The Complex Christ

Guest Post 2: Through the Keyhole

I realised I don’t need to go to church services anymore. All I need to do is look ‘through the keyhole’ and I recognise the ideology/theology of that place.

It’s something television has exploited. And we understand it intuitively. ‘Through the keyhole’ the cameras wander around someone else's house, from living room, to kitchen, to bedroom, in order to discover what kind of person lives there. Is it open-plan? Is the living space a TV salon or place for conversation or reading? Is the kitchen a utility room or a creative suite for gastronomy? Where is attention lavished? What is omitted? What lifestyle, or ideology/theology is being played out there?

Let me take you through the keyhole of a few church buildings. You enter a high vaulted barn. Rows of wooden pews run wall to wall. At the front you are able to recognise three focal points. One at the centre, a table with a cloth over it; one on the right up three steps, a bronze eagle on an orb, with, on its wings a large open book; thirdly to the left a stone sided platform raised up five steps. So here what dominates the proceedings is a table, a book and a pulpit.

Ah yes, here we have middle England, middle of the road, Church of England. Peace be with you.

Walk into another building past some pamphlets and again there are pews. Row after row. This time at the front there is a big speakers lectern. To the side there is a piano, music stands and a hanging projection screen. Here the focus is an orator’s platform, supported by some musical production.

Ah yes, a conservative evangelical church. Amen.

Walk into another space, low ceiling with just a few chairs in an arc and cushions available for use. The room is quite minimalist. There is dimmable lighting, and a Tibetan bowl to hand.

Ah, quite rare, a centre for Christian mediation. Ma-ra-na-tha.

Somewhere else I visit, the host hangs at the centre of the space. In another church the band is the focus of attention and its not dissimilar to going to a music venue.

Next time you pop your head into a church and are thinking you ought to wait around for a liturgy or a sermon or stay long enough for sing song, don’t bother. You don’t need to hear the words. Just read the space and you will know exactly what the ideology/theology is. Just like anyone’s home, any house of G/god will say a huge amount about what the ideology/theology is there.

They say a picture says a thousand words, but when you move from two to three dimensions, I would say space speaks a thousand thousand words or more correctly a million words.

Now that’s a lot of words. The question is, what are they actually saying?

See the straitjacket

Go into any social gathering and you will see how the hierarchies are set up. Whether it’s the debating chamber of parliament, your living room, a local pub, an interview room, or a Sunday morning service...

Forget what is actually being said or why. Forget content. Through the way the space is set up, relationships are articulated, roles are cast and the type of communication that will happen in that space is largely determined.

Obviously there are fixed spaces and there are fluid domains. And people occasionally subvert or reconfigure them. But more often than not spaces irrevocably influence the relationships and positions of privilege or authority within them. Spaces define who is included and who is excluded, who are performers and who are spectators, who is the focus of attention and who are positioned as unimportant.

What strikes me in most progressive discussions of local weekly congregational enactments of church is that people get locked into thinking about the content of what is said, or the way people say it, but no-one thinks about how the way the room is set up might implicitly affect the relationships of the people in the space and therefore any message or communication that takes place within it.

Consider for example a group of people gathered in a circle as compared to the same group seated in rows of seats facing one individual. They are the same people, but configure them another way and entirely different kind of interaction takes place.

It was interesting reading the thread about preaching. Preaching is a condition of a certain construction of space. Change the configuration of space and you no longer get preaching.

When I was at postgraduate college, I was fed up with the teacher=‘expert’, student=‘receiver of expertise’ model. It existed because no-one thought about the way the spaces of interaction were configured. My response was to set up a series of round-table discussions. They were convened by different people, students and tutors. Ideas were shared through distributing key texts before each discussion began. Guests were invited in to be participants in the discussions and bring in other angles/perspectives. Chairs were arranged in a circle around a round table. No-one stood up to speak. The discussions became democratised, multi-contributor, informed, challenging and engaging.

The room did not change—the round-table discussions took place in the same space. The configuration of people and furniture changed. And so did the kind of interactions that took place.

It is not just what we say, or how we say it, but the configuration of the spaces we meet in that impact our interactions.

Space has ideological and theological implications.