Session 3 – Challenging Powers

The Jews in Babylon – a powerless group of exiles, who nonetheless challenged the Empire

Models of challenging powers

Asking awkward questions, e.g. the assumption that economic growth is always desirable. We also need to be willing to question – often Christians seem more ready to simply provide answers.

Modelling creative alternatives, e.g. restorative justice

Protest, e.g. civil disobedience.

Prayer – e.g. Daniel 9, the imagining of an alternative reality.

It’s hard to challenge the powers individually – note that Daniel was part of a group. We need to think about how challenge as a community, and how we resource each other.

How to challenge as a community

We need to understand that we live in a discipling culture. We are being discipled by our culture all the time, our culture wants us to see things in certain ways.

We can be a community of resistance and discernment, e.g. being discerning about the TV adverts we watch.

We need to be realistic about our capacity. We are a sizeable minority, but still a minority. We must be careful not to wear ourselves out.

We need to keep checking our tone of voice. Think again about how respectful Daniel was. We still have a ‘majority complex.’ We need to move from being a moral majority to a prophetic minority.

We also need to consider how we can challenge powers, for the benefit of others. If we only challenge for the benefit of ourselves, how are we different from anyone else? What about love for others and the oppressed? What would be the impact of Christians standing up and saying that they’re distressed about the upset caused to Muslims about a film which is so offensive about the foundations of their faith?

Stories of Challenging the Powers

Christian Peacemaking Teams

Standing up for the disappeared of El Salvador

Making cakes to combat the gang culture of an estate in Bristol.

Freemantle, Australia – clearing utility debts, as a sign of Jubilee

Prayer for Kolkata by its Christian minority

The example of Jeremiah 29, the ‘Letter to the Exiles’: an alternative approach to exile.

Session Two – Forming Habits

Our society is now moving beyond the era of Christendom, a long period when the church held considerable power and influence over the laws, practices and culture (e.g. calendar, architecture, art) of much of the Western world. Christendom has left an enduring legacy in our societies, but we also need to acknowledge Christendom often displayed little capacity to love ‘the other.’ Consider, for example, the frequent persecution of Jews and Muslims.

Consider habits and reflexes. Habits are things which we do over a sustained period of time, so that eventually they become natural to us. Reflexes tend to be the things we do when we haven’t time to think.  Habits are not immutable. They can be formed and broken.

Read Daniel 1-6 – what habits do we see lived out by the Jewish exiles in Babylon?

Consider the remarkable response of forgiveness demonstrated by the Amish community of Nickel Mines, following the shooting of five girls by Charles Roberts in October 2006. The community had been shaped by its regular sharing of the Lord’s Prayer, seven times a day.

In his book Seeking Spirituality, Ronald Rolheiser writes about the following barriers to forming healthy habits:

Naivety about the nature of spiritual energy

Pathological busyness, distraction and restlessness

The problem of balance in life which has led to a separation of things that should belong together:

Religion and eros

Spirituality and church

Private morality and social justice

Rolheiser suggests ‘four pillars’ or responses

Private prayer and personal integrity – wholeness in life

Social justice – standing with the poor

Mellowness of heart and mind – staying grateful

Participating in the community of the people of God

What formational practices can we develop as a community?

Prayer – ways of praying

Scripture – ways of reading

Testimony – ways of speaking of God

Worship – Word, Water, Wheat and Wine

Service – laying down our lives

Session One – Loving People

The situation facing the church in the UK is not unlike that which faced the Jewish people dragged off into exile in Babylon. Read Psalm 137, and you quickly get a sense of how painful their loss was. Consider the emotions which are expressed in this psalm – bitterness, loss, injustice, humiliation, a desire for vengeance. The presence of the psalm reminds us it’s ok to bring such feelings to God in prayer, but we need to think seriously about how we process such feelings.

We are now a minority. Only 6-7% of the British population are involved in churches, and we don’t feel ‘at home’ in our society like we used to. This leads to a strong desire that we have to blame certain people and groups for what is happening in our culture.

Think about the people we struggle to love:

The growing Muslim community

Secularists/the ‘new atheists’

The media

We need to think seriously about how we love ‘the other,’ those who are different to us. We also need to understand that to love others is to pass on the love we ourselves have experienced on God. You might it helpful to reflect on a passage Sian read, John 15:1-17, which speaks of the centrality of love.

You may also want to take time giving to God the people you find it hard to love, reflecting on the following questions:

Why do I find it hard to love this person?

What does their presence do to me/

What thoughts and feelings do they raise in me?

What do they teach me about myself?

How do I feel about that?

