The Complex Christ | Signs of Emergence

Clinton? Obama? McCain? This Guy Gets My Vote...

Thanks so much to Shane and his people for sending me a copy of his new book, written with Chris Haw, Jesus for President. It's gorgeous to look at and hold, fabulously designed, and perfectly balanced between seriousness and playfulness... starting with the title. Why can't every Christian book be like this? I just hope people get it, and read it thoroughly as they think about the coming US elections.

Worst case scenario: Shane gets asked to be Obama's advisor on something. As Campolo is quoted in the book: "Mixing the church and state is like mixing ice cream and cow manure . It may not do much to the manure, but it sure messes up the ice cream." Stay pure and creamy Shane!

Check http://www.jesusforpresident.org for details / reviews / news.

Technorati: Claiborne | Don Carson | Jesus for President | Politics | Poverty | Power | puppy

Jaime Lerner ¦ Stealth and the City ¦ The City is Not the Self

Thanks to Helen of Urban Practitioners for sending me this article in The Guardian a couple of weeks back about Jaime Lerner and his radical environmental policies that have transformed the Brazilian city of Curitiba.

I say environmental in the truest sense: he is an architect by trade, and is concerned with the built environment, as well as carbon footprints.

What is particularly interesting was the necessity of stealth and speed: with political turmoil and dictatorial governance, he was never quite sure how long he had before his authority as mayor was swept away, nor how long it would be before someone tied his ideas up in red tape. Hence:

"We had to do things quickly because next week we might not be here anymore [because of the dictatorship].' And you have to be quick to avoid your own bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is like a fungus that contaminates everything. We built the opera house in two months, the botanical gardens in three months, Niemeyer's museum in five months. We transformed the city's main street into a pedestrian area in 72 hours. It wasn't that we were chasing after records - it was necessity."

There's something of the trickster about him, and as London comes to its own mayoral elections, it's going to be interesting who people plump for. One wonders if Lerner would have won the popular vote; in the case of Ken Livingstone, many of his policies for London - like the congestion charge - have been wildly unpopular, and yet have been very successful and vital to the city's environmental awareness.

Einstein once said 'the environment is everything that isn't me', and we might re-phrase that as 'the city is not about the self.' It's worth holding this in mind whenever we vote. Are we voting for our own pockets, or for the common - and more difficult - good?

Frrvrr.com

This is Onion genius. Read it and weep, Web 2.0.

Technorati: Frrvrr | Onion | Web 2.0

Sort it out gays - stop destroying earth!

The Telegraph reported recently that an Israeli MP has blamed the recent spate of earthquakes in the Middle East on gays. The Knesset has recently repealed various laws about homosexuality, and this created the siesmic events.

Gays were also to blame for flooding in Britain last year, according to one Bishop, and one might also argue that with their thrusting steel tubes penetrating and bringing down two of America's largest twin erections, 9/11 was some sort of twisted stunt to highlight the destructive power of gay love, a judgement on liberal America, if you will.

So sort it out gay people - we don't want more floods and earthquakes and terror attacks! Stop it!

Vaux Is Like a Box Of Chocolates...

Rather surprised to see, as I opened a bar of chocolate from Lundy Island - a present from my mum, that Vaux had branched out into confectionary. With Grace were doing Donuts, Ikon just candy-floss, perhaps I shouldn't have been.

Technorati: Chocolate | Grace | Ikon | Lundy | Vaux

Some Ideas for Commemorating 9/11

It's that time of year again, so how might we begin to find a rhythm for commemorating 9/11 and/or the July London bombings?

Perhaps, in our local communities, we could build huge bonfires, and all gather round them, faces glowing in the heat. We could make effigies of Bin Laden, or Mohammed Siddique Khan, and have competitions to create the most grotesque one, before lifting them atop the fire and cheering as they burned.

We could light up the sky with fireworks, reminding us of the explosions that ripped through the air that day.

We could gather together for festive food: sweet toffee apples or spiced wine, and congregate in large crowds in pubs and bars beforehand to get right into the mood.

Or we could lobby our governments and demand that no Muslim ever held public office - at least for a few hundred years until things calmed down a bit.

Ah. Apologies. I forgot. That's what we Brits do to commemorate the 5th of November 1605, when the Catholic, Guy Fawkes, very nearly blew up parliament with kegs of gunpowder stowed in the basement of the Palace of Westminster.

