Today’s Proost advent post is not a video, but an original piece of art by the wonderful Si Smith – a long time contributor and friend to Proost.
We asked him to say something about the work- although artists often prefer their art to speak for itself! In this instance, this is what he said;
….it was made in 2014 (I think) for one of Gav Mart’s Engedi shows in Llandudno, and it was probably the first digital painting that I’d done full colour (everything pre that had been basically greyscale – 40, Raised in Leeds, Advent 25 etc)
So it’s interesting to get it out and look at it again – at the time it felt like a Great Leap Forward for my practice, looking back at it it feels quite clumsy and awkward. That said, I still really like it.
The block of flats in it is down the end of our road – there are a few of these buildings, all constructed to the same plan and when we first moved here I got bit obsessed with them.
So the Virgin Mary of this artwork lives in this one, and Mary Magdalene in Raised in Leeds lives in the block just down the road…
If you are UK based, you can not have missed the dominance of one story in the news of late- the (re)imposition of inheritance tax on farming land by the new Labour government. This has led to a howl of protest from farmers who say that this will be the end of their family farms. There has been a lot of discussion about how this works- the way that farms below 250 acres are almost unviable economically, and how farmers are often ‘asset rich and cash poor’.
The story that comes through strongest in these discussions is how hard working farmers, who often trace their linage back many generations, are being forced off the land by city lefties, or venture capitalists who are driving up land prices, both of whom have no understanding of what the countryside is or needs. Farmers, in this story, are the heroes of nature. Their toil is what preserves the brightest and best of our heritage and out nationhood. Many do this with very little recompense other than a love of the soil and a deep abiding relationship with the land that they live upon. Whilst this story is one we should pay heed to – there are real people whose lives and ways of living are at stake here – this is another story that I have heard almost nothing about during this debate, and that is the issue of land ownership in this country.
1 percent of this country owns half of the land in England. Mostly this ownership has not changed for a thousand years. The same elites have continued their lines of ownership which has preserved their hold of wealth and power for generation after generation.
If you want to find out more, then I very much suggest watching this vid;
In Scotland, this is unequal division of land ownership is even more pronounced. 432 private land owners own 50% of the private land in rural Scotland. The latest estimate of Scotland’s population is 5,327,000 , so this means that half of a fundamental resource for the country is owned by just 0.008% of the population.
Given that the baseline for so much of our nations widening inequality is not about income so much as wealth – particularly property wealth – then land ownership matters.
Ownership of land is in itself a problem that sooner or later we will have to grapple with, given the fact that the current ownership patterns have continued to oversee a catastrophic decline in biodiversity.
Grouse moors, as discussed in the video above, are an illustration of how bad things have become. Half a million acres in England, two and a half million acres in Scotland. Vast amounts of land, covering the most sensitive parts of our uplands, are kept in a state of dessecration simply for the entertainment of a wealthy elite. We have ceded ownership of a vital carbon store to people who have demonstrated very clearly that they are not safe or responsible stewards. Everything that affect the sport is killed- even at the potential threat of imprisonment- goshawks, mountain hares, weasels. Everything that should live in our uplands is gone. The once-vibrant ecosystem has been degraded to the point where it is invisible, and what is worse is that we have been so blinded by the power structures that keep these abominations in place that we think that these places are ‘wild’.
The weight of pheasants released into the wild – non native invasive species – as shotgun fodder (50 million birds) is greater than the mass of all native birdlife in the UK. Think about that!
So let’s retuen to the family farm. People who work harder than most of us can imagine and deeply love what they do. If changes to inheritance tax are really going to impact them so severely, then surely this can’t be right?
The problem is that we are highlighting the wrong problem.
Farming in this country is in crisis. It is uneconomic because of a whole set of global and local fiscal rules.
It does not constitute a safe and secure food chain.
It is unsustainable.
Rather than safeguarding our land, it has destroyed almost everything that once lived on it.
