Categories: uncategorized
Date: 16 July 2012 12:59:51
The Guardian has a state the blooming obvious article today explaining how police surviellance has been going on down in the Greenfields at Glastonbury but it's gotten me thinking - shouldn't churches be places of activity where the police need to come undercover to find out what is happening too? Jesus ended up going to the cross because he was engaged in a form of activism which threatened the authorities not through violence but through subverting the norms and values of the day and challenging the dominant thinking and worldly power structures of zealots, pharisees and rulers alike - if we are his followers seeking to act in line with the gospels shouldn't we be doing the same?
Ok, hands up I've been reading another chapter of Christoyannopoulos' Christian Anarchism but I've also been reading the Guardian article referred to above and listening to Graham Cray's Fresh Expression clip on "What is Church?" This all comes on top of a weekend when I ended up in tears feeling utterly confuddled and excluded within Sunday morning worship because it was all being done in a way which was so alien to me I kept getting lost and ended up in a wtf is happening place. But the central questions these articles and experiences have led me to thinking about is what does it mean to be a Christian who is part of the church? And what is the church?
Tolstoy and others who Christoyannopoulos refers to seem to judge the church as a corrupted institution which is in league with the establishment - something which we should have no part of. Cray seems to judge it to be a community rooted in worship and there for mission. I view it as Cray does to a large extent but with a level of cynicism more often found amongst Christian Anarchists. However, unlike the Christian Anarchists I refuse to throw the baby out with the bath water and I think the institution is something to be cherished as much as it is challenged. Going back to what I've said before I think that it should be rooted in a fluid understanding of what mixed economy is rather than in an either/ or model as so often seems the case at the moment.
Going back to my initial point I want to use this article to articulate what I think church should be and why I think it should be something that the police are as equally wary of as they are secular social movement activities. Within this reflection I will find myself taking on board elements of both Cray's envisioning and the Christian Anarchists critique of the church.
Church is about community and belonging not simply about buying into a product or event experience as Cray makes clear. It is about opting in, voluntarily, to another way of being and doing - one focused upon God (in the form of the whole trinity including the Spirit which Cray appears to neglect in his clip which is full of cliches and soundbites).
It is this focus and foundation which makes a faith community different to a secular political community - but both are subversive concepts.....which are by their very nature anti-capitalist. That is both are based not on getting people to buy into a product but rather encouraging people to opt into a different mindset based on an alternative way of thinking. Or that's the theory. I think too often churches have become places which are seeking to market themselves and/ or finance themselves through embracing rather than rejecting capitalist ideology.
As Cray makes clear what FX are offering people is a different set of norms and values. What makes Christianity different from secular anti-capitalist ideologies is that rather than simply focusing on the activities and ways of thinking involved and wanting to distance ourselves from the capitalist oppressor we see that we are just as guilty as the capitalist oppressor and that we need something to happen to make us change - we can't simply do it by will.
It is the Spirit within that prompts us to subvert our thinking, doing and being as we seek to follow Jesus example and live in a way which overcomes the oppressor through love, prayer and messing with the status quo. We lovingly rather than grudingly are inviting that oppressor to come and share with us and the oppressed in the communion meal. In that meal we are all meeting Jesus afresh - whilst we may be refusing to buy their products or live by the norms and values they seek to impose upon us. That role of the communion meal as an act of subversion (through the way it subverts all the norms and values we have about who dines / shares food with whom as well as the subversive nature of the act it remembers) is why I think that Cray is right and it should be something celebrated in a culturally appropriate way by all groups of Christians (churches). It is also why I think that if the church were being the institution it should be that our communion services should all be on the police database as dangerous activities. The sacrament should never be an easy thing to engage in and it should always have the power to be used to change our thoughts and actions. I think often we have made communion all too easy in our thinking.
In terms of what Cray says about mission I think he is essentially right in what he says but I felt disturbed by his language. He was using "one way terminology" that was he was talking about the church going and doing and being the group that existed for the community. As I get older and realise I know less I have come to see that the idea that the church has all the right answers and is the only place where God lives, breathes and walks is questionable to say the least and very probably wrong.
I see mission as people sometimes going and sometimes being in the context they are now (but opening their eyes enough to see where they are now is where they live, work, eat, sleep, shop and play - not just where they go for formal worship). I see it as people opening themselves up to the reality of being community with all the risk and vulnerability involved in that and being ready to learn and experience joy in the company of others. It is in that sharing that we get to see more of God and his love in ourselves and in others - through the hard times as well as the easy times.
God is not just seen or signposted through Christians - I believe he is in some form within all humanity and so all people are capable of signposting others to God - in a world which has so often closed peoples eyes to their own self-worth or the beauty of others around them our role as signposts is to help people see what is already there often within themselves. We cannot and must not as church set ourselves above others - although we may at times set ourselves apart from others in what we do or don't do.
So why's it not happening? Well, I don't know - I know I am part of the problem as well as part of the solution. Sunday morning somehow crystallised this for me. I - like most people - have moved away from living out my faith and have gotten caught up with being more interested in how we do stuff in church buildings and formal worship. I got upset and cried because I couldn't share the Lords prayer with others because of how it was being sung in a way I didn't get. I got upset in this ecumenical church because I'm not an Anglican and had felt lost all service - despite being apparently theologically literate and having a sheet that was meant to be guiding me through I was totally confused in terms of what was going on at times. Yet I wasn't crying about the world I saw around me and the very real exclusion happening and growing in our society. Now, I know in terms of the me getting frustrated that about the exclusion there is a wider issue about how we include those with little or no theological education/ literacy and that is where FX have a real role to play.....but that still keeps the focus on us and on how we do things. It keeps our minds pre-occupied with things which impact those coming in our doors, not things which are impacting the lived experience of the majority of people who are made in the image of God but don't come into church buildings.
As a church I believe we have gotten so caught up in what we do and how we feel about it we have, to some extent, lost our vision and purpose. We spend more time working out how to maintain our buildings and who to authorise to do what than we do focusing on oppression, injustice and so on that we are no threat to anybody and in turn no benefit to anybody a lot of the time I would argue. I wonder if we have lost our focus on God and his agenda.
Is God's church struggling in the current age because we are spending too much time trying to be respectable and as a result losing integrity? Will we be closer to what we should be when it is ourselves rather than leftie stall holders that the police struggle to understand and decide to keep on database?