Category Archives: Mission

Is the Emerging Church going far enough?

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Mark commented on his blog about our recent discussions on church he used these two fantastic quotes which I thought were worth a mention. The quotes also tie into some thinking about the Church on the Edge project we are working on. One the big questions I have is around what are the non negotiables of church, and the sacraments. I always wonder how much is added and think Bonhoeffer is spot on with the Sermon on the mount as the core.

Bonhoeffer wrote,

The renewal of the church will come from a new type of monasticism which only has in common with the old an uncompromising allegiance to the Sermon on the Mount.

…and Br Samuel SSF wrote,

The renewal of both the Church and Society will come through the re-emergence of forms of Christian community that are homes of generous hospitality, places of challenging reconciliation and centres of attentiveness to the living God

I have been thinking a lot about the sacraments and the work we are doing with young people on Church on the Edge. I raised questions around the sacraments at a recent session I did for the Baptist College on Emerging Church and got this really helpful response from Ernest Lucas

I was particularly struck by your suggestion that tattooing might be an appropriate replacement for baptism for some young people today. You said that those involved with ‘emerging church’ have a right to ask difficult questions, and I fully agree with that. You also said that in seeking answers you sought to combine imagination, tradition and Scripture. I want to make some comments from the basis of tradition and Scripture.

Your suggestion about tattooing seemed to be based on the assumption that baptism is primarily a ‘rite of passage’. I accept it is that, but that is only a secondary aspect of it. I think that, on Scriptural grounds, the traditional view that it is primarily a ‘sacrament’ and ‘sign’ is correct. As a sacrament it is the use of a physical element which God has appointed and promised to be a means of blessing. As something that is a ‘given’ from God I don’t think we are free to replace it by whatever we like and then expect God to fall in with our wishes and use it as a means a blessing. That does not mean that the physical form of it can never be changed. However, this is where the ‘sign’ aspect comes in. As a sign it says something important about what God has done, and is doing, for us and in us. What it says is connected to the physical form. Baptism, in Scripture, says at least three things.

· It speaks of a moral cleansing (1 Peter 3:21).

· It speaks of a dying to one way of life and rising to a new life (Romans 6), and this imagery, expressed by going under water and coming out of it (however that is done), is linked to Jesus’ death and resurrection.

· It speaks of joining the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12:13).

If there is a physical action other than baptism which could convey these three meanings to a group of people today, then I’d be open to it being used instead of baptism. I don’t see how tattooing can convey either of the first two meanings above. I suppose that if it was done under general anaesthetic it could convey the second! In fact, it seems to me that water baptism is a good cross-cultural symbol for conveying these three meanings, which needs little explanation. Where explanation is needed is in linking it with Jesus’ death and resurrection. I’ll come back to this point later.

You suggested that baptism was a common ‘rite of passage’ in the first century and so it was easy for Christians to adopt it. I am not sure that this is true. Ritual washings were certainly common, especially within Judaism. However, the significance of baptism as death to an old way of life and entry into a new one was, I think, a Christian innovation. I think it only appears with this significance in mystery cults and Gnostic sects in post-Christian times and is borrowed from the Christian use. I may be wrong about this because I am by no means an expert with regard to these religions. Jewish proselyte baptism was primarily a ritual washing. Jews regarded Gentiles and Gentile territory as ritually unclean. So, when a Jew returned from travelling abroad, when they got to border of the ‘ Holy Land’ they would shake the dust of the Gentile lands from their clothes and have a ritual bath. Proselyte baptism was just such a cleansing prior to (for males) circumcision.

Circumcision itself is an interesting case study. It was a ‘rite of passage’ among the Semitic peoples of the ancient Near East. It was undergone by adolescent males and was linked with preparation for marriage. When the Hebrews started to use it for eight-day-old babies it lost this ‘rite of passage’ significance. An important aspect of a rite of passage is the ‘psychological journey’ undergone by the person in undergoing the rite. This cannot apply to a very young baby. The link with marriage preparation was also lost. Circumcision for the Hebrews became solely a sign of the covenant with Yahweh, and so of membership of the covenant people. In so far as baptism replaces circumcision this underlines that it is not primarily a rite of passage but a sign of the new covenant.