Somehow it all seems a less appropriate celebration these days...

Technorati: 9/11 | Bin Laden| September 11| Guy Fawkes| Terrorism|Commemoration

Signs of Life in the Churches

As I mentioned in a previous post, I've been really enjoying Roger Deakin's meditation on trees 'Wildwood'.

In one passage on 'The Sacred Groves of Devon', Deakin goes in search of the 'Green Man' - the woodland spirit of rebirth often seen carved into beams in old churches - in various villages. He notes the oddity of having a basically pagan deity carved into the very supporting fabric of these ancient Christian places of worship - "nowadays such an inspired conjunction would be called 'multiculturalism'" - but then goes on to quote a great piece of Ruskin:

"Go forth again to gaze upon the old cathedral front, where you have smiled so often at the fantastic ignorance of the old sculptors: examine once more those ugly goblins, and formless monsters, and stern statties, anatomiless and rigid; but do not mock at them, for they are signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure; but which is must be the first aim of all Europe at this day to regain for her children."

I had never appreciated this before. In the hundreds of tiny country churches - many built around the 16th and 17th centuries, we see local communities expressing, through their craftsmen, their faith and spirituality. Later, as more grand projects emerged, the masons were still able to throw their personal touches into their work through gargoyles and other features.

Have we lost something here? Are the warehouse churches that we throw up or rent just bland, interchangeable shells for an equally bland and interchangeable God?

Technorati: Deakin | Green Man | Megachurch | Ruskin

Is The Emerging Church Hopelessly Utopian? [3]

Hopelessly Utopian [1]

Hopelessly Utopian [2]

Thanks for the comments on the above posts. In response to Cheryl and Becky, yes, of course every church movement has felt 'no one else has ever felt this way before'. And it's actually important to recognise that, as Gray does in Black Mass, suggesting that 'the utopian instinct in modern politics, which has itself presented itself in secular and often explicitly anti-religious form, must be understood as a kind of sublimated religious impulse.' Gray, as I've written, goes on to say that we need to move beyond any grand visions, any utopian ideals, but the point I think he misses is within his own words: utopian dreams are part of what it is to be human. They are part of the divine ache within each of us.

So, if the Emerging Church is hopelessly utopian, that's partly because it's hopelessly human, and hopelessly divine. We couldn't be any other way.

Trouble is, these grand visions often lead to states/power structures enforcing their own purity codes on others, and, in church parallels, people getting hurt and religious warfare/bigotry breaking out. Which is why Jay Winter argues for us to go after 'minor utopias', "a modest strand of visionary thought that sketch out a world very different from the one we live in, but from which not all social conflict or all oppression has been eliminated."

Because, as I've written in the book, I believe the Emerging Church needs to be a 'dirty' church, having a 'minor utopian' vision will hopefully allow us to avoid some of the pitfalls of sterile religion, and avoid becoming a fully denominated, bounded group.

So what might this look like?

I'm really glad Nic brought up the concept of TAZs in the comments on the first post. The article describes these Temporary Autonomous Zones as "like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it."

In other words, as the article continues, TAZ is, in the ancient sense, 'festive': "it envisions an intensification of everyday life, or as the Surrealists might have said, life's penetration by the Marvelous [...] It lies at the intersection of many forces, like some pagan power-spot at the junction of mysterious ley-lines, visible to the adept in seemingly unrelated bits of terrain, landscape, flows of air, water, animals. [...] The patterns of force which bring the TAZ into being have something in common with those chaotic "Strange Attractors" which exist, so to speak, between the dimensions."

I don't think it's too far to push the TAZ concept to say that Jesus was involved in TAZing. The incarnation event was 'life's penetration by the Marvelous', which existed in festival for a while before the authorities radared it and tried to crush it. Jesus' miracles can be seen in the same way: foretastes of another world, TAZs breaking through, complex, strange, without fixed dimensions.

I believe, as John L pushed towards in his comments, that the Emerging Church will not be hopelessly utopian if it follows Jesus' TAZ vision. Never institutionalising, never forming solidly, always festive, always uprising, always liberating, always slipping away, Trickster-style before the authorities can crush it. But, as John rightly points out, this will take a totally different sort of leadership, and membership. One that resists trying to permanently inhabit the spaces that should only be TAZs. Permanent spaces have to be state-sanctioned; they are not penetrated by the Marvelous.

Of course, 'utopia' means 'no place'. If we are dreaming of 'winning', and turning everyone on to our way of thinking, we are trying to create permanent, pure places that will divide and oppress. If, on the other hand, we are about more modest, local visions, about creating festive TAZs, then these temporal, radical 'non places' are, by that definition, utopian.

So, is the Emerging Church hopelessly utopian? In many senses, I hope so. The utopian instinct is part of our divine humanity for things to change - and thank God for hopelessly utopian figures like William Wilberforce - but we must temper this desire with our also very human instinct to grab power. If we can find that middle way then I, for one, am in.

Technorati: Black Mass | Festival | Jay Winter | John Gray | TAZ

Is The Emerging Church Hopelessly Utopian? [2]

In the previous post, I outlined John Gray's recent conclusion that, post-Iraq (and thus, essentially, post Neo-con), post-Communism, post-Marxism, post-Nazism, the grand utopian ideas of the 20th Century had proved themselves failures, and that we should all give up on grand political visions. I paralleled that with some of the disenchantment I've seen expressed about the 'emerging church' movement.

Commenting on that, Matt says:

"With a few exceptions, the utopias of the c20th were of an all-encompassing top-down nature, rather than the organic communities of the c19."

I think this is pretty spot on, and actually lines up nicely with the later sections of the Prospect article on utopias, where the writer points out that:

"During the 19th Century, many utopians tried to create perfect societies in small settlements, often in the 'new world' of the US. [...] The real harm came in the 20th Century, when utopians abandoned the idea of withdrawing from the world and instead attempted to remake it."

I think this model is actually helpful. We can see two visions of the emerging church through it: the 'withdrawal' model (no giggling, please ;-) or the 're-making' model. Both have been seen to fail in history. The withdrawal model because the very act of attempting to create a pure society carries within it its own destruction, especially when disillusionment with the leader comes (which it always does). The re-making model fails because it is essentially futile. We can't bring heaven to the whole earth yet. Energy saps, and people drift away.

So what's the way forward? Do we admit the EC vision has been hopelessly utopian, and give up?

The Prospect article continues with a review of another book - Jay Winter's Dreams of Peace and Freedom (subtitle: Utopian Moments in the 20th Century) - which I think offers us some direction. Winter wants to 'resurrect a more modest strand of visionary thought, what he calls "minor utopias" [...] He describes these as visions of partial transformation that "sketch out a world very different from the one we live in, but from which not all social conflict or all oppression has been eliminated"'

So one way forward is for us to think of the emerging church in terms of such a 'minor utopia'. In other words, we retain the powerful vision, but are more realistic about the bounds and reach of that vision. It's always going to be partial transformation, and dirt is always going to remain.

As I outline in the book, the characters that help us to remain involved in 'dirt' are the Tricksters, and thus, if the Emerging Church is going to pull back from the 'hopelessly utopian' place, it must keep in touch with its tricksters; it must avoid trying to harden boundaries and purify its ground. In other speak, I think that means it needs to pro-actively avoid 'denominating' - moving towards a settled, denominated state. (See earlier post on this.)

Some ideas about how we might practically do that, I'll try to cover in the next post.

Technorati: Black Mass | Jay Winter | Nazism | Neocon | Politics | Denomination | Utopia

Salvaged Faith ¦ Baptized in Arial Black ¦ RS Exam Bloomers

We've been having school examinations the past week. I had to mark a bunch of scripts (the kids are 11/12 years old) of an RS paper on Christianity. Some of the answers were just priceless:

 

In a series of questions on parts of a church - what is an altar, what is a pulpit...

What is a font?

"I'm not sure what font they wrote the Bible in, but I reckon it was probably Times New Roman or Arial Black or something."

Genius. Though the cynical francophone atheist might have prefered 'Comic Sans' ;-)

 

What is the Salvation Army?

"The Salvation Army are a bunch of people who salvage Christians."

I think this is going to be a key emerging market! Anyone think their faith needs salvaging? Not sure how much I'd get for mine...

 

 

Technorati: RS | Exam | Bloomers | Font