Hasan Baglar’s ‘Danlock’ has been crowned the grand prize winner of this year’s Cewe Photo Award (Image credit: Hasan Baglar)
I have been thinking a lot about prayer recently. I am starting a 2 year discernment process towards a decision of becoming a full member of the Iona Community. I will be committing myself to doing my best to keep the ‘rule’ of the community- which includes the following;
Daily prayer, worship with others and regular engagement with the Bible and other material which nourishes us.
Prayer is something I have never been ‘good’ at, even in the days when I tried hard to be good at it. In more recent times, I have moved to a point where I mostly do not pray – at least not in the way I used to understand what it was and what it was for.
I grew up with an understanding of prayer as a means to persuade God to aid our cause. The degree to which God was willing to accede to our entreaties and lists of requests was always something of a problem. It was very tempting to over-claim – or to build castles of consequence on shaky coincidences. Those times, for instance, when God miraculously granted us a free parking space, or a friend to talk to just when we needed them.
My wife Michaela was prayed for by good people for years because of her experience of chronic illness which left her ill and unable to participate in many things others took for granted. Some even suggested her lack of healing was due to unconfessed sin, or lack of faith.
Then her illness got better, overnight. It confounded medical people and confused us…
…particularly as my theological journey has taken me to a place where I no longer believe in an interventionist God. My current way of trying to resolve all of these contraditictions is through process theology – or sometimes open relational theology.
But this is all very ‘head first’ stuff.
For any theology to be real, it has to sing in our souls. The complexity of open relational ways to try to describe the way that a divine being might interact with our broken humanity is beyond more of us, particularly during the inevitable struggles and challenges of our lives.
What part has prayer to play in these struggles?
How might I/we concieve of a spiritual practice of prayer that is meaningful, relational, dynamic and useful?
I saw this quote from a new book the other day;
On the strength of this quote alone, and in the shadow of my own struggles with prayer, I ordered the book.
But these are not new questions for me, so I have some other provisional answers about what I think of as prayer now. They have broadened out to include this list (which is not in any kind of order)
Breathing
Seeking connection in forest
Singing
Caring and hoping for friends
Dancing
Looking for resonance in art
Hoping
listening to bird song
Deep talk around a fireside
Making art
Seeking goodness
Listening to people who are hurting
Pilgrimage
You may well think that this list is a good list, but not a prayerful one…
Above all, my current thinking is that I need to pray with a pen in my hand (or more commonly a keyboard under my fingers.) For me, my poetry is above all, prayer.
So I finish with this poem, which I wrote this morning;
Regular readers of this blog may remember previous articles and even podcast interviews with Dr. Katy Cross, who has been undertaking research trying to understand paths taken by people who leave church- the meaning they make and find, the connections they still seek and so on.
Katy is now towards the end of her research, and is entering a ‘creative response’ stage. There are a few ways you can be involved, but the first meeting on-line is Tuesday the 29th at 6PM. If you are on your own journey beyond church, but feel like understanding this better in community then this might be just the place for you.
There are two ways folk can take part:
By attending online workshops to discuss prompts and reflect together. You can sign up here to join in.
By writing up your own reflections in your own time, and emailing these to Katie here.
As above, the first group is meeting on Tuesday 29th July at 6pm on MS Teams.
We hope that Katie will be able to join us on the Proost podcast soon to collect together some thoughts and conclusions about this very important research.
Why do I think this chat is so important? As with this post, there is lots of chat just now about what is emerging in terms of organised religion in the UK. After a long decline, some say (on currently very limited evidence) that there is a ‘quiet revival’ taking place here, with young people, and young men in particular, flocking back into Churches. If this is true – if we are seeing a reversal of the decades-long social trend away from organised religion – then it seems important to understand this and the social forces that might be at work.
On the other hand (and at present I remain in this camp) if this research turns out to be flawed, we also need to understand why so many people within the Church have siezed on it with such uncritical enthusiasm.
Meanwhile there is another conversation that is taking place – for example in Katy’s research – with those who have been activists, leaders and pioneers within the church, but no longer feel able to be part of formal religious structures. What happened ot these people? Where are they finding meaning? How might they shape and influence what happens next?
Even as I write this, I think too of dear friends who continue to work WITHIN the Church, to carry forward acts of grace and mercy, to serve an aging population with critical needs, to run food banks and toddler groups, to set up refugee support groups and to make simple beautiful acts of worship that enable people to deepen their spiritual experience. I think how exhausted some of them are, and how abandoned the conversation above makes them feel…
Things are changing, shifting, shinking and unfolding at the same time. This has always been the case, but it does feel like we are standing on anther threshold. Whilst we mourn what is lost, we can also be excited about what will come.
The Bible Society commissioned a survey from Yougov – a legitimate and credible polling organisation – which they claim ‘busts the myth of church decline’.
Here are the headline claims, using the somewhat bombastic language from the Bible Society itself.
Key findings from The Quiet Revival
Co-author of The Quiet Revival Dr Rhiannon McAleer says the report shows that what people believe about Church decline is no longer true. ‘These are striking findings that completely reverse the widely held assumption that the Church in England and Wales is in terminal decline,’ she said.
‘While some traditional denominations continue to face challenges, we’ve seen significant, broad-based growth among most expressions of Church – particularly in Roman Catholicism and Pentecostalism. There are now over 2 million more people attending church than there were six years ago.’