I am more open to the sharing of crisps and coke as a form of ‘communion’. The sharing of bread and wine in the Communion Service conveys at least two meanings.

· That through Christ God provides us with spiritual nourishment (John 6).

· The remembering of Jesus’ sacrificial death for us and the appropriating of its benefits (1 Cor. 11).

Bread and wine were staple food and drink in Jesus’ culture. I suppose crisps and coke may be staples for some young people – but on their own they are not truly ‘nourishment’! Jesus might have used bread and water if ‘nourishment’ was the only message to be conveyed. However, the red wine is evocative of his blood shed in sacrificial death. Also, of course, Jesus did not use just any bread and wine, he used the bread and wine of the Passover meal, which spoke to Jews of freedom from slavery which involved a sacrificial death.

Any stable food and a red drink is capable of conveying the meaning of the Communion Service. However, it can only do this fully if it is done in the context of retelling the story of the Passover and of the Last Supper. It is striking that when the first Christians took the gospel to the Gentiles, for whom the Passover was not part of their heritage, they did not ‘ditch’ this aspect of it, but taught the story to the Gentiles.

Just as there are aspects of ‘modernism’ that are inimical to Christian faith, so there are aspects of ‘post-modernism’ that are inimical to it too. An obvious one is the rejection of ‘meta-narratives’. Christians cannot dispense with the meta-narrative of God’s story of salvation history: creation-fall-Israel-Jesus-the church-consummation. Unless the ‘emerging church’ teaches this story and enables people to make it their own and live by it, it will not be authentically Christian. It seems to me that the sacraments of communion of baptism are prime means of introducing people to this story and enabling them to appropriate it. If, to some extent, the form of these sacraments is ‘counter cultural’ I don’t see that as necessarily a stumbling block. Getting to grips with them might be what is needed to stimulate people to use their imagination to enter into the story, and so begin to make it their own.

One thing I find interesting is the difference between baptism and communion and rembemer the resistance to coke and crisps ten years ago. At the moment I am just asking the questions so would like some help with the following.
-If are going to truely journey with young people in the light of the sermon on the mount, and practice love and genuine mutual relationships, how do we negotaite issues like the sacrements?
-Luther cut the sacrements down from 7 to 3 by looking at Tradition and Scripture are there further impliactions for the sacrements if we bring culture into that critical framework?
-Is this part of the root of the subculutral weakness of church, and will the emerging church emerge if we do not grapple more fully with the sacrements

-Any others you wish to add??

Emerging from a desert place

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Following on the previous post “being in but not off the church” James raises a really interesting question about wether we need to wait in a desert place for the the reframed paradigm of church. There are some really interesting links with the desert fathers, and the space and time this gave culture and church to shift. Are we working/thinking too much about emerging church? Do we actually need to retreat to a desert place rather than engage? Or could it be argued that church has actually been in the desert for decades?Reindeer Games buy

Maintaining movement

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I did a session on Emerging Church on Wednesday at the Baptist college, and pulled out the verb and noun issue. One of the comments in the discussion was looking at the notion of church moving from/through movement – sect – institution. The roots of some this is in Weber’s work on the sociology of religion and implicit within this model is the idea of protest and equilibrium. I don’t want to focus too much on the terms and semantics but look at the concept and importance of Emerging church as “movementâ€?. NB not “aâ€? movement. The idea being that EC resembles much of the movement idea but is not as cohesive or worried about cohesiveness enough to be a movement. Part of the root of this is in protest, but again not in the classic idea of being against something, but being for something; in the EC the protest element is present in the deconstruction needed but this is done in the climate of being pro or for people, for culture, for dialogue, for journey, for connectivity.

Gerlach and Hine in Kraft’s Christianity in Culture talk about movements having 5 key characteristics; A more cellular, segmented structure, Face to face recruitment, Personal commitment, An ideology or conceptual framework, and Real or perceived opposition. Again these characteristics don’t fit EC exactly as it is not “a� movement but are present in EC.
Part of the issue why these don’t quite fit I would suggest is that the greater recognition of weaknesses and humility in EC is part of it’s strength, and key to maintaining movement and that there is a maturity in this approach, that is aided by post modernity.

