Categories: uncategorized
Date: 29 May 2006 11:27:07
As mentioned in the previous post I feel DIY:the rise of lo-fi culture by Amy Spencer should be mandatory reading for anybody interested / involved in alt worship and/ or emergent church / emerging church. Whilst I may at times run the risk of being accused of being reductionaist let me start with a quote and then explain why.
"Subcultures often have to search for their place in the world, with participants moving away from their hometowns and forming communities in unfamiliar environments. In the 40s and 50s, restless youths moved to New York and San Francisco from smaller suburban or rural communities, looking to find themselves and like-minded comrades in the big cities....The early punk musicians, and other artists who worked alongside them, followed this artistic tradition of building a new creative community within an existing urban structure but separate in its ideas and aspirations. New York was their territory, the place where so many previous art movements had grown. Many punks moved from the suburbs looking for excitement and validation of their identity. Here punk was set in the middle classes, with middle class youth from the suburbs looking for an escape route from a life they felt to be dull and predictable." (Spencer, A, (2005), DIY: THE RISE OF LO-FI CULTURE, Marion Boyars, London pp 234 - 235).
Whilst the whole thing of alt worship, emerging and emergent church may be starting to look like it's getting stale and be moving away from the original ideas that is because it is following the established pattern of any DIY movement, inside or outside the church. It has made that jump from radical underground expression to being known and seeing the incorporation of many of the "safer" elements into the mainstream, as another "consumer choice".
As with DIY movements we have also seen the development of two distinct sets of community, which do overlap and meet in certain spaces,such as Greenbelt, but largely have developed seperately due to their nature. Firstly, there are the "professionals" many of whom now hold positions of leadership & influence. These people are those who make atleast part of their living from the phenomenon they have helped to create. They are the people who were often there on the ground floor and it is their frustrations we owe alot to. That said, they are people who themselves are now part of the situation they started trying to change because of the power they now hold.
Then there are the "grassroots" who use the media which have been created to support the whole sub-culture of "alt worship", "emerging" & "emergent church" .
We are the "fans" who use media like the Wibsite to create networks, aswell as create our own small scale part of the sub-culture, through wiblogs, etc. We know we will never be successful in terms of being visible or involved in leadership and are largely self-indulgent but we enjoy it. Also and more importantly many of us involved in this whole area ,(who if we're honest doesn't fit nicely into any of the labels and descriptions that the professional grouping use), are here because we are the slight misfits in mainstream churches. The people who get frustrated because we have turned up year in year out being expected to fit into Churchianity. Many of us have come to a stage where we have found being honest with God and ourselves has meant rejecting alot of the expectations of "Churchianity" but without rejecting God and so now we are searching for a way to live authentic faith in a way which suits us. Through the use of lo-fi DIY stuff we are connecting with others like ourselves and finding out we don't need to be told what our faith should be like, we are finding out that you don't need to have permission to be a Christian and that despite what it seems like sometimes there are other people like us out there,which we can form community with and find support from.
The DIY culture and history also teaches us how we can be a community who are coming from different places but all co-operating together, not believing the lie that the "other" is dangerous. If I've got it right on this site I'm sharing ideas and learning about our heritage, with people from a range of traditions,(I'm a Baptist sharing with Orthodox, Methodist, Catholic, Cof E, NFI, and Hillsong - hope I've got that about right in terms of where people are). What we're doing is learning that beyond the segregation that the denominational system inadvertantly leads to there are others who are just like us and by sharing we can actually move forward.
Looking at the situation alot of mainstream denominations are getting themselves into I think that DIY culture in the church (in widest term) is going to become more important. There are alot of us who refuse to be "church leavers" who want to invest time engaging with others from a range of theological perspectives to develop our understanding of God and thinking about a range of issues regarding spirituality and our understanding of scripture (including but most definately going beyond the issue of sexuality) and are finding that this is impossible, (or certainly challenging), within our home churches. The "grass roots" emergent type of subculture which has developed is the one place in the church where I think that it really doesn't matter if you are married, single, gay, straight, bi, balck, white, young, old, liberal, evangelical, radical or whatever.
Reading the book will also be useful because I think churches fall into the trap of trying to find a formular and keeping to it. DIY has shown that there is and has to be evolution and space for each generation to develop its own networks and ideas, reinventing ideas from and expressing frustration with previous times and ways of doing things.