I was asked today to join with a meeting the new way of being church The Passion of the Christ rip community. A mixed bunch of faithful radicals that have been exploring new ways of being church long before the term emerging church became trendy. Lots of connections, it was interesting how we shared many links, basic eccelesial communities, friere, alinsky, jim punton, fyt. They have lots of resources online and worth a visit.
I was revisiting some of Off the Beaten Track today and this story hit me again as I thought about church and change.
The prison walls had become the home they had forgotten, so long had they been there amongst the dust and dirt that any memory of the outside world was but a dream to them.
One day, which started like any other, they huddled together to talk. Having the same conversation they’d had every day for as long as any of them could remember, talk of escape. In the middle of this discussion something unusual happened. The cell door swung open.
The prisoners cowered against the back wall, shielding their eyes from the bright sunlight. A man stood there, someone they didn’t recognise, for had they not seen or heard anyone for these long years? The man spoke to them saying;‘You are free to go.’ The group sat in silence, for though they had planned to leave; now they were too afraid to do so. What world was out there? A place that surely must have changed beyond recognition. The prison walls suddenly seemed appealing, for hadn’t it become their home? No one moved, until one man, cautiously making his way to his feet, crossed the small cell and averting his gaze from what lay beyond quietly closed the door.
I have been exploring the issue of bounded and open sets, one thing that is often talked about is about being committed at the core and open at the edges, yet I wonder if we are missing an opportunity for growth here. I am part of a network that describes itself as A network of mission practitioners and communities who are restlessly trying to follow Jesus in the midst of a changing contemporary culture. The Ugly Truth full I cannot underestimate the support I have found within group and how important the space to be open and vulnerable with like minded people is. In many ways this group is not fully open (nor should it??) but this is what I am questioning. At one level all open groups are self selecting and will attract people around the ethos of the group etc, but open set groups for people exploring spirituality will mean the members come into contact with those they disagree with, those they think are off the wall etc, all of which if processed worked through, dialogued about, motives, passions and actions searched and questioned help us on the path to enlightenment. You can hear a talk on patience a 100 times but try living with someone you think is a Muppet, what has the greater benefit for the soul?
Over the weekend I am facilitating a conversation on Church on the Edge with the subtitle Emerging church gets missional. So I will be introducing the concept and process via a handout and as part of the session asking the following questions, and would appreciate any comments.
1. Is the emerging church in missional mode?
2. Are EC’s still a bounded set model but just with better PR?
3. Is community development a core part of your mission approach?
4. How does the church on the edge model/process fit your situation?
5. Where should church on the edge go from here?
I was discussing how missiology shold come from our christology and then give shape for our eccelesiology. We were discussing church on the edge and how do we maintain the mission dna in what we do and what arises. The conversation moved on to some of the initial conversations about part of the reason for establishing church on the edge was due to questions about the emerging churches approach to mission (or lack of it) and that missiological approaches to youth had a lot to learn about church from the EC and likewise EC about mission. (I am aware of the generalisations used in the last sentance). Anyway we wondered if, for many in the EC, the primary revelation/ focus on God was around creativity through the Trinity hence the lack of missionary impetus.Great Expectations movie full
I am doing some stuff around young people and emerging church and what we can learn from one another. My experience suggests that many yp and youth workers think of their youth groups etc as expressions of church and I am interested in how this sense of definition can either release creativity and growth or inhibit. By this I mean that groups who grow together towards an expression of church can be inhibited from further development when it is not openly acknowledged. When named as such and discussed as an expression of church it creates impetus to grow deeper relationships and outwardly but when not acknowledged outwardly i have seen groups loose momentum over time and dissipate.
Two areas I would value feedback on
Firstly if you are involved in an emerging church thing have noticed this process in the emerging churches that you are part of. Did people start getting together and once you defined what you were doing – did it release energy and creativity? Did people start to make more effort to meet together etc or am I way off the mark?
Secondly if you are a youth worker are young people or leaders describing what you do as church? Can you relate to the blocks/ creativity and definition?
I have been having a conversation with Louis Krog who is doing some work on the history of the emerging church movement in the UK. I gave him a copy of some notes I put together for Denmark and some talks in the UK about the links between youth work and EC. He is trying to establish a time line and has put up a slide from me and and an alternative timeline here
and would like your comments. My contention is that a lot of the EC has some roots in different strands of youth work and developed through different expresions of youth work into altworship as the youth workers got older. Let us know what you think!
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??
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
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.