Do you ever try to look behind the façade? Or is that just a little too scary for you? I visited a church on Sunday. The modern looking cross at the front struck a contrast with the old architecture, and was illuminated by lights from the base. On the columns were speakers, with big LCD screens positioned so that those in the side seating would have full visual access to all that happened. There were no pews. Instead, loosely arranged rows of basic chairs were interrupted with deep seated couches. They had painted the churches interior - the vaulted roof, walls and all. And not just a plain colour, but with decorative areas of deep pastels among sections of off-whites, brightening up the place no end (although some wear and tear was evident) … even the organ pipes had not escaped. It felt like walking into a lived-in home. The music was a modern blend of guitar, keyboard, bass guitar and drums - acoustics were less than ideal, and the projection lyrics got lost at times, but none of that really mattered. The lead was a prominently tattooed vocalist / guitarist, supported by an excellent backing singer. Volumes ranged from quiet to very loud. Woman featured prominently throughout the service. Robes and adornments were absent and the style was casual – a short denim dress for the main speaker! The feeling was unashamedly family! Kids roamed - the noise was not aggressively contained but remained at typical family levels. The opening songs were kid-focused, and un-embarrassedly led by a 20-something couple full of energy and actions. When the children left for their “life course” sunday school (it sounded like an Alpha course for pre-teens), everything stopped for 5 minutes to let people chat while we transitioned into an “adult-zone” … meaning that the intellectual language went up a notch, but without any theological dilution of the simple hard truths that had just been given to children (as is so often the case when churches overcomplicate simplicity in order to sound "adult"). The congregation – that's a poor word, let's say the gathering – seemed fully engaged; their attention was focused, voices raised in song, mobile phones put away, and bodies in motion. Ages ranged from the white-haired old gent down to the 20-year old's fashion statement. From the front the lead was as a conversation – not of imposing instruction or abstract idealism, but framed as discussion and an implied invitation to participation - as one might enjoy at a dinner table. Theology was orthodox. It was all just so natural, so normal. The speaker drew on everyday experiences … such as talking about an episode of “Game of Thrones” (which she admitted she probably shouldn't be watching), and a personal story of recently trying to gate-crash a live performance of a band she had loved as a teenager. When, during the talk, the presumed minister-in-charge (sitting in a front row couch) publicly interrupted to indicate that she'd only got to the first point and time was running out, she simply said “oh you, shush!” and carried on - I gather he was her husband. That he could interrupt her, that she could publicly “shush” him, and that everyone simply took it all as normal, only served to reinforce the sense that this was family! This gathering appeared to reflect every-day lives coming together in a gathering around the cross. The typical façade of religiosity or the formulaic contemporary expression that I've so come to expect in churches (even in post-modern churches) was simply not there. When the Dads were invited to stand in recognition of their role (this was fathers day), and when the Dads were prayed for with the kids and woman moving around to lay on hands, it seemed the most natural thing in the world. At the back, next to the table serving pre-service hot bacon rolls and coffee for breakfast (at 11am!) was a display of recommended books. Alongside the expected Bible and a few easy-read authors like Yancy, were some that would challenge the motivation (and possibly the comprehension) of many in my church. Like the book on the essential Chesterton, or the thick academically-oriented tome critiquing modern thought on the tension between science and religion - both subjects dear to my heart but seemingly unshared by others in my own community. I bought both, and they didn't seem to know how much to charge, so simply took what I offered to pay - I think I overpaid, but that's good. As best a visitor can read a situation, I took this all to indicate a community of believers who were engaged in living out who they were with a full heart, soul, mind and strength, and doing so naturally, imperfectly, and unashamedly. I'm sure not everything is as ideal as it appeared There are probably, almost certainly, behind-the-scenes problems; this side of heaven there always will be. But this was a church that looked like it had thrown out the mentality of "tradition for traditions sake", and instead said "lets use the liturgy, form, function, and facilities to serve who we are and what we do – we'll not serve the heritage, but rather incorporate the heritage into who we are, changing, discarding, and creatively inventing as needed". The result is a deeply attractive natural expression of Christian community. I am reminded of Chesterton's comment: “The orthodox church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox church was never respectable. ... It is always easy to let the age have its head, the difficult thing is to keep ones own. It is always easy to be a modernist, as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of these open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom – that would indeed have been simple. … To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.” I dream of being in such a family this side of heaven. A family of wild and untamed orthodoxy, where truth leads and form follows, and where heart, soul, mind and strength bend all conventions to the real purposes of Christian living. It seems I had a taste of what could be, which makes not having it all the harder.
