Disconnect & Connect

The final presentation of my course, on Gospel & Mission, was this morning. I was quite enthusiastic about it but when it came to the bit where we had to draft a mission policy for the parish (we don't have one) everything seemed to get stuck in thick mud. It seemed (and I could be quite wrong here) that my incumbent was trying to stifle any initiative. Frustrated, I asked him, "Are you against evangelism?" He looked taken aback and I clarified: "I mean in a structured intentional way..." Afterwards Shirleyanne, my wife, said that my question was too strong, though she had felt the same way as me. O well...

In the afternoon a joined a few others in conversation about emerging church at the Bishop's house. We were all a bit tentative at first but it was good to sense the enthusiasm as well as the encouragement from the bishop and archdeacon. We didn't come to any conclusion (which was good) and there was no emergence either but we made some connections and we introduced some diversity into the system, so that was a positive start.

So, a funny day; all part of life's rich blah blah blah I suppose.

There's no such thing as a church

I've puzzled over this question for a long while: I know what the church is, but what is a church? None of the definitions or explanations I could think of, or that I have read quite worked for me. Today the penny dropped.

There is one holy, catholic and apostolic church - and there are a myriad of localised expressions of this church. We have got into the habit of thinking of some of these expressions as being churches. Contrariwise, we have gotten into the habit of thinking of other expressions as not being churches. This thinking has got so ingrained that it trips us up when we try to think about new ways of being church.

The question we should be asking of a body of Christians is whether it is an authentic expression of church. If it is, then its outward form and inner structure do not matter. If it is not then its outward form and inner structure don't matter either. Of course, the test for authenticity might not always be easy to apply or unequivocal in its answers but the principle is still important.

Indeed, even much of what I have written above may be guilty of an inappropriate reification. By thinking of church as a noun and then dividing it up into more and more nouns we have turned Paul's body of Christ into a tangible object. Does an authentic expression of church always have to involve a gathering of people? Does that gathering always have to rely on physical contiguity? Could a valid expression of church be a disparate and scattered set of people, perhaps only connected by the fact that they visit the same space from time to time (but never at the same time)? (I'm thinking of the visitors to our church building.)

There's a lot more to think on this topic but I do feel I've made a start for myself.

Be Quiet!

I went to the Mission Shaped Church conference yesterday and I will write about that in sue course. But I was more struck, as my journey home was delayed more and more, by a passage from Doug Pagitt's "Reimagining Spiritual formation"; his account of the Solomon's Porch experimental church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (A very interesting book, by the way.)

I get quite upset by the amount of noise at the start of services. I want to be quiet, to prepare myself for an encounter with God. The babble of secular conversations distracts me and I can end up feeling a bit resentful and spiritually superior (I've come here to worship God, you lot have just come to swap trivialities with your friends...). Doug wrote:

"Our Sunday night gatherings officially start at 5:30 pm, so people are sometimes puzzled when the music doesn't start until 5:40. At least once a month someone asks me, "Why do we start late?" I tell them we aren't starting late, we're starting the conversation. And that's important because this conversation is the heart of who we are. Our hope is that the music, the invocation, the prayers, and the sermon that follows will be a continuation of the conversation between us and with God." (p 50)

And I was suddenly convicted that this is right and that I have been wrong. I talk a lot about building community, about worship being a collective rather than individual experience and yet my own thoughts and actions belie my words.

On Sunday I will start the service by sharing this with the congregation. I wonder what response I'll get.

What is a Church?

I'm having trouble with the notion of a church. The church seems far less problematic - those who are 'in Christ', the body of Christ, etc. But what is a church? There seem to be lots of possibilities:

1. Those people, some of whom may be 'in Christ', who attend public worship at a particular building? Often called the congregation.

2. Those people who attend public worship together (there may be others who attend different services in that building)? Often called a congregation.

3. A group of Christians focused around a priest/pastor?

4. A group of people meeting together to participate in God's work of justice and mission (New Way of Being Church or Cell Church)?

There are others. I guess that numbers 2 and 4 seem most important. We should be treating them as the atoms of the church and wondering how we can support them in their development and interaction with other atoms. This means that one church building and one priest could support several different 'churches' within it. They may interact and overlap at times but at other times they will develop their own particular ethos and style (within the parameters of the catholic church) and will provide a home for those whose path to God lies through their particular way of approaching him.

All in the Family?