More men than women go to church
The Quiet Revival shows that men (13 per cent) are more likely to attend church than women (10 per cent). And as well church decline being reversed, the Church is also becoming more ethnically diverse, with one in five people (19 per cent) coming from an ethnic minority. Close to half of young Black people aged 18–34 (47 per cent) are now attending church at least monthly, according to The Quiet Revival.
It’s also great to see that Bible reading and confidence in the Bible have increased as well as church growth. Some 67 per cent of churchgoing Christians read the Bible at least weekly outside church.
This is the key statistic. It would seem to point to a massic uplift in church going, particularly in the 18-24 range. Young men now seem four times more likely to go to church than pre pandemic – at least according to this survey.
This rather startling survey has been greeted by some with incredulity. It seems to be describing a trend that has reversed a decades long decline in church attendance in the UK. Many have greeted it with rejoicing. Could this really be true?
There have already been webinars and conferences that are using the term ‘quiet revival’ to describe what people are claiming as a ‘move of God.’ The lesson, it is claimed, is that this is the beginning of an awakening of spiritual seeking in younger generations, and evidence of the fact that yound men in particular are searching for meaning.
This all sounds like a good thing, right?
We might not have noticed it, but are we seeing an actual revival?
So why do I feel a deep sense of scepticism? Is this just my post-church cynicism? I am on record as having very mixed feelings about the word ‘revival’ (this from 11 years ago for example) after being previously part of expressions of religion that saw this as the only valid aim of Christian activity.
I think it is much more than that, however. A long time ago I was a social science graduate, and if we had come accross a piece of research or a survey that had suggested a social phenomenon that was different to all other sources of data, we would have immediately placed it on the ‘need more examination’ pile. We would have to look at other sources of evidence and test any conclusions that might be made by exposing them to wider scrutiny and comparison. One survey is never enough to declare a brand new social trend…
…particularly when other sources of information seem to directly contradict this survey.
For example, the British Social Attitudes Survey – the largest and most authorative survey of social trends in the UK – found no evidence of an increase of religious attendence, noting instead a continual decline.
It seems I am not alone in my sceptism. More or Less, the BBC radio 4 programme that explains – and sometimes debunks – numbers and statistics used in public life spent some time examing this issue today- it is well worth a listen.
Here is how the Church Mouse frames the problem some of us have with this survey;
The most extraordinary claim is that, in the past six years (i.e., since just before the pandemic), the Church in England and Wales, across all denominations, has grown by more than half, from a total of 3.7 million regular worshippers to 5.8 million. The report says that it is largely the young who are driving this, in contradiction to our previous assumption that every generation is less religious than their parents.
The evidence for these claims comes from a large survey undertaken by a highly respected polling organisation, YouGov, that whether they had attended a church in the past month, among other questions. The same question set and methodology six years previously reveals a 56% increase in attendance.
And none of us noticed.
The Church Mouse goes on to say this.
Some of the churches where the Bible Society reported significant growth actually count the number of people who walk through their doors, and the numbers don’t match.
The most robust data set by a UK denomination is from the Church of England. Each church counts the number of worshippers during the same period each year, and the numbers are compiled to create a robust, consistent data set. The data shows that over the past six years, the Church has shrunk by between 10-20%, depending on how you count it…
…The same methodology can be applied to the data for the Catholic Church, the next largest denomination. The report said that it has grown from 23% of attendees in 2018 to 31% in 2024, meaning it would have grown from around 850,000 regular attendees in 2018 to 1.8 million in 2024, spectacular growth of almost a million regular worshippers.
The Catholic Church in England and Wales reported regular mass attendance down around 20% from pre-pandemic levels, to 555,000 in 2023 from 702,000 in 2019.
Between them, these two denominations have reportedly grown their regular attendance by almost 1.5m people, out of the total reported growth (According to the Bible society survey) of 2.1m, or over 70% of the total growth. But Church attendance data simply does not back that up.
Is this all hot air intended to inflate church ego? (Sorry, could not resist in relation to the photo above.)
The simple answer is that we do not know.
But either way we need to explain why this survey is so different. Here are the possible reasons for this as I see them just now.
Data collection problems/survey bias
Yougov knows its business, but rougue findings from one-off polls and surveys are certainly possible.
Many have pointed out that saying you go to church is not actually the same thing as going to church, and people do seem to exagerate their church attendence. Might the fact that apparently more people have exagerated their attendence in itself be an indication of church being a more desirable option?
Or perhaps there was an error in earlier surveys, and in pew numbers collected by churches? All of them? Over decades?
Timescale
Has the survey picked up sometihng interesting that has happened in the last year? has the decline flattened out? Is there a new trend? The comparison figure of actual numbers collected by churches are all earlier. This seem implausable but…
What does ‘church attendance’ actually mean?
Must we include the many on-line expressions of faith – apps, streaming, etc etc? If so, perhaps people are now exposed to wider digital forms of church and so are including these in their answer?
What about Churches that don’t collect or publish stats?
Perhaps the increase is all in the non conformist, independent churches? There is other evidence that some of these are indeed growing, particularly independent and evangelical churches. The trouble is, this is from a lower base, and the Bible Society survey asked people to list their religious affiliation- leading to the claim of growth in mainline churches that simply is not evidenced by other sources.
Young men?