So in order to maintain movement it could be important for EC not to align too closely to institutional or established church that seek to define, but to move on into fluid type definitions or labels, that maintain key verbs that help give shape without holding it down. Whilst it could be that we are in a catch 22 type of situation as any label can restrict, I would suggest that with the shift in culture and maturity in EC that there is the capability to define itself in this more fluid way. For example in the post on redefining church I posted these elements towards definition
6. The redefinition we are offering of Church in the post- Christendom west is a way of being and living that is a series of chaotic but intentional encounters with God, one another, and the world, founded on the holistic teaching of Christ, and encompassing the whole of life.
7. This encompasses the critical outcome of the imagery of church used in the bible, this being that all the bibles images of church include “attitude and course of action�.
8. This whole of life process is not about walls, rules or fences but about wells, mutuality and redemptive processes.

To conclude I would ask/argue is it time to redefine in this fluid way as it could be crucial to maintaining movement, and stop EC becoming “a� movement in the classical sense as otherwise history would suggest (see Baptists, Methodist etc) that becoming an institution could quickly follow.

Labelling Church

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I’m following the comments against Richard’s Fresh Expressions post with great interest.

I’ve just had a look on the Fresh Expressions web site and peeked into their directory of fresh expressions of church. In it I note what appears to be a 100% tendency to label one’s church. Now, in a way that is a stupid thing for me to say, because if they didn’t have labels they wouldn’t be in the directory.

Whilst I don’t think that labelling yourself is wrong – after all it is quite a handy way for people to refer to you (and it helps if you want a web site) – it is interesting to give labelling some thought. The points that I’m tending to ponder are these:

  • Do labels tend to straightjacket your practices? e.g. ‘Baptists’ aren’t ever going to not Baptise are they?
  • Do labels tend to limit your mission to a particular demographic? e.g. pensioners aren’t going to turn up to ‘Loud Rave Church’ are they? Does this make us exclusive rather than inclusive in mission?
  • Do labels enable you to exert controlling power? After all, if one person is the founder, inventor and owner of the label, aren’t others more likely to go along with what they say, so that they can retain some of the benefits of that label? Having an ‘owner’ of the label can surely get in the way of God raising up other key figures within that group.
  • Do labels tend to go hand in hand with formalised procedures?
  • Weren’t labels first applied by those outside of the group? People who looked at the church, from the outside, and found a way of referring to it.
  • Do labels push you towards becoming a legally recognised organisation? Whilst this may give benefits (e.g. Gift Aid tax reimbursement) does this then put you in a position of subservience to societal law?
  • Do labels enable us to shortcut relationships? If we have a label is there then less need to know each other so well?

So, whilst I don’t want to argue for not having labels, I think that we have to be aware that our natural tendency can cause negative things to arise from having a label. In my mind we constantly have to fight our temptation of implement rules and routines that will suffocate the movement of the Holy Spirit.

The Two Prerequisites for Love (?)

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What God wants of us is for us to reflect his love. What do we need to do this all encompassing thing?

Well, one thing we need to show love is God himself:
1 John 4:7
Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.

What else do we need to love?

Time.

Without time we cannot love, as love is something that we do, something that takes time. All that we do needs to be out of love – we even look after ourselves and provide for our own needs out of love, enabling us to look outward and love others. However, sometimes we spend our time outside of love, we sometimes busy ourselves providing for our selfish desires.

Sometimes I think that perhaps we spend too much time making money, and sometimes we justify that by pointing to the good we can do with the money. However, I don’t think that God is short of a bob or two, but I do think that God would like more people to do His works of love. The one thing that we have that God doesn’t, unless we give it to Him, is our time.

Acts 3:6
Then Peter said, “Silver or gold I do not have, but what I have I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk.”

The love that God gives us is much more precious than silver and gold. I’m trying to focus more on giving my time. To do that I’m trying to reduce my requirement for money and therefore reduce my need to work for money. I’m trying to live more economically and not be so caught up in our materialist culture, but I’m not forgetting that we do need material provision – as with most things it is a balance.

