The Complex Christ

t + 5 Years | Will the Emerging Church be a Denomination?

In discussion about a forthcoming UK project with Jonny and some others from various networks on Friday, the question was asked "where do we want to be [with this project] in 5 years?" In the ensuing debate the question was then raised: "in what way is what we are doing not the establishment of a denomination?"

This set me thinking about what is going on in the Emerging Church, and perhaps in particular in Emergent in the US. In 5 years time, will this all boil down to another denomination? Are we plotting the same basic trajectory as Vineyard, with MClaren as Wimber, the same exciting conferences, and broadband playing the part of the Spirit? And will this exciting freedom distill down to something... different when the second generation comes? Is this the inevitable fate of any movement?

Let's be clear from the start, this is not about a value judgement on denominations. It's not 'denomination bad, non-denomination good.' Denomination faith has basically been a framework that has kept the Church going through thick and thin. But the price for this soldiering tenacity is a perhaps always a limit on free expression. Either way, we would be foolish to walk blindly on without considering what the various paths would be likely to hold.

The Wiktionary entry on denominations is, I think, excellent:

alt.emerging. UK National Gathering

Exciting event coming up 24th - 26th Feb 06.

For fuller details read Jonny's post here.

Highly recommended. For current practitioners. Limited to 100 places.

Email [email protected] for further details.

Advent: Dirt and Creation

As we think about the coming season of Advent, I've been mulling about the process by which 'newness' comes about.

I was talking with two Vaux accomplices on Sunday, who are both doing post-graduate studies variously around ideas of space. Both were commenting on the varied backgrounds of the people they were studying with, and how this led to interesting cross-fertilization, particularly where two different fields of study were using common language in uncommon ways.

I was reminded of the work of the Santa Fe institute, which deliberately puts people from different academic disciplines together to consider problems, particularly around ideas of complexity. Physicists might talk about self-organising phenomena, which economists, biologists and computer scientists might throw different perspectives from their observations into the mix... which in turn might lead to the physicists discovering something totally new.

Crossing boundaries can feel dirty. It's Trickster territory. 'It's not pure theology.' 'You can't mix those.' But it's precisely in the cross-contamination that newness appears. I touched on this in a previous post and pondered whether we might see Adam and Eve as the 'first artists'... And as we come to another advent we begin to reflect on a God who was not content to remain inert, sterile, pure... But crossed our boundary, re-synthesized the divine and human, and wrought a newness for us.

The second edge of advent's perforating sword is that we are called to be the body of Christ. To continue to take this archetype of boundary-crossing-reaping-newness and... get out there to discover some new territory between the lands we thought were islands. Which is precisely what those two are doing. And I for one can't wait to see what they find.

Advent: Journeys and Gifts

Perhaps it was the mixture of darkness, waiting and the great mulled wine afterwards, but Advent was always my favourite time of year at Vaux, and as this will be the first year for about 7 years when we won't be doing something I thought I'd offer some resources from the services we did on this theme.

Firstly, a link to the liturgy 'Journeys and Gifts' from the Vaux archive, which explores the coming incarnation through the 3 traditional gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. In typically obtuse style, the service sheets ended up being triangular. Beautiful, time-consuming and totally unnecessary. Summed a lot of what we did up nicely.

Secondly, a video-liturgy simply entitled 'Wait', personally one of my favourites of all the things we produced.
This was filmed one night at the local station (screen-shot above), and is simply a single shot of the bank of 3 platform monitors that the drivers use, plus a remix of Sigur Ros' Svefn g englar, followed by a liturgy on waiting bouncing off Whitman's poem 'finally comes the poet'.

"As Christ waited, waited to be emptied of power self sufficiency, so we should wait.
For one advent, finally shall come the poet, the true son of God, singing songs."

It's around 12Mb, but streams nicely over broadband. If you'd like a full-size version on DVD, just get in touch.

Thirdly, a 4-voice meditation which combines themes from the nativity with Rumi's words "Whoever brought me here will have to take me home."

Emerging Church and the Holy Spirit [4]

The language of the Spirit has been hijacked by the charismatic/pentecostal movement, which is probably why people in Emerging circles have been shy of using it. What some of them appear to have seen from their side of the fence is that this shyness amounts to a rejection of the Spirit, and what they interpret that to mean is a lack of 'power manifestations.' What I have been arguing in these posts is that:

1. We need to reclaim the language of the Spirit and not be afraid to use it and
2. We need to think much more widely about what spiritual gifts are.

On the second point, using some of Lewis Hyde's work on gift, I've argued that gift-exchange is actually the very fuel that runs the church, the inter-connect that is the fabric of our relationships. We don't relate on a market-exchange plane, where the scales are balanced, but on a gift-exchange plane, where things are left unbalanced, and the relational potential is heightened in every transaction.

Furthermore, true gifts always operate in a circle of 3 or more, meaning that the relational cycle is never bi-polar but involves 'the other'. In such a system I don't necessarily receive from the person I gave to, leading to multiplex relational networks that operate on multiple levels. The circle of 3 of course hints at the trinity, which is the ultimate model of generous exchange and relationship.

So how does this work out in some practical ways?

German Edition Out Now...

Apparently the title didn't translate very well...
ISBN 3-928093-73-8
€14,80
Part of an excellent forth-coming series on the Emerging Church by C+P Verlag.
Accompanying website to follow.

Emerging Church and the Holy Spirit [3]

In the last post on this I tried to argue that we need to re-imagine our language of spiritual gifts, and used some of Lewis Hyde's thinking on gift to consider how, in fact, any transaction that occurs in the 'gift economy' is actually rooted in God's breathing into us.