I have a slight discomfort about this, in that there appear to be other trends happening in that age group. There’s a growing divide between young men and women, with men increasingly drawn to conservative, traditionalist or right-wing political movements (while women tend to lean more liberal.) This trend, linked ot the influence of ‘Celebrity Christians’ such as Jordan Peterson is not one that I find comfort in. Might this be the reason for young men apparently seeing Church in a more positive light? The attraction here might then be narrow moral certainty rather than the teachings of Jesus.
This survey is interesting, but we need to treat it with a great degree of caution. There are major difficulties with drawing any conclusions based on this one survey, and the Bible Society itself has used language and great fanfare that I find highly questionable.
Whatever is going on is not revival.
It might hint at a change to come, but only time will tell.
I was thinking about the book of Revelation today – perhaps the most controversial book in that library of books that we know as the Bible. I grew up in a kind of religion that took this book and used it as a lens to understand world events, particularly (but not exclusively) what has happening in the middle east.
This was before all the current madness, stemming from things like the Left Behind series of books, and all the American Christian Zionism.
Back then, we had people like Hal Lindsay and The Late Great Planet Earth. It was the same stuff and it earned him a fortune.
I still know people who live within this bizarre world view, in which world events are viewed through a particular, modern, Capitalist and elitist interpretation of scripture. In some ways this is the first and ultimate of conspiracy theories- ground zero. All the ingredients are there- the special secrets that will open your eyes to ‘reality’, the sense of being part of a special selection, the cataclysmic alternatives, the network of others who see things like you do and constantly reinforce your world view.
There is also the unforunate side effect of how these ideas, now almost mainstream in the US, have made victims out of already oppressed people and become a wierd distraction for many at best, perhaps actually morally corosive.
Perhaps these ideas are even antichrist.
I will not be deconstructing end times eschatology in this post. If you are interested in digging deeper into this, then I would recommend this podcast;
Back to my cogitations on Revelation. I was thinking about how we might (as with Keith Giles’ account) better approach this book as a confusing veiled analogy of the danger of Empire.
How powerfull, charismatic and despotic individuals can first seem like messiah, but then turn out to be beasts.
We do not have to look far to see examples of these kind of individuals. Ones for whom death, destruction, exploitation and subjugation are just political tools, used casually for personal power and profit.
But I will not name any person ‘Antichrist’. I have heard Christians name many people this way over the years. The Pope, Gorbachev, Putin to name but a few.
What I think I can call antichrist are those things that are against the teachings of Jesus – those things that are contrary to a movement towards goodness otherwise known as ‘the Kingdom of God’.
There seems to be a particular kind of antichrist-ness that uses the Bible as a means to achieve its aim. I find myself loathing this most of all – Jesus did the same. He seemed to reserve a special kind of anger for the religious people who were users, profiteers, division-creators, victim-blamers and hate dealers. Think about these examples;
The Sermon on the Mount:Jesus directly challenges the teachings of the Pharisees by emphasizing the importance of inner motives and true righteousness over outward actions.
“Woes upon you, scribes and Pharisees”:In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus delivers a series of pronouncements condemning the religious leaders for their hypocrisy and self-righteousness.
Cleansing the Temple:A dramatic act where Jesus drove out those selling animals and money in the temple, criticizing their commercialization of a sacred space.
There is danger here of falling into that same old dualistic us/them, good/bad, holy/profane trap in which we retire into a trench built of sandbags full of our own rightness. But despite this danger, after conversations this week I am going to say this. Christians have no monopoly on Christ. We are all capable of being antchrist. This is true in the small things and the big things.
Lets subjugate everything to love, to kindness and to compassion – particularly towrds the weak, the poor, the broken. Anything else is empire. Anything else is antichrist.
This is a continuation of a series of posts in which I have been grappling with the religion I have inherited but often find myself deeply at odds with. I have this idea that what is happening to Christianity in the western world is not an end, but a transition. Lord knows, we need our holy stories more than ever to lead us towards better, to inspire the next generation and make leaders out of the old one. In these posts, I have been trying to describe what I think the shape of this transition might look like, sometimes through observation and discussion with others and sometimes by striving to get beyond my cynical frustration and letting loose hopeful imagination.
You can find the old posts by using the search box above- try ‘remaking religion’ as your search criteria…
…or if you are not in the reading mood then we have discussed some of the issues on a podcast, here.
Hermaneutic
I have spoken about this word on this blog over the years. I have usually tried to define it this way; the set of googles/telescope through which you view the world.
The optical distortions within these goggles- acknoledged or not – affect what we see and how we understand what we see.
I think this word is central to how we approach any renewal efforts towards religious story making.
I will start with a confession – I have developed a bit of a youtube habit. I would like to pretend that this arises from my deep interest in ideas- philisophy, economics, history, sociology, religion etc., but the algorithm does not lie. It knows me better than I know myself. Each twitch of the finger over the remote control is recorded as if as my unguarded conscience. So it is that alongside some material that does relate to high minded pretentiousness, there is a whole lot about car renovation, cricket, metal detecting, oppositional American politics, sailing and all sorts of other nonsense which allows me to switch off and not think. However, the algorithm sometimes serves up pure gold and the other day this came in the form of a video from the Centre for Action and Contemplation, of Richard Rohr talking about how Jesus used and quoted scripture.
Now perhaps you would have skipped along the feed towards something less cerebral – I almost did but I gave it a try, as much to save it for later. Instead I watched the whole thing, all one hour and eight minutes, despite all the other things I should have been doing.
