e~mergent kiwi

a theology of pop culture and the Spirit in Luke 10

I am in Auckland for the next 2 days, participating in "The Spirit of Truth - Reading Scripture and Constructing Theology with the Spirit" Colloquim. My task includes delivering a paper titled: A pneumatology for an everyday theology: whither the anonymous Spirit in Luke 10:1-12?

It's been a lot of fun putting it together; moving between Biblical text and theology of Spirit. I want to offer a theology of popular culture that navigates beyond two tensions that bother me. First, the "adulation of "theology" in the everyday, in which theological God-talk threatens to obliterate out the uniqueness of the pop cultural artifact."

And a second tension, ""How low can you go?" in constructing a theology of popular culture?

If the feedback is good, I will be looking to publish it in a journal. It's part of a number of ongoing projects in this area of theology and popular culture for me; including work on an article in the Bible in Bro town and a book project in relation to Christ figures in film.

resurrecting the resurrection

Went to see the movie Vantage Point and it helped me make sense of the resurrection. The movie is tagged 8 points of view: 1 truth. It's a soft form of postmodernity, affirming eyewitnesses as subjective, without losing history as truthful.

In a similar way, the Bible has 4 gospels. Each offers a uniquely different point of view - Mark is fear and trembling; Matthew is earthquakes and angels; Luke is burning hearts; John is a new start. Each is subjective. Each adds insight, without losing truth.

Vantage point (the movie) ends with an 8th scene, an extended narrative which provides the big picture. In the same way, Christian hope is a big picture, or in the words of N. T Wright:
the events of Easter Sunday are no less than "a full, recreated life in the presence and love of God, a totally renewed creation, an integrated new heavens and new earth, and a complete humanness … in worship and love for God, in love for one another as humans, in stewardship over God’s world."

In between the 4th and 8th perspective is the church. Each of us, in our homes, workplaces, city, living out the resurrection in our lives. Each of us subjective eyewitnesses, adding insight.

I wonder if the evangelical captivity to historical truth means that we jump to quickly from the 4th to the 8th perspective. I wonder if evangelicals are so concerned about the historical truth of the resurrection that they reduce the resurrection to an intellectual set of categories. Thus the entry to the 8th perspective is reduced to a set of beliefs that get you into heaven.

Yet the resurrection is so much more than an intellectual historical search. It is the affirmation of life, and life to the full. That is a truth to be lived, through your own unique point of view.

Full sermon manuscript is here.

how should we use the Bible?

I was listening to someone rant this week. Discipleship was poor in the church. The evidence? Well, only 21% of people said they read their Bibles daily.

I thought back to the early Jews. They had handcopied scrolls in the Synagogue. They never had a Bible to read daily.

I thought back to the first disciples. They never had a book. Although they did have the stories of Jesus to tell to each other.

I thought back to the church before the printing press. They had handcopied scrolls in the church. They never had a Bible to read daily.

So isn't daily Bible reading as a mark of discipleship simply a contemporary phenomenon, based on the fact that due to the printing press and internet, we now have Bibles we can read daily?

I thought back to Jesus. When asked about eternal life in Luke 10. He quotes the Bible, mixing two Bible texts from different contexts. Then he creates a story from contemporary culture (the one about robbers and Samaritans and religious leaders). Then he says go and do likewise. That is discipleship for Jesus. Nothing to do with reading the Bible daily. Simply the ability to relate the Bible to everyday contemporary life in a way that changes behaviour.

Using that story, yes discipleship will include using the Bible. Although not necessarily daily and privately. And it must also include the number of contemporary stories told in church. And it also must include the way lives are lived.

How about you? As you think about the church through time, how should we use the Bible?

a local church bobbing in a heavy sea

I had a fascinating phone conversation with Bernard Walker, from the School of Organisational Leadership and Development at the University of Canterbury. He had been reading my Out of bounds church? book and was making some fascinating connections with current issues facing industrial relations and labour unions. He was after a book reading list for a post-graduate research project, looking for parallels between the literature regarding church involvement and that regarding union membership. It was a most stimulating conversation that I have continued to ponder.