If there was just one ‘brexit benefit’ that I have been able to identify it is the end of the common agricultural policy subsidies. For the first time, we have an opportunity to pay farmers (and land owners who have never farmed in thier lives) to change entirely the way they use the land. To grow food in sustainable ways. To increase wild land, to make room for biodiversity recovery which we need so desperately.
I think this should be done by government action. We should pay farmers from taxation where it is needed, because this is needed not just to save family farms, but to save our land itself – not least, from the farmers.
As part of the ongoing Proost revival project, we are about to start a daily advent posting from a variety of poets, artists and musicians. The idea is to use our network to post across as many platforms as we can… if you can help spread the posts via facebook and other social media outlets then this would be great. I will post them on this blog as one source outlet.
We are already gathering some lovely material, but there is room for more!
If you would like to take part, then ideally drop us a short video via our dropbox – drop me a line via a comment on this post and I will send you the details. We would love to showcase as many artforms as we can though, so if you have pictures we will do our best to include other formats.
The old Proost materials – much of which is currently unavailable, if still very much in circulation – included so many wonderful advent related resourced, not least by Si Smith…
You may be aware that Rob and I have been podcasting as a means of making connections relevant to the revival of an old publishing platform called Proost. What this might look like is starting to take place- we are determined that whatever Proost is will depend on the community that comes together to make it happen. Our committment is to provide spaces for this community to happen. If you are interested in knowing more about this, feel free to drop me a message, or join our facebook group– it is a closed group, but this is simply to keep it a safe supportive place for those who need it.
This advent, we will be inviting artists to contribute to a collaborative daily offering
Some of these will be live poetry readings.
We would genuinely love to connect as many of you who want ot be part of this embryonic movement. There is a possibility here of the development of a very different kind of space for spirituality and creativity. It may be chaotic, but Rob and I are determined to make sure that it will be kind, supportive and fun.
Rob is a lovely man. He is so encouraging and enthusiastic about other people’s work – mine included. He had been following the long form ponderings on this blog about the renewal of religion (spool back through the feed – we are up to 7 posts in the series now) so he asked if we could chat through some of this on the Proost podcast.
Iniitialy I was reluctant, for these reasons;
I was not sure I could articulate my thinking in a chat. I tend to think by writing. In the end though, I decided I did not need to post it if it did not go well!
Was the Proost format an appropriate place for this discussion? As I thought about this though, it seemed to me that the Proost project is driven by the same thoughts and feelings
Finally, I am conscious that so many friends – including some who areninvolved in Proost – are still very much involved in organised religion. But then again, most of these have similar frustrations with elements of the old religion.
So we had the chat. In the end I enjoyed it – perhaps too much, as Rob had to slow me down! Being interviewed rather than being the interviewer is an interesting experience, and I was surprised how far the themes and issues unfolded. We will probably do one more as well. I will leave it to you to decide whether the podcast format helps to explore these complex issues more helpfully than written words…
I am just back from a late Autumn canoe trip on Loch Arkaig, a place of sublime beauty, lined with ancient woodland and high mountains. We stayed in a bothy maintained by the Mountain Bothy Association, who make it freely available to the wide community of walkers, climbers and paddlers. There were four of us, and amidst the usual profanity and age-related moans and grouns we spent a lot of time talking about things that mattered. (I made a short video about the woods, here.)
In many ways, this landscape captures the best of what the Scottish landscape and history has to offer. The huge expanse of the mountains around a twelve mile long loch. Wild boar, deer, eagles, Ospreys (who had left for warmer places when we were there.) The Caledonian pine forest there feels holy, in the way it demonstrates connectedness, but also what being there does to me deep inside my chest.
Approaching St Columba’s isle – Island Columbkill or Chalum Cille – Loch Arkaig
Out in the loch is a very small island with the remains of a chapel so old that no-one knows when it was built. It is known as St Columba’s chapel, and the island as St Columba’s island – who knows, it may well have a connection to one of the saint’s missionary journeys.