Emerging (verb) Fresh Expression (noun)

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I know it may be semantics BUT I have this nagging doubt about the language of Fresh Expressions and it’s link to institutional church. I have almost posted this on several occasions but a conversation with a minister within the institutional church, this week, finally prompted me – thanks Ian.

You see the wording of Emerging Church is a great VERB, and it is one that has grown through the process of dialogue and practice and has come to express an approach to church that is traveling, on a pilgrimage, developing, growing, struggling. As a phrase it has begun to take root in people’s consciousness, and as a concept that has verb as part of it’s definition, it cannot be easily fixed or described and it continues to grow as is moves. There is something very right in the theological DNA of this type approach to being church.

However since the Mission shaped Church report was published and the link to Fresh Expressions made, I cant help feeling a slight loss of momentum. It seems that Fresh Expressions are more noun, more static, more shaped, more copyable. Please note I am not criticising individual fresh expressions of church, but wondering if the institutional link of emerging church through mission shaped church to fresh expressions is really a divergence from the missiological imperative of church to be more fluid, and to continually to contextualise particularly in the post modern west. The noun like wording makes it easier for institutional church to define, and then roll out examples to copy (and some would say control). BUT those that copy will miss all the hard work that these fresh expressions had to do as they emerged all the traveling, the pilgrimage, developing, growing, the struggling.

I think it maybe a backward step, and the consumer mentality of looking for models and the latest thing is so rampant, that if new fresh expressions don’t do the hard work of emerging, we will risk losing the stories and dialogue with people who are struggling to reconfigure what church is in their context, particularly if the structures continue to mirror consumer branding (which I think Fresh Expressions is rapidly becoming) of Fresh Expressions and they let people buy into fresh expressions as the latest thing too easily. History from missiology teaches us to be aware of copying what worked in one area, in another, and the loss this was to the church. Yes by all means learn from one another, but do the hard work of contextualising, maintain the right DNA, otherwise we will fail to grow in understanding of what church is.

This brings me to my final point, which is the sense of arrival that Fresh Expression as the noun has. This is incredibly unhelpful as potentially it can move people to think they have arrived, limit experiments, and certainly has the potential to subdue thinking and redefinition about what church in post modernity is. If we have arrived why do we need to continue to journey!!

Meals for Families

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Following on from my thoughts that lead to this idea I would like to explore a measure that might help and also encourage families to spend more time together.

What I’m imagining (speaking as a non-cook! Oh dear!) is the provision of cheap, reasonable quality meals, for families. To qualify for access to such meals you would need to turn up as a minimum of one adult and one child. The meals would be on one or more weekdays and would be available between 5pm and 8pm. Payment for the meals would be necessary except in exceptional circumstances. It would be attractive because the family would need to make less effort to have a meal and yet still have a meal at a very reasonable price.

This would appear to improve contact between family members (addressing the issues outlined here) and also be a way to create relationships between church people and non-church people.

Would be interested in your comments.

What Poverty Today?

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If we strip out the UK government definition of poverty as being those households with an income of lower than 60% of the average UK income, then we are left with the question of what poverty is there in the UK today?

In theory UK welfare and bankruptcy laws should provide for the needs of daily life, such as food and shelter. However, I do recognise that the application of this theory is fraught – I have personally had to spend time helping a friend claim what was due her (after she had suffered injuries that had made her unable to work). It’s as if our society wants to make it as hard as possible to keep one’s head above water in difficult circumstances.

So apart from money troubles due to the lack of help available to get the benefits of bankruptcy or welfare (and these are far from insignificant matters) what poverty do we have today?

My post the other day about the well-being of our children made me think that perhaps a large problem was the amount of time that family members spend with each other.

This is essentially what is behind the ‘Keep Sunday Special’ campaign – the idea that families need to spend more time together. However, because I don’t see any theological reason for Sunday actually being a special day, then I would rather tackle the issue directly rather than attempt to tell people that they shouldn’t work on Sunday. The church needs to wake up to the needs of those that work on a Sunday and change from having what is generally regarded as a key time within the church on a Sunday morning.

