sustain:if:able kiwi

church for the (kiwi) man in the shed

My interests include the relationship between church and society, gospel and culture. What is the role of the church in the world? How does the world see the church?

I’m currently enjoying The man in the Shed, a collection of short stories by Kiwi writer, Lloyd Jones, published in 2009, a commercial follow-up to the success (Commonwealth Writers Prize and shortlist for Man Booker Prize) of Mister Pip.

One story, Lost Cities, begins with Alice, who is painting her (rural Canterbury) town, building by building.

“And after the theatre, she plans an eating house and, next to it, a bar, and across the street a police station and gaol. And at the end of the street, a church of sharp cheekbones and high forehead. Within view of the church Alice adds the farmhouse.” (52)

A typical rural town, complete with to be expected church. The pages of the short story continue to turn.

Over time, Alice’s husband dies and her son, Mark grows. In time, Mark leaves for the bright lights (of Sydney). All the time, Alice continues to paint, the same picture, touched and re-touched, a visual reflection on her changing life in changing times. She paints and repaints. The tree grows, the buildings are modernised, threatres and restuarants are added, the city crowds are coloured in.

“Milling among the crowd over the ‘historic’ flagstone area are hotdog vendors, jugglers, pickpockets, thieves of all descriptions. There are yellow cabs, policemen on horseback, a flotilla carrying a beauty-pageant queen.” (59-60).

It’s a gorgeous sentence and a fascinating way to visualise change. The painting work as the still point, the canvas which captures change. So what will be the place of faith, the church, as times they are a changing?

“Over the church hovers Alice’s paintbrush. She hesitates to demolish it because the city will need a soup kitchen for the lives stranded short of the promised land.” (60).

It’s a fascinating glimpse, one perspective, on the future of faith in a culture of change. In the imagination of Kiwi author, Lloyd Jones, the future obviously needs a church. The reason is based on what Lloyd sees as the role of the church in contemporary society – to care for the broken and dispossessed. As it does that, it earns the right to remain in a contemporary painting, as it exists as a beacon of hope.

Yet such a place for the church, remains for Alice simply a painting. She might be grieving, she might be oh so creative. However, church remains for her an object painted for “them.” Never, for creative, middle-class, grieving Alice.

A fascinating way to paint the body of Christ into society today!

transforming space into place: great example of culture making

The video below is a fascinating example of culture making. “It is not enough to condemn culture. Nor is it sufficient merely to critique culture or to copy culture. Most of the time, we just consume culture. But the only way to change culture is to create culture.” So says Andy Crouch, in relation to his great book Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

So here’s a fascinating example of culture making, emerging from a vision for community among the city suburbs. In the words of Simon Holt: “A spirituality of the neighbourhood is one that embraces its most immediate context as a place of God’s presence and rich with sacred possibilities.” (God next door, 100)

(Hat tip Len via Dwight)

(For more on culture making as it applies to church go here and workplace mission, go here).

What is church? seed cathedral as contemporary ecclesiology

Over the week I had an email, inviting me to speak on the topic of “What is Church?’ to a rural grouping of churches.

Over the week, I’ve also been thinking about an invite to speak at CityChurch 2010, the first ever gathering of city centre Uniting church leaders, to explore what it means for them to be church in the context of the centre of the city.

Over the week I discovered the Seed Cathedral (via the creative blog of Michael Volland). It is the UK Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo 2010. Expecting over 70 million visitors, the theme is “Better City, Better Life.” The design had three aims, including providing a significant public open space in which visitors can relax. The Seed Cathedral is 20-metres high, made from 60,000 transparent 7.5-metre long optical strands. Each of the 60,000 rods has a seed embedded within its tip. The seeds are taken from the Millennium Seedbank, at the Royal Botanical Gardens. (For more go here)

Fantastic! Amazing to see such imagination, outside the church, in such a public space.