I always find myself wondering about what motivated Columba and his fellow Irish missionary monks. What problems were they trying to solve? Was it always about saving souls? Did they see themselves as right and the pagan world they set off towards as wrong? The assumption in the old stories always seems to be that these questions had obvious answers. Of course they were ‘right’, and of course those who had not encountered the Christian story needed to hear it. In a black and white world, colour is confusing. Better not to see it.
But perhaps I judge Columba (and his generation) too harshly, because their mission was not the same as those that came later – or at least I don’t think so. Theirs was a mission of peace to a world of tribal/clan conflict. What came later was much worse. Celtic Christianity developed and flowed amongst the culture and traditions of its time – perhaps even sitting alongside older spiritualities rather than replacing them. There is a much longer conversation to be had about this, but my point here is to wonder what might be the mission that religion would/could send us on now. What problems might/must we engage with? What cultural context might/must shape our mission?
It is worth saying right now that the religion we are largely leaving behind continues to make mission. I have been (rightly) critical of some – the legacy of which has left toxic stains across the world. Those kinds of missions had as much to do with cultural and economic conquest as they did with religion. They were a product of empire, a means of colonisation and subjugation. But despite this dark legacy, there have always been people motivated by their faith who have become activists of a different kind- peace makers, feeders of strangers, animal lovers, adventurers. Even now, if you look to the workforce of charities around the world – from our city streets to the furthest flung war zones – you will find that an outsized proportion who are there because of their religion. We should celebrate these people, and the way that faith has sent them on missions of healing and goodness.
My strong feeling is that people of faith have a duty – we might even say a religious obligation – to engage hopefully and critically with the context in which we are living. This means bringing as much passion, integrity and energy to bear as we can, illuminated by a set of principles not of this world (not of empire) but of another, sometimes known as ‘the Kingdom of God’.
This might mean opening our eyes to the spirit of our age, and exposing it to a different story- to the considerations of the Kingdom of God. At a time of widening inequlaity, of climate breakdown and mass extinction, of war-by-drone waged on defenseless children, we surely do not have to look very far…
This Kingdom of God always had a different set of priorities – above all, it was a call towards living in compassionate community with each other and with the beautiful world we are part of. In so many ways this simple, radical message was always at odds with the logic of empire, and as such, the counter-cultural part of the message was often reduced to a far less problematic priority of personal individual sins – particularly sexual sins.
Furthermore, the dualistic message that the old story was bound up in (saved/unsaved, evil/holy, sacred/profane) was never a good fit with the Jesus story, let alone the indigenous religion of the Jews. It was, however, a good fit with the logic of Roman exceptionalism (or all the other empire exceptionalisms that have followed since.) It has been so easy to forget this inside the small rooms we have made out of our personal religion – to imagine ourselves as special, and anyone outside our ‘chosen-ness’ as dwelling in darkness.
But this takes me back to the first post in this series, which is to wonder how a (religious) story might inspire action – or mission.
If we embraced that part of our tradition that calls us back towards connection to the earth – with our non human brothers and sisters – what missions might this inspire?
If we embraced that part of our tradition that calls us back towards radical inclusion of the outcast and outsiders, how might we use our homes and communal spaces?
If we embraced that part of our tradition that calls us back towards honouring the poor what will that mean for our comfort and our bank balances? When will we have enough? What will we share with those who have less and how will we share it?
If we embrace that part of our tradition that calls us to make peace with our enemies, then how will be relate to those around us? How will we hold the war-mongers to account?
And if these are the priorities of our religion as it seeks to make a mission in our broken and hurting world, then what collective rituals and practices might assist us, encourage us and inspire us? Where will we make our church, and what will it look like?
Mostly the mission this might send us on will be human-scale. Those who get to influence great events or act as major change agents have a rare and precious opportunity.
The rest of us use what power we can within our arms reach – and this is not a small thing. A mass movement of individuals can be more powerful than a King, but what might create this mass movement in an age of a million divisive voices screaming at us through all those little screens?
If not a religious story, committed to action that is as loving and truth-centred as we can make it.