It is easy to get locked into the local church and to then judge mission effectiveness by the rise and fall of a local community. Yet the local church bobs on a cultural sea. Issues, for example, about membership and belonging and commitment and busy life and time-styles are not just local church issues, but are part of larger cultural currents. We ignore these currents at our own peril.

For all of the alarm in Christian literature about the decline of the church, their is as much, if not more alarm, in other voluntary sectors. (Rugby clubs, unions, political party membership lists being just three examples). In fact, some of the emerging church thinking might actually be of help to the future of other groups in society.

And vice versa, for the health of Christianity, we need to be part of inter-disciplinary conversations, talking to other groups in society, learning together.

globalisation and the Biblical text

Each week in my Gospel and post-Christian class we interact with the same Biblical text: Luke 10:1-12. It is amazing to me, and to the class, how one text can have the depth and breadth to challenge us week after week. It puts a whole new slant on the Biblical text as living text.

Today I placed on an overhead for the class all the brand labels of clothing I was wearing. I gave the class a copy of the overhead, with the Biblical text in amongst the brands. Then I read the following story (page xv) from No logo.

Here they were all young, some of them as young as fifteen; only a few were over twenty-one.

I was sympathetic, of course, but, being the Western foreigner, I wanted to know what brands of garments they produced at the Kaho factory - if I was to bring their story home, I would have to have my journalistic hook. So here we were, ten of us, crowded into a concrete bunker only slightly bigger than a telephone booth ...

Suddenly the words of Luke 10:5-7 have fresh challenge: 5"When you enter a house, first say, 'Peace to this house.' 6If a person of peace is there, your peace will rest on them; if not, it will return to you. 7Stay in that house, eating and drinking whatever they give you, for the worker deserves their wages. Do not move around from house to house.

These are the questions and issues, raised by globalisation and the Biblical text, that framed our lecture.

1. What does it mean to sit at a sweatshop table in a way that lets go of our perceptions of poverty and injustice?
2. There is a cost to self. Will we give to people out of our abundance or lack?
3. When we listen first, then the listening can change us. Change, Kingdom change, will then actually happen now, and in us, not just later, "in heaven."
4. "The workers deserve their wages." Makes a surprising connection to sweatshops, because it no longer speaks to us, but the need for justice among sweatshops.
5. What does it mean to pray "give us this day our daily bread"?
6. What would happen if you, because of your justice stance, didn't eat meat and yet the food placed before you was battery farmed chicken? Would your justice principles, or the desire for relationship, be pre-eminent?
7. In globalisation, the power remains with the bosses. What are the power relationships in our "gospel encounters"? In contrast, in the Kingdom of God, the harvest (ie. every person) has value. How do we do mission so that power does not lie with us?
8. In New Zealand our power issues include land issues. How will we as Christians respond in New Zealand today?
9. What is proclaiming "peace as shalom" to sweatshop? How can you separate "peace and justice"?
10. How do we "dwell" long-term, around sweatshop tables?
11. How do our lives back home change as a result of our short-term overseas trips and cross-cultural changes?
12. The local is intrinsically linked to the global. How does changing the local impact on the global?

Update: In the comments, both Darren and I have applauded this book;
Consuming faith as a wonderfully accessible theological response to globalisation and how a Christian might respond to the issues raised by No logo.

reading a post-colonial Bible

OR: How to sing "ashamed of my past" as the Lord's song?

Being on top is only one way to view the world. Post-colonial studies is the attempt to read "from the other side."

Take Genesis 28. Jacob is promised the land of Israel. So what happens when you read this from the "other side"? What does this text mean for the land itself, which will in time be ploughed and domesticated by the migrant? Where is God for those who lose land when the migrant arrives? In the words of Jomo Kenyatta: When the Missionaries arrived, the Africans had the Land and the Missionaries had the Bible. They taught how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.

I have been reading Jacob's story throught the eyes of the settler: James Cook Voyage of the Endeavour, and second, through the eyes of the dispossessed: Te Horeta Te Taniwha's Account of Cook's Visit. Different values. Different ways of viewing the world.

I, as Pakeha, am descended from settler. I often feel guilty over the migration of my ancestors. It becomes more complex when God and God's word is used on behalf of those on top.

So this work is part of my learning and listening what it means to follow Christ, when the name of Christ has, at times, been shamefully used in our past. It is also part of research in preparation for a paper I am presenting at the Faith in a Hyphen conference, December 4-6, Sydney, Australia.

Further links:
For more of a poetic on this Genesis 28 text go here.
For a multi-sensory and pop cultural preaching engagement with this text here.

salvation in the arms of another

It's a line from a song (Salvation), by Rae and Christian, from 2001 Sleepwalking album. It became a theme song for my gospel in post-Christian class this week. We looked at the fiction of Douglas Coupland; the endings to 3 of his books; Generation X, 1991; Life after God, 1994; Hey Nostradamus, 2003.

It is fascinating to realise that each book ends exploring themes of salvation; salvation from human loss and need into reconciliation of human relationships in Hey Nostradamus; salvation from human selfishness into a life of giving and serving through creation, through death to self (with sacramental hints of cleansing and baptism) in Life after God; salvation from aloneness into mutual acceptance in community through surrendering the love of the mentally challenged in Generation X.

As a class we then reflected on the narrow ways that salvation is presented in modernity. We contrasted this with the richness of Biblical images. We decided that Biblical images of God as Family restorer (Luke 15) and Environmental integrator (Colossians 1:18-20) in fact connect with the endings and the salvific themes in contemporary culture, specifically in Douglas Coupland's work.

What a shame if the church was actually preaching a limited gospel that was in fact disconnected from the salvific search in our culture. It was a great class.

Relevant parts of the lecture notes are here if you're interested.

newbigin and the future of mission in the west

From June 25-29 I am participating in a International Think Tank on Mission to Western Culture. This involves a multi-year think tank re-applying the work of Lesslie Newbigin to denominational, seminary and other church systems regarding missional engagement with western culture(s). In preparation I was asked to answer 2 questions.

Question 2: What would you identify as the primary themes/questions that need to be addressed regarding mission to western culture at this point in time?

Perhaps one way to answer this question is reflect on my personal story in regard to Newbigin. I was first influenced by Newbigin without knowing. I chose to commence my Seminary training (at Carey Baptist College, New Zealand) because they had decided to focus on Mission to Western Culture and by insisting that all pastoral ministry students had to be involved in a church planting situation. This was intended to allow mission, congregation and praxis to become formational. It was highly innovative and (still) deserves huge applause. Scarcely a day goes by that I do not thank God that my primary ministerial formation was missionary and on the edges of culture, rather than pastorally central. The work and thought of Newbigin, in particular his call for mission in the West, had been a substantive influence on my Seminary choosing this approach to ministerial formation.

Arriving at this Seminary, I took courses and now began to be influenced directly by Newbigin’s words. One the one hand was the Gospel in Pluralist Society. On the other hand was my attempts to plant a missional community. The gulf - between Newbigin’s mega-theories about public truth and the reality of incarnating a faith community in an urban suburb – were huge. I wonder if this tension is emblematic of the primary themes that need to be addressed regarding mission to Western culture. While Newbigin’s writings totally re-aligned the vision of our Seminary, it proved lifeless when it came to the reality of the Incarnation of a faith community.

I stopped reading Newbigin. Instead I found more help in some of the insights of contextual theology. It gave me a framework in which to practice incarnation and develop contextual worship. In turn, this enabled me to engage with postmodernity, both philosophically and as I drank coffee with friends and we talked together about their loss of faith. This mix of congregational planting and engagement with local narratives then shaped up my PhD research in which I explored the effectiveness of the emerging church as a missional contextualization of faith. In the midst of my research I stumbled across the work of French philosopher and Jesuit, Michel de Certeau. This was an unexpected grace and his work gave me a framework in which I could initiate a conversation between the narratives, of local communities and popular culture, and with theology and academic post-modernity.