Last night at my course David Court, the vicar of Cromer, was with us. He observed that CPAS and the Church Army, the two prime home mission organisations in the Church of England,have quite different strategies. CPAS favours all-age worship ("The CPAS body beautiful? Conference challenges the local church to become the all-age community that God has always intended it to be.") while CA is leaning towards segmentation. Having recently moved from 'one size fits all' to segmentation myself this was interesting to hear.

Behind this is, I think, a sense of imperative. Church should be a family and so we should all meet together. The first part may well be true; certainly if we are all sons of God we must be related and part of his family. But the second part? Modern families spend much of their time apart. Dad in his shed, Mum watching Eastenders or Corrie, Sam upstairs with her best friend Julie, while Jo is on his PS2. They may come together for meals from time to time but their sense of family does not necessarily depend on them doing everything together.

So why do some want to impose another model of family on the church? Is it more 'Biblical'? I'm not convinced. "In my Father's house there are many mansions" - does this imply that we're all supposed to be together all the time? Poor exegesis, I know but nothing to support what seems to me to be a rather romantic ideal of family leaps out of the Bible either.

Certainly, if we are to be where the people are then the segmented model of worship and congregation would seem to be closer to most people's experience of family than the 'all together now' approach.

Metanarrative & Fractal Encoding

If the metanarrative is unknowable, what does this say about the Bible? I guess that the Bible points to, proclaims, but does not delineate, the metanarrative. After all, there is no linear narrative in the Bible. Biblical theology may try to 'extract' such a story - that, after all, is part of the Enlightenment enterprise. But, in truth, this does injury to the text. The Bible is full of contradictions such as an unchanging God (Ps 59:19, Mal 3:6) who has to put a rainbow in the sky in order to remember, who is beaten down by Abraham in a haggling contest and who changes his mind constantly. The two creation stories contradict each other, and so on.

This is important. Instead of trying to harmonise these different strands we should let them interact and see what emerges. It is significant, though, that we often find the metanarrative fractally encoded in individual stories.

Richard.

Is there a metanarrative?

Postmodernism—at least some forms of it (Lyotard, for one)claims that there is no such thing as a unique metanarrative, or megastory (or that there are lots of metanarratives and it is not possible to privilege one of them). I say, there is a metanarrative, which is God’s story and that it broadly corresponds with McLaren’s Creation, Crisis, Conversation, Christ, Community, Consummation.

However we cannot know the details. Instead there are lots of mininarratives which may even contradict one another. This is the way to read the Bible (Bruegemann 1993, Texts Under Negotiation). Treat each mininarrative (or pericope, if you prefer)on its own terms and see what emerges. Don't try to harmonise different parts of scripture or use scripture to read scripture (heresy!). This can only work if you know the answer already. Whilst this may be true in broad outline it cannot be true in the details.

Richard.

Modernism & fundamentalism

I'm reading Ernest Gellner's postmodernism, Reason and Religion in which he argues that there are "three basic contestants" today in the matter of faith: religious fundamentalism, relativism (of which postmodernism is the most obvious exemplar) and Enlightenment rationalism.

He offers Islamic fundamentalism as an example of the former and shows considerable understanding and respect for it. He abhors postmodernism as, for instance, "What all this means is less than clear - the metaphysical-lit. crit. jargon takes care of that - but the theory, such as it is, feeds back on its own style and underwrites its chaos and obscurity..." (p. 29)

Gellner's preferred option is rationalism, which he admits is also a kind of fundamentalism - he calls it 'mild'; there is a belief that there is a unique truth but a society can never possess it definitively.

I find this very interesting; because although I thought I had repudiated Enlightenment rationalism, this latter position is closest to my own. I believe that there is an absolute truth (one privileged metanarrative which is privileged because of its one-to-one mapping onto the way things actually are) but that we cannot know it in its entirety (1Corinthians 13:9-12).

Gellner and I would disagree fundamentally about the nature of this absolute truth and also about the ways we may gain knowledge about it but our positions are more similar than I had thought. Interesting...

Holy Experiments

There are lots of suggestions for new ways of being church at the moment. The modernist approach would be to decide that one of them was right and to pursue it until it succeeds or fails. purpose-driven seems to be the flavour of the month in the States at present.

I think that a postmodernist approach might be to adopt the notion of holy experiment: try lots of different things and see where the Spirit leads. If one thing doesn't work (in the sense that no-one is able to connect with it - or, more importantly, to connect with God through it) or if it runs out of steam, try something else. Have faith that the emergent result of all these experiments will be what God desires.

