View From The Basement

Cloakroom Community

Zygmunt Bauman concludes his thoughts in Liquid Modernity with a chapter on community

In this chapter he introduces the concept of 'cloakroom community. He comments that,

"cloakroom communities need a spectacle which appeals to similar interests dormant in otherwise disparate individuals and so brings them all together for a stretch of time when other interests - those which divide them instead of uniting - are temporarily laid aside, put on a slow burner or silenced altogether" (p200).

Bauman then concludes, "one effect of cloakroom/carnival communities is that they effectively ward off the condensation of genuine (that is comprehensive and lasting) communities which they mime and (misleadingly) promise to replicate or generate from scratch" (p 201).

As I read this I scribbled in the margin of the book, "is this a description of church?" For many, particularly those in small family churches, Bauman's cloakroom community is not a description of their faith community, but I fear that for a growing number of people it is.

We commute perhaps as much as an hour to sit beside people who we know next to nothing about primarily to experience an event that is as much about show and entrainment than it is about worship. Bill Hyble's says that every meeting should be made memorable, and while this could be understood in several ways, I suspect that it often translates into, "put on a show that will keep them coming back". IMHO when this happens we have ceased being church and have morphed into a cloakroom/carnival community.

It is illuminating that Bauman qualifies 'genuine' community by comprehensive and lasting. I believe we need such a qualification / description of what we mean by community as the word is used so loosely and ubiquitously that it has become a gloss and refers to a myth rather than reality. Many who talk of community struggle to articulate what this concretely means or looks like!

I like Bauman's comprehensive as it suggests that our knowing each other, our coming together is both spatially and relationally multi-faceted. Those I am in genuine community with I meet in more than one space, not just a church sanctuary. The relational structure also changes - e.g. friend, equal, leader, follower, dependent, provider, servant.

I like the tag lasting as this echo's the idea of a covenanting community. This takes us beyond consuming community as another commodity and challenges us to belong by an act of our will.

This said, after reading Bauman's thoughts on individualism and community, one is left pondering if in liquid modernity (or whatever other name we want to call the society we are in), and sense of genuine community is possible, "they may be put beside each other, but they will not congeal"(p35) is his conclusion.

So to the communitarian dream of re-embedding the disembedded, "nothing may change the fact that there are but motel beds, sleeping bags and analysts' couches available for re-embedding, and from now on the communities - more postulated than imagined - may be only ephemeral artifacts of the ongoing individuality play" (P22). As someone who is drawn deeply to a relational, communitarian understanding of the Trinity and that church should bear this likeness, Bauman's analysis and warning that "individulization is here to stay; all thinking about the means of dealing with its impact in the fashion in which we conduct our lives must start from acknowledging this fact" (p37), presents a significant challenge.

UK Revival?

It's 50 years since Jean Darnall had he third of three visions in which she described revival starting in the North of Scotland among young people and the flowing through the UK and onto Europe.

I've never met Darnall, never heard he speak, but I know a lot of respected leaders who have put a lot of weight behind her prophecy concerning the UK.

So 50 years on what are we to make of this?

Running

"When many people simultaneously run in the same direction, two questions need to be asked: what are they running after and what are they running from" T.H. Marshall (Quoted in Liquid Modernity, Bauman, p81).

Given the dispersed geographical nature of the church we are perhaps aware of the two's and three's who leave the church we are part of, but cannot easily observe the bigger picture.

The last Scottish Church Census was done in 2002, in his report Peter Brierley notes, "congregations are getting smaller....huge numbers of young people (under 30) have dropped out of church in the last 20 years in Scotland, as in England and other Western countries".

Marshall's question above is therefore a pertinent one for the church, as the huge numbers Brierley's research has counted constitutes many people simultaneously running in the same direction.

So what are people running after?

What are people running from?

Post your thoughts in the comments section.

Modernity is still alive and well!

"the society which enters the twenty-first century is no less 'modern' than the society which entered the twentieth; the most one can say is that it is modern in a different way" - Zygmunt Bauman

I've had conversations with a number of people about how 'post-modern' Scotland is and to what extent modernity still has a grip of us.

To help give me some tools to think about this I bought Bauman's Liquid Modernity. It's a hard read, but I think his hypothesis is simple - modernity is alive and well, albeit it in a chaotic form in which individualization has brought about the "disintegration of citizenship" and thus how we relate with each other and society as a whole has been irrevocably changed.

Strange Blessing?

I've got Alison my wife reading Gibbs & Bolger's book on emerging churches. Last night she was reading the bit where they describe what was happening at the Nine O'Clock Service in Sheffield. In the book they describe how this service was one of the most exciting places to be in the UK and that for many there was an experience of God's presence that they had not encountered before or after. Yet while this great blessing was happening there were major problems with some of the leadership of this group with regards to sin.

So Alison's question was, "so how does that work...why did God choose to bless NOS, show up there in an incredible way when there was lots wrong, and yet you many churches where they are doing everything right, leading godly lives and they are seeing decline"?

Hmmmm.....answers on a post card to..yes the comments section.

Mission / Ecclesiology interplay

  Jason Clark has been thinking about how Church, God and the World intersect and the implications for us with regards to mission and church.

