As a sophisticated society we can construct many arguments against God, and apologetics can deconstruct some of these, and so we can go on round and round. Likewise people of faith can construct many arguments and others can deconstruct. The sophistication of humanity means either side this can construct seeming meaningful arguments for science and theology through logic and reason, and yet it is the development of science, philosophy and science that a over many years begins to pull the rug out.

I am a huge fan of CS Lewis but Maybe like Lewis moved away from apologetics into fiction and art, Do we need to let the theologian and scientist fade to help us earth lives of love?

Following on from THIS post I have a lot of conversation about both/and. I always seem to be in meetings, in classrooms, in churches, where when we are talking about change, doing things differently we kind of reach a polite “yes but it’s both/and”. If it’s about the focus of the work pushing out into riskier mission initiatives, Both/and is used so as it’s not at the expense of other. Wether it was when I was in YFC or in local situations, people used the both/and approach, perhaps as an excuse to keep pet projects going, maintain a level of status quo or just avoid upsetting people, it’s a phrase that always seems to pop up, and I’m not sure Jesus was a both/and kind of guy.

Recently I have been rethinking about change and my role. Now on the edge of the inside it is very easy to succumb to the both/and too easily but when the locus of activity is already centralised it can too easily maintain the status quo. I wonder if we need to resist a bit more this mentality, not out of awkwardness but as part of moving to the edge, redressing the balance. In the post Jesus didn’t sit with the marginalised the locus was relocated out of the system, which leads me to question the validity of the both/and. As mentioned in the Last post a deliberate strategy of leading edge innovation and third spaces has pulled us forward faster than I could ever have imagined. But I am still wrestling a lot with the comfort of my role, and it’s very different from the having time to hang out on the streets, so trying to find myself a new space at the edge. In a recent conversation where the both/and was used it was about changing the church and how as big ship it takes time to change direction and with people on the inside steering the rudder it will happen eventually. However I wonder if the ships already adrift if a few well placed tugs pulling from the front would be far more effective and quicker. Perhaps we need those with their hand on the rudder to let go and invest in a few tugs, these are NOT disconnected from the ship but have the distance and space to pull it in a new direction.

In mission I often talk about the need to break the gravitational pull (just search “gravitational Pull for a shed load of posts on here around that) of church, and how we need to break out if we are going to engage people more meaningfully. I was wondering where the current centre of gravity was in the church, is it dispersed, centralised or on the centre, how we shift it so it becomes a centripetal force sending people out to love and serve rather than a centrifugal force that is self serving?

Yet in many ways I’ve been asking the wrong questions. When we think about the incarnation we see a move from the centre to the edge. We see a christ figure who by his presence completely shifts the centre of gravity from the religious community to the margins. The locus of God is on the edge, it is outside the church, beyond the institution, outside the doors. Jesus didn’t sit with the marginalised because by his presence the centre of gravity shifted and the margins ceased to be the margins by the presence of the incarnated God. (HT to John Swinton)

This completely shifts how real meaning making then can happen, and calls into question the validity of the meaning making that takes place within established religious communities. It completely challenges notions of discipleship based on banking knowledge within a structure. It pulls the rug out from underneath notions of sacred and secular, and calls the walls to dust.

I have been struck recently by the number of calls for more “telling” of gospel. There has been a much higher level of criticism that we have lost the art of telling, often it has been generalist aimed at organisations perceived to be more concerned with a social gospel. Sometimes it has been personal, but usually both a bit misguided and I often think spoken from a lack of confidence in the gospel itself, in the past it was about replacing the hard work of loving your neighbour with a trite message that was spoken from a distance. Sometimes that distance was the pulpit and sometimes that distance was maintained even in the one to one conversation when proximity is not the issue.
It is very easy to replace the gospel with a pale imitation that disconnects words and actions. Recently I think it has been more nuanced and the gospel has been replaced by actions or franchised models of action that play on Christians insecurities that we need to “tell” people more explicitly why we are doing this or that project, and these models suggest they are joining back up the circle of the spoken and the social gospel. BUT they miss the point and Too often these models are a masquerade of proximity, a false notion that confuses being physically nearer people through meeting a need, when in reality there is no real relationship. It is a confidence trick built on sand, where people think they’re joining up the social and spoken gospel, but because it’s rooted in fear or anxiety, it can be just as trite as a message spoken from a pulpit in decades gone past. Yet perhaps even more worrying is that like any good confidence trick, neither the actor nor the recipient know they have been scammed until it’s too late or perhaps they ever know.