What is church? Well, working from the Seed Cathedral it includes
– a place to honour the past (seeds/tradition) as a source of future life (seeds grow, tradition contextualises)
– a spacious place to invite reflection on living better
– an invitation to consider transcendence

This all links for me with my use of the children’s story book, Bodge plants a seed, including at the recent Queensland Synod (my talk is here). Leaders treating people as seeds, nurturing their growth, seeking the unfolding of their unique charism.

images of church in society: Why we need salt not exodus

Exodus is a powerful and repeated Biblical motif. For Israel, and for many oppressed people’s through time, it has defined a profound liberation from bondage and a life of service in response to a God who led through perils to a new land.

But spatially, Exodus relies on a “going out.” The people are to leave behind what is bad.

Contrast the metaphor of exodus with the metaphor of salt and leaven, which work only by staying within. Salt needs meat, leaven needs dough and so the metaphor acts spatially, in a startlingly different way than Exodus. Rather than leave in order to become God’s community, we become God’s community from within, by digging in and staying put, by infiltration, rather than by separation and removal.

Marianne Sawicki suggests that this metaphor, of salt and leaven, was actually the dominant metaphor for the very early church.

“Jesus’ first followers knew that there was no escape, no place to get away from the civil war and personal evils confronting them. They had to figure out how to live in a landscape compromised by colonial oppressions. They would seek and find God’s kingdom precisely in the midst of that.” (Marianne Sawicki, Crossing Galilee: Architectures of Contact in the Occupied Land of Jesus, 155)

She describes this as a “stealth operation” that looks for the Kingdom of God in the midst of (Roman) oppression. “It presumes that imperial structures will remain intact so that they can be infiltrated. This is a resistance that exploits the empire; it does not defeat, neutralize, kill, or escape from its host.” (162) She draws both on the parables and on the missionary text that is Luke 10, in which the disciples “indigenize themselves by attaching to the family that employs them.” (163)

This is a pattern of cultural immersion. It’s deliberate.

It’s also a pattern of cultural resistance. Salt not only preserves, it also corrodes. In other words using the metaphor of salt and leaven to understand ourselves as the church, allows “the gospel to be both corrosive and preservative like salt … to be infectious, expansive and profane like leaven.” (155) As a metaphor it still encourages the church as a contrast community, refusing to bless the culture.

Sawicki suggests that perhaps the church today – globalized, enmeshed in consumerism – might find the salt and leaven metaphor a most useful stance in relation to our world:

The kingdom of God is not free-standing. It has to be sought in the middle of something else … [it] can take the form of small-scale refusals to comply with the alleged inevitability of the pomps and glamours of middle-class life … the commuting lifestyle; so-called “life insurance” and retirement funds; careerism; the “soccer mom” syndrome and the overscheduling of adolescent activities; fast food; fashionable clothing … (174, 175)

It strikes me as a fantastically practical, deeply Biblical way for Christians to see ourselves in the world today.

stuff that’s making me weep

This makes me weep. It makes me want to hug my children, scream in anger and change my buying habits.

It’s also, intellectually, a superb example of culture-making, of poetic and ethical imagination amid the practices of everyday life. Let me explain. I’ve been talking a bit recently about culture making, drawing from the superb book by Andy Crouch , Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling, to remind us that in response to cultural change, any and all of us can be culture-makers. Rather than condemn, critique, copy or consume, in echoes of Genesis 2, humans can be culture-makers.

I also want to add a number of nuances to this notion of culture-making. First, to add in Richard Kearney’s The Wake of Imagination in which he argues for imagination as both poetic and ethical. The first, poetic, relates to our commitment to create, as God’s image-bearers. The second, ethical, invites us to create in ways that focus on the other, on the least, on the marginalised, aware of the absent voices.

Second, Michel de Certeau’s, The Practice of Everyday Life and his insistence that culture-making occurs in the midst of the ordinary and everday.

So for me this Radiohead video brings these strands together. Consider that it arises from a pop-culture world which is now our globe’s ordinary and everyday. It is also set among the everyday activities of getting dressed for school, an activity which ‘000’s of Western kids, like my kids, do each day. Further, it is an act of both poetic and ethical imagination, a video clip that forces us to think about who makes our shoes, and how they spend their every day. Third, as a piece of music and as a video, it is an act of culture-making, refusing to condemn, critique, copy or consume, but creatively addressing an issue in our world today. In so doing, it offers us a challenge: as a result of that video, what will we do? Consume? or act?

Further:
For more on Radiohead videos.

vegetarian lasagne and cultural change

The introduction to Sunday’s sermon produced a number of requests for the recipe for Steve’s vegetarian lasage.

Slice whole pumpkin into halves. Cook in oven for 60 minutes. Leave to cool, then deseed and de-skin. Set aside.

Note that in this recipe, the following are all homegrown: pumpkin, onion, carrot, celery, silver beet, spinach, brocolli and tomato.

And for those who weren’t around on Sunday morning, here is the introduction to the sermon, on the subject of being culture-makers in mission: (more…)

would you like an icon with that?

My semester 2 Laidlaw class – Gospel in post-Christian society – just kicked off. The first day included students picking their icon of choice. Both the iPod and nike went quickly. Other icons that proved popular included Barbie, mobile phone, double helix, Homer, football pitch and google. Icons that missed out included Harry Potter, Buffy, Kate Moss, play station, McDonalds,

Their task is to live with that icon for 2 months. During that time they have to interview 3 people about what this icon means to them and how this icon shapes society (positively and negatively)? In light of the icon and these interviews, students are required to reflect on: (a) In what ways does this icon provide a window into contemporary Western society? and (b) What challenges does this icon present in relation to the Christian gospel?

The task is based on what I have found to be a very helpful diagram in Metavista: Bible, Church and Mission in an Age of Imagination. It portrays cultural hermeneutics as three interlocking circle: cultural icons, societal imagination, the nature and encounter with the gospel. So inviting the students to engage a cultural icon (I used Third Way’s Icon of the month series) is a way of inviting them to consider the underlying narratives forming these icons, and what the gospel might then say in response. I am looking forward to seeing where the journey takes them and the class.

The first time I taught this course back in 2004, I chose the icon. It was a McDonalds hamburger. I brought one as the course commenced. Each week the burger was gently placed on the desk. By the end of 15 weeks, it still looked pretty much the same as that first week. Slightly harder, but so well medicated that it all bugs and bacteria remained firmly at bay.

the church as culturemaker? yeah? right?

(This is the introduction for the paper I’m delivering at the International Conference on Baptist studies, July 15-18 in Melbourne.)

The story is true, but the names are changed in order to focus on the question at hand, that of the interface between Baptists and others. In 1995, members of First Baptist, began to murmur. As a church in the city centre, they owned, through a Trust, nearby property. A long term tenant was of foreign descent and had, in recent times, began to display their gods in the shop front window. Prayer among church members began to focus on the need to remove the idols, and the shopkeeper, from the building. This is one response, that of condemnation and critique, in a Baptist relationship with an/other, both ethnic and religious.

Down the street was “Fresh expression” Baptist Church. Formerly a dying City Mission, a new minister had begun to experiment with liturgical and ecclesial innovation. Contemporary culture was to viewed in a more positive light and a growing group of young adults had began to gather. Both churches were Baptist in name and shared over 100 years of history in the inner city. Yet both churches embody contrasting approaches to the interface between Baptists and others.

Andy Crouch, in his accessible book, Culture Making, summarises a range of contemporary stances toward culture:
– condemnation
– critique, with the emphasis on intellectual analysis of culture
– copying culture, in which a subculture develops around the imitation of forms from contemporary culture
– consuming, in which “most evangelicals today … simply go to the movies … [and] … walk out amused, titillated, distracted or thrilled, just like our fellow consumers who do not share our faith.” (89)
– creating
Crouch argues that the first four are problematic and that the “only way to change culture is to create more of it.”

Practical ways churches can respond to Influenza A part 4

While this pandemic is not as severe as it might have been, Influenza A (H1N1) could affect one third of the Canterbury population over the next few months. This could mean a peak week with 40,000 – 60,000 people may be ill with Swine Flu, with 6,000 – 8,000 needing some form of assistance at home. The existing health and welfare systems may not be able to respond to this level of demand.

If this happens, the church in Christchurch has a potential opportunity to be the practical hands and feet of Jesus. Many churches have started thinking about this already and are keen to explore ways to offer a response.

There is currently an attempt to bring together a coordinated response across the city via a web-based volunteer self-registration website which can be accessed by health and council coordinator roles. This would give an opportunity for churches and other community groups to come together in a coordinated way in response to needs that emerge in the community – often in ways that existing services struggle to deal with.

Ideally churches would:
1. Use our notices, websites, blogs and networks to point people to www.fluinfo.org.nz (here) or 0800 37 30 37 and encourage people to consider being volunteer in a range of practical ways, practically in areas like childcare and home visits. They can register here. Non-patient contact functions are available if people are more comfortable with this option. Altering health and council coordinators to the availability of volunteers will make a big difference.
2. As many are doing, prepare flu packs with items like – food, soup, lemonade, aloe vera tissues, alcohol hand cleanser, recent magazine, inside things for bored kids to do, some prayers for healing – this can be offered as part of the coordinated city-wide volunteer response on the website, or into your local communities as many are doing.
3. Consider helping at the local flu centre in a new role being explored as we speak. The work load at the flu centre could be further streamlined, allowing more people to be cared for more efficiently, if there was a team of reliable volunteers willing to work at the flu centre, prepared to partner with nurses, consider practical support needs and ensure adequate support as people return home.

Considering being a volunteer raises a lot of questions, so do check out the FAQ or email a question via the volunteer self-registration website. Please leave a comment if you are interested in the new role at the flu centre, or have questions/suggestions.

For a Biblical encouragement to get involved, see here.

seeking a con:text:ual interpretation

con : text : u al = with : Bible : us all

with (honesty, whole bodies, through up and down, culturally attentive) : Bible (as God’s big story) : us all (the community living in and for our time)

a christian response to swine flu part 3

Short-term, what 10 things would you give a family suffering from the flu? With people in our community now nursing sick kids, we want to put together a “thinking of you flu pack” (a variant on pastoral care through transition packs); some things that could be dropped into a letterbox and might bring cheer to the sick and those caring for the sick. Any ideas?

Longterm, this quote from the local newspaper: “Most infectious diseases are diseases of poverty.” Ouch. I stopped and read that again.

“And beyond fears of infection, there is a bigger story about inequality and social conditions …”As a society, we’ve got to look at the conditions some members of our society live in and recognise that the conditions in which poor people live are important for all of us. If we don’t reduce inequalities, it does ultimately affect all of us. And this is a stark example of that. This is what the reformists in the 19th century argued about poverty and disease. We look back and think it was about cholera and tuberculosis and it doesn’t apply anymore. It still applies. This is exactly what’s happened in Christchurch.” Alistair Humphrey in The Press, D2.

In other words, housing inequity is an issue that churches who dare to take the endtimes dreams of Isaiah 65 seriously.

God in the silence: the lost history of Christianity part 2

Where is God when bad things happen to good people? How, if God is sovereign, could God let over 1,000 years of Christian life disappear in Asia and Middle East? If God loves us and has a purpose, then why do churches die? What does this do for Christian faith in God’s love and companionship? The last 2 chapters of The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia–and How It Died addresses these questions:

1- Be honest:

“Historically, all major religions have produced multiple instances of intolerance and persecution, and the scriptures of Islam include considerably fewer calls to blood-curdling violence than do their Christian and Jewish counterparts: witness Joshua’s conquest of the land of Canaan, or the ethnic purges associated with Ezra and Nehemiah … At various times, some Muslim regimes have been inconceivably brutal, others mild and accommodating. That diversity suggests that episodes of persecution and violence derive not from anything inherent in the faith of Islam, but from circumstances in particular times and places.” (242)

2 – Be Strategic:
Churches are better positioned to survive tough times if they diversify, accepting that times are always transient and thus being willing to adapt, both politically, economically, sociologically, ethnically. “Churches also survive best when they diversify in global terms, so that they are not dependent on just one region of the world, however significant that region might appear at a given time.” (244). A look at history shows that “Too little adaptation means irrelevance; too much leads to assimilation and, often, disappearance.” (245).

3 – Take the long way home:
As we consider, for example, that Christianity has appeared in China four times over the last 2000 years, we should be weary of too quickly declaring something dead. In other words, “forever can be a risky term to apply to human affairs, and so can extinction.” (256).

