the Weary Pilgrim

how radical...is your orthodoxy

We've heard the term " Radical Orthodoxy " being bounced around the the realm of cyberspace.  It was a treat to hear the leading thinkers and founders of the movement, John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock in conversation, opening the depth of what they see as radical orthodoxy. The podcast is about 51 minutes. The conversation reaches back to pre-modern faith of pre 1300's...and looking forward past postmodernity.

Have a listen...is this orthodoxy to radical for you?

This past week CBC “Ideas” ran a program looking at the movement, and now you can download the podcast. Here is the description:

On Radical Orthodoxy

The modern world seems bent on its own destruction. A theological movement called “Radical Orthodoxy” believes it has uncovered the roots of the modern mistake. David Cayley talks to the movement’s founders and leading writers, John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock.

CBC Ideas

church transformation...

Still reflecting on change I came across an article by Darryl Dash, interviewing Alan Roxbourgh around change in the local church...

According to Alan, most recognize that Christendom has ended and Canadian culture is rapidly changing. This discontinuous change is more than a blip. We are not going back to where we were before, and this makes some anxious.

The story that shaped the church for much of the twentieth century is no longer the story that will move it forward. The habits and practices and the way we did church were developed for a certain kind of culture that no longer exists. Therefore, many of our old habits and practices no longer make sense. This is generally accepted and no longer a matter of debate.

Surface Change...

Issues arise as leaders ask what it means to be the church in this new context. Some are trying to revitalize churches by changing at the surface level without understanding the underlying issues. These approaches fail because they do not bring about culture change.

When churches change at the surface, they take what they're doing try to do it better. They hope that if they become welcoming enough, run the right programs, and hire the right pastor, they will attract people. The assumption is that the culture of the church doesn't need to change; they just need better implementation and marketing.

These churches often look for solutions to come from the outside. A church or denomination calls in a great leader, and this leader comes in with programs to turn things around. This way of thinking leads to short term spikes but fails to bring about lasting change.

Read more from Darryl about real change... here

The Upside of Down...Thomas Homer-Dixon @ Uvic :: Saturday

Saturday May 19th 7:30 pm @ the University of Victoria

University Center :: Farquhar Auditorium                           

Cost :: Free

Details here to resereve your seat

In The Upside of Down, political scientist and award-winning author Thomas Homer-Dixon argues that converging stresses could cause a catastrophic breakdown of national and global order — a social earthquake that could hurt billions of people. But he shows that this outcome isn't inevitable; there's much we can do to prevent it. And after setting out a general theory of the growth, breakdown, and renewal of societies, he shows that less severe types of breakdown could open up extraordinary opportunities for creative, bold reform of our societies.

Homer-Dixon contends that five "tectonic stresses" are accumulating deep underneath the surface of today's global order:

• energy stress, especially from increasing scarcity of conventional oil;
• economic stress from greater global economic instability and widening income gaps between rich and poor;
• demographic stress from differentials in population growth rates between rich and poor societies and from expansion of megacities in poor societies;
• environmental stress from worsening damage to land, water forests, and fisheries; and,
• climate stress from changes in the composition of Earth's atmosphere.

Of the five, energy stress plays a particularly important role, because energy is humankind's master resource. When energy is scarce and costly, everything a society tries to do — including growing its food, obtaining enough fresh water, transmitting and processing information, and defending itself — becomes far harder.

The effect of the five stresses is multiplied by the rising connectivity and speed of our societies and by the escalating power of small groups to destroy things and people, including, potentially, whole cities.

Drawing parallels between the challenges we face today and the crisis faced by the Roman empire almost two thousand years ago, Homer-Dixon argues that these stresses and multipliers are potentially a lethal mixture. Together, they greatly increase the risk of a cascading collapse of systems vital to our wellbeing — a phenomenon he calls "synchronous failure." Societies must do everything they can to avoid such an outcome.

On the other hand, if people are well-prepared, they may be able to exploit less extreme forms of breakdown to achieve deep reform and renewal of institutions, social relations, technologies, and entrenched habits of behavior. This is likely our best hope for a prosperous and humane future.

cha-cha-change...defining moments

Last week I wrote a post, " emergence under pressure...in your church." It tweaked some nerves, poked some old wounds, and also revealed some circumstances that people find themselves in now. I must say in the process of e-mail conversations with a few people, some old wounds I thought had been healed re-surfaced and started to bleed ...causing me to reflect.

Now in the post, I talked about pressure on faith communities from the prevailing postmodern culture that surrounds us from all sides. We can't avoid the reality that these pressures should cause change. Again, I want to say, the pressure of post modernity does not change the Gospel...what changes is how we engage the culture with the Gospel.

