You walk down the drive and and picnic with your wife on the beach. Never was the old estuary so lovely than on a hazy Spring day;
Things you do with sunshine and a day off…
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Making missional community…
We have been away for a couple of days in England, visiting our old church, Calvary Christian Fellowship, near Preston. It has been a glorious spring weekend, full of sunshine, hazy blue skies and green shoots everywhere.
All of which felt very appropriate as we were asked to come to talk to CCF about our experience of the process of making small ‘missional’ communities. They are in the process of trying to change the structure and focus of their organisation towards a collection of such groups. It seems to me to be a very interesting and potentially difficult process- akin to turning around a large oil tanker on a lake, but if anyone can do it I think they can.
Michaela and I did a bit of a double act- I spoke a lot about the thinking behind some of the changes that we have been through, and she described the actual practical experiences. In between we showed photographs, did some activities, and we used a large double sided loom to weave together the names of our community- something that Aoradh first developed for Greenbelt Festival. It has since been used at a few different events up and down the country.
What is created is this lovely thing, messy and rough around the edges, interconnected and full of humanity. We think it is rather a good analogy for the making of community…
It is 10 years since we moved away from CCF up to Scotland. For us this trip was a chance to take stock for ourselves as to the journey we have made. There have been challenges and times of real hardship, but also very great blessings.
This morning, Michaela and I have both taken a day off, which is fortunate as we are both exhausted. We came back to Dunoon on the last (midnight) ferry yesterday.
One of the things we tried to speak about with clarity is the question of what community (or church) is FOR. It is easy for our groups and activities to become all about OUR needs, OUR spirituality, OUR comfort zones. God might then be adopted as some kind of benign mascot. I think the primary way we avoid this is to constantly make community a place of sending, as well as gathering. Hence, we used this poem;
There is a time for all things under heaven
A time for the sent ones of God
To follow the rough roads
Into the barren broken places
To look for the marks left by Jesus
On the soft tissue and brittle bones
Of the Imago Dei
The stinking, wretched
Image bearers of the Living God
.
Time for the insurgency of God
To follow the mission
Into the hostile places
To seek out the secret stains left by the love
That was woven into the very core
Of the Imago Christi
The failing, faithless
Manifest images of the Christ
.
Time for the dancers of the new Kingdom dance
To look for the music of Jesus
Amid the static and street noise
Tuning to the high fluting fragile sound
Vibrant and resonant;
To the gracenotes made there by Spiritus Sanctus
We, the discordant, cursing and gossiping
Vessels of the Spirit of the Living God
.
Time for the revolutionaries of God
To follow the long hard march
Unyoked and with easy burdens
Looking for the soft places where people are
Where freedom flickers, where hopes soar
To seek out the Participatio Christi
With weak but willing hands and sore feet
Learning to partake in the labours of love
For now is the time for holy huddles to scatter
On the winds of the Spirit
From ‘Listing’, available from Proost.
I love you will you marry me?
Did anyone listen to this programme on Radio 4?
It was a modern day fairy-tale, with a twist of tragedy.
Across a concrete footbridge high up in a crumbling concrete wasteland someone had written the words-
Clare Middleton I love you will u marry me
The words were visible for miles, and speculation became rife as to the story behind them. Who wrote it? Did Clare Middleton say yes?
In Sheffield, the stories grew like patches of mildew on the wall- some said that she said no, and the man who wrote it jumped off the bridge. Others suggested that Clare was part of a love triangle and it all ended in violence and a burnt out flat.
The presenter managed to track down first Clare’s mother, then her friends, and eventually the writer of the message, and the story took on real flesh.
Clare was a live wire who loved to dance. She was an electric presence, who was drawn to dangerous men and drugs. She already had several kids when she fell in with the writer of the message- himself a survivor of institutional child care. By then she was stick thin and toothless from amphatamine use, but he loved her.
She said yes by the way.
But three months later they were separated, at least in part because of social work’s concerns about the safety of her children.
And then she died of cancer.