It turns out that Richard Rohr – who I believe offers a vital prophetic, apastolic perspective to our generation – had things to say that were of great importance to my quest for a renewal of religion. He does this with a playful gentle kindness that always makes me listen all the harder. Here is the video in question;
There is so much about what RR has to say here that I find myself saying a soul-deep YES to… but towards the beginning he says something like this;
You must define and clarify tour hermeneutic- your science of interpretation. If you don’t have a consistent hermeneutic, you can make scripture say whatever you want. If we don’t make clear at the beginning how we approach scripture and the way we give it authority, then we are really not worth listening to because it will just end up being ‘opinion’. You will then just find texts that affirm your opinon.
Richard Rohr
Even the most faithful of my critics – with much justification – might point to this Remaking Religion series and accuse me of doing exactly what RR warns us against. I am expressing opinions then, if I seek to anchor this in scripture at all, then I do so only in ways that justify my opinions.
Some might chucle and suggest that my hereneutic is youtube!
Perhaps my critical friends might go even further than this, and point out that my failure to base most of my arguments on scripture is indicative of my wearyness, my cynicism towards the scripture itself and there would be truth in this criticism. I feel as though I have escaped from what I now view as a a prison in which the iron bars were made out of scripture. No wonder then that I, and others like me, are less interested in ‘proving’ or ‘evidencing’ truth based on narrow versions of scripture because the whole idea of ‘biblical authority’ feels like a prison gate. Having said that, any cursory read of this blog will notice that I am certainly not done with the bible, neither do I in any way reject the treasure and wisdom it contains.
What RR does in this video – and many others have done alongside him – is hold a mirror up to the religious traditions we were parented by in our faith and in doing so, pointing out that they too had substantial unconscious bias arising from their hermaneutics. They too then backwards interpreted scripture in such a way as to confirm these biases.
Worse than this, the bigger and more ‘successful’ these hermeneutics became, the more invisible they were, the more unasailable, the more they were given the authority of ‘truth’. The more they were seen as coming directly from God himself, as if on a velvet cushion from the sky. (Strange then, that this truth often seemed to fit well with a set of priorities that confirmed the power structure of the empires they grew within and continued to support.)
The continuing attempt to preserve the crumbling remains of the 13thC Dunkeld Cathedral
What do we do with this insight?
What might it mean as we try to remake our religion in our shifting changing context?
I think we have to refuse to get back in theological prison, and instead start to use scripture in a very different way, which involves reading it through a deliberately different hermeneutic – one that remains faithful to tradition, but free from it also.
JESUS
RR does a brilliant job in trying to describe how Jesus approached scripture, and how this seems radically different to the way we have read it. Selective quoting from just 4 OT books are recorded in the gospels- sometimes miss-quotes! Actively disagreeing/wrestling with scripture
HIERARCHY OF TRUTH
As Pope Francis puts it, not all truth is equal. Some comes first. Not every sentence in scripture can or should be given equal merit as if it were heavenly law.
INCLUSION
Jesus always includes. Critique the in-group, make the outsider the hero.
MERCY
Always Jesus started with love, continued with love and ended with love
PEOPLE OVER DOCTRINE
I loved the way that RR described the difference it makes when we engage with theology though connection to people as opposed to approaching people through theology.
PRINCIPLE OVER FINE PRINT
Back to that hierarchy of truth thing- if we can ‘prove’ something using ancient scriptural texts then we must also subject that text to the bigger principles that the text contains. We know this as Christians because that is what Jesus did.
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.
You can find echoes of the same idea written many hundreds of years before by the prophet Isiaiah. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.
For some reason, this sentence always pokes me in the heart, right where I hope from. It has often come to me with tears. It was out of this place that I wrote this poem…
The great Becoming
.
How small we made you.
How constrained by our constraints;
We wore you like a lapel badge,
Pocketed you like a personal passport, then
Raised you at our borders like a flag.
We locked you in the pages of
Our Book, then threw away the key.
.
But how we worshipped you.
How we pointed at you with steeples.
You asked us to follow you, to
Give away our second shirts, but instead
We made a million icons, each one framed in gold.
We swayed and raised our egos, singing love songs-
Not to you, but to idealised versions of ourselves.
.
How is it that still, you love things by becoming them?
How was it that this brown-skinned man with the heart of a woman
Took upon herself another name for everything, so we could
Encounter her in all these beautiful things and bleed with her when she
Lies broken? And just when all seems lost, she whispers still;
See, I am making all things new.
Even you.
I think that when I first read these words, I saw them (or they were described to me as) the description of a one-off event – most likely a supernatural Jesus event – or prehaps an individualised thing done by our own personal Jesus. It may well refer to both of these things, or it might mean something… bigger.
What if this is a constant kind of ‘being made new’?
Rather than describing a divine rescue plan for a chosen few, what if it is the description of a great cosmic unfolding that began with an explosion of love so powerful that nothing can stop it from reaching outwards, and continues on and on not just through history, but through each and every one of us, every bade of grass, every living and love-made thing?
An unfolding that can be sensed in the kindness of strangers, the flow of water or the feeling we get in the pit of our stomachs when we stare up at stars…
We celebrate the Cosmic Christ, the God who loves things by becoming them (with a nod to the writings of Richard Rohr and his grounding in the Fransican tradition.) Christ might also be a word which means ‘another name for everything’.