So, in light of this personal narrative, what primary themes/questions do I think need to be addressed regarding mission to western culture at this point in time?

a) We need skills to read local narratives in light of Scripture and missional texts like Newbigin’s. We need methodologies that simultaneously value a simple story, yet allow the peeling back of ever deepening layers, without privilege. How do we create partnerships between academia and local narratives, between missional practice and missiology?

b) Leadership formation needs to be congregational and missional in its praxis. We need to find ways for Denominational systems and Seminaries to serve local congregational narratives.

c) We need to find ways to articulate a glocal theology. By this I mean that while a congregational hermeneutic rightly returns mission to the local church as a communal narrative, we need to find ways for these local narratives to be informed by conversation with ecclesial communities both diachronic and synchronic? The tension I felt between Newbigin in theory and Newbigin in practice needs to avoid being reduced to either/or dichotomies. Instead the awareness of the particularity of the communal narrative needs to allow a “knowledge with humility” in which the community dialogues with a gospel that is wholistically universal. Else we run the danger of a local theology which in fact merely continues the prevailing atomization of belief.

d) Centres and margins: There is a potentially dangerous ecclesial-centrism in the work of Newbigin. As a pastor, I love the notion of the congregation as the primary hermeneutic. But as a pastor I am probably the only one that thinks about the congregation other than Sunday. The lives of my congregation include 50 hour working weeks, debt loading and subtle consumer pressures. A congregational hermeneutic tempts me to place myself at the centre of the conversation. Is it a form of church-olatory? How does the congregational hermeneutic speak to the Kingdom? How do I mesh my pastorally centrist experiences with the exilic experience of the church in the West? How does the congregation not become pastor and church centred? How does the pastor enable a congregation to be theological about their worlds?

e) Finally, Newbigin’s work failed to acknowledge the world of popular culture. So much contemporary cultural work is now done at the movies and through television. There is a constant sense of high cultural arrogance within much theological work. A re-missionalisation project is going to need to take far more seriously than Newbigin the cultural texts that are reality TV programmes like Survivor, Da Vinci Code and the Matrix.

(My response to Question 1: What are the primary contributions of Lesslie Newbigin to this conversation is here).

the images say it all

I'm kicking off the conversation at our espresso congregation tonite. I've been handed the question "what does postmodern mean when applied to theology."

I'm tired of words, so for fun I thought I'd google "postmodern" under google images. The first 20 images visually say it all really; the art, the language and the language games, the commerce, the architecture.

Now take those 20 images and think about how theology (God talk) is applied to seeing God and speaking of God and connecting God...

an eco-theological hermeneutic
- thanks Mike

spirituality of place

I visited the arthouse here in Christchurch this week, where a local New Zealand artist, J.S. Parker, is exhibiting. The exhibition is a series called Plain Song: referring to medieval Gregorian chants and the fact that his work captures a spirituality of place, drawing on the Plains of Canterbury and Marlborough. (It's also an allusion to Parker's painting techniques; in which he uses the 2-dimensionality of planes as a core motif.)

I have been reflecting recently on the relationship between spirituality and place, both given my geographic moves this year, and given that I am working on a theological article on indigenous landrights in relation to the New Zealand sea-bed and foreshore issue. I suspect that Western theology has been placeless due to its abstract notions of the Trinity, and so we are divorced from a spirituality of place.

A final quote from the Parker exhibition stood out for me: Parker "has always had a spiritual basis to his work and feels this may be one explanation for the recent, strong resurgence of interest in his paintings." It is nice to see resonnance between my ponderous theological ponderings and the contemporary New Zealand art scene.

Is the Trinity placeless?

I blog this earthed in a cafe, with a headache, under pressure from a particular set of embodied circumstances and relationships. I blog this in Canterbury, with a particular landscape and seascape. The view from my table shapes my thinking, blabbing, blogging. Place shapes theological reflection.