You can see glimmerings of this approach in some settings. Spring harvest here is the UK (a large evangelical celebration held over five days each year) has different evening celebrations with different styles. But they are all variations on the same theme.

Even Saddleback (home of purpose driving) offers something 'brand new': a range of worship venues on their campus ("What is a worship venue? It's a live feed of the message on a large bright LED screen. It's live bands with different styles than in the Worship Center. It's a smaller, more intimate atmosphere for worship. AND you can even bring your coffee with you into the service!") They offer Worship Center (Saddleback Style), Praise! (Large Gospel Choir), Over Drive (Rock 'n Roll), unplugged (intimate, acoustic), elevation (Saddleback with an edge), and Passion (intimate, younger).

This is good but what I had in mind is a bigger mix still. Something like this, perhaps: Taize, alt.worship, Book of Common Prayer, praise services, contemplative, etc. Funnily enough we had all these at St Mary's, Ealing while I was there. So what's new? Well, for me I think that I did not value the diversity in a proper way - I loved all of them and I wanted everyone else to love all of them as well. Most others seemed to feel that one style was more important or better than the rest. So we had BCP once a quarter at 10:30 (and lots of people didn't like that). What I am thinking of now is to have BCP every week and work to build a BCP church, as well as an alt.worship church and a Taize church.

Sure, some people might go to all of them (like me, though I wouldn't go to all of them all the time) but most would find a way which enables them to get closer to God and would stick with it for as long as it 'worked'. You could have multiple churches meeting in the same church. Perhaps they'd come together sometimes but you'd never get everybody together, just as a service at a cathedral will never attract all the Christians in a diocese. I'll say a bit more on this another time.

Diversity - what are the limits

It is becoming increasingly clear to me that diversity is key. We have to be able to offer a range of 'ways in' to church. I hesitated as I wrote that last word - church?; Jesus?; God? But if we accept Pete Ward's definition of church - those who are 'in Christ' then it is actually offering ways to Jesus.

But are there limits? Does anything go because it might just be the way to Jesus for some individual? I guess it seems as if we ought to be able to say that no impure road would lead anyone there so that there must be limits. But all roads are impure - without the guidance of the Spirit no-one would get to Jesus. We are commanded to 'judge not'; we are told that 'by their fruits you shall know them'. Between the creative interplay of these two principles we may be able to discern what is OK - good enough - in what we offer.

Labyrinth in a country church?

Just got back from the first session in the Gospel & Mission module of my course. A guy called Tony Windross, vicar of St Peter's, Sheringham was with us. He has just published a book (The Thoughtful Guide to Faith, O Books, New Arelsford, Hants). He seems to have a very non-theist approach but claims that this is a way of speaking to the postmodern generation. I'll try to reserve judgement until I read it.

While he was speaking (reading from a prepared speech, actually) I started to think about diversity and 'going to church' (a phrase which Tony used several times). Lots of people visit our church in Bacton; some of them sign the visitor's book; some put requests in the prayer book. Some wander round, others sit. Some are one-off visitors, others come quite frequently.

What more could we offer them? Some suitable literature? What about a labyrinth of some kind? Something which would offer a tour of the church (catering for those who appreciate church history & architecture etc) and combining that with the idea of prayer stations and different focuses for prayer. Since the church is unattended there are some obvious security implications - anything high or even medium tech would be susceptible to light fingers but surely we could offer something? It's worth thinking about...

We've all got to start somewhere...

Normally, beginnings are my speciality. Endings are a different matter, though.

This, however, feels difficult. So I won't try too much today. Suffice it to say that I am on a personal journey of discovery about the possibilities of emerging church. Not only that, but I guess I have a particular interest in how new forms of church can emerge in the countryside since I live in rural Norfolk - right on the edge of rural Norfolk, actually.

I'm due to be ordained in October (2nd) as an Ordained Local Minster. It will be interesting, especially as I intend to continue my work as an organisation consultant - which my reminds me of my current anxieties. Having got through the hurdle of my first beach service this morning (it went very well) I still have to face a workshop in King's Lynn tomorrow with a team of people who have some significant interpersonal difficulties. I have a proposal for conducting the workshop from a positive fiture-oriented frame but if they reject this it could easily disintegrate into acrimony and massive projections and introjections. I'll let you know how it goes and perhaps then I'll be able to post some thoughts on emerging church.