This is an old theme here- in fact it might be worth reading this first, in which I asked a list of questions like this;

If more people who seek to live out faith in the UK are NOT attending Church regularly than those who still do, what is Church doing wrong? Or what are those non attenders looking for that they are not finding? (I should add that I personally am done with trying to rescue Church.)

How can faith form and reform without gatherings, without buildings, without programmes and without paid staff?

How will we ‘make diciples’? How might we learn? How will we find commonality and inspiration? How will we prevent our ‘coals going cold’?

If we even wanted to make converts (I don’t, but I do long for people to turn towards good, to long for better) what would we do with them after they converted?

If people are free to believe what they want, and to practice what they feel, what is the point of doctrine or creed? Is this OK? How much freedom to make a new way is acceptable? Do we eventually have to settle on a new orthodoxy? What if this new way takes extremist paths? How much variety can we tolerate?

One explanation/condemnation for church leaving we hear within Church is concerned with the scourge of post-modernist individualism. Those who leave do so because we are seduced by it. Whether this is true or not, it points to a cultural reality of isolation, ex-carnation and avotarism. (I might have made up at least one of those last words.) In this contect, how do people find connection and community?

Perhaps these church leavers need help. What does this look like? Where will the help come from?

There were some glaring ommissions from this list that I have been grappling with in myself, partly because of conversations with women who have had to live in a patriarchal society, and try to find meaning within a patriarchal church.

Then there is the fact that old lefties like me fail to see that even in our attempts to include, we end up making spaces that suit people just like me- white, middle class left-of-centre folk, who talk about social justice mainly from our places of comfort and security. We reach out of this of privilege only as ‘helpers’.

Meanwhile, I am working with Rob to try to revive an old organisation called Proost, formerly a platform for gathering church resources, and making them available to small missional groups, emerging church thingamies and alternative worship gatherings. It fell into disuse, and Rob had the idea of restarting it. I was interested in this idea because I remembered fondly the community of belonging that formed around old Proost. It was a large part of my own emergence as an ‘artist’ or a ‘poet’, and brought me into contact with lots of lovely people, some of whom remains an important part of my life.

But…

As we have started the process of re-imagining Proost, we have come up against that list of questions I posted above – and the further ones mentioned too. An overarching question then emerges of what a revived Proost would be for?

What community would it gather now? Where is there a need for this kind of community and what sort of meaning would this community regard as essential orthodoxy?

Where are the potential users of a new Proost? (as an aside, we could also ask where are all the old users of Proost?) Are they still in Church- and if so, what processes/events/resources/community can we offer that is not commonly available within Church? Or are they now often part of the Church diaspora, and if so, how can we support each other to find community, common purpose and shared meaning skewed towards grace?

There is another question for me too is around the importance of art and activism as a means for both personal engagement but also collective action towards change, and how these things might be encouraged, mentored and commissioned.

Already I am being taken outside my comfort zone in terms of what ‘activism’ might look like- how confrontative it might be. What are the right targets of this activism and how much might this cost us in an age of punative laws around protest here in the UK?

What is the point of a faith-based organisation if it only feeds the self-centred spiritual journeys and the creative egos of its own member. Is this not one of the legitimate criticisms of institutional Church?

What is the role of spirituality/faith in the face of war in Gaza, the impact of neoliberalism on vulnerable people, climate breakdown and mass extinction? How do we express our faith? How do we reach for alternatives? How do we structure ourselves towards the looking outwards rather than just creating opportunities for moral elevation for ourselves?

How do we listen to/include/defer to those voices prevoiusly excluded? How do we grapple with patriarchy. colonial legacies and the traumas they cause, both historically and presently. How do we celebrate and include people from an LGBTQ background?

How does our theology reshape and reform? Who decides what is ‘acceptabe’ and what is ‘marginal’?

Can an organisation contain these elements safely? How?

This is the Proost conversation that we are trying to have in the open, hoping that it will gatherer others who are asking the same questions. We are trying to be honest, not least about our own personal failure to deal with some of these questions in the past. We are also trying to be honest about our own incompetence, our lack of experience, our maleness, our whiteness and our middle-classness. I could add honest too about a longing for connection, for deeper meaning, for better ways to live and more loving ways to engage with the world.

It is easy to ask questions, but if we are going to actually do something, we have to try to answer at least some of them.

I think some answers are starting to take shape, (almost in the form of intuition, or widely held suspicion) of what a post-church network or organisation that seeks to give proper place to the way that spirituality might look like.

Or perhaps I am mainly talking about myself? (There I go with the questions again.)

Here is my provisional list of what an organisation suited to providing safe spaces for spiritual nomads might look like (and my provision thoughts as to what a reformed Proost might look like);

• Decentred geographically and in terms of power structures
• Offering inclusion but not obligation
• Community making is non-hierarchical in nature
• Leadership facilitative, not dominant
• A very generous orthodoxy and a high value placed on tolerating difference
• There is a presumption that individuals are responsible for their own spiritual formation
• Attempts to engage with colonial/patriarchal legacies and trauma within both organisational structure and underpinning theology
• Earth centred, through theologies of one-ness, am-ness, mystical Christ embodied in the world
• Social justice is at the heart of theology and practice.
• Physical gatherings are special ‘events’ , most regular contact is at distance, via internet
• Resources produced/employed emerge from dispersed, grass-roots activities within the community. Authenticity has a high value
• Art and creativity are key tools for personal refelection, community building and cutural engagement

Of course, this is not an exhaustive list.

But it is all I have for now.