Christ the substance through which all things have their being. S/he might be understood as the shared am-ness of all things. Through Christ we are interwoven and connected to all created things both human and non-human. Through Christ we are drawn to be lovers of the earth not because we are ascendent, but because we are included and interdependent.
Learning from the Celtic tradition, this same Christ is the very ground of our being, the truest deepest part of our personhood and our shared humanity. Sin is that which prevents us from being our truest selves, and this can be seen both in our individual lives and our collective brokenness.
This might mean that we discover Christ in our own souls not by addition, but by subtraction (with a nod to the wisdom of Meister Eckhart) by finding our way through all the mess, trauma and bad choices through to what was there all along, waiting for rediscovery and re-connection.
Remarkably, the story of Jesus (the historical Christ rather than the Cosmic Christ) suggests that god has been revealed not only through nature (the first incarnation) but through taking on flesh (the second incarnation) The life and death of Jesus is a deep call towards sacrificial love towards our human and non-human neighbours.
Christ taught a gospel of grace, in which we remember that the god who is the light behind our light and the soul within our souls knows our woundedness, and waits for us to journey towards her. A Christ who no longer is the deserter of earth, but an example of its greatest lover. A Jesus who is no longer a supra-human ‘other’, but rather one of ‘us’.
After the Celtic tradition, we seek to take our place in world where nature is the gift of being, but grace is the gift of wellbeing.
In other words, we enter the Kingdom of God (which the historical Jesus called us to take our part within) is way to describe a non-dual, engaged way to collaborate in the service of healing, peace-making and acts of love towards the world, with a particular emphasis on those parts of the human and non-human world that are broken, enslaved, endangered or subject to injustice.
So far, in terms of trying to uncover an origin story, perhaps it is. In future posts, I hope to turn again to examining the degree to which this story might influence our practices, our ways of worship and our organisational structures- following the narrative logic that it might suggest to us.
One more thing before we leave this story though. I made reference to how we might discover God in our souls through subtraction rather than addition. This takes us back to an old debate between Pelagius and Augustine of Hippo.
Pelagius, thought to have been a learned Celt, from somewhere in the British Isles or Ireland, travelled to Rome and started to write things that upset Augustine, who had proposed the idea of original sin as a theological technology for making sense of our relationship with god, and to give meaning to the death of Jesus on the Cross. Pelagius held with the Celtic tradition, which saw humans as containing the living god in the core of our being – clearly not compatable with original sin.
One side called us towards the inate dignity and sacredness of each and every soul. The other required salvation through a narrow gate, controlled by the power of the Church. You can guess who won the argument. Pelagius was written out of the Christian story.
What would the world look like if Augustine had lost the argument with Pelagius? What if we had never been convinced of our ‘original sin’, but instead built our thinking around the idea of original sacredness at the core of everything that has breath?
Without the empire that would we have had the religion of Christianity at all? What else might have filled this space?
What if the old Chritstianity is at the end of one of its natural cycles of existence?
What if it needs to be born again, and if so, who will be the midwives?
The point of this series of post is simple- renewal of a whole religious tradition to make it fit for purpose. For many, this is heresy of the kind that previously would have earned me a bloody end, but revolutionary reformulation is needed more urgently than ever.
After all, despite the grand proclaimations, what current use is western religion as a means of healing and restoration in our current broken world? I would argue that this is not just a minor issue requiring a slight shift of focus. Rather we need to remake our religion at source.
In this post, I attempt to reconsider our origin story, but first we have to consider the one that is still firmly in place.
When considering the stories told about the life of Jesus – those that have come to us through the inspired/historically accurate/mythological/unreliable (delete words as appropriate) written record – this thought occured to me;
If, by some strange circumstance, we lost all the scriptural records apart from the death and resurection story, would modern Christianity be any different? If we knew nothing of the teachings of Jesus – which we have ignored in large part anyway – could modern Christianity still stand?
Then there is a subsiduary thought.
If we only had the records of his teaching, and how he lived his life, WITHOUT the death and resurection story how might Christianity have developed- if it had been allowed to develop at all?
I think this is a significant question because (arguably) the religion Paul made – and was later adopted as the official religion of Empire – concerned itself to a large degree with the next life, not this one.
The origin story of this religion went something like this.
God is a divine judge who can bear no sinfulness, but because of his great love, he sent his only son into the world to be tortured and killed, taking on the rightful punishment of the rest of us, so that those who practice correct belief might be saved from eternal hellfire.
The degree to which ALL followers of the Christian relgion understood the origin story to be like this is, of course, debateable, but perhaps we can agree that this became the dominant Christian ‘good news’ story (or Gospel) fairly early, particularly in Rome, centre of the new Holy Christian Empire.
Meanwhile, those inconvenient teachings of Jesus slipped quietly down the list of priorities. For example, just off the top of my head;
The first shall be last and the last shall be first stuff
You don’t need two shirts on you back
Blessed are the poor (in spirit) and his recognition of the beauty and dignity of all people
Harder for a rich man to entire the kingdom than a camel through the eye of a needle
The band of malcontents, failure and low-lifes he spent his time with, who he saw as his disciples
Non-violence, offering the other cheek
The ‘new kingdom’ (perhaps better understood as ‘anti-Empire’)
Breaking national /ethical morality codes by speaking to women and Samaritans, lepers and Roman soldiers
The radical inclusion of outcasts and outsiders
The call to love for all and everything, even enemies
That question again- to what extent are these sorts of teachings central to our practice of the Christian religion?
Is it possible that we have made them at best ‘optional’ matters, much less important than saving souls from hell? We might hear preaching about them, but I think we can see clearly how Empire is always more important than the Kingdom of God’s anti-Empire messge. The dominance of American Evangelicalism is only the latest version of the same.
The goggles we have been given to look back at Jesus through make it very difficult to look afresh at the religion we have inherited, but if we were to invite an uninformed alien to read the gospels then visit one of our cathedrals, or attend one of our evangelical worship services, surely they would be very confused?
How did we end up here?
If the story of Jesus is the origin story not just of our religion but of our whole culture, it is hard to deny that this story does not seem to have been adopted whole. Rather it has all-too-often been interpreted in such a way as to protect the powerful and ignore the needs of the weak and oppressed. (One of the key ways that this replacement trick seems to have been wrought is by the deployment of a theological construct called ‘original sin’ but we will return to this later.)
Do we need a new origin story? Might we yet redeem our religion from the clutches of Empire? More than this, might there be somethng in this new origin story that might be useful to us as we grapple with the world that has been made in the shadow of the old one?
My answer to this is yes – and no.
Yes because the story as laid out above is not fit for purpose so we have to replace it. I say this because it fails to challenge the fundamental economically over-reaching, socially unjust and environmentally unsustainable problems created by the western culture it has sustained and developed within.
No because (many would argue) this was never the real story in the first place. The religion named after Jesus lost itself along the way. It became corrupted by those very things he spent so much time warning us against. Therefore, the task is not to make a new story, but to strive to find the one that was always there.
No also because rather than inventing anything new, perhaps the better strategy is to go back and examine what other followers of Jesus found most persuasive. We are not the first generation to grapple with these issues and perhaps others had a better story in the first place, engaging better with the problems described above?
This is difficult work, even for those of us who have been through painful deconstruction of the religion we previously knew. Where should we start? Who can we trust to guide and inspire us? After all, the Christian religion – particularly in Protestant form – sometimes seems like one long argument in which successions of men (it is always men) think they have a better grip on Truth than those before, and where did all of that get us?
One lesson we might take from the Protestant project is the failure of attempts to create correct belief based on ever more narrow readings of scripture, as if an ascendant Christian tradition would eventually reach a final ‘true’ position on all things – because the Bible says so. This approach has so many problems, but perhaps the more obvious one is that it is based on an unexamined and unacknowledged set of assumptions about the nature of scripture itself and the blind spots deployed to protect those asssumptions. I have written a lot about this – if you are interested, perhaps here is a good place to start.
If this approach was always flawed, and even worse has failed to deliver a religious framework that can engage with the crisis facing our society, perhaps we must instead find ways to prioritise practicalities and praxis – the efficacy and usefulness of religion. After all, what is belief for?
Or to put this another way – who cares what you believe if it does not change you/the world towards better? The saving souls business has too often been a distraction convenient to vested interests opposed to any real change.
It might be worth mentioning here my own process as I grapple with what might be described as ‘reconstruction’, along these lines;
I acknowledge those whose teaching/writing/leadership has inspired me, consciously holding on to the things I inherited that are ‘good’. These act like signposts or filters or channels through which I measure and encounter the new
I pay attention to what sings in my soul. I have decided to trust my own embodied reaction as a guide for accepting and adventuring. If I read something or encounter something and it lights me up emotionally/physically/spirituality (even intelluctually) then I follow this down and let it lead me to new places. are
What is useful? By which I mean the degree to which ideas contribute towards my understanding of peace love and justice. If they do not seem immediately useful in this regard, I am not necessarily rejecting them as ‘wrong’, rather I am far less interested.
Enough with picking over the old story, what about a new/old one?
Trigger warning- this is a small diversion into Bible history. For some this might be a turn-off right there, whereas others may find it goes to places that they are simply uncomfortable with. There will also be bible scholars who will take issue with some – or all – of the things I am saying, because we are dipping into a vault of murky ancient history filtered through a religion which claims the authority of God on whatever it has sanctified.
But sometimes, in order to make things new, we need to look backwards too – in this case, to the very beginning – so that we can see where we came from, and perhaps where we turned left when we could have turned right.
So, feel free to disagree. Go and do your own research and I hope that this brings to you your own meaning. Find your own story, just as I look for mine.
I was at an Iona community family group meeting last weekend, in which we were discussing Christian humanism. I confess to approaching the discussion warily, as it seemed likely to be rather esoteric, but what actually happened was that it opened a window into something that I found interesting intellectually and more importantly, to offer ideas that might be very useful as we seek to rediscover our story. Or perhaps it would be better to say ‘as we seek to rediscover purpose, mission, our concepts of goodness and our prophetic voices’.
Just little things like that.
For those who have read this far who have no allegiance to Christianity, past or present, perhaps I should say a little bit more about this ‘story’ thing. Western culture was founded – or perhaps it would be better to say shaped then continuously disrupted – by the Christian story. I would argue that what we made of this story was always full of obvious tortuous distortions of the words of Jesus, such as we know them. After all, how can we reconcille conquest, empire, the accumulation of wealth, slavery, poverty, capitalism, etc etc with the words of Jesus? Christianity became a religion that had little to do with the core elements of the story Jesus told.