The work of Miroslav Volf positions the Trinity within the context of 9/11 and ethnic cleansing. It argues that in the face of religious tribalism God embraces us, then releases us to the possibility of being fully human. This becomes a model for human relating; we must embrace the other, we must release the other to face being fully human. This sounds great. It is practically sharpened by the fact that Volf grew up in Yugoslavia and so writes of embrace and freedom and consequence against the bitter backdrop of ethnic cleansing. What do I do with the violator and oppressor; asks Volf? I must embrace because God embraced me. I must release, trusting the love of God and people.

However, this presents the possibility of the Trinity as an abstract meta-narrative, a model for human relationships. And I wonder how such a potentially abstract model is shaped by place. How do the contours of land, of land displacement, shape a Trinitarian theology.

The typical answer is that in Jesus the Trinity becomes "placed"? As Jesus walks, so the Triune God walks. This makes all place important, as a localised, Jewish place, is universalized. However, there is a nagging sense that once again the Trinity has become an abstract meta-narrative, a model for human relationships; as God in one place becomes God in all places.

Or, from my place cafe table, I ask you at your place, is there more to Trinitarian placement?

preaching the lamb of God

Jesus the lamb of God:

are there any contemporary metaphors that might illuminate this blood-stained, distinctly rural image in today's urban context?

how to communicate such an image, especially today, 1 October, World Vegetarian
Day!?

blokes and books

I have further developed my thoughts on doing postmodernity into a longer piece on blokes and books, for a local radio station.

Oh, I rate 30/100 in the good booking quiz. Given the tone of some of the questions, I am taking this as a compliment.

You see, the local newspaper on Saturday informed me that blokes don’t read books.

Apparently getting men to read fiction is the holy grail of publishing. No publisher, no matter how much their advertising budget, has been able to wean men off newspapers and books about rugby and war?

Men read less than women.
Men read way less books than women.

This month, a book company in Britain has launched the Good Booking campaign. The hunt is on for good booking men.

And so this book company is offering a 1000 pound spot prizes to any man caught reading one of their fiction books in public.

The hunt is on for good booking blokes.

Go to their website and there’s a quiz you can take to see if you are good booking.
It’s a bit risqué and it’s very blokey.

But for the sake of Radio research I took the quiz.

I scored 30 out of 100.

And according to the penguin good booking campaign,
I am not a good booking bloke.
I need to polish my good booking image.
I need to read more books.

Which considering I have just finished a Phd and read over 500 books, probably suggests a faulty quiz.

Blokes and books.

A few months ago, the church I pastor celebrated Easter by making an Easter Art installation. The entire 400 seat church auditorium was turned into an easter garden, complete with interactive art installations.

The pews were pulled out and seven tones of sand was brought into the church.

I watched wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of sand be trucked in.
I watched the concrete pavers be laid,
and then trees and the shrubs and the grass arrived.
Then the bridges were build.
Finally a flowing waterfall.

Amid all this hive of activity, all this hammering and banging,
it suddenly struck me that for some of our men, this was worship.

Sweat and sand,
hammering nails,
building things
- was their way of loving God.

Doing practical stuff with their hands was their worship.

And I suddenly realised how goodbooking is our Christianity.
read the Bible
read 40 days of purpose.
sit down and listen to a preacher
sing songs about Jesus being my darling of heaven.
Blokes don’t read books, yet so much of our Christianity is book and word bound.

So what do we do with blokes, books and Christianity?

Should we make them good booking?
spot prizes of a 1000 dollars if you are caught reading your Bible in public

cute little internet quizs on our church websites that rate one’s bible knowledge:
30 out of 100, so get your good booking act together

or does Christianity need to do a rethink.

I mean, does Christianity need to be goodbooking?
How important are books to following Jesus?

Did Jesus need books?

Sure he used the scrolls
but he lived in an oral culture of storytelling
and he taught by action: watch me act, then you act,

So if Jesus wasn’t goodbooking, then why is Christianity?

Surely blokes don’t need to read be good booking to follow Jesus.