I am just back from a canoe trip with some friends. We stayed in Glenmallie bothy and explored the stunning woodlands that fringe Loch Arkaig, where work is underway to protect and perserve what remains of the pristine ancient pine forest.
I made this video, which captures something of what we found. I use the words ‘Caledonian pine’ throughout, but perhaps should have been using the more common ‘Scots pine’.
Eight years ago, I wrote this, quoting Richard Rohr;
Our very suffering now, our crowded presence in this nest that we have largely fouled, will soon be the one thing that we finally share in common. It might be the one thing that will bring us together politically and religiously. The earth and its life systems, on which we all entirely depend, might soon become the very thing that will convert us to a simple lifestyle, to a necessary community, and to an inherent and natural sense of the Holy. We all breathe the same air and drink the same water. There are no Native, Hindu, Jewish, Christian, or Muslim versions of the universal elements. They are exactly the same for each of us.
It was an attempt to hold on to the idea that things would turn again towards good – in the wake of that first Trump victory in 2016. What I did not say in this post was that I wanted to be an active part of the resistance. I spent years writing and agitating, longing for better. Pleading for a world in which justice-making would push back the war mongers, the hate dealers and those who would exploit our human and non-human brothers and sisters for profit.
It almost seemed possible that the arc of history was turning. Trump lost. Bolsonaro lost. Johnson was toppled. But in a world of Starmer and Biden, any kind of radical shift was managed out of our expectations from the outset.
And now, the Mad King is back once more, vengeful in his dotage, full of fear and thunder, spewing lies and bombast, promising to prosecute an agenda that can only make things worse.
It feels like Nero, fiddling whilst Rome burns.
Perhaps this really is the fall towards the end of the civilisation we have known.
If so, this will not be the first time civilisations have fallen – in fact, they all must, eventually. You could even make a strong argument that would say ours is overdue. In his book Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart, writer Brian McLaren suggested that there were four possible future scenarios for our planet, based on current climate research- Collapse Avoidance, Collapse/Rebirth, Collapse/Survival, and Collapse/Extinction.
In Collapse/Avoidance, we heed the warning, take radical action, lower emissions, etc. The danger is, all we do is kick the can down the road for a further collapse in the future.
In Collapse/Rebirth we experience the pain of things falling apart – our lifestyles, our security, etc. and we finally wake up to the need to live differently on this planet. We consume less, throw less away, distribute more equally.
The other two outcomes I will leave to your own imagination.
But I can not go back to that same place I found myself in 8 years ago.
I learned that if you spend too long in protest – eating only bitter seed out of a half empty bowl – then you will start to lose yourself. You are in danger of just picking at scabs till they leak.
This is not to say that we should not stand against injustice – of course not. But this is not enough. We must also live and love.
This poem has become increasingly important to me, so I offer it here in a format we have previously offered to our patreon feed. I hope our patreons will forgive me, but it feels very necessary just now….
Last night, I watched this series. All of it. I was transfixed, wide awake through the whole thing, so that I only went to bed in the small hours. It concerns itself with the dreadful story of the Magdelene Laundries, which were Catholic run institutions for ‘fallen women’, in which pregnant young girls or those regarded as promiscuous outside of marriage, were abused and incarcerated, forced to work long hours. All lost their children, many of whom were ‘sold’ for adoption in Ireland and across the world. Yet here I am in the middle of a series in which I am advocating for a new religious engagement.
Perhaps you think that unfair – and want ot defend all those fine Jesus-inspired ways that people try to serve and work towards good, but I would counter by asking this. When religion is given official status within society or culture – as arbiter, as moral ajudicator – has it ever gone well?
I find myself immediately thinking of how Christianity has given cover for so much brutality and exploitation within the British Empire, or how the Americans have made the same idolotrous mistakes with their version of Christian nationalism. Then we have to remember Hindu nationalism in India and Islamic state. I honestly can’t think of one positive example of what happens when religion is given power in an of itself, or perhaps more when it compromises with the power of empire.
