GraceStreet- a company of exiles

Thoughts on a late summer morning

“When the forms of an old culture are dying, the new culture is created by a few people who are not afraid to be insecure.”
- Rudolf Bahro

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it will take grace to let others here be different to our expectations of them
so we pray for grace

it will take courage for each of us to live beyond the story we know of ourselves
so we pray for courage

it will take wisdom to believe we don’t have all the answers
so we pray for wisdom

it will take hope to believe our future is not yet determined
so we pray for hope

in the story of god all expectations are defied
all things are made possible
the whole world is made new

it will take faith to live as though this can be our story
and so we pray for faith. -Cheryl Lawrie

" But the Helper, the Holy Spirit,
whom the Father will send in My name,
He will teach you all things,
and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you.
Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you;
not as the world gives do I give to you. "

“…We didn’t talk about false dichotomies, like inwardly and outwardly focused churches, but looked at how God always begins where we are, in the midst of the ordinariness of our stories and the places where we live.  These are places and ways in which the Spirit is calling forth a new imagination for the church…” Alan Roxburgh

communion

‘At the Altar Table the overweight parson is doing something or other with the bread as his assistant stands by with the wine. In the pews, the congregation sits more or less patiently waiting to get into the act. The church is quiet. Outside, a bird starts singing. It’s nothing special, only a handful of notes angling out in different directions. Then a pause. Then a trill or two. A chirp. It is just warming up for the business of the day, but it is enough.

The parson and his assistant and the usual scattering of senior citizens, parents, teenagers are not alone in whatever they think they’re doing. Maybe that is what the bird is there to remind them. In its own slapdash way the bird has a part in it too. Not to mention “Angels and Archangels and all the company of heaven” if the prayer book is to be believed. Maybe we should believe it. Angels and Archangels. Cherubim and seraphim. They are all in the act together. It must look a little like the great jeu de son et lumière at Versailles when all the fountains are turned on at once and the night is ablaze with fireworks. It must sound a little like the last movement of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony or the Atlantic in a gale.

And “all the company of heaven” means everybody we ever loved and lost, including the ones we didn’t know we loved until we lost them or didn’t love at all. It means people we never heard of. It means everybody who ever did – or at some unimaginable time in the future ever will – come together at something like this table in search of something like what is offered at it.

Whatever other reasons we have for coming to such a place, if we come also to give each other our love and to give God our love, then together with Gabriel and Michael, and the fat parson, and Sebastian pierced with arrows, and the old lady whose teeth don’t fit, and Teresa in her ecstasy, we are the communion of saints’. – Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark: An ABC Theologized (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), 30–1.

Kingdom thoughts from Merton

“WE CANNOT DO what [the desert fathers and mothers] did.  But we must be as thorough and as ruthless in our determination to break all spiritual chains, and cast off the domination of alien compulsions, to find our true selves, to discover and develop our inalienable spiritual liberty and use it to build, on earth, the Kingdom of God.  

 

“This is not the place in which to speculate what our great and mysterious vocation might be.  That is still unknown.  Let it suffice for me to say that we need to learn from these men [and women] of the fourth century how to ignore prejudice, defy compulsion and strike out fearlessly into the unknown.”

                                                             Thomas Merton

Worshipping onscreen: Supersize me!

Here's an interesting piece written by Halden Doerge at Inhabitatio Dei.

Sorry for the long silence – we’ve been in transit to Sydney all week, and I haven’t had much internet access.

This morning, out of curiosity, I went along to a service at a famous Sydney megachurch. It was quite an experience. They had it all: the hustle and bustle of important people; the man with a torch and walkie-talkie who met us at the door and briskly ushered us to our seats; the dimly lit auditorium with its brightly coloured stage; the use of words like “vision” and “awesome”; the advertising segments (last week’s sermon was available on DVD for only $14.95); the slick businessmen with their Rolexes and their glamorous wives; the exuberant music performed by handsome musicians and voluptuous singers (I confessed to my wife that I had committed adultery in my heart all the way through “All I Need Is You”); the give-your-life-to-Jesus altar call; and throughout all this, the ubiquity of what Peter Berger has called “the Protestant smile.”

There were no limits to the professionalism of this worship service. There was even a bit of product placement: the lobby was adorned with a lovely suite of iMacs; and the sermon was delivered from behind a lectern with an open MacBook on top, its illuminated Apple icon gleaming at the cameras. (It was like watching BBC television – I was waiting for someone to arrive at any moment in a shining new Audi.)

As for the preaching, it was motivating and highly inspirational: the sermon’s title (sorry, I’m not kidding) was “Ten Kinds of People That God Can’t Help.” The main idea was that you should “invest” your time in positive happy friends, instead of making bad investments in friendships with hopeless, unhappy people: “Why are you trying to help people like that when even God can’t help them?” The sermon’s best one-liner: “The Bible isn’t a book about God’s love for man; it’s a book about man’s love for God.”

