Why I Don't Go To Church

The other day I read this article entitled: "Why I don't go to church." It questions our assumptions about the word 'church' and how we use it, and how far we have drifted from the Biblical definition. Church = PEOPLE - we ARE the Church. How can we 'go' to it? Not only the building/organism confusion, we have also lost a sense of there being One Church, not in the universal sense (we seem to at least pay lip service to that concept), but in a geographical sense - as in "the Church of (fill in name of city)" - which is how Paul addresses his letters.

This of course means we have a shared responsibility for our city. All of it. All of us. Which has implications.

The photo is of the only church building I've ever seen that gets it right. "Meets here..." should be a compulsory add-on to all church building signs!

MPhil-ip me!

Well, it's official. My application to do an MPhil with the Urban Theology Unit in Sheffield has been accepted by their validating university, Birmingham, beginning October 1st. The old (and I mean 'old') academic chops are going to have to get not only restored but multiplied. To say I'm a bit daunted by this undertaking would be putting it mildly, but it seems to be 'right' to give it a good go. Maybe a Peter getting out of the boat situation.

I ended my 2007 sabbatical feeling I was entering a year of transition. I'd begun some study on "Mission With" as a theological back-fill on my involvement with Carisma and PeaceWeek which had opened up a number of other avenues of thought which needed more exploration. And I still had my 'itch'. The Urban Presence Trustees recommended I try to keep the study going a day a week. In December I gave a presentation on "Mission With" to the annual Urban Theology Collective, one of the members of which heads up the Post-Graduate bit of UTU. Afterwards he suggested I had the beginnings of a good MPhil. There followed several months of weighing up pros and cons, praying and taking advice, which was mostly "go for it". So I did. Recently I realised that October 1 is ONE YEAR EXACTLY from when my sabbatical finished. Spooky.

So, as best as I can work out, I think God is in this. Oo-er. The title of the research proposal is: "“Mission With” in Inner-city Manchester: Presence, Partnership and Power in Local Church Community Engagement" The sub-title is a quote from Steve Chalke: "True incarnation is when I go out and get involved in a local project where I don't run the show and I don't pull all the strings." No doubt I'll comment on progress here from time to time. Meantime, those of you who do, please pray for me!


P.S. The title of this blog sounds better said in a Belfast accent as it is a play on a local colloquialism. (This piece of information should, academically speaking, have a footnote leading to at least one verifiable source, referenced in a Bibliography, to demonstrate its accuracy... or you can take my word for it.)

Knock-down Countdown

In Asda the other day I came across a huge display of Ramadan Countdown Calendars. Each door had a question on it (e.g. How long do we fast for?) and just like our Advent Calendars a piece of chocolate behind it. They were half-price, so I bought one. I was curious as to why so many of them and why the price reduction. Was there a theological problem? Or some sort of disapproval of the concept?

Now I think I know...

The chocolate tastes AWFUL. Even my girls won't touch it and that is saying something.

Are you having a drink?

The last two weekends Judith and I have been guests at a friend's daughter's wedding. They are Muslim so the wedding takes place over several events spread over about 10 days. It was a great experience, lots of people having a great time, and of course fantastic food (there's not a lot I won't do for a decent curry!) Interesting to compare and contrast to 'our' weddings - some similar traditions, some that were new to me. Like trying to take something, preferably money, but a shoe will do, off the groom. Or everyone feeding wedding cake to the bride and groom.

The wedding service (there was a civil marriage some days beforehand) seems to take place in 2 parts. A ceremony with the Imam and the bride in a private room then another in the main room with Imam and the groom (to be honest I couldn't hear much of it). Then with much celebration the bride is brought into the main room and presented to the groom.

A big difference is that over the two events there was not one drop of alcohol consumed. Now hang on... didn't I say up there people had a "great time"? Is that possible without the imbibing of intoxicating liquids? Well, yes it would appear so. Contrast our white christian (small c) British culture where it is assumed the drinks have to be alcoholic for enjoyment to be possible, to the extent that the word 'drink' in certain contexts = 'alcoholic drink'. As someone who has had his manhood questioned BY FELLOW CHRISTIANS when ordering a soft drink in a pub I think this is a big problem in the Church also. I'm not teetotal, but I wonder if in these days of binge and alco-fuelled violence if we can learn something from the Muslim community and be more ready to challenge the cultural assumption behind "are you having a drink?"

O me of little faith

Last Saturday was the annual fun day in our city park. Judith and I are part of the 'Friends' group of local residents that organise and run it. We arrived and met the rest of the group at 9.30am as planned to start setting up... but didn't as it was raining very heavily from a sky of unbroken dark grey. Nick from church turned up in the minibus. We climbed in and began to decide whether to call the day off or to move it indoors at the church.

I was for calling it off, and was still unsure when the rain slackened to heavy and one of the group - not a committed Christian - got out and said: "Looks like the rain is stopping. Let's get started." As we put up the first couple of gazebos the rain got a bit lighter, but I still wasn't convinced and was grumbling that we'd look like right idiots later, sheltering in one of the gazebos in a sodden and empty park. You see, I knew the weather forecast was for heavy showers all day...

Well, the rain stopped. We finished setting up, the jazz band, food, entertainers and face-painters arrived, the sun began to shine, and people started to come. Apart from a brief and not very heavy shower around 2pm, the next serious rain was about 5pm. By that time the event was over, several hundred people had come and had a great time, some community cohesing had occurred, and we'd done most of the clearing up.

Alannah told me later when she'd first noticed the gray skies she'd prayed that the rain would stop. Now, why didn't I think of that?







Photos: Top: 9.45am - view from the front of the minibus. Middle: 3pm - the Fun Day in full swing. Bottom: 5pm - the Friends group shelter under the trees, clearing up nearly done.
More photos of the Fun Day here.

Toaster

We bought The Simpsons series 6 on DVD recently (bargain price on CD-Wow). Much to my delight it includes one of my all-time favourite bits - the middle section of "Treehouse of Horror V" where Homer travels back in time while trying to fix a broken toaster and ends up altering the future when he swats a fly. This cycle is repeated numerous times with bizarre and laugh-out-loud results, in a great spoof of the Butterfly Effect.


I suppose I should make a spiritual point here...












Doh.

Relocation, relocation, relocation

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)