This kind of religion seems to traffic in fear more than almost anything else. Fear of hell, fear of being ‘outside’, fear of getting things wrong, fear of saying the wrong thing, wearing the wrong clothes, being the wrong gender/race/sexuality. This from a religion whose holy book tells us not to fear at least 365 times.
Is the problem here religion, or power mongering? Is there an intrinsic problem with the way we humans ascribe control to a distant God, or do the problems start when religious institutions take on power for themselves, then foster and bolster it within the context of greedy and godless empire.
I would contend that religion has always struggled with this problem. Depending on where you look, it is both reactionary or revolutionary. It is a force of oppression, but also a force for liberation. Arguably, this was the whole Jesus project in a nutshell. He proposed a different kind of empire making, which he called ‘the kingdom of God’, with an upside-down, inside-out power structure that is very inconvenient for empire, so has mostly been tidied away ever since.
Having got that off my chest, what activities should a renewed and evolved church engage in?
How should it worship? How should it congregate? How would it share life? Would it evangelise – ever? How would it pray? How would it teach itself and share ideas and inspiration?
(The next image comes with a trigger warning for some of you!)
I should come clean right away and say that I am not going to try to answer these questions in any depth, rather just (tentatively) suggest broad areas of enquiry. The task has to be to work these things out in your own small community – bringing as much integrity, passion and creativity as possible. Have fun, make mistakes, learn from them, but in order to set out on this adventure, we have to be free. We have to give ourselves/be given permission to start afresh, letting go of the chains we inherited.
After all Jesus came to set us free did he not? Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom, and it is for freedom that you have been set free. What then shall we do with this beautiful freedom of ours – with this wild living we have been given? Shall we get back in bed with the Pharasees, or sell ourselves to the Empire? Surely we can do better.
Many of us feel the need for a clean break from these aspects of our history but at the same time want to embrace the best examples we can find in our heritage, in turn forming them into new expressions, new collective gatherings. Our context and the overarching crises we are grappling with in our age demands this of us, because the alternative is despair. Which is another way of saying that (almost) anything goes – as long as our practices flow from the freedom we have embraced, grounded in love.
In this new landscape, concerns about correctness and orthodoxy have little currency. Instead I sense a deep longing for authenticity and compassion – towards others, towards our broken natural world and even to ourselves.
Worship installation, Greenbelt festival
Making (small) authentic community
There has been so much said (not least on this blog over the years) about the nature – formation, maintenance, leadership, challenges etc. – of community. It is something I have often idealised, but rarely experienced in truest form. It can also strip us bare and can even be a dangerous place- I have experienced both. But I would argue that community remains the place of encounter for humans.
What is certain is this- community and Church are not/have never been synonymous. Certainly we can experience communality in Church, but I would argue that we mostly experience what Peck calls ‘pseudo community’. We also carry the traditions of sharing ‘Communion’, which we have understood to be primarily about heaven and hell, not about the actual communing…
…and yet the writings about Church that we have inherited, and the forms it has taken since those early days, have (almost) always been collective over individual. Certainly there have been hermits, anchorites and pillar saints, but these have been exceptions to the norm- a fact that should offer a challenge to our modernist individualist westernist mindset. We are not islands alone and in through connections we make shared meaning.
Community deepens, validates, challenges, uplifts and celebrates. At best, it includes, gives us a home and allows us to become better versions of ourselves. Without community, humans sicken. In community, we flourish.
Community reflects our nature – as upright apes, as creatures of interdependence.
Community reflects our nature – as containers of one spirt, as part of the network of all living things. (We might also seek ways to reflect this broader non-human community within our human gatherings.)
Community allows small bands ordinary people to become more than the sum of their parts. Together, we can create an generative environment. We can conspire. We can collaborate, we can mix and match skills and abilities.
Community honours the traditions and practices of followers of Jesus from the very start. It is no surprise that the words of Jesus in that most profound sermon he gave as recorded in Matthew chapter 5 concern themselves overwhelmingly with rules for how to make loving community. It is almost as if, for Jesus, community was an end in itself.
Likewise, Paul’s great list of ‘fuits of the spirit’, as recorded in Galatians chapter 5 (love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control) are above all the gifts of good community.