When you let someone into traffic. When you hold a door open. When you pay for a stranger's bus ticket. That feeling that somehow this is how life should be: generous, amicable, inclusive? It's God. That's the gift of the Spirit: taking us above the apes into humanity, into the realm of the gift. It's not a 'power manifestation.' But we only need to read article's such as this - thanks to Sanctus for the link - to see how powerful the gift is.

I want to come back to this idea of generous action later. But before I do that, I want to examine why Hyde is keen to point out that there is a further level of complexity in true gift exchange. According to him, a true gift must go 'out of sight' before it is received and passed on.

Emerging Church and the Holy Spirit [2]

I ended the last post - which was a critique of Chris Simmons' article in Christianity accusing the Emerging Church of lacking power manifestations, and thus lacking the Spirit - by arguing that we needed a fresh understanding of the concept of 'gift'. It is only by doing this that we can prevent the hijack of the language of 'spiritual gifts' by those who want to tie this to power manifestations, healings, tongues etc.

Indeed, in the book I try to argue, using Lewis Hyde's fabulous work on art, that the Church needs to re-evaluate not just the language of gift in relation to the Holy Spirit, but also in relation to its entire existence. My conclusion is that in a world drowning in the market economy of needs, desires, advertising, cash for questions and touch-the-screen salvations, the Emergent church will be a place where the gift economy rules. Churches ought to be places of gift-exchange; they are often places where gift and market confusions abound, creating a jarring experience for those exploring...

Is the Emerging Church Lacking the Spirit? [1]

Any visit to my parents' house requires the customary penance to be done: reading all the Christian press that they subscribe to. October's Christianity carried an article which questioned whether the Emerging Church was lacking the Spirit. Their much-used stock graphic of an arid desert pretty much summarized the tone that Chris Simmons - a Vineyard pastor from Brighton - took. It's a depressing read.

Jason Clark has helpfully posted a PDF of the article, written a reply to Christianity, and looks like he is also hosting a conference around the issues this Saturday. All of which has catalyzed me to get some thoughts down about this vital issue over the course of a few posts....

Chris' article worries me on a number of levels. Firstly, he writes that "it was frightening and horrifying to see that Jesus was much bigger and more powerful that I had thought" and goes on to criticize the other speakers at the event he was at who "spoke eloquently but then just left the platform". He then describes how he sees power manifestations - healings, exorcisms etc. as not only central to his 'conversion', but a required part of normal Christian life.

His argument appears to run like this: power manifestations are evidence of the Spirit; without the manifestations the Spirit is not there.

I find this not only deeply troubling as an argument, but deeply insulting too. In what power and in whose name does Chris think Christians in the Emerging Church are working? If he really thinks it is being done outside of the Spirit this is a very serious indictment indeed... One that would appear, in what I am assuming to be the fairly standard Vineyard theology, to condemn us to a very unfortunate fate.

Confusingly, he ends his piece by saying:

"In the UK church let's keep loving the church in all its diversity... Let's pray that we can identify with our converts in the UK as the apostle Paul did with his 2000 years ago with the words, 'Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard?'"

I totally agree with the diversity angle - but don't really see it reflected in his argument, which appears to present a very one-dimensional view of the Spirit. Not a wrong dimension necessarily. But only affirming one.

Secondly, Chris seems to be equating observation of the law with "mental ascent, a journey of faith with more questions than answers" - in other words, doubt, questioning and uncertainty. We should simply 'believe what we hear', a conclusion that deeply troubles me when connected back to his opening statements about how he as a pastor is constantly being hassled "by people with some new idea, usually to do with something called emergent." A precis of the piece thus seems to read:

Power manifestations are the true test of whether something is 'of the Spirit.' If you are going to doubt this, you are falling into 'observing the law.' The right thing to do? Just believe what you hear from me.

I have to feel sorry for those in his church who have come up to him with these new ideas. I hope they have not really been re-buffed in this way, and don't doubt that he would have been pastorally sensitive. What worries me is the underlying message that the leader is right and there is no other way.

So what should we do? If we are not experiencing power manifestations is the journey we are exploring not 'of God'? Ought we simply 'believe what we've heard'?

I want to propose that we need to radically re-imagine our language of the Spirit. It is unfortunate that the charismatic wing of the Church have hijacked the concept of the Spirit and taken it hostage to the power-evangelism agenda... It seems that one cannot talk about the gifts of the Spirit without it being taken as meaning healing, speaking in tongues, prophecy etc.

This, I believe is a real shame, for the concept of gift, as I've explored in the book, is an incredible rich one. And it's this I want to explore in the next post.

Beyond Self Actualization

In a great post [ here ] Will Samson describes how the dominant psychological metaphor for our culture, as set out in Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, needs pushing further. Maslow's system is very much based around the needs of the individual, and Will has done some thinking about how, once the individual 'self' is actualized, we need to go beyond into 'group actualization' (where we discover who we are in terms of the group we are a part of) and finally into 'contextual actualization' (where we discover where our group fits into the wider living system of our community, locality, nation...)

I think this connects nicely with the previous post, which set out some ideas for how churches might use tools like Belbin, Myers-Briggs etc. to bring their members to a better self-awareness, and thus to a more rich and full involvement in the life of the Body, rather than just 'child of God who has to sit and warm a pew til I die. Or learn to play guitar.'

On a different tangent, the last I heard of Maslow was in connection to the disaster in New Orleans: how to help individuals who have lost everything to re-gain some kind of actualization, once their physiological and safety needs had been met. If what Will is saying is correct, the city will only really on the road to recovery once people can begin to move beyond those things and begin to think about re-actualizing their groups, and re-establish the boundaries and contexts of the groups they are a part of. This destruction of psychological, rather than just physical, communities - with people dispersed over such a wide area, may be the more painful aspect of the disaster... and more tricky to get aid to sort out.