After my grump in the last post about church porn books, I've come across a couple more confessions out there...
Anyone else joining us in the confessional?
One of the trends that i have come across in my life is the breakdown of following Jesus into a personal and private experience. Even when it comes to something as communal and corporate as church then this pattern continues.
I think we can see this in practises of church life: for example:
Not to mention parking the car in the same space, sitting in the same seat, saying hi to the same people, or not.
Is it any wonder then that people are following this path of individual pursuit of church to its logical extreme and exiting all together? After all why give up 2 hours at an inconvenient time on sunday when...
...after all with me and Jesus why do I need church anyway? It's a much better investment of my time and energy to go and hang out with people i like who don't go to church and be a missionary in my community.
And let's face it if i am really having a crisis, well there will always be a church handy where i can pop in and get some sympathy, prayer, and maybe a donut or two to help me back up on to my own two feet...
Or is this just me?!?
I've written a guest post at Jason Clark's site exploring the idea that the early church was the orginal 3rd space and what implications this may have as we consider church/3rd spaces.
3rd places are those outside work/home culture i,e. cafes, coffee shops, pubs etc and have a number of characteristics that make them ideal for missional engagement such as their accessibility/openess.
Dr Luke Bretherton argues that the early church provided a 3rd place outside of the household and civic life which was radical in its rebasing of cultural values in that for example women and slaves had equality becasue it was based on status in christ rather than status in household/city life.
My post asks 2 questions that i'd love to hear from you on:
In my continued exploring of church, one of the things I am really interested in is how do we practically do/be church. However this presupposes that I have any idea how to answer the question what is church? Or more pertently, what is the point of church?
On one level it seems very straight forward, that place where people go on a Sunday but over recent years that idea has been broadened and deepened considerably. I’ve got four ideas that I’d love to run by you to hear what you think…
Church as...
...Place – that seems the easiest idea to get my head around. Church is a place where people go as in “I’m going to church” or “it’s been weeks since I’ve been to church”. It is a physical, geographical, spacial, tangible place – whether its decked with marble and pews or scuzzy tables and coffee stains. And of course we can take the idea of church futher and explore church at a local, regional, national and global levels as well...
...People - this seems to be what i've been hearing that church is about over the last fews - we're not a builiding we're a group of people - we can of course obsess about how many people we are, whether we only care about the people who are there or focussed on the ones who aren't. It's clear though that the church is some form of gathering, a family, a tribe, a people who have some kind of commonality/shared identity.
Of course we're not a happy family all the time and we're pretty dysfunctional, with tendencies to be obsessed with our image, either +ively or -ively....
...Presence - moving away from the tangible towards the intagible there seems to be indirect spaces that church faciliates - groups, gatherings, parties, programmes, charities, clubs, friendships, blogs, books, conferences, support groups, soup runs, shoulders to cry on, affiliations and on and on... all the things that people who connect via a place can do... is it something where the presence of God is also sometimes found?
...Practice - can church be a practice? a discipline? a way of life? a lifestyle? Does it represent an orientation, a commitment, a calling? Is it something to opt in or or opt out of? Do we exercise our rights to chose whether to take part or not, is it something that we seek on our terms or it it a place where we detox from the consumer driven life?
I guess this "P" could also be called point, as in what is the point of church?
So any more suggestions as to what church for you is..?
There have been some very interesting posts on blogs of late about church, two that have caught my eye and my comments have been Jason Clark's "I love church" and Glenn Hager's "does church life equip us for real life?"
Both of these posts have stirred up some thinking i have been thinking over the last few weeks about church - mostly how much i have fashioned church into my own expectations and let those perceptions determine my reality - from romanticisng the church one year to hating it the next, from wishing it was better to realising that there was no such thing as the perfect church (and even there was it wouldn't want me).
I have had the experience where i have been hurt in church, where i have expected church to be the one place where people would react differently than in the outside world and was sorely disappointed when they acted in the same predictable crap manner.
I've also conviently busy some people have needed help, refused to give up any more time and energy or take a risk on a new relationship and managed to dress it up with some suitable spritual sounding excuse like giving others the chance to step forward, being in a season of rest, yadda yadda.
i have experienced the rubbish of others selfishness and i has also contributed to that as well through my own.
i once famously posted a guest piece on Jason's blog where i said in the comments that as a man I didn't get very much out of church but that i was glad i had met some good friends through it, it was helping my wife in her depression and my kids were being really blessed meeting some other christian kids to play and learn with.
What has church ever done for me? I sounded remarkably like the sketch from Monty Python's Life of Brian, where the question is asked what have the Roman oppressors ever done for the Jews...
I did recant a little the following year and posted on how i was rediscovering and appreciating churchianity - in other words what church was giving me that I had not really appreciated before - all the good times and hard times, doing life with people at our best and our worst. The grace that comes from having to experiene people i'd rather not and knowing that i was someone elses problem and they were feeling exactly the same about me.
It feels a lot easier to me to remain in apathy, despair or fantasy about the church rather than keep going in the reality that church is full of flawed people like me who will often disappoint but also that we have something to hope about together. That those moments when we are chose to go that extra mile, to give instead of to take, to love instead of to walk away - where the penny drops and we realise together that life is not just about me and what we want, but instead that there is a different reality to order our lives around. That the ultimate reality of life is not about following our individual desires but in changing the practice of our lives in following Jesus - to give up our rights and to learn to love and serve.
I want to spend the next few posts looking a little at what we mean when we talk about church, it is afterall a term that can mean anything from "shoot me now please" to a place to reorientate a shared life around the reality of Jesus" - sometimes both at the same time :).
I want to explore with you how we can begin to reconstruct something of our church experience out of the dominant narrative of our consumeristic-individualism orientation and practices. Hopefully we can look at some of the practical ways we are exploring this without our faith communities and pool our thoughts together.
But before we go there together let me ask you this question: what has the church ever done for you?
I've had another article kindly published by the ooze on the empire, i mean the church and it's message of disintergration, i mean intergration and reconciliation, lol.
Ok i was a lot more positive than that, I just couldn't resist this poster! In the article i look especially at how the views of the 2nd and 3rd world help us see things differently, particularly in providing a different view point from our western individualistic centric world view that I have.
Glen Hager has started this snychroblog - so feel free to join in if you want :)
I have been around church all my life, so that is 32 years of learning.
I have learnt a lot that has proven helpful and as far as my experience and that of the wider church community across time and traditions has also been true. I've found my life transformed, dramatic healings of my psyche, divine encounters and an ongoing narrative of the Kingdom of God which constantly challenges the dominant narrative of our western culture that life is about chasing what makes me happy!
I also recognise that faith is a process, that I have been wrong in the past and no doubt what I have learnt up to now that I consider good stuff may actually turn out to be not quite so true in the next 32 yrs…
So what have I have learned and started to unlearned:
Church is not all about me - it's not a social network, a support group, a place to wow an appreciative audience etc.
Church is not about becoming a doormat either - appropriate and healthy boundaries need to exist and one of the lessons I had to learn was saying "no" to things.
There is no perfect church - it's full of broken, hurt, confused, stressed, tired, busy people, like me, all using a range of coping strategies - we get to see each other at our best and at our worst. Normal healthy church experience will encompass both the best and worst of times and I will inflict best/worst of me on others and receive best/worst in return.
There is no perfect way of doing church - it takes all sorts of different churches to reach all sorts of different people in all sorts of different ways/places - to try and hold up one way of doing church as the way or even the best way is to ask everyone to be the same as me [and we've established that church is not all about me already].
It is ok to admit that there is not a perfect church or a perfect way - to give people permission to be honest and different - it is even better for me to stop focussing on others faults and start on my own - honestly sharing my failings and frustrations and involve God and God through others in them. It's very freeing to allow people to talk honestly about me and to be honest about my life with people who care enough about me to accept me and challenge me to go after the best God has for me.
Church is God's idea - Jesus and the Holy Spirit are doing it to bring glory to the Father and invite me to take part/join them/be co-mission.
My theology continues to expand, my understanding of God, myself, the world, church, life, the universe and everything does not stand still. That experience informs learning and learning informs experience/practice.
Jesus is the Truth in which all the truths in all other realities and narratives make sense/find coherence. As Jesus is Truth I can have a relationship with truth but not own/possess/claim that I have the full truth. The best form of relationship I can participate with the Truth is a communal one, across time/traditions/cultures/contexts.
It is normal to have times when God feel very close and faith is very experiential and times when God feels distant and faith very faint and hard.
There is no substitute for spiritual practices of prayer, reading the bible, worship, giving, fasting, serving but no prescribed way that works for everyone. However it is far easier to do these things communally/as part of a community rather than as a lone spiritual ranger.
The kingdom of God is bigger than church, the Holy Spirit is at work in the world, the mission of God is gather a people who will bear both his name and his likeness - an ongoing work that goes on until God restores our full humanity in our resurrected perfected bodies/natures…
Not every prayer is answered in the way that I want it answered, when I want it answered.
God cares about my character as much as my actions and beliefs .
Being right is not a fraction as important as being loving, kind, generous, gentle, gracious and reconciling.
Things I am learning...
following God costs me my life and is an ongoing struggle between acceptance and resistance.
I am more self centred and individualistic than I realise - I am addicted abstracted consumer!
church can often reflect that dominant narrative of our culture rather than the dominant narrative of the kingdom of God because it is full of people like me who struggle with that same battle.
church history/experience across time and traditions can help reveal what is cultural and what is kingdom.
critique is often valuable and prophetic - whether from within the church or from without. It is worth listening to our critics carefully.
there is not always one answer/solution/way and in fact the process of talking about these issues can be more important than everyone agreeing on a single resolution
That I need to listen/hear the voices of the global church, particularly the 2/3 world as a critique to my own western-centric theological orientation.
the emerging conversation is often highly therapeutic, incoherent and therefore is often very polarised/reactionary/confusing to anyone listening in.
what I do reflects/tells a lot more about what I believe then what I say I believe.
I need to take myself a lot less seriously.
What are you learning/unlearning about church???
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Fellow synchrobloggers:
Erin @ Decompressing Faith: Think Of It As “Agapeology.” Alan @ The Assembling of the Church: Here I Am To Worship. Heather @ A Deconstructed Christian: 15 Things I Learned From and Another 15 I Am Learning Lately Jim @ Lord, I Believe; Help My Unbelief : Some Ecclesiastical Paradoxes Lew @ The Pursuit: It’s A Grace vs. Works Thing Lyn @ Beyond the 4 Walls: Learning To be “Proper” Sonja @ Calacirian: Losing Her Religion and Keeping Her Faith
When I was a kid one of the tapes that i would listen to was my Dad's copy of the musical 'Fiddler on the roof.' In the musical the opening song is called 'tradition' in which traditon is a force for stability, order and status quo. No one quite knows how it started but they accept without it the price of instability would be high.
Traditionalism fatigue
The church environment I grew up in was very much in the same way - there were traditions for everything and often the traditionalism became part of the faith, the way we did christian things - to alter the tradition was to somehow lessen our faith. It seems crazy to think that an event like the communion table being moved back a few feet could almost cause a church to kick out their pastor but that is what almost happened.
Tradition for me became a bad word - it meant being stuck in the past - i equated it with being traditonal - with hymn sandwiches, arguements about organ music and lesser matters such as doctrinal positions - all being lumped together into who was saved/christian/heaven bound.
The attraction then of moving away from anything traditional was a strong one - hanging around with christians in new forms of church, with no old school denomination ties to weigh me down was great. God became about experience, about seeking the new thing - we were free of tradition and therrefore able to once again connect with Jesus the way we were meant to.
Creating new traditions
Funnily enough although we didn't have explicitly say we had traditions looking back i can see that we did. I have hung out in the Vineyard for 13 yrs and it is clear to me that we have our set of traditions:
Being without "traditon" was great in the sense that it meant life felt a lot free-er but over time it also seemed to be a lot more unstable as well - the quest for the new began to get tiring - especially when experience did not help much with questions like why does God feel far away and the answer invariably was along the lines of trying harder in some way to manufacturer that encounter - longer worship times, more praying, another conference etc...
Rediscovering traditions in a more helpful way?
It makes me wonder if there is something in between - not just an unquestioned traditionalism or a rejection of tradition/recreation of new traditions. Is there some things that are christians have taken as part of their traditonal beliefs that have provided stability across time and traditions? For me that is one of the exciting things about the deep church conversation, the desire to explore the common christian tradition but also be open to the new things of God as well.
This post from Dan Kimball on core/non-core beliefs recently caught my eye as he was looking at something similar, albeit in the context of trying to find a better term/metaphore. He had two pictures to illustrate...
1. Core beliefs
2. non-core beliefs
I find this helpful in seperating out how we do things/interpret things away from the core belief - for example i believe God created the earth and that we are charged to tend and serve it - some days and in some ways i believe the 6 day creation as a useful way of understanding aspects of that story and in other ways i believe it has taken a lot lot lot longer...
You may agree/disagree with what Dan included in his core slide - for instance i think the virgin birth is not as important as the idea of the humanity/divinity of Jesus and i'm pretty sure other would have Apple computers on the core list ;).
More so it also makes me wonder what we are encountering/learning/understanding/experiencing now that will inform the christian tradition - perhaps there will be nothing particulalry new but merely matters of emphasis/relative importance - so our view on the trinity may stay doctrinally very similar but our understanding and practice of other centred sacrificial living may grow in terms of modelling our lives/faith communities around this particular idea...
How does this help impact and reorder our realities around God's?
Maybe even more so is not just what we believe about God and whether we rank it as core/non-core but what it means to believe in Jesus - how does that effect the ordering/priority/actions of our lives? How does the tradition help us to not only believe right things but also to do good? How does it impact on our reality?
Which seems to me to ask the further question, as well a core beliefs that christians have traditionally found helpful in changing/challenging their reality are there core practices too which help us in that transition?
What do you think?
Anne Jackson is working on a book project about church burnout - check out her blog mad church disease to see how you can help her with her research and support her efforts.
Feel free to spread the word too...
Yesterday I posted on Jason Clark's site a piece about how i have been rediscovering my churchianity. I've always felt positive about the church, in lots of different types of church but at the moment i actually feel positive about going to church, on a sunday and at other times, for a variety of reasons I posted at Jason's...
I find the emerging church an exciting, empowering conversation, I find deep church a reminder that tradition can help my faith and in living out an ordinary mundane life how I need both - the presence of God and ways of being present...
So how about you, +ive about church?
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