This is a bold statement, I know, but one that I believe I could ‘prove’ in a court of law.
Arguably, the tensions created by this disconnect have always been there throughout Christian history, characterised by purges against heretics, or successive Protestant reformations. Always, people talked about going back to true religion and recreating the purity of the early church. The source material for this protesting and reforming was always the Bible- viewed through the context and passions of the people reading it.
Part of the problem – the nature of the torturous distortions perhaps – comes about when we ask what the Christian story that we built western culture on actually is/was. There is the story of love, compassion, caring for the weak and poor, looking after widows and orphans. The inverted power structures, the value given to each person. The living lives colectively and fairly. But this never fitted easily with the cultures we created. What did fit was a different gospel, which might be understood as how personal sin results in eternal damnation, but for the sacrificial death of jesus.
Despite the sometimes cataclysmic changes that these religious arguments brought about, we have a different problem now. Churches are empty. Sure, I know there are exceptions, but here in the UK, the number of people who attend church is still declining, still aging, still arguing and as such the Church is less and less relevant as a moral or political force. It still has an important ceremonial function, but it has no prophetic voice. It has no story that anyone is listening to. Perhaps, given the tortuous distortions I refered to above, this might not be a bad thing.
But the end of one story (if indeed that is what we are seeing) leaves an empty space. People have always looked for meaning and purpose and without a story, what do we have? In a post-covid world, overshadowed by global warming and mass extinctions, how do we conceive of a better story? In a political system dominated by inequality and the failure of our institutions and political/economic systems to bring hope, how do we shape our story towards better things?
Can’t remember where I got this from. The Creation museum perhaps?
Given what I have said above, the Bible would seem to be a strange place to start, right? After all, even now there are plenty of people in the world who seek to use it as blunt weapon to bludgeon us towards their story – often a very narrow story that seems very much to be part of the problem; a story that is anchored to textual determinism, at least in relation to some of the words of the Bible, which is seen as a unified, divinely inspired and heavenly-delivered holy text.
But what if the Bible is much less than that, but at the same time, much more? What if it is a library of miss-steps, half truths, mythological history and open-hearted laments? What if it is one third poetry? What if there are no other books in human history that are like it?
More pertinently, what if the Bible – or at least the books of the new testament – contains great big clues as to how the words of a man called Jesus became repackaged into a religion called Christianity by a Jewish religious genius (who never actually met Jesus) called Paul?
This was what we ended up talking about at our meeting.
Remember those clues I mentioned above? Here is what we think we know – with the usual warning that some (many!) will take different views.
The oldest of the four gospels is Mark’s gospel. It is very different from the others, so much so that later scribes have tried to give it a different ending. He does not include the resurection.
The other gospels seem to quote freely from Mark, but spin off into other directions. They add many of the ideas that MAY have been influenced by Paul.
Paul never met Jesus, and we can infer tensions between him and the other apostles who actually did – many of whom get a very bad press in the gospels! Paul’s encounter with Jesus was mystical, and he seemed to trust this more than he did the words or experience of those who had been his disciples.
Paul was a sophisticated, educated man. The other apostles were not. (But Jesus picked them!) Without his innovation and leadership, it seems unlikely that the early Christian church would have survived – many other Jewish movements did not after all. The difference was… Paul.
The oldest actual book to be included is thought to be St Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, in which some believe he was correcting or addressing issues that had been created by an earlier letter around the second coming of Jesus.
This letter may well have been the Didache (pronounced did-a-kay), which was a letter from the apostles in Jerusalem giving instructions as to how to run a church. As such this letter certainly predates most of the NT books, but may well be earlier than them all. More on this later.
The canon of scripture that evolved over the next many centuries involved many good people struggling to make sense of a complexity of writings that most of us have no idea ever existed. The struggle to do this well, according to a set of principles that made sense, is to be honoured. But we have to remember that the library of diverse books that entered the canon was a human construct, that was shaped by context, best understandings and compromise.
All of which should leave us room to treat these incredible documents with respectful skepticism. After all, they are strong enough to allow our questions, our doubts, our various entanglements. The ‘truth’ they contain is no less real if we question its historicity for example (there are plenty of problems reconciling the Bible with the archeological/historical record.) We might learn as much from apparent contradictions as from attempts to ‘make it all fit’.
The bottom line here is that our interpretations and understandings of the Bible- what it is, what it has to say, what it means for our lives, our politics, our priorities – what STORY it leads us towards depend a lot on what we think the Bible is. If we are to allow it to shape us, I would argue that we must first loosen up a little. It is OK to take the book/s out of their leather case. Doubt them and see where the doubts lead. Believe them and see where the beliefs lead.
If you want to know more about the complex and fascinating (to me anyway!) bible history, then it can be difficult to know where to start. There is so much out there and unless you are an academic (and I am certainly not) then it is difficult to know who is dealing with these issues honestly and who is coming at them with a perspective pre-formed by their own tribe.
The Bible Project has tried hard to bring some of the acedemic perspective to a wider audience, with video’s like this one;
More controversially perhaps, and thanks to my fellow (and inspirational) Iona community family group member, I would point you towards some of the writing and speaking of a man called James Tabor, who communicates well around many of these issues, including via his excellent you tube channel. Videos like this one;
So where does all of this take me to? Can it really be a way towards a new and better story?