Blokes and books:
Can we use more images in church?
Can we use more stories in church?
What is the place of action and activity?

coming or going and mission

attractional vs missional: do people come to us or do we go to people: this is a false dualism.

sociologically – people are always coming and going. centre is edge and edge is centre and the journey is more interesting that the destination.

biblically - the bible shows times of attractional mission – I’m going up to Jerusalem or John 17, by love they know we are disciples or Acts 2; are you drunk?; and moments of missional mission; the end of Acts, the wandering of the prophet Jesus.

theologically – the triune God is both the embrace of the divine dance of love and the incarnational gift of love for the world.

the underlying principle is right - that Christendom is over. But the either/or dualism is unhelpful. mission must be missional in order to find Christ in new places. and mission can be attractional in a post-Christendom world. For example, building an alternative community of love - or standing up for the ethic of marriage while accepting that our world is pluralistic and tolerant of a range of sexual expressions.

the postmodern in 1 sentence

A story in response to Tim's comment: in three words (i.e., "Postmodernism is _____").

So it is 9 am on a Sunday morning late last year. Barely awake, barely functioning, I am doing a workshop, with Mark Pierson from Cityside. The prescribed title (NOT our choice) was "Postmodern communication." The prescribed audience is New Zealand Bapist Assembly.

In true postmodern style, Mark and I have prepared a deck of cards with a different topic on each card and an egg timer. An audience member will choose a card from the deck and we have "egg timer" time to answer. It will be participatory, interactive, audience-driven, random, chaotic, fast moving ... (not that I am defining the postmodern in 1 sentence).

Before we start a hand shoots up. I am not sure I am in right place. Can you define postmodernity for me in 1 sentence? This man might be looking for the right place, but suddenly I sense I am in the wrong place.

a question

Do you ever wonder why some postmodernist writers (e.g. Jacques Derrida or Stanley Fish) use so many words? Is it
a) the only way to convince modernists
b) a deeply and deliberately ironic gesture
c) evidence of how deeply rooted modernity really is
d) a cheap shot criticism not worth pondering further?

the postmodern contest

One of the questions my PhD examiners asked me was to reflect on the contested nature of postmodernity. They liked my answer so much they suggested it be inserted into the thesis. So here is a first draft.

There is a huge amount of literature that describes a movement from modern to postmodern. At base this reflects some rejection of the past; often in relation to triumphal and over-arching words, symbols and systems.

I would group critiques of postmodernity into five camps.

the hypen and the hyper - a labeling critique. Different people have named the cultural shift in different ways. Some have called it hyper or ultra modern (Thomas Oden), some have called it liquid modernity (Bauman). Some have hyphenated or spaced or capitalised it; Post modern … postmodern … post-modern. All of this reflects questions about the relationship between modern and the postmodern, and whether one emphasises continuity or discontinuity.

the ism and the ity - a lens critique. Words like postmodernism and postmodernity describe different lens through which people look at the cultural shift. Do you look at culture through changes in technology and global capital (ism) or to do you reflect on the ideas of deconstruction etc (ity)?

the paradigm critique. Some people base their view of cultural shift on Kuhn’s notion of paradigm’s, and argue for a convenient pre-modern, modern and post-modern view of 2000 years of history. Questions have been raised over the simplicity of such a view.

the colonising critique. Ziaddhin Sardar’s book, Postmodernism and the Other, is a superb dissection of the postmodernity’s dismissal of the way modernity elevates reason at the expense of other ways of knowing and being, especially as seen in ethnic cultures. Sardar then argues however, that postmodernity is in fact an oppressive metanarrative itself, that is sucking cultural diversity once again into a Western way of seeing the world. Postmodernity becomes an unjust exploitation of non-Western cultures.

the good old days critique. This represents a yearning for what was. It argues against cultural shift by calling for a return to previous ways of being.

I concluded by noting that none of the above in anyway suggest that culture has not changed. I have never read anyone who thinks culture is the same now as it was 50 years ago. What is contested is how to accurately name the changes, and the impact of these changes about people.