But in this post I want to talk about inside pressure...that can be as deadly to the life of the community as pressures from the outside.

I write out of my experience from a few years back, and I'm finally at a place where I can confront the mess that I had basically swept in to a dark corner of my mind. So this is therapeutic for me, and also I hope my old friends from St. Stephens will find some understanding in it.

This was a community that wanted change, they asked for change...and they understood the reason for change. But the failed to understand a couple of important things...

• in order to change a complex system it must be disturbed
• systems resist change...disturb a complex system and it will attempt to return to stability, the status quo.

It's interesting Scott Peck talks about Pseudo-community. It’s the group where we meet together and smile, even when hearts are breaking. We are polite and avoid conflict.. and honesty and growth. The only way to achieve community is to pass through chaos.. and emptiness. Because systems resist change, most groups cycle through chaos back to pseudo-community. That doesn’t bode well for churches attempting to come to grips with the changes around them.

Pseudo-community on the surface can look like the real thing, but it is very deceptive and is only the illusion of real community. This community took a survey by a group called " Natural Church Development Institute. " The community scored highest in loving relationships, and community. The down-side, the survey doesn't differentiate between pseudo and the real thing.

Scott Peck also says this about community:  community is not achieved once for all… it requires constant effort and vigilance; and community is not sustainable unless it has a clearly defined task and that change is a constant variable in communal life.

“The only obstacle to building and maintaining community within an organization is not structural. It’s political. If you get somebody at the top, or who are dominant in the community,  who are not willing to relinquish the structure, even temporarily, or who have to dominate everything, there’s no way you can have community in that organization. So the people in the community, particularly the domineering, have to be willing to temporarily lay aside their egos and their agendas.”

Institutions seek stability, and a couple of ways they do it is through tradition, well defined roles and structure. Anglican churches are embedded in hundreds of years of this kind of organization and are about as stable as a mountain...and changing direction is near impossible, unless you have dynamite. Any change that is likely to happen will come in infinitely small increments, noticeable only under a microscope. It might take the form of a committee, years of discussion...and eventually the conversation dies like fading wind.

But by miracle, if it does get to the point where the community is ready to think about changing direction, sorting and packing the things that make up the community, things begin to teeter a bit...and instability sets in. Relational alliances begin to shift, new allegiances are formed, undermining will happen, power struggles within the community...and the blame game starts.

Any of this sound familiar. This is sort of what Moses experienced in the wilderness with his faith community. So when the boat that the faith community lives in begins to rock... instability, predictability, and control are like waves on the ocean...folks start to look around. They never seem to look ahead to the horizon to the future. Everyone seems to strain to look backwards to where they came from.

It is here where faith becomes monumental, this is where the community will be defined and shaped. This is the place where the community builds altars, this is the place they truly meet God. This is the place where the community has the most potential and creativity.

This is where we can truly say we have changed...or

christian sub-culture...how many people can we drown in the shallow end of the pool

 

Listen to Dick Staub, Part two... " The Culturally Savvy Christian " ... a stunning wake up to the prevailing christian sub-culture of the North American evangelical church.

Click ... < HERE > ... to listen.

Dick Staub...The Culturally Saavy Christian

Dick Staub turns the reins of The Kindlings Muse over to his trusted friend Bill Hogg a man with that rare blend of wisdom and wit delivered in the tongue of one who speaks in the accent he swears we will hear in heaven. They are talking about Dick Staub’s newest book “The Culturally Savvy Christian: A Manifesto for Deepening Faith and Enriching Popular Culture in an Age of Christianity-Lite,” described by scholar/pastor NT Wright as “an urgent book for our times.”

For those not familiar with Dick Staub, he hails out of the Pacific Northwest in the Seattle area. He has been engaged in the conversation of faith and culture for years. He does a live podcast from Hales Ales Brewery & Pub , Seattle’s Fremont District,  every Monday night at 7pm. After years of interviewing the shapers of American culture-authors, business leaders, educators, politicians, futurists, theologians, filmmakers, musicians and trend-watchers - Dick Staub is emerging as one of today’s most experienced and thoughtful observers of ideas in contemporary culture.

I'm barely in Dick's new book," The Culturally Saavy Christian ", and from the small bytes I've tasted...I'm ready to digest a whole more. Bill Hogg is doing the first of a three part interview around the book, and you can listen to it ...click < here >.

ridding ourselves of " god in the slots "

I have followed the writing of Simon Barrow for years, he is always in the forefront of the conversation around faith and society. He constantly seeks to erase the artificial boundary the church has constructed between the sacred and the secular...from God and the world that surrounds us. The following are a few bytes from Simon's article, I encourage you to read it all. They are timely words, the church desperately needs to give ear to...