Church weekend 2012

We’re just back from a wonderful church weekend in Cleobury Mortimer, spending time in the company of Sian and Stuart Murray-Williams, who were so helpful to us in thinking through the themes of loving people, forming habits and challenging powers. I’ll be posting notes from each of these sessions. It would be wonderful to hear your feedback on the ideas we discussed, how you were encouraged and challenged, and the ways in which we can live out these values in our YWBC.

Worship - looking for the next hit?

Now I know where I’ve been going wrong. All the time I thought I was leading a church, but have just discovered that instead I could be running ‘powerful purveyors of emotional religious experience.’ Puzzled? Let me explain...

An intriguing new piece of research, reported last week by Christianity Today makes the suggestion that the experience of many worshippers at American megachurches is akin to that of addicts looking for their next high. You can read the full paper, written by University of Washington research staff here.

The article draws on previous work by American sociologist Randall Collins, and begins with the hypothesis that what drives and motivates humans is their desire for ‘emotional energy,’ defined by Collins as ‘confidence and enthusiasm.’ It’s important to note that EE is not presented as just a narcissistic quest for warm and happy feelings; the writers also note the theories of Emile Durkheim, suggesting that EE has a ‘powerful and motivating effect upon the individual,’ which could lead to a change in moral behaviour.

But the Washington researchers also  offer the theory that our feelings of EE are closely linked to our levels of oxytocin, a hormone related to a variety of actions including social recognition, pair bonding and tribal behaviour, including bonding with insiders and the distrust of outsiders. And having established these factors, they then get to the heart of their argument, with the suggestion that megachurch worship effectively offers an ‘oxytocin cocktail’ to those attending, through its carefully choreographed blend of a large number of people, the sharing together of an intense emotional mood and time spent in the presence of a charismatic senior leader.

The sort of techniques referred to in the article may be familiar to many of us. The music is upbeat and loud, not unlike a concert, the lighting is low, all around people will be raising hands and swaying along. In some venues, large screens will even project images of the most intense worshippers in the auditorium, reminding those present of the appropriate response to be making at any given moment. The impact on those present is often deeply intense, and reflected in the testimony of many interviewed for the purposes of the research: ‘Expressions relating to the sensory experience were common—tasting seeing, feeling, touching, listening, feeding, thirsting—and words related to the emotions—loving, longing, feeling, moving, vulnerability, wanting, crying, joy—were not only peppered throughout the interviews, but rather were the driving force behind nearly every description and often the punch line to every story.’

But it also needs to be noted that the article isn’t just about the experience of gathered worship. Those attending megachurches speak passionately about the friendliness and love of others in their community, and also bear witness to a strong sense of purpose they’ve found concerning their personal morality.

So are there any lessons we can learn from this? The suggestion that emotional hysteria, and even manifestations which could be labelled as ‘signs and wonders’, can be generated through manipulation techniques is hardly new news. Inducing fear, failure or hopelessness before introducing the answer, the effect of a large crowd, these are techniques which have been employed by some of the most cruel and unscrupulous political regimes our world has seen. There’s no place for such practices in Christian worship.

But we need to be careful not to dismiss the experience of megachurch worshippers too readily. Reading their stories, I was reminded of the words of Barth in Church Dogmatics, VI/2: “The Christian community, can and must be the scene of many human activities which are new and supremely astonishing to many of its members as well as to the world because they rest on an endowment with extraordinary capacities.”

This doesn’t mean that the experience of church is reduced down to offering an intense hit for spiritual adrenaline junkies. Discipleship, of course, needs to consist of the death of self and the forming of disciplines, as well as the ability to think in depth about issues of faith. In his moving book, A Churchless Faith, Alan Jamieson has chronicled the tragedy of those who have walked away from apparently successful evangelical and Pentecostal churches, disillusioned and stifled with no safe place to talk about their doubts and questions. But surely Christian worshippers also need to feel some sense of intimacy with God, some inkling of having been in his presence, when they gather with others in the community of believers. This doesn’t have to mean making judgements on the worship service on the basis of ‘how I felt’ or ‘what I got out of it.’ But if we’re called to love God with our hearts, souls and minds, our emotions need to be impacted by our faith as well.

I’ll leave the final word to James Smith, from his excellent book on worship, Desiring the Kingdom: ‘While Hollister and Starbucks have taken hold of our heart with tangible, material liturgies, Christian schools are “fighting back” by giving young people Christian ideas. We hand young people (and old people!) a “Christian worldview” and then tell them, “There, that should fix it.” But such strategies are aimed at the head and thus miss the real target: our hearts, our loves, our desires. Christian education as formation needs to be a pedagogy of desire.’

What message are we communicating?

Last night we had the first meeting of our new Communications Team at YWBC, a thoroughly constructive time spent trying to get to grips with a variety of issues in our church. The meeting has provoked action (the need to start blogging again!), but thinking as well. While discussing our church website, