Yesterday was interesting. During the day I went to a conference on incarnational ministry called 'Living Amongst'. About 30 people, most if not all of whom were already doing what it said on the tin - re-locating to areas those who can choose to move out of. Talk of identifying, living alongside, long-term, struggle, frustration... and the mix of joy that comes from knowing you are where you are by choice and obedience to the call of God and not through dutiful grit teeth. The word 'transformation' came up several times, in a wider context as a Kingdom vision to aim for, in a personal sense as much about OUR transformation as learners, neighbours, servants, detoxifying control-freaks as about anyone else's.
In the evening I joined with about 500 others for a big prayer event (er... not over 6000 as
quoted on the BBC News website) focusing on gang crime. Here the talk was of exciting projects and initiatives run by churches and Christian organisations, often in partnership with the Police - including of course
Street Pastors - community clean-ups, drops in crime-rates, acts of kindness. Here 'transformation' in the wider context was already taking place, in communities, in towns and cities, in the personal sense as something happening already to young people all over the city. I'm not knocking any of this, it's great that as Christians we're getting out of our buildings and doing stuff. But I am concerned that we think it's enough. Venture out into a poor area, do a project, come to a meeting and pray and jump and sing and think we've 'done' social action.
A few weeks ago
Shane Claiborne visited Manchester. This is someone who is doing the incarnational 'living amongst' thing, in
community and in a quite radical way, attracting much admiration particularly from young evangelicals. A lot of the people who were at the meeting last night were also there and heard him say the
first mark of what he and his friends were trying to do was "Relocation to the abandoned places of Empire." Relocation. I heard nothing of this last night, or of any of what we had been reflecting on earlier in the day.
I kept thinking last night of a quote from Ann Morisy's superb book "
Journeying Out." "The radical, missionary activity of the Church cannot, like liberal, secular, social policy, aim at the transformation of the poor. In the new adaptive zone we have entered,
the aim must be the transformation of the secure, the well-meaning and the well-endowed of this world. The processes that Jesus teaches and demonstrates invest potential in the most unlikely, not in the well resourced." (my emphasis) And that transformation needs to start right here, with us.
I think yesterday I saw, and have been struggling to reconcile, two approaches to the same thing. One thinks big, one thinks small. Both have their pluses and negatives, but I think ultimately one is from a safe distance, shallower, short-term, and will not actually transform in the deeper way that I think the Bible would have us strive for - justice, inequality. (And maybe this should start with the Church and work outwards.) The other is an attempt at going further in, reducing that distance, living among, working 'WITH' rather than 'for': dare I say doing it as Jesus did - the one who sends us as he was sent. From this foundation there is still a place for projects such as community clean-ups, but it would involve working with other local people to do it. A bit different from sending in 100 young people to pick up litter FOR the community, with the risk of reinforcing the dependency culture, and never asking the question why it got untidy again after the last time we did it.
Shane Claiborne quoted Søren Kierkegaard: "The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church's prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall in the hands of the living God."
I was chatting with the speaker at the end of the 'Living Amongst' day and saying perhaps we should do a conference for the church called "Relocation, relocation, relocation". But would anyone come?
Footnote: 6pm. As I write this some of my neighbours are sitting on their doorstep across the street getting very drunk and playing the same song over and over on a volume-up-to-distortion hi-fi... Praying for rain.
Cartoon "Gabardine Swine" by Roy Mitchell. (Source: torn out of a magazine years ago)