So I guess it comes down to providing for people’s poverty. If the poverty is a lack of quality time together then do things that enable people, from diverse backgrounds, to be able to have that time together.

Whilst I’m not sure that I would back a ‘keep dinner special’ campaign or a ‘play boardgames instead of watching TV’ campaign there are surely things we can do.

What are the things that are eating into people’s family time?

  • Sports
  • Watching sports
  • TV viewing
  • Ready meals and easy snacking
  • I’m sure that there are many others…

… but that last one gives me an idea:
Meals for Families

I think that that will need to be my next post!

Christmas at Greenbelt

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Greenbelt did not disappoint. As we had the children with us the festival had a very different spin for me. It was great to see the children get so much out of it, and thanks go out to those who made the festival work so well for families. Stuff like the drumming, statues, artwork, etc around the site was great for us, the shed camera obscurer was fantastic, and Jo as ever loved the sacred space on the top floor of the grandstand. Also the programmed family stuff was great fun, the twist and children’s festival, don’t let the pigeon drive the bus etc.

The one seminar I really wanted to go to I made – Pete Rollins who spoke about faithful betrayal, which was excellent. I recently read his book How not to speak of God which I think is a very important contribution to the current dialogue, I recommend it as the best book I have read for ten years. His talk begins to pilot a theology of redemption as a rupture and gives a great background to some of the issues I raised in the series of post about redefining church, for example see point 4 in this post.

Greenbelt for me is better than a family Christmas, I see so many people I have good relationships with, who I know are on a similar journey. People I now only reconnect with at Greenbelt, but who get me, and as ever the whole festival was a thin place where heaven and earth were a lot closer.

Exactly Who is Doing the Giving?

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Bartley brings up the issue of Government funding the church to carry out welfare services. This is a hot topic for many missions of the church including youthwork.

Whilst there are many considerations around the matter, I would like to merely ask: Who is doing the giving?

This is a hard question, but we all need to be careful that we consider it and are aware of it in our own situations.

As Christians, God has asked us to give our lives, as a sacrifice, to put others first. We show love in what we do, because it is our resource that we are giving.

If I give and in my giving I employ someone else to do the work, is it me who is giving or is it my employee? Well, it is me – surely. Sure, there may be the case where my employee is adding his giving on top of mine, perhaps putting in extra hours. That would be the his giving, not mine.

Our love needs to consist of giving of what we have got. Being a ‘professional Christian’ doesn’t mean that you are giving anything – it is only when you go beyond your job that you are giving, or when you receive ‘tiny pay’ (I knew that there was a good reason for such low pay! 🙂 ) – just the same as a shelf-stacking job down at Tesco’s, it is only when you go beyond the requirements of your job that you begin to give.

(note: how fantastically tax efficient it is to be a low paid youthworker and to make your giving your time rather than your money! Alternatively you could give money, but be taxed on the extra income you would need to receive before giving the money away. There isn’t a rule on this though – we just individually have to know God’s calling, and sometimes that can be to make money, possibly…)

When we think about giving let’s start by looking at what we have to give. It doesn’t need to be ‘silver and gold’ of which you may ‘have none’, but it does need to be something that you have.

Don’t seek merely to be an unloving, ungenerous, ungiving conduity of someone else’s love or giving. Don’t seek to merely be an paid arm of the state, or a paid arm of other Christians.

Sure, join with others who want to give, join with those who want to fund (as long as they have the same ultimate aims and wish to use the same methods as you), but don’t forget where your giving ends and someone else’s giving begins.

Ultimately it is giving what God has freely given us that matters.

Youthwork is a fantastically important thing to be doing – do make sure that the youth can see that you are not just giving other’s resources, but that you are giving your own too. It is that that gives you authenticity.

As an aside, I’ve just come across a case where (non-church) parents were given a letter by the youthwork explaining that as so much money went on upkeep of the church building it would be useful for parents to contribute to the youth activities. I was a bit bemused that the church felt it worth saying that the building was a higher priority than the people and that, whilst the church was willing to spend hundreds of pounds a week on the building, it wasn’t willing to spend a much smaller amount on people…