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If you don't believe there's an absolute truth, the following will makes no sense. And if you think we are no more than the atoms that make up our bodies, then we barely have a place to begin a discussion. But if you believe that we are more than the atoms we're made of, and there's a truth which stands independent of personal preference, then there's a problem.
We had a good service this morning, despite my recent moanings. What was particularly good, so far as I was concerned, was that there was no beating around the bush. The point was clearly made: this is the foundation of the Christian truth, and if you don't like it, you can argue with it, but you can't rewrite it. All this was in the context of the letter to the church at Pergamum - so much like my city where we harbour seductive heresy to the point that many in the church actively endorse relativistic truths as normative, while dabbling in mysticism for comfort, and defensively subscribing to syncretism. So why am I irked? I am irked because of why some seemed to be offended. Not that they were offended - that can be a healthy if its an offence by the truth - but that they were offended because they were not being left alone in their comfort zone of reinterpreted and self-constructed idealism. I suspect there are far more people than we'd care to admit who are attending our churches and who live with their comfortable version of Jesus 2.0, re-released in soft colours as seen in our life's web browser, nicely tweaked to satisfy, but intellectually indefensible as being anything more than our creation of a personalized religion. If the central message of the Bible is true, then the offence is by that truth. We're not talking about a subtle interpretation of one verse here or there, but about holding on to the central threads that bind it together in a rational, logical, and cohesive whole - a whole that is unique among religions, and incompatible with all other religions. Christianity is not intellectually compatible with any other faith - not unless we cut it and slice it and massage it until its a malleable pulp ready to be shaped into what we want. Unadulterated Christianity says we went from from a normative created state into a broken and twisted nature, fractured our relationship by the fact that logically the holy and unholy cannot be mixed without leading to the destruction of both. Yet there is a marriage forged by one all consuming sacrifice to regain intimacy, to restore our normative being. There are two ways to be home; never leave, come full circle back to where you started. So when people start twisting truth simply because its made them uncomfortable, I get irked. Argue with it, by all means. Disagree as much as you like. But be honest. If you want to rewrite scripture, go for it, only don't call it Christianity. If you want syncretism to rule the day, for "Love is all you need" to be the mantra on everyone's lips, then be my guest and go right ahead. But don't brand your private religion with a Christian label. That's why I'm irked. When there’s not enough gumption to reason through a point of offence, I get irked. When someone stops short, staying on a point of illogicality because that's the limit they "can live with", then that's not living. Either there is truth, or there's not. If there is truth, we may not fully comprehend it, but at least we can recognize it. So if you want to wrestle with all the mystery and supposed paradox, then let's do that, but don't stop short. Because the letters to "the seven churches that are in Asia" are hard warnings. And to Pergamum, the warning of harbouring seductive heresy comes painfully close to describing some in my church, many in our churches, and is prevalent in my city. Prelude: Just because a story is feeble, the science is incomplete, the telling is weak, or the point is obscure, doesn't mean it can't or shouldn't be told. Anyway, its my blog, so at least read the postlude at the end (for where else would it be?). Jared was aware that his date was about to end. He'd had a great time and so said "I wish we could time travel and do this again". She glanced at him as she slipped her arms into her coat, about to walk through the door, and said "Impossible". "Oh come on" Jared responded, "dream a little". She shrugged, "Sorry, but logic is logic, it's impossible." Desperately wanting to prolong the evening, if only for a few minutes more, and not realizing the incongruity that he was trying to slow down time, Jared tried "Well I'm not so sure about that. I mean, I know all about the time travel paradoxes - the killing your own grandfather sort of thing - but why are you so sure we won't time travel one day?" Jared didn't seem to realise his question contained the answer, but then there was lots of things Jared didn't realize. She felt a bit sorry for him, and thought for a moment before saying "Sigh, ok, well it's like this". (I'm sorry to say that she was one of those people who said the word "sigh" rather than actually sighing ... a shortcoming in her otherwise quite nice person). "You see, there are two ways to travel in time, one is to travel through time, going forwards or backwards. The other is to step out of time altogether and jump in again at another point. Both are appealing ideas, and both have been used in stories over and over again. And both are impossible. For example, say we want to travel through time - along the arrow of time. You've know about Einstein's relativity?" "Uh, yes, sort of" said Jared, beginning to feel he'd