However, the ‘I love you bridge’ has become a symbol of hope. Visible tenderness, humanity and romance in the middle of all those slabs of brown streaked concrete. So much so that some artist has picked out the shaky handwriting in neon lights.
Although not the name- still there, but faded. Which seems to me unbearably sad.
Clare Middleton- you were loved.
Never ‘rebloged’ before (sounds like it relates to a dysfunctional digestive tract) but I liked this article from Simon Cross….
Reflects some of the earlier posts here about masculinity. The idea of reasserting male identity by demanding that men become the roaring lions of the church always disturbed me. The Lion of Judah came as a lamb after all.
Do the small things. I like that…
Just a few thoughts about issues of masculine identity in the context of spirituality and religion… please dont let is be a soliloquy, let me know your thoughts in the comments box.
There have been a few articles written recently about the disengagement and disappearance of men from places such as church sanctuaries and missionary agencies.
Two notable recent articles on this are: Steve Davies, writing about men and the mission field, and Vicky Beeching (current Christian uber blogger) on feminisation of worship music.
I’m left feeling though that in both cases, what the writers describe are symptoms of a greater malaise, and while both are interesting and important, they arent quite catching the very complex causes.
These causes are complex, and I would categorise them as essentially psycho spiritual and sociological.
For a very long time the church has been deeply patriarchal, as indeed has…
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The view from here…
Sometimes the wonder of the world we move through hits you between the eyes.
Last week I had to take M to a hospital appointment. She spent half her life very ill from Ulcerative Colitis, until 10 years ago when for no apparent reason, all symptoms disappeared. However because of all the steroids she took there have been concerns about the effect on her bone density. As it happens however, she seems to be doing OK.
We are all passing through, and many are walking a much harder path than us at the moment. We have no right to demand days like today- all we can do is to be grateful when they come.
On the way back home, we stopped for a picnic next to Loch Lomond. Green salad and French bread. Me and my wife, with the smell of Spring in the air.
Michaela took these photos…
A voice in the wilderness…
Sometimes someone is given the power to say something that cuts through all the political/religious/ideological divides. For the sake of America, I hope that this man’s voice might be widely heard;
Listening to one of my social work heroes…
There is lots of good stuff on the new Greenbelt Website, including a new GTV section, full of short film clips with some of the speakers/performers at the festival.
One of them was Bob Holman. I was there to see him filmed- you can see me in the second row if you click on this link;
Bob was one of the men who inspired me to believe that community activism and social work in particular could make a difference. As a young man, when I heard that friends were planning to be accountants, or hairdressers, or mechanics (but particularly accounts to be honest) I would shake my head slowly at the waste of a life. I believed passionately that life ought to be about helping others- connecting with people who were caught up in poverty or addiction and seeking to bring them to freedom.
There were of course lots of reasons for this- my own troubled and difficult childhood, and also my understanding of what Jesus was all about. These things met in the person of Bob- who because of his Christian faith, gave up a well paid job in a university and moved his family to a council estate, later moving to the still notorious Easterhouse in Glasgow. I do not know Bob, nor the detail of what he achieved, but what he did represented something noble and authentic at a time when Christianity appeared to have little to say about social action, and lots about saving people from hell.
The fact that I watched this video clip again (it is only short- 8 mins or so) at this point of my career is really poignant. All that naive but still cherished idealism about social work as a means to change society for the better, and to be the bridge for grace in the lives of the people I work with- this is all 21 years behind me. I now find myself on a trajectory out of social work all together.
As I reflect, the process of social work has taken a lot from me. After meeting so many people at their lowest ebb, or at their worst behaviour, my compassion and tolerance is blunted. But it has not gone altogether. After feeling the responsibility of managing situation that simply can not be managed, and seeking to help people who will not help themselves my motivation to keep standing in those difficult places has been eroded. But this too remains in part.
Above all, I am tired. I want a cave for a while where I will live out gentle days in the throwing of stones and the lighting of fires.
Then perhaps there might be a rekindling of the old part of me that was so excited by the story old Bob told.