What this means is that the God of whom Christians traditionally speak (the source, transformer and destiny of life) cannot, by definition, be fitted into a gap, a box or a slot. Ironically, many outside the church seem to understand this better than those inside it – even though those in it, especially if they are bishops, are supposed to have learned at least a bit of theology.

Moreover, there is a biblical case for saying that the God of the prophets and of Jesus is supremely uninterested in “religion” as a specialist activity extricated or set against the rest of life. On the contrary, the prophets oppose ritual devoid of ethical commitment and human solidarity. Similarly, Jesus challenges the Temple system and the monopoly of religious leaders over the ordinary people, and Paul says that the important gifts of the Spirit are a new way of living not a spiritual ego-trip.

All of this ought to be relatively uncontroversial to a church that has come to terms with the dynamic of the Gospel that formed it. But instead its mind has been seized by fear, and by “religious” distortions of its message shaped by an alliance with governing powers and ideas – ones that have encouraged an essentially dualistic mindset.

Because the world is continually foisting “religion” (which depends on an idea of a god alien to the world) upon us, an alternative community is needed to sustain a different, non-dualistic understanding. It does this through worship (learning not to mistake anything in the world for God, and not to reduce God to anything in the world) and through prayer (learning to receive life as a gift to be shared not a product to be manipulated to our advantage). Strictly speaking these activities therefore have nothing to do with “religion” as it is conventionally defined these days. In fact they stand in opposition to it.

The upshot of all this is that the Christian Gospel, at least – I don’t seek to speak on behalf of other faith perspectives – cannot and should not depend upon obsessively ring-fencing bits of worldly life for God, as if God needed or asked us to do this.

So if Christians are invited to share their experience, insights and understanding on TV and radio, great; but they should not try to keep others out. Indeed they should welcome conversation and dialogue. Otherwise they are contradicting their message, which is about gift not possession.

And this...

Similarly, the job of the church is most definitely not to give people the entirely false impression that God is only present when they are in power, or that the presence of “secular” persons or ideas means the exclusion of God – as if God were a competitor for space within the world, constantly in danger of being “squeezed out”.

The message of the incarnation, on the contrary, is that – in opposition to what is usually supposed – God, while remaining beyond our grasp, is a life-giver who is not against the flesh, but who comes to us in and through it, affirming and transforming “the earthly” in the direction of a living which is truly unrestricted, unlike a good deal of our rather mean attempts at it.

This means that the job of the church in post-Christendom has nothing to do with defending Christian oases in a spiritual desert, or demanding, as of “right”, the sort of “God slots” which actually end up confirming people’s suspicion that God is a weakling in need of propping up, or a human-crafted consumable alongside others – albeit with a distinctly unfashionable religious label.

Instead, the job of the church is to speak and act in such a way that people can look at life and other people and see – not something less than what is around and in them, but something bigger, something more beautiful, truly liberating and hopeful beyond mere calculation. This is tough, because life is also tragic and difficult. Not denying its underlying goodness takes guts, imagination and self-giving.

And to finish it off...

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer pointed out many years ago, the “religious” god is destined to die, because this is not the unconditioned God who is met – paradoxically – in the tortured body of Christ, in the poor, and in all kinds of “non-religious” people and things which have much more to do with fullness of life (what God gives) than organized religion and metaphysics. God does not need self-appointed political defenders, but those who live life unconditionally.

Read the whole article...here.

trans/*/ition {*growth in the gutter}

Good friend, artist, thoughtful creative and cultural engager Jason Nobel, whom I've also had the pleasure of working with on some Poasis projects has a gallery showing coming...

trans|*|ition

trans|*|ition
{*growth in the gutter}



faith, identity, and superheroes:
exploring the growth between 'before' and 'after.'

where: con brio music school (1270 may st, victoria bc).
opening: june 1, 2007; 7-9pm.
when: june 3-24, 2007.
open to view: 1-5pm on sundays or by appointment.

Ok here's the ...Map... now you can't say you don't know how to get there.

sacred and secular...the postmodern context

Thoughtful humans, both religious and irreligious, recognize the symptoms of cultural and spiritual banality described by cultures thoughtful creatives. In Fight Club, writer Chuck Palahnuik gives voice to a lost generation: " We are the middle children of history---no purpose or place. There is no great war for us to fight, no great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great deression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'll be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. We're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."

Michael Stipe, lead singer of REM, adds, " We are floundering more---culturally, political, spiritually---than I can imagine has been in several centuries. It's hard to imagine that so many people are confused about who they are---and who's pulling the strings."

The late writer Walker Percy observed, " You live in a deranged age, more deranged than usual, because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing."

All humans share a common need and desire for a creative, spiritual, intellectual, moral, and realtional renaissance, and yet, in todays polarized cultural war, we are not talking to each other. ( Dick Staub, The Culturally Savvy Christian...introduction pg. xiii )

emergence under pressure...in your church

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future. ( John F Kennedy )

The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers. ( Scott M Peck )

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. ( Charles Darwin )

Change is inevitable, except from vending machines. ( Unknown )

People can knowing come to the place where they say they need change. They can commit to change...and enter into the journey. But in the land of transition they will fight it tooth and nail, and die before seeing change through. There is something about looking ahead to a new horizon, not being able to really see what is ahead that causes fear... so much fear, we'll strain our necks, constantly looking back to the land of familiarity we just left.

I have seen and experienced this. Being on leadership team I saw a community turn, the lead Pastor ended up on extended leave for depression, and his wife in Eric Martin Institute on suicide watch. Change is inevitable...but most churches will fight it to the end.

Again here I'm speaking from the experience where I find myself now, and from where I have been and come from. Most churches are insular, creating their own culture...and have no idea, or understanding of the prevailing culture that surrounds them. Most would compartmentalize it into sacred and secular...one good one bad...live in one and avoid the other. They would acknowledge it as quite different...but would not understand why. In most cases, the fear of not understanding does nothing more than to reinforce there existing structures...no matter what the cost.

Most people in faith communities around Victoria will not likely heard of the " Emerging Church Conversation." Some in the conversation have come up with a very definitive label of what the emerging church is...I'm not one of them. Pete Rollin's of Ikon says it beautifully...

While the term ' emerging church ' is increasingly being employed to describe a well defined and well- equipped religious movement, in actual fact it is currently little more than a fragile, embryonic and diverse conversation being held between individuals over the Internet and at various small gatherings. Not only does the elusive and tentative nature of this conversation initially make it difficult to describe what, if anything, unifies those involved; the sheer breadth of perspectives held by those within the dialog makes terms such as ' movement ', ' denomination ', and ' church ' seem somewhat inappropriate...rest here.

Do we all need to become " emerging churches "...no, not necessarily...but it would be good for churches to read and understand what it is all about. In my mind, one of the most important things about the emerging conversation is that, it has sought to seek to understand the relationship between faith and postmodern culture...in the context of where the church finds itself today.

A great resource on the emerging conversation comes from Prof. Scot McKnight...it's a twelve page document and well worth reading...and can be found here.

One of the greatest causes of change is pressure...from storms changing our land scape, a potters hand applying force changing the shape of a lump of clay...and of course...postmodern culture applying pressure on the church.

In my previous post, " blazing new trails " was a quote from Elizabeth O'Connor...

“We never have expected to hit upon that final stable structure. This is important for a church to understand, for when it starts to be the church it will be constantly be adventuring out into places where there are no tried and tested ways. If the church in our day has few prophetic voices above the noise of the street, perhaps in large part it is because the pioneering spirit has become foreign to it. It shows little willingness to explore new ways. Where it does it has often been called an experiment. We would say the church of Christ is never an experiment, but where that church is true to it’s mission it will be experimenting, pioneering, blazing new paths, seeking how to speak the reconciling words of God to it’s own age.” It cannot do this if it is held captive by the structures of another day.

We can't turn our heads any longer and try and recapture the past, we need to wake-up to the reality that changing culture/post-modernity is a constant pressure on the church. To avoid it is to become so insular, that  you live in a vacuum in which you will likely suffocate and die.

Many churches are also feeling the pressure of declining numbers, and with that diminishing church budgets...money just isn't around in the same way it was. This too is making the church look at sustainable structures. Again pressure, and nothing like pressure to fuel creativity...in experimenting, pioneering and blazing new paths.

The Gospel still is, and will always be the Good News...no matter what " post " culture the church finds itself in. We can allow the pressure of the prevailing culture to shape us, so we can better engage it...or we can avoid it, and suffer the consequences of being no news at all.

And love dares you to care
For people on the edge of the night
And love dares you to change our way
Of caring about ourselves
This is our last dance
This is our last dance
This is ourselves under pressure
Under pressure pressure ( David Bowie )