just made a terrible mistake. "Well, think about it, if you want to time travel forwards in time, that means everyone else needs to be moving faster through time than you so that when you join them again you're in their future - relatively speaking time must pass faster for them than it does for you. Now thanks to Einstein, we know that if you want that to happen, you need to change your relative velocities, you need to be moving in space much, much faster than they are." "Huh?" said Jared. He was thinking that this was not how a date should end. She continued, "Your experience of time doesn't change, but if you are moving a whole lot faster than everyone else, then when you match speeds again you'll have experienced a less amount of time than they have. Going 'forward' in time means you want to get into the future of others. That means that for awhile you have to be moving physically faster than everyone else so that your time passes more slowly. Its all quite simple, and the basis for all sorts of sci-fi stories; the young handsome boy or pretty girl heads off in a big space ship, goes very fast, and when they return home a little later they find a hundred years has passed for everyone else, all their friends have died of old age, and they end up marrying their now-dead friend's grandchild." Jared looked at her with a confused expression.. "Ok, so that's getting into everyone else's future. To go into their past ... well I'm sure you'd think it's simply a case of reversing roles" - Jared missed the sarcasm, he wasn't good at sarcasm - "and make everyone else go very fast so you'd age more than them, and when you met again they would be younger than you. But it's a little tricky, because what you will find is not your past, only their present. Thanks to Einstein all we have to play with is how relatively fast you and others are both going forward in time. So you can't get to your current past." She looked at him with some compassion as his internal brain friction seemed to be making his face flush. But, thinking that once begun, best to finish, she ploughed on. "Ok, so we can go forward in time, in a fashion, but not backward. Ok?" Jared hesitated, worried his next question was going to be stupid (he had every reason to be worried), but he thought he saw the solution. "If I go faster and faster so my time goes slower and slower compared to everyone else, then if I go even faster still, won't my time run backwards?" "Sigh" she said. "Nope, because there's this little thing called the speed of light. As you get closer and closer to the speed of light so your time slows relative to everyone else - of course it doesn't feel like that to you - and by the way, you gain mass - but the problem of going ever faster is that its asymptotic." "Asymwhatic?" said Jared. "Asymptotic" she said. "think about dividing the number 1 into ever smaller fractions. 1/2 = 0.5, 1/4 = 0.25, , 1/8 = 0.125, and so forth. You get closer and closer to zero, but never actually get to zero unless you divide 1/infinity. Then you get zero - sort of. So think about that in terms of going faster and faster so that your time is going slower and slower relative to everyone else. The closer you get to the speed of light the slower your passage of time relative to others - and the heavier you get. When you finally reach the speed of light, you're not getting any older compared to others, but you're infinitely heavy, and there's all sorts of problems with making that statement mean anything. But assuming you can get to that point - you can't - but if you could it would take more than an infinite force to make your infinite mass go faster than light, and as you don't have more than an infinite amount of force, you can't, so your relative time will never run backwards. You see?" This was really awkward. Jared had begun by wanting to prolong the evening. She, until recently, had wanted to end it quickly. Now it was Jared who hoped she would just go home, and she was getting into her stride thinking "surely he's got brain cells somewhere". "OK" she continued, "so let's give up on going forwards or backward through time. Let's just step off time and join it somewhere else. Can we do that? Not really, at least not so that we'd survive". Actually she had often wondered what 'survive' really meant. "Lets see, how about this as an analogy, and remember analogies are only poor simplifications that don't explain everything!" "Huh?" said Jared, not for the last time. "Let me tell you a story", she said. "Ah", said Jared, feeling on more secure grounds here. "Let's say you're in Rome, and want to get to New York for some reason, like you want a hotdog. The two cities are on about the same latitude, so what you could do is travel west along the surface of the planet until you reach New York. Ok? However, you could also get in a rocket and go up, neutralize the rotation velocity you had when you left the ground, and then wait until New York comes whizzing along underneath you so you can drop down, match velocities and step into Central Park for your much needed hotdog. That's an analogy ... you see it? It's also what an aeroplane actually does except it doesn't go directly west. Anyway, in the analogy ... the story, get it? ... stepping off the surface of the planet is the analogy for stepping off time. Then you wait there while the ground passes by - or for time to move along - and then you drop back onto the ground - or into time. Of course how you 'wait' when you've just stepped off time is one of those many little semantic details we'll ignore for the