Community is counter-cultural, particularly in an age which over-values individualism and forgets the collective.
Then we can rip each other apart, because community can be the best of us, but also the worst. After the trauma of the abuse of power within community settings, or an experience of divisive, exclusive and toxic community, it is tempting to recoil and go it alone, but we soon realise that this is not a long term solution. These experiences mean that we must eventually cautiously try to make safer, more healthy and whole forms of community, because this is the nature of our humanity.
So far, an argument for gathering together – but what has this to do with faith? Surely we humans gather in all sorts of ways, for all sorts of purposes? I am part of a cricket club for instance, and I love to blunder around at ceilidhs. I have also run therapeautic groups of different kinds in my past work as a mental health social worker. All of these things are good – in fact I would go as far as to argue that they contain things that might even be called sacred – so why do we need religion?
Perhaps we first need to concede the fact that we do not have a monopoly on meaningful, profound community making. Having said that though, not all communities are equal.
Not all communities come together around the guiding principles of love, peace and justice-making.
Not all communities seek to align themselves to – to celebrate, to conspire, to agitate, to protest and to demonstrate – the priorities of what Jesus called ‘the kingdom of God’. (Whatever that means!)
Not all are able to harness the power of ritual and season-celebrating. Not all offer means to hold each other in prayer through the glory and pain of life, sickness and death.
Not all communities are deliberately inclusive, particularly of those who have been marginalised and otherwise excluded.
Not all communities seek to confound the logic of empire by declaring the sacredness of all people.
Not all communities seek to break the logic of consumption by declaring the sacredness of the ‘first incarnation’ – the created world which holds us in communion with our non-human brothers and sisters.
Not all communities offer radical alternative ways to live life – collective, sustainable, deeply connected to the earth and the love that holds it all together.
Perhaps NO communities exist that are like this. But if not, then how we need them! Or we need to keep trying to make them… imperfect though they will surely be.
What is community, in this context? How is it different from those that have gone before? Perhaps it is not. There is nothing new under the sun, it has all been done before.
The key words here is authenticity. The community that it made has to belong to those who make it – it has to fit who they are are and what they stand for. How, where and when is then up for grabs. Uniquely in history, there is even an open question as to whether community has to locate itself within the same location.
Being big is hard. To paraphrase Jesus, it is harder for a large group of people to make community than for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle. Bigger groups require organisation which easily becomes unconvivial. As Illitch puts it, large institutions make it much harder for us to develop autonomous, creative intercourse among persons and between individuals and their environment.
Big requires big leaders, and this tends to bring in the power hungry.
Small is human, it is portable, it is resource-light and capable of mighty things.
Small can belong to a network – one that facilliatates rather than dictates. One that can cope with diversity and supports broad orthodoxy, mostly around principles rather than narrow rules or requirements. But even this is harder than just being… small.
Cross from Hermits cave, west of Scotland
Community practices
I set out on this journey by longing for a different kind of religion- one that was a lover of the earth and a seeker after justice and peace. These would be the priorites of a community that I would belong to, but you would have to work those things out for yourself.
As a lovers of the earth, we might seek ways to connect, to dwell within, to appreciate the wild. We might make a practice that includes nature within the way that we worship or meditate. We might seek to make the connection we sense towards all living things – through our shared am-ness, grounded in the god who loves things by becoming them – a lived, present reality.
This might inlfuence the rituals we make together in my community, the liturgy we might use, the songs we might sing. The poetry we will write, or the art we make together.
As people with awareness of climate injustice and of the harm we are doing to our ecosystems – our community might seek to live more simply, to consume less and grow more, to share what we have with others who need it more. We might look to the fields and woods around where we live and notice the lack of diversity and the unbalance. This might lead us to try to use our resources differently, and to use our collective voices to demand better economic and agriculural practices from our politicians and local businesses.
This might influence the way we shop, the way we travel, the places we go to on holiday, but it might also mean that we use our collective power to support local activism, or to work on local nature conservation projects. We will probably need help with this, so we might seek connection with others on the same path.
As people who appreciate the way that all people carry within the spirit of god, we might appreciate the dignity and beauty of all people. This might lead us towards concern for those who have been marginalised, dehumanised or excluded.
This might influence the way we seek to make friends, or the way we look to include people in our gatherings who are different – even if this means doing the difficult work of decolonising ourselves from the empire that has privileged us. We will probably need help with this, so we might seek connection with others on the same path.
The rest of it, we will make up as we go along. Perhaps we will share tables, make community art, attend protests, write to politicians, invite others to feasts.
Before we get into this, if you are wondering where some of these ideas come from, here are a few earlier posts which might give background to the discussion;
What right have I to talk about these tihngs? I am not a theologian nor a church planter or a priest. I make pots and write poems. Those of you who either read or stumble accross this series of posts in which I try to imagine an entirely different approach to faith would do well to consider my lack of credentials. I am not writing a road-map to victory or a blueprint for milimetric construction, rather I am dreaming out loud, because that is what poets do. But this is not a casual excersise. It is very serious.
Why do I persist then? What gives me the confidence to continue to commit these ideas to silicon? Firstly, I have been thinking about them a long time. Long term readers of this blog (if such things exist!) may note that all the ideas gathered into this series of posts have been discussed here before, and that (almost) none of them are original, all are borrowed from people who are much more learned. Secondly, I have some experience of strategic analysis and planning for change, arising from by background in social studies, social work and my (failed) attempts to transform a mental health service.
Thirdly, I have many friends who are active in and around what remains of Church and even though many will disagree with me in wholly or in part, in private at least our conversations have often centred on how exhausted they feel working to hold up the old structures. It is as if the machine has long ago ceased to function well, but the only choice is to keep it running, because what else is there? And perhaps there may yet be a way of making the machine run better, of adapting its mechanics… but then again we have been trying this for so long.
Finally, I do so because I must. If this blog is about anything it is a journal in which I try to describe the light I see through darkness. I claim no divine inspiration, but then again, all poetry comes from somewhere.
In my last post I tried to describe a different origin story for a new/old kind of Christian faith, based around cosmic connection, through Christ, to all created things. I used words like ‘non-dual’ and ‘shared am-ness’. I wondered how a rejection of the doctrine of original sin might change us and restated the centrality of the idea of a counter-cultural ‘kingdom of god’, whose adherents seek to live towards love and grace. This last point gives us the starting point for this post.
What might a church (or churching) look like if we followed the narrative logic of this kind of story?
And perhaps most importantly, what would it do? How would it worship (if at all?) What practices would it follow?
Once again, it is difficult to imagine ‘church’ without seeing Church, particularly for those of us who have grown up with the insitution – even those of us who have tried to reform and reshape it. We have perhaps loved it and railed against it, or have even been one of those people who tried to return to the ‘New Testament model’ of church (which every new expressions of Christian organisation seems to claim.) Perhaps you have been to the church planting conferences or employed one of the many stategies for church growth or attempts to make Church relevant to culture. None of these things necessarily qualify you or me to speak with authority on what sort of organisational structure might best fit our new dispersed context. At best they will give clues and hints.
We have already discussed our changing context – one in which less and less people are interested in in attending Church, despite some (many) local examples which buck the overall trend (particularly some of the hard line findementalist Churches, albeit from a much lower base.)
Rather than trying to suggest ONE structure, what we might be able to do is to propose some broad principles;
Decentralisation
In a world of dwindling religious participation, we have seen a retreat into religious silos. The focus has been on preserving buildings and maintaining a front door, albiet for fewer and older visitors. However, my experience has been that my ‘church’ is not just local. My closest friends and conspirators are at distance.
I have written before about my instincts around the increasing value of dispersed community, as something that offers a sense of belonging and connection at both distance and by drawing people together for less frequent in person meetings.
