by an Angel and is impregnated – she remains a virgin/ never sleeping with a man. The semen is divine – was it divine IVF? This is impossible – never happened before – how would she tell Joseph? What would he think? What would her friends think? What were her feelings –perhaps deep fear of being seen as crazy, many questions, awe, amazement and anxiety all fused together.

How did Joseph feel? – Mary has slept with an angel / God – this brings a whole new meaning to the earth moved! How can he compete with that? Is he just a bit-part in the whole scenario? Can he believe her, can he trust her – this is impossible and it’s not fair, it messes with all my plans! Never has anything like this happened before or anyone claimed this… Who is Mary?

Agnostic Advent

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Following on from a recent comment I made on one of Richard’s posts about embracing the religious tradition of Agnosticism, I began to think about what this would mean in terms of advent. And so I hope throughout this advent season to explore this by putting up a few posts.

Being an agnostic essentially means unknowing and Advent means ‘waiting’ – so perhaps as we enter this advent season we enter a time of waiting for the unknown.

Perhaps this was how Mary and Joseph felt…

And how the mystics lived…

The tradition of agnosticism belongs to the mystics outside the church walls, where they are free to embrace uncertainty, weakness, uselessness, not- knowing and powerlessness. They have no need of dualism, answers, or right and wrong thinking. They have no need of a parent to have authority over them. They embrace empathy, uncondtional love, the question and the unending journey.

Missional Imagination 4 – Finding the question

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When we started with church on the edge there were a number of questions we had around mission and church that were important. They included things like, what does Donovans new place look like for young people, By name is G-d known in this context, what is church?

For me they broke down into two main categories, – There were Star Trek questions, that perhaps will never be answered but keep fueling the missionary imagination, questions about the new place. These questions keep you on the journey and keep you on a missional trajectory – to boldly go. Then there were the Star Wars questions which were more practical and about the steps towards breaking out the old way of doing things and moving beyond the empire of the instution towards a practical outworking of the force. Although hard to answer, these were more attainable, eg what is equivalent of Engai to the young people

When it comes to mission a lot of what we do is instinctive or stems from the feeling that something needs to change. However unless you identify your questions it is hard to begin to re imagine any answers.

What are your missional questions?

You say syncretism, I say inculturation or What’s wrong with a bit of syncretism?

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I have been thinking a lot about holding the tension between culture, bible and tradition which has moved into thinking about what it is to be swept up with missio dei, and what this may look like for our structures and approaches/ theology.

I still think and still feel we are a long way off the mark in emerging church circles as we are worried about slipping into syncretism, and the gravitational pull of orthodoxy. Perhaps our orthodoxy is as much a myth as the myth that we can know the unknowable G-d.
I think the separation of sacred and secular is rooted in our need to box God in, to define what is God and what is not.

So there is something buzzing away in the back of head about the need to collapse much of our approach as it feels dualist. We have made great progress in missional thinking and understanding recognizing the missio dei etc – if God is working, sovereign, we ask what is God already doing, so we can get in on this (rather than the older approach which was thinking it is our mission or we are the carriers of God or God is not present/at work) but this question, what is god doing is still rooted in identifying a particular thing God is doing (which in itself supposes there are things that God is not in control of or doing) and thus enables us to focus on this known/discerned aspect of God rather than simply being cast adrift with the missio dei with G-d in G-d’s world.

This raises the question of ‘other’ what is it, does it exist, or is there other but that is a whole other kettle of fish which i cant get my head around.

If syncretism is about the attempt to reconcile contrary beliefs, often while melding practices of various schools of thought wasn’t this what happened with introduction of christ and the emerging christology. So since Christ split the curtain shouldn’t we be a bit more about what Robert Schreiter sees as inculturation “the dynamic relation between the Christian message and culture or cultures; an insertion of the Christian life into a culture; an ongoing process of reciprocal and critical insertion and assimilation between them” which seems to differ little for me from syncretism. Perhaps i am being naive about the semantics.