I think so, firstly because it allows us to break with the old one – not to dismiss it, but to include and transcend it. After all, arguably this is exactly what Paul did to the teachings of Jesus – brilliantly, and perhaps problematically. Secondly because It might encourage us to project new – yet faithful – understandings onto our context in a way that is free from some of the distortions. Of course, we will no doubt make new distortions, and for this we need those who will doubt and test them too.
Finally, I want to return to the Didache. I had never heard of this document, and this was interesting to me too. How is this not better known? (Perhaps you are far ahead of me however and the problem was just my ignorance.)
James Tabor has a blog piece that talks in more detail about this document. You should read it, but I will quote from it here;
The Didache was discovered in 1873 in a library at Constantinople by a Greek, Priest Father Philoteus Bryennios. This precious text, dating to the late 1st or early 2nd century CE, is mentioned by early Christian writers but had disappeared. Father Bryennios discovered it in an archive of old manuscripts quite by accident.
TheDidache is divided into sixteen chapters and was intended to be a “handbook” for Christian converts. The first six chapters give a summary of Christian ethics based on the teachings of Jesus, divided into two parts: the way of life and the way of death. Much of the content is similar to what we have in the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain, that is, the basic ethical teachings of Jesus drawn from the Q source now found in Matthew and Luke. It begins with the two “great commandments,” to love God and love one’s neighbor as oneself, as well as a version of the Golden Rule: “And whatever you do not want to happen to you, do not do to another.” It contains many familiar injunctions and exhortations, but often with additions not found in our Gospels:
Bless those who curse you, pray for your enemies, and fast for those who persecute you. (1.3)
If anyone slaps your right cheek, turn the other to him as well and you will be perfect. (1.4)
Give to everyone who asks, and do not ask for anything back, for the Father wants everyone to be given something from the gracious gifts he himself provides. (1.5)
Many of the sayings and teachings are not found in our New Testament gospels but are nonetheless consistent with the tradition we know from Jesus and from his brother James:
Let your gift to charity sweat in your hands until you know to whom to give it. (1.6)
Do not be of two minds or speak from both sides of your mouth, for speaking from both sides of your mouth is a deadly trap. (2.4)
Do not be one who reaches out your hands to receive but draws them back from giving. (4.5)
Do not shun a person in need, but share all things with your brother and do not say that anything is your own. (4.8)
As well as the similarities, there are real differences from the Christianity of Paul however. Communion for example is to be a simple thanksgiving meal of wine and bread with references to Jesus as the holy “vine of David.” It ends with a prayer: “Hosanna to the God of David,” emphasizing the Davidic lineage of Jesus. The bigger issues raised by the Didache are these (again via James Tabor);
The entire content and tone of the Didache reminds one strongly of the faith and piety we find in the letter of James, and teachings of Jesus in the Q source. The most remarkable thing about the Didache is that there is nothing in this document that corresponds to Paul’s “gospel”―no divinity of Jesus, no atoning through his body and blood, and no mention of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. In the Didache Jesus is the one who has brought the knowledge of life and faith, but there is no emphasis whatsoever upon the figure of Jesus apart from his message. Sacrifice and forgiveness of sins in the Didache come through good deeds and a consecrated life (4.6).
The Didache is an precious witness to a form of the Christian faith more directly tied to the Jewish orientation of Jesus’ original followers. I encourage my readers to take a look for themselves. There are many versions both on-line and in print. You can begin here: Early Christian Writings: The Didache.
I wonder how this makes you feel?
Perhaps you are weary from all this deconstrction – I certainly am. The idea of being confronted with documents that start to undermine the very nature of the divinity of Christ might be the last thing we need. Anyway, this is not defnitive. The Didache is just an ancient document that never made it into the canon of scripture that became the Bible. It contains other problems too- not least the apocalyptic vision that Paul may have been clarifying and correcting in his letter to the Thessalonian church. Perhaps this document describes an evolutionary early set of followers trying to establish some kind of common practice. Perhaps we needed a theologian such as Paul to bring the whole story together.
But then again…
As with all theology, my last question is always , So what? How might these ideas lead to liberation, to renewal, to a new story?
What is most important, the details of doctrinal correctness, or the heart and spirit of the matter? It is the latter that gives us our story is it not, and to me at least, this rings all the more true when set free.
I would like to use the time to talk in some depth about things that seem important. What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua — that´s the only name that I can think of for it — like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move across America, […] an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer. ( Pirsig, p.17)
The origin of the words seems to be a movement founded in the 19th C that provided education and entertainment to isolated farming communities via a kind of travelling circus- complete with lectures, discussions and workshops. They fed a hunger for knowledge and self improvement.
Pirsig uses the word whenever he introduces as new concept, a new idea.The Chautauqua becomes the vehicle by which the mind can travel. The fact that this story is happening in the context of a motorcycle journey (with his curious son as a pillion passenger) makes the Chautauguas all the more vital.
I mention this as it made me think again about the way we encounter the words of the Bible. Might it be better to see them as a travelling circus tent full of ideas, concepts, poetry, philosophy? A spiritual Chautauqua. Those of us that visit and engage do so as people eager for the fun of the journey, able to debate, question, laugh, cry, heckle or just listen in awe.
So, rather than academic stuffyness, or unassailable unapproachable holiness. Rather than being ‘The Word of God’, might we see the Bible as Chautauqua?
A tent at the side of the road in which to exchange ideas about who God is…
this fragile tent 