I commented on his post saying the following;

"I found this diagram (the one to the right) helpful when reading the shape of things to come, and I hear your concern / observation that position 4, which I think is where we should be aiming for, can lead to a post-church response. I can’t help but feel that this is due in part to Frost & Hirsch’s insistence that mission drives ecclesiology. For me this is too simplistic, there needs to be an interplay between the two rather than the domination of one by the other".

Jason responded in the comments asking how I say the interplay working out.

I think in order to articulate how this interplay might work out I need to take a step back and place mission and church in some context. The diagram below is my attempt to formulate this context.

The diagram is a bit messy - but perhaps that points to what I think is obvious, i.e. theology is messy and trying to describe how our theology flows into our practices is messy.

What I'm trying to show here is that our christology, ecclesiology, missiology and eschatology "swim" in our understanding of who God is. They are not however located in our knowledge of God in a static way but that there is a dialectical relationship between  our understanding of God and these other doctrines. I my opinion there is no simple liner progression from one to the other, but there is a interpenetration, a circularity a shaping of one by the other.

So from my Trinitarian understanding of God things like mutuality, non-hierarchy, community, generosity, a going out of oneself to embrace the other come to the fore and inform my view / understanding of ecclesiology, christology, missiology and eschatology. 

Locating missiology within this understanding rather than defining it in some liner fashion by christology for me expands what mission is. Mission its then transformed from just being about "saving souls" to participation in God's redemption and transformation of all of creation. I think that this is the position that Frosh and Hirsch want us to reach in their number 4, yet I'm struck that we can often arrive at the "right" praxis while holding onto a theology that slowly erodes it. Thus like a cliff being eroded at it's base if fear that if we have a thinking and a praxis that are not mutually compatible then in the medium to long term our practice will collapse as over time our theology fails to sustain it.

I feel it's important to have eschatology in this mix as this gives us a sense of direction,a telos, and also that our shaping then is not solely driven but history past but by the yet to come of the kingdom. Eschatology needs the pressures of Christology and missiology upon it otherwise it becomes about creating an enclave of the kingdom rather than a subversive yeast that undermines the structures of our society that are antithetical to the gospel.

Missiology needs ecclesiology otherwise we become like chickens with our heads cut off. We run around create a stir and then fall flat. Our mission needs to be located in community (well that's MHO), yet without the force of mission acting upon this community this too can become insular. It would be my hope that ecclesiology's dialog with missiology prevents us from a post-church approach. Here again I find the concept of Trinity helpful, for there we see a diversity and yet unity - so I theologically and in practice want to affirm the unity of the catholic church and it's diversity. Yes we need new forms or expressions of church, but this need not mean a doing away with church.

Christology, the incarnation when read with a Trinitarian hermeneutic becomes not the mission itself, but the decisive act in that mission for the mission. Christology alone cannot adequately define the mission for if it did in what sense would it then be the missio dei? I recently read (it's inappropriate to name who) a leader of an important Christian organization say. "while caring for the environment is good it's not what it's really about, after all where do we see Jesus care for the environment". For me this is a truncated version of our mission and of the Gospel itself - yet is was driven by this guys christology. You might want to argue that he needs a better christology and I'd have some sympathy for that, but I would say that the route for this "better" christology is in a Trinitarian understanding of God.

There's much more that could and probably should be said on this but this would seem like enough to be getting on with for just now. Jason I trust this starts to tease this out?

Passover

At the weekend it was our leaders weekend away. I'd been asked to take the Sunday morning communion service and decided to do a Christianized version of a passover seder.

To help create a visual focus I painted the picture to the right on a curtain. It's the lamb from the book of revelation. Note the red cross is not St George's cross, rather a red cross was a symbol for the resurrection. So the picture shows both the death and resurrection of the lamb.

Celtic Soliton Sessions - Portrush

Si hosted this leg of the sessions and some other Facilitators joined us, namely Kester Brewin and Julie McGonigle.

If my memory serves me right Gareth provided the reflection and backdrop for this part of the weekend. He told some stories from his journey where he encoutered and experianced confusion, brokenness and pain. We then broke into small groups to share what we wanted to get out of this part of the weekend and what we feared.

Busy Weekend

Stuart (pictured) and myself are team speaking at the ICC students weekend away. It should be a blast, and err no we've not done this kind of thing weith each other before so it will be a bit of a learning experiance for us both. The plan is not to have one of us do one session and the other the other. Rather I'll take the lead in session one and Stuart will contribute, butt in, as it were to this. Stuart will then take the lead in session two and I'll contribute some thoughts to this as well. Session 3, well that's were we get very participatory as we gather around the Lord's Table, so it's not so much about Stuart or I preaching but about the students getting involved, thinking, writing, praying and interacting.

I'll then rush back on Sunday afternoon to preach at the QPBC evening service. Paul and Esther Ede will join me in the preach to share a bit about what they are going to be doing with Urban Expressions here.

A reductionist Baptist identity

Mr B has had some great posts recently thinking about Baptist identity and the act of believer's baptism as an act of civil disobedience. I've been struck how for many Baptist churches the criteria for allowing a person to "join" in membership is (a) are they a Christian and (b) have they as a believer been baptised?

This strikes me as a rather reductionist approach to Baptist identity, especially as in general there's a rather poor understanding of the act of baptism.

Now I'm not for creating some long check list that people have to comply with in order to "join". I'd simply want to ask when it comes to Baptist identity why we have a hierarchy where the act of Baptism is seem as more important than other aspects of Baptist identity?