But for me, the most interesting aspect of the service was the dominance of the screen. Every moment of the service, from start to finish, was broadcast on to huge screens around the auditorium. When the pastor spoke, he would address one of the many cameras. When the worship-leader spoke to the congregation, he would speak into the camera. Even the heartfelt altar call at the end of the service was addressed to the camera. During the worship songs, the screens would be filled with the faces of those gorgeously happy singers and musicians; then a camera would pan across the crowd of raised hands before cutting back to a shot of the worship-leader’s face, full of adoration and passionate sincerity.

What made this so interesting was that the songs’ lyrics were also superimposed over these images; so if you wanted to join in singing, you had no choice but to turn your face away from the altar (if there had been an altar), away from the congregation, even away from the flesh-and-blood performers on stage. In short, participation in worship was possible only through the mediation of the screen. The entire worship service was orchestrated primarily as an event of the screen, so that one could take part only by turning towards the screen and participating in its projected images of worship.

The Protestant reformers used to complain that the Roman Catholic priest was “doing worship” for the whole congregation, standing in their place and performing everything on their behalf – and a similar complaint is often made about today’s Pentecostal megachurches. But I think the function of the screen raises a much more interesting problem: not merely that the congregation is worshipping vicariously through the onstage performers, but that the entire worship event is actually taking place onscreen.

At this morning’s service, even the worship leader himself was not a direct participant in the worship event – the real worshipping subject was his onscreen image. The flesh-and-blood performer participates in this worship only indirectly, through a vicarious participation in his own projected image – a larger-than-life image which becomes the bearer of transcendence. Similarly, the congregation is involved in worship only vicariously, through the mediation of the screen. This is an instance in which the screen comes to possess more ontological depth than the flesh-and-blood world itself; the projected image becomes “more real” than reality.

Visitors to Manhattan are often struck by the uncanny familiarity of their surroundings: the city has been so frequently and so meticulously presented onscreen that the “real” physical environment seems a remarkable copy of the much-more-real world of the screen. “Oh look,” tourists exclaim: “It’s just like in The Godfather!”

In the same way, towards the end of the church service I glanced down from the vast screen, and for a moment I glimpsed the flesh-and-blood pastor speaking passionately into the camera. It was strange to see the man standing there like this: a miniature version – touchingly flimsy and remote and insubstantial – of the real preacher whom I’d been watching on the screen. I felt embarrassed to have seen him like this – like the embarrassment of visitors at a hospital, who don’t know where to look – so I quickly averted my eyes, and returned my gaze to the big reassuring smile on the screen high above.

Missional imagination

Paul (Prodigal Kiwi) writes – over the weekend I sent out an e-mail to some friends and fellow-explorers. In it I talked a little about the importance of stories, listening and discernment. I wish I’d included the following (abridged) quote from Alan Roxburgh. In fewer words it captures what I was trying to say:

“...Missional imagination is all about [our] conversations [and of living] into the power of conversation, unlocking the stories [and finding the connections that] connected us with the Spirit’s real presence amongst us...”

The slow-work of calling forth, or discerning a new missional imagination is about the weaving together of a number of critical strands: Context, conversation, deep-listening to our own lives and in our own particular context(s), questions, engaging the possibilities of change, listening one another into speech, shared-connections, the Spirit, simple experiments, and the practices of discernment, all helping us ‘see’ and imaginatively engage God’s future and its possibilities already within us, amongst us as a small group or church, and beyond us in the wider community.

It’s about opening ourselves to being surprised by what God is up to and what the Spirit is wanting to do in us, through us, and with us.

Al again,

“...But it won’t be experts telling others what to do... It’s all about ... listening and going deeper and recognizing the real resources are ourselves and our people. 

The real force of transformation is [us,] our people and their neighbourhoods rather than our strategies or even the dreaming of the latest gurus.  Mission life is not about false dichotomies of inside/outside or institution versus organic; it’s about the conversations and the conviction that God is already at work among us.  We are in an unthinkable world and it’s all about the conversations” [bold text in this quote is Al’s]

Thoughts from Merton

"Those who attempt to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening their own self-understanding, freedom, integrity and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others. They will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of their own obsessions, their aggressiveness, their ego-centered ambitions, their delusions about ends and means, their doctrinaire prejudices and ideas. There is nothing more tragic in the modern world than the misuse of power and action to which people are driven by their own Faustian misunderstandings and misapprehensions. We have more power at our disposal today than we have ever had, and yet we are more alienated and estranged from the inner ground of meaning and of love than we have ever been."

and William Cavanaough

"Christians themselves are called to create concrete alternative practices that open up a different kind of economic space--the space marked by the body of Christ."