There is a romantic link here to the old Celtic tradition of the wandering holy folk, or Wanderers for Christ – who were often poets or minstrels and saw themselves as wandering the roads spreading the news and talking of God. Making their holy voyage, or ‘perigrinatio’ was often an internal as much as external journey towards God, possible only because of the hospitality and welcome of those they met on the road.
Hyper-connectivity
During the pandemic there was much innovation within the locked down churches concerning the use of online activities and meeting spaces – although there was also much push-back, as if religious spaces had a divine right to ignore those restrictions imposed on the secular world. It is notable that although many have continued to live stream services and maintain facebook pages, much of this innovation has not continued. Like it or not – for both good and ill – we now live in a digital age. If the goal is meaningful community, kindness, justice, healing, then the challenge is how we can pursue these in a changed world, not just to continue as if the world is the same. That is not to say that we do not deeply appreciate fleshly human connection, or love the mystery of tradition, but we have new ways to encounter and connect.
The production of resources for support , for worship, for exploration, for contemplation, for protest, for celebration – all of these things are now available to us for almost no cost (apart from skill and time.) This is part of the reason that Rob and I are working so hard to try to revive the Proost network. (You can find out more about this from our podcast, in which we have tried to let people know our thinking out loud.)
Loose association
We can not afford only to connect to people/organisations that are just like us, that have the same theology or political views. This is hard work, particularly in our polarised times. The value of common purpose and generous orthodoxy is both a religious imperative and has wider implications for engaging with societal and global problems. This means letting go of purity of ideology/theology in pursuit of coalitions of kindness.
Project focus
The above might suggest that collectivising takes place around particular projects rather than forming an end in itself. In my experience it is better to time limit these projects in oder to maintain momentum and focus.
Minimal infrastructure
What support/back office/hierarchy can survive? We know that all the major religious denominations are asking these questions here in the UK. The other (and perhaps better question) is ‘what do we need’? How will the resources left be best employed? The cost of buildings are a huge burden, not to mention maintaining salaries, pensions and other costs associated with a professional clergy. A smaller, minimal back office might include facillitators, mentors, advisors and encouragers. This might be a very different skill set, requiring different training than that offered to our professionals currently
Lean
It goes without saying that in a religious world of less money, we need to manage with less. More than this we need to understand that this is not necessarily a ‘crisis’ – rather it is a reality that requires a different approach.
Small
Small gatherings of people who seek to share life, to pray and to plan small revolutions have a long history within the very best of our traditions. Not just those who grew to become mega churches or subsequently built cathedrals (in fact, this is possibly where things had gone wrong!) We need our friends, we need to share our houses and our lives with people close to us (and now, even at distance, given the internet.) Small is beautiful. Smal is normal. Small is human. Small is messy and real. Small is ephemeral and fragile, but so are we.
Convention
Sometimes we need to go large – to make big music or big art. There is a link here to the ‘project’ tag above. These events do not need to be frequent, or expensive, but larger gatherings seem crucial.
Radical alternatives
The final thing I will mention here is the need for some of us to go hard core.
The other lesson from history is that there has always been a sliding scale of commitment to a religious life. Most seek to incorporate faith into their ordinary. Some make a new ordinary in the form of taking on relgious orders, of various degrees of austerity and severity. The point of these communities has always seemed odd from the outside – sometimes they have closed the doors on the outside world and become houses of prayer, whereas others have seen themselves as healers or peace makers. All have taken on the ‘habit’ of following Jesus on a mission beyond what has been understood as normal.
What mission are we being called to now? Where do we need healing or peace? What prayers are needed most?
Dipping back into my Celtic bag of heritage, there are lots of examples here, of how monastic sites or holy houses became places of learning and hospitality, unlike any of the religious institutions we see today. Some followed strict segregation of men and women, others (Culdees for example) had married couples. Some were withdrawn from the world, others were active and engaged. All were seen as somehow offering a point of difference, of spiritual wisdom and focus.
What might a modern day Culdean house look like? We have seen a renewed interest in monasticism – particualarly that known as ‘new monasticism’. Here is me mate Mark talking about the same;
this fragile tent 