moment." "Yes" said Jared, deciding to simply ignore all the bits he failed to understand, "that's what I mean, so you can time travel if you just had the means to step out of time for awhile." "Well" she said patiently, "perhaps. But you do realize what happens when you step out of time?" "What?" "You have no time, you're off time, or dare I say you're specifically and exactly out of time. You ... the essence of who you are, only has any meaning in time. You think in time, you eat in time, you go to the toilet in time - mostly. Everything you are only exists in time. Take away time and you no longer have any existence. You can't think, because you have no time to think in, and so you don't exist." "uh .... " said Jared. "Good night" she said, giving him a peck on the cheek. "You're amusing". And with that she stepped into the night followed by Jared's glazed expression. In the days that followed Jared was never sure if it had been the drink, his overheated brain, or a trick of the street light on a misty night that made it seem as though she was suddenly moving very fast. Postlude: This is nominally a blog about living as a Christian, or about thinking about living as a Christian, or at the very least it employs some thinking. So the one thought I'd leave here is that God is not outside time, but that God encompasses time. So when we die, we don't step out of time, we step into something that encompasses time. How we're going to think in that state is an exciting thought, for as you can see, our semantics simply break down. Who do you come to church for? Do you come to acclaim a god of your preference - that god you'd like to select in the supermarket of faith? But if God exists, then by definition God is who he is, not what we want him to be. Some say:
The left hand column are things most people would have no problem with. But those on the right? Not so easily, and yet they are the flip side of the coin for those on the left ... you can't separate them! Everything we know about God - the Christian God that is - is that God makes extraordinary claims, about who we are, about who he is, and about the nature of our existence: and that necessarily includes the attributes in left column AND the right column above. In our church services we gather together to share with each other from our lives, and to stand together in our worship of God. Will you worship a God who allows people to go to hell, lets people suffer, claims exclusivity, and judges us? Because that is part of the package, and if it makes you uncomfortable, you need to deal with it. Two options: deny that selective aspects are the real nature of God, or wrestle with it all while recognizing you cannot fully understand God. So this Sunday, when we come to church, it is our individual choice whether we come to worship a sanitized god, or the God as experienced and described in history. If the former, we're engaged in collective idiocy that is catastrophically illogical. I'm not sure if that's not a more scary proposition than worshipping the God whose perceived character offends me. The Christianity Today magazine has a thought provoking article on the Christian response to trans-gender people (and possibly by extension to a whole range of alternative sexualities).
Article is HERE Every now and then the accumulation of experience needs to be vented. This is my June eruption - over-the-top, blunt, possibly exaggerated, but you'll get my drift. I left church today deeply disillusioned, something is wrong with this conventional idea of a church service, and either I'm headed down a path of deception, or I'm butting my head against a barrier of inertia. Here's some of the backstory. We did a survey of the people coming to our services - we did it over four weeks to catch the irregulars (the majority?). In the results some respondents asked for a bit of everything – robes and organ and hymns and liturgy along with contemporary music and bands and informality; really, some did ask for it all. That says to me that they are trying to tick the boxes of religious duty and get a bit of culture comfort at the same time. Some respondents said they want communion every week, but that they only attend once a month! Basically saying that they are consumers who come infrequently but want communion to happen every week so they don’t miss it when they do attend – they're ticking a box. And then a number noted that they come every week, yet they only filled in the survey on week four despite being asked to every week, suggesting they are self deluded at best, lying at worst. Independently of the survey, there also have been complaints about the length of worship (typically 20 minutes!). I know there will always be complainers, but this is coming with explanations such as that it's hard to stand for so long. That makes me want to shout “Get your head and heart and spirit in the right place – have you ever heard of the phrase 'a sacrifice of praise' - we do this because God is worthy, around his throne is never ending praise and worship! If your feet are sore, why don't you dance? You're absolutely welcome to and will be in good company with David.” No wonder I'm meeting more and more people who are very occasional church attendees while professing to be Christians. Yet as Garrison Keeler, Woody Allen, and Billy Sunday are all claimed to have said "Going to church no more makes you a Christian than standing in a garage makes you a car." Could these irregulars be right? Could it be that going to church is unimportant, and that church must be more accommodating of meeting peoples