I hope so…
Jonny Baker: Imagination, Creativity, and Mission | ChurchNext
If you want a summary of what is happening in and around the edges of organised church in the UK, then you could do a lot worse than watching this;
Jonny Baker: Imagination, Creativity, and Mission | ChurchNext.
It might even be cause for great optimism!
The visible presence of the living God…
It is an installation by artist Berndnaut Smilde, who uses smoke machines and bits of trickery to form clouds in the middle of rooms. They only last for seconds, but I think they are really cool.
Th fact that this one is in the middle of an empty church is particularly poignant if you are wired like me. It conjures up Biblical images of the Host of God in the temple of the Ancient Hebrews – but in this case, within what looks like a run down and disused chapel, tarted up a little for the photograph.
It also asks some rather searching theological questions about our hopes for God and where we might encounter God. There are some clues in the Bible;
God is not contained, but is there when we gather.
God is not to be conjured up, but delights in our praise.
These are all very familiar concepts to anyone who has been involved in leading communal worship. I have spoken before about the tendency we had within lots of the services I have been involved with to try to whip up some kind of God-expectancy, or God-imitation as part of a religious show.
You could say that we made our own cloud in the middle of each and every gathering just like the one above. We tried hard to make visible the fact that God was there, whether or not we really believed it, whether or not it was true. If we had created some kind of evidence that he was there, this was enough.
But then I am reminded of an obscure passage from 1 Kings 19, when Elijah is in the middle of a particularly tough time. Prophets tended to upset people then (and now) and would have to flee for their lives;
And the word of the LORD came to him: “What are you doing here, Elijah?”
10 He replied, “I have been very zealous for the LORD God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too.”
11 The LORD said, “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by.”
Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. 12 After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. 13 When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.
Then a voice said to him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”
There is humour here I think. And love, and tolerance, and power. There is the man on the mountain scared out of his wits by what is happening all around him.
And then there is a whisper asking him- “What are you doing here?”
The clouds and the winds and the earthquakes come and go- but the point is not the transcendent experience, but the life we live in the wake of it all.
What are we doing here?
Shock- churches unite!
I find it all so depressing.
Is there nothing else that Churches can unite behind or against?
I suppose the truth is that they DO- all the time, but no body notices. There is a feeling in me however that that the issue of personal sexuality, and the application of the word ‘marriage’ to same sex coupling still has the power to bring spittle to the lips of the faithful like no other.
Not poverty, or people unfairly imprisoned or tortured. Not restoring sight to the blind or declaring jubilee to those who are oppressed.
I know- for many of my fellow Christians, this issue is complex- full of difficult theological questions and wrapped up some kind of desperate struggle against a perception of a rising secular tide.
For me it is much simpler.
If we are to make any kind of mistake- err on the side of grace.
Oh- and get on with the things that are the proper business of the Kingdom of God.
The stuff in Matthew chapter 5, not the obscure bits of Leviticus. This bit for example;
16 The LORD said to Moses, 17 “Say to Aaron: ‘For the generations to come none of your descendants who has a defect may come near to offer the food of his God. 18 No man who has any defect may come near: no man who is blind or lame, disfigured or deformed; 19 no man with a crippled foot or hand, 20 or who is a hunchback or a dwarf, or who has any eye defect, or who has festering or running sores or damaged testicles. 21 No descendant of Aaron the priest who has any defect is to come near to present the food offerings to the LORD. He has a defect; he must not come near to offer the food of his God. 22 He may eat the most holy food of his God, as well as the holy food; 23 yet because of his defect, he must not go near the curtain or approach the altar, and so desecrate my sanctuary. I am the LORD, who makes them holy.’”
If you were born with a disability then you may not go to church?
Quite clearly we find this interpretation abhorrent. In our culture (but not the one of the ancient Hebrews) to be born with disability is not shameful. You are not to be hidden away lest other people are somehow made unclean. You are not condemned to a life that is less that those around you, or excluded from parts of civic life.
Does the parallel strike you?
this fragile tent 