I will joining the resource weekend in Reading at St Laurence’s, on Saturday, to talk about church on the edge. Jonny says they may be able to squeeze a few more people in if you book soon. It is shaping up for an interesting time and I hope to get along early enough to hear some the input from Chris.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
HERE is the final contextualised story
Pete Ward has an essay here on the nature of celebrity in culture and missiological implications. There are some interesting points raised and I value several of the observations and critic of celebrity as an entity. However when it comes to exploring the missional nature it is again theologically/missionally conservative, and IMHO falls far short of genuine missional application. His section on Beyond Functional Equivalence is well written but is rooted in a quasi imperialistic approach to missional engagement masquerading as a radical movement. Pete suggests we must “take this capital into account” and whilst he recognises the “contested meanings” around celebrity provide a fruitful area for engagement it is very much on re-interpretative terms rather than from any position of powerlessness or that our doctrines could be wrong and need re-interpreting through genuine dialogue with the people shaped by the culture.
I am not arguing all culture is good, but equally neither is all doctrine. I simply want to hold the culture with the reverence it is due and as an equal partner with the bible and tradition in the “contested” space that non imperialistic mission should inhabit.
I hope the book that is due to follow the article will address some of these issues, but I wonder if there is an inherent imperialism or notion that we have our doctrines right, rooted in the theological or publishing culture that would never let a book like this get written. As underlying any text would be the need for an heretical imperative as that is part of what enables real dialogue in the contested space of missional engagement.
NB This may not make much sense as words are problematic.
Often people talk about awareness in mission, the need to be open to what God is doing, and this is critical. However this a part of the process, and we need to discover a place of awareness. Without sounding too much like an old duffer, when I was younger, practicing the spiritual disciplines of silence, different prayer forms and awareness exercises was a key in helping me tune into what G-D what doing on the streets. Like any muscle it needed training and exercise. However the process became too important and I found my self looking for acts of kindness, giving or love etc and it was spotting these that tuned me into the recognition that we were in a thin place, where heaven and earth seemed closer. More recently I have found I needed to practice inhabiting the thin place in the whole of life, slowly I have begun to learn to tune into seeing Jesus in both the act and the person. It is like the difference from being aware you are walking on thin ice and so watching for every step, to simply being in tune with the ice that you walk on so you spend less time watching your step but feel the environment with all your senses.
Last week on visiting some of the great projects around, we went walkabout. On encountering a group one guy the workers knew was homeless, so they checked to see how he was doing. As they chatted over the income support forms another in the group reached across and gave the guy a chocolate bar. He wasn’t sharing a piece because he was eating a bar himself, but simply a response, a seemingly random act. The guy was homeless simply said thanks stuck it in his pocket for later and continued to work on the forms.
I felt christ in the workers, both young people, the sacred space and the well know chocolate bar but I knew we were in a thin place the moment I parked the car and hour or so before the encounter.
So if we have thought about some of the blocks how do we develop the missional imagination. Most people realise the need to do something different as they recognise that what they have been doing doesn’t cut it anymore or their faith is maturing towards or beyond owned faith. Often there is a deconstruction process – where the ambiguity of faith is presented and the gray areas expanded, this then enables us, when we start to deconstruct enables the move from certainty towards mystery. As we recognise and encounter the mystery at the heart of faith we find a freedom to re-imagine our faith, encounter G-D rather than the God we have created in our own image, and this gives us space and inner permission to experiment.
Start the journey:
– Trust your questions
– Leave church as you know it
– Find silence
– Read Scripture from below
– Find fellow travelers
– Reject the God you know as that can’t be G-D
– Be Still but Still moving
– Spend more time at the beach or in woods
– Experiment with your own creativity, eg painting, sculpture