expectations? I think not, instead I think the problem is that the church has simply got it backwards; we're mostly continuing with the way things have always been because "that's the way it's always been". Well, actually it hasn't been always, and that's a poor reason anyway! So, recognizing that you're always going to offend someone, lets just decide who's going to end up offended when we do the right thing, and get on with offending them. Even in the talk this morning it was noted that the early church did not have buildings for the first few hundred years, and instead met in homes. Think for a moment, when you go to someone's home, how can you do that without building a conversational relationship. You might do things in the home in a regular manner (eat the main course before desert, desert before drinks, please use a knife an fork, and put the toilet seat down when you're finished), but these actions are not the objective of being there - the actions are merely a consequence of serving the bigger purpose - relationship. That's not to say a church building is wrong, but it says something about how we see the purpose of the building. Sadly most “conventional” Christians “go to Church”, they don't “go to gather”. No wonder so many of our attendees want their liturgy, robes, and hymns – that’s what they're "going to church" for, it ticks the boxes of their check list about being a Christian, and if they can't tick the box they feel cheated, and like all good consumers do, they go and shop elsewhere. They're not going to really meet God (unless its the comforting feeling of “I met God because I did my duty and went to church”), and they're not going for the relationships; its really a case of “in and out, been there, done that, now for the real part of the day.” Of course there are exceptions. Of course there are individuals who don't approach it like that. But they are not the majority! Yesterday I had breakfast with two good friends; they and I have our respective trials in life, they more so than I at present. We talked a God-infused talk, but not a religious talk. The conversation was caring and tremendously helpful even though there was nothing about our situation that changed by the time we parted. We met for expression, not for breakfast; breakfast was simply the vehicle, conversation and relationship was the intent. So why has this been inverted in our institutional church; the services seem to be there for hosting a priority of sermons, songs, bible readings, and giving people their dose of pew-sitting piety – but not for conversation. In this day and age, like the first few centuries after Jesus, we are desperately in need of relational conversation to explore, discuss, understand, empathise, listen, teach and care. Conventional church services do next to nothing to achieve that. Something is wrong. Instead of using services to relate, we use services to do ritual. Then we expect people to "improve themselves" by reading a Christian book, watching a Christian video, or (my personal pet peeve) sign up yet for another Christian course. Dare I say “heaven forbid that you do another Christian course at the expense of Christian community”? God says love one another, not love the conventions. He says love one another like you love yourself. And what do each of us yearn for? To be heard, listened to, and to have conversation. For we are made relational creatures. And God says love me with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. We say “Ah, sorry Lord, I'm getting bored after song number 3. And that sermon, well it started well enough I guess, but I can't really remember it now.” You know what I remember from this morning's service? The conversation I had with three individuals before we started, and the conversation with another two afterwards! And those 5 people were very atypical of the ones in our church. A few weeks ago I went and got the census data for our city, for our church's neighbourhood. The data gives us a picture of the type of people around us; and it has only a weak correlation with who we find in our services. I want to meet the people outside. We're doing something wrong. So what do we do if we're to do something right. Well, I don't really know, other than that it of course needs to be Spirit led. But surely we first need to rethink how we understand and embrace the purpose of the service. For some that's a total mind shift, uncomfortable, scary. We might fail (so what?). However, I do think that whatever “something right” is, it means using the church as a resource to do what needs to be done, not measuring the "success" by how many people we get to participate in going through the motions. In our church what could this mean? I see two paths. On one path we continue trying to adapt what we have while keeping all the traditional check boxes that the existing members seem to prioritize. Yet, for as long as we do that we will likely remain irrelevant to the bulk of the community that surrounds us, atrophying into extinction. Or we don't do that. What if we threw out what pleased the itinerant congregants, and instead did what engaged the people in the street. Interestingly, while we atrophy in the services, we're growing in our mid-week event that engages with contentious issues. Surely there's a message in that? Ok, rant over. |
Why?
Probably the best therapy is to express yourself. Why do you think psychiatrists make you lie on the couch and talk, while all they do is murmur "hmmm", "uhuh", or "go on"? Archives
May 2017
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