4- Easter benchmarks:
Our criteria for influence are too easily secular, too easily tied to power and politics. In reality the Christian understanding of Easter offers a totally different paradigm by which we should view life: that of suffering and surprising life. “The more we study the catastrophes and endings that befell individual churches in particular eras, the better we appreciate the surprising new births that Christianity achieves in these very years, in odd and surprising contexts.” (261) Jenkins ends with a great quote from the title by a Charles Olson poem: the chain of memory is resurrection.

5 – Silence is simply our shame:
Jenkins is a historian and so he can’t resist waving a flag for his discipline and having a dig at our contemporary culture of amnesia. He notes that yes, silence can be due to nobody speaking. Yet silence can also be because nobody is bothering to listen. If Christians do believe God speaks through history, then why are we not better studiers of history? And make that all history, not just the successes, but the failures too? “Losing the ancient churches is one thing, but losing their memory and experience so utterly is a disaster scarely less damaging.” (262).

In that sense The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia–and How It Died does us a great service. And leaves us with a great question: how are we going, attempting to listen to history? What ways have you find helpful to educate, and be educated about, the times before you became the centre of your theological world?

(This is a 2nd post. Part 1, including debunking of some myths about Christianity, is here)

making your theological enemy a birthday cake

The lectionary reading was 1 Corinthians 6:1-11. I groan inside. Lawsuits among Christians. Why drop that onto a congregation in New Zealand in 2009.

But verse 6 is surely a stand out. “Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated?”

So here is Paul talking to a group of Christians. Some are lawyering up. They’ve been wronged. They’ve got rights.

To which Paul response seems to be: surprise them. Let yourself be wronged. Let yourself be cheated. Lose an argument. Give up that carpark. Bake your theological enemy a cake. Smile at migrants. Go on. Make someone’s week by losing a right.

I wonder what would happen if the church in New Zealand took that seriously?

the lost (Asian and African) history of Christianity part 1

(This is part 1, part 2 is here).

Reading The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia–and How It Died has just been fascinating.

The book describes a vital and energetic first 1000 year period in Christianity, a period during which the Middle East, Asia and Africa where much more dominant than Europe. In so doing, it provides some contemporary myth-busters.

Myth one – Christianity is a Western religion. Take the city of Merv, located in what is now Turkmenistan. During the 12th century it was one of the largest cities on the planet. From the year 420, the town had a bishop, from the year 500 a seminary with a significant intellectual output including access to Aristotle (This was some 600 years before universities began to emerge in Europe).

Or take the fact that in 1287, a Christian bishop, in ethnicity from near Beijing, was sent by Kublai Khan to the Christian Europe. He turned at to meet the Pope, who was amazed at his “orthodox” faith.

Myth two – The Catholic (Western) church supressed various Gospels (of Thomas, Judas etc). Why then do church leaders throughout Asia and Africa show familiarity with these alleged supressed “gospels”, yet still reject them because they knew they were “late and tenditious.” (88)

Myth three – Christianity suffers when the other faiths emerge. Quite the opposite, “Christians needed to maintain their highest intellectual standards because of the constant competition they faced from other faiths.” (46)

Myth four – The church needs good leaders to grow. Not so, for “Syriac Christian writers used the word merchant as a metaphor for those who spread the gospel. One hymn urged:
“Travel well girt like merchants,
That we may gain the world.
Convert men to me,
Fill creation with teaching.” (63-64).

Myth five – Christianity and Islam are enemies. Actually, peaceful co-existence between Muslims and Christians occurred for nearly 500 years throughout the Middle East. While Muhammad received his first revelations in 610, it was not until the 14th century that sustained persecution led to a decisive collapse of Christianity through the Middle East, Asia and much of Africa. The Middle East even 100 years ago was a place of religious diversity: “an area in which Christians remained a familiar part of the social and cultural landscape.” (140-1).

Jenkins writes lucidly, pulling a huge amount of reading into clear, lucid prose. Only read this book if you’re willing to have your prejudices -that Christianity kills cultures and the Crusades are the only way the church has treated Muslims – challenged by careful historical study.