The wedding banquet from below

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Just looked at this parable with a group and started with the question where is God in the parable?

If see God as with the poor and marginalised he is in the highways and byways. Using this as the startpoint you don’t have the option of seeing the king as god or the son as Jesus and could see the parable as a critique of organized religion or power.

The king is keen to make alliances with the rich farmers and businessmen so invites them to the party to impress them, they are obviously powerful as they have the opportunity and means to kill the servants the king first sent, and the king needs to subdue these people after they killed the servants by the use of force with armies not just a couple of people.

Then in order to not be seen as a loser the king needs to have some people come to the party so invites (coerces?) poorer people to attend. Tradition at the time suggests the grooms father provides the right clothes for the party guests but one person refuses to wear the clothes from the manipulative, politically savvy, violent and coercive monarch. one person refuses to play the game by the rules of the powerful and is cast out into the darkness with the outcasts.

Here we see Jesus as someone not willing to go along with the power plays of the day, someone who stands up for justice, who reads the motives of the powerful and stands outside of those systems. The kingdom is heaven is about putting other people first, standing up for righteousness, speaking out for the voiceless and living in a way that is radically different to established ways of the world.

1 Jesus spoke to them again in parables, saying: 2 “The kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son. 3 He sent his servants to those who had been invited to the banquet to tell them to come, but they refused to come.
4 “Then he sent some more servants and said, ‘Tell those who have been invited that I have prepared my dinner: My oxen and fattened cattle have been butchered, and everything is ready. Come to the wedding banquet.’
5 “But they paid no attention and went off—one to his field, another to his business. 6 The rest seized his servants, mistreated them and killed them. 7 The king was enraged. He sent his army and destroyed those murderers and burned their city.
8 “Then he said to his servants, ‘The wedding banquet is ready, but those I invited did not deserve to come. 9 So go to the street corners and invite to the banquet anyone you find.’ 10 So the servants went out into the streets and gathered all the people they could find, the bad as well as the good, and the wedding hall was filled with guests.
11 “But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing wedding clothes. 12 He asked, ‘How did you get in here without wedding clothes, friend?’ The man was speechless. 13 “Then the king told the attendants, ‘Tie him hand and foot, and throw him outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’
14 “For many are invited, but few are chosen.”

Misisonal Imagination 3

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It took me while to reflect on why I had a disquiet about yesterdays post on Mike Frosts, Gaby Ngaboca and TSK’s conversation around missional church. I think the root is that whilst Mikes examples in his talk seemed to be in an Outside Out approach (and were truly inspiring), the way he phrased the question “what would our worship/community/disciple making look like if they were shaped by mission?” FEELS like an inside out approach to mission.

The “our” word is problematic as whilst the way he discusses mission is more missio-dei this question is more inside out, and attractional (which I assume was not his intention based on other stuff he has written). TSK comments that the culture then helps shape the way you then become missional church, but I wonder if by then due to the feel of the question and the insider start to the question ifgravitational pull would have already kicked in for most churches.

So when it comes to missional imagination perhaps we are back to the bare bones of the question that simply asks “what is G-D doing (or where is G-d) in this context?” and allow that to start the journey to missional church.

Missional church

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Listening to Mike Frost and TSK HERE and Frost defines he defines mission as All that we do outside of ourselves to alert people to reign of God in Christ (a Bosch quote). He sees church having four equal elements – Mission, Worship, Community, Discipleship. He defines missional church is one where the community is attempting to discover, what does it look like if mission shapes or catalyzes the conduct of the other three functions.

He then asks the questions what would our worship/community/disciple making look like if they were shaped by mission. I think this is a really helpful way of looking at things, and good question.

I am interested that in two of the four elements he identifies for church we see the nature of God (Mission – missio-dei and Community – trinity) but not sure why but I think it maybe a key to some of the questions I have about some of the other things he says.