Categories: uncategorized
Date: 29 October 2008 10:34:43
Q. What is your relationship to/ involvement in Church? What is your relationship to/involvement in Emerging Church? What is your relationship to/ involvement in Emergent Church? What is your relationship to / involvement in Missional Church? and finally what is your relationship to / involvement in Deep Church?
At this point I am guessing that I have a few readers who can answer all those questions. I welcome those visitors who are here because their Macs, (and they will be probably be macs), are set up to find stuff which contains these "buzz" words. However beyond these visiting "professional practioners" I'm thinking most of us will be struggling to answer all of the above.
I'm guessing that there are a few more people amongst us, particularly the Greenbelt regulars, who will be able to answer some of the above and will have, atleast some understanding of what these questions mean.
And then there will be the humble reader whom I welcome most of all, that is the person who understands the first question but isn't quite sure what b****ks the rest of it is on about.
What the above should have illustrated is that we have come to a place where the language is becoming a barrier. If other people are like me, in this murky world of specialised terms, they aren't quite sure how what they do fits into the relevant categories. Therefore, what has sought to be an inclusive movement is increasingly becoming self-defeating due to it's increasing use of exclusive terms that those outside it's inner circle of professionals fail to understand or get to the point of not wanting to understand. This over-reliance on buzzwords we don't understand is something which comes clearly out within Mark Sayers article on Emerging Church.info. It is also something which makes me worry that Jason Clark of the Deep Church site may be disappointed when he talks of wanting to have "church goers", (and one presumes the word "ordinary" should be going before it), involved in the ongoing Deep Church conversation.
What I think the "professionals" need to recover is the fact that this "movement" whatever it is, is primarily made up of people simply doing what they do. For example, I am sure that there are those who would argue, (and I would be one of them), that the Wibsite fits somewhere into the web of "church" the questions above referred to. My reasoning here is we are a community, primarily made up of Christians, engaged in regular conversation, sharing our journeys with each other. As a community part of what we are involved in sometimes, through our reading and writing of blog posts and comments, is sharing what God (father, son and spirit) has done in our lives and through this building relationships which have resulted in some of us supporting each other and being supported through prayer and in practical ways at times of crisis. It's also a place where you may sometimes find icons posted, or prayers, or spiritual poems, (but not normally on this blog), which can be identified as forms of worship. So the Wibsite becomes one of our forms of church, although not usually the primary one.
Many of us are creative people, who naturally reflect God within our creative endevours. This fruits of our creativity may be used in "formal", "institutional" - "normal" church services, they might be used in themed services, they might simply be shared with others as gifts or they might be kept by ourselves and used or not within our personal spiritual activity. The thing is with it all, whilst what we do and how we do it might be be something which connects us into one of these different types of / ways of doing church we actually normally don't know or care - we simply like making / creating stuff and often sharing it with other people.
As for the ecumenical stuff and the learning of different practices we don't necessarily do it in a conscious way, but we do it. Again coming back to the Wibsite, I know I am sharing with amongst others Orthodox, Anglican, Catholic, Mennonite, Methodist and Baptist people. Through what they blog about their everyday I learn stuff about their traditions which I might or might not follow up further. This coming together with others of different denominations is something which is multiplied in my every day life through ordinary interaction with friends, colleagues and such like. Equally I learn this stuff through books and through coming into contact with heritage sites. It all impacts my thinking and wider (spiritual) life and practice. Yet I don't think of it as getting involved with any new ways of doing stuff, rather I think of it as "chatting to my friends", "reading blogs and books" and "visiting interesting places". In terms of how it's translated it's not a particular type of "church" it's prayer and stuff.
So, returning to the questions I posed at the beginning I have to admit I can't answer them. I know I am involved in some if not all of the above to some extent, even if I don't even understand what half of them mean. Yet, my involvement is chosen, in that I have to decided what to do and how to do it but it is not conscious because I don't even know where half of the stuff I do fits in. That is what I think "the professionals" have to realise, particularly if they are trying to build a movement, we don't need boxes to tick - we just need to be acknoweldged as getting on with it... what ever it is and encouraged in doing so. The role these "professionals" and "facilitators" should have is in helping us think about our practice so we can identify, through discussion, bible study and prayer, which aspects are useful in building ourselves and others up and in helping connecting ourselves and others to God and which aren't, according to the time and space we find ourselves in.
On this basis I'd be really happy if the ongoing conversation weren't entitled "Emerging", "Emergent", "Deep", "Post-Evangelical" church or anything else but rather we could all just have a massive chat about what we're doing and why and what we've found useful and why. Perhaps one of these professionals, and it would probably need to be them, because they have the right set of networking connections, could set up it up on Facebook, at Greenbelt and in other spaces. Within this chat we could, perhaps have a talk about the Christian sites we network on and why we find them useful. This, perhaps could then lead to a central directory of organisations and groups involved in all this stuff becoming available. Ok, I know it would soon be out of date, and some groups would want to be below the radar, but if it were online somewhere and became a popular well known resource it would be updated as people went along.
It would be enevitable that the conversation and directory would then be taken into working groups and stuff, and the professionalisation of it would occur but then as is the case at the moment the grass roots would always be doing something. So there you have it, a dream - a dream that we'll stop getting bogged down by the language and just all get involved in sharing in a big conversation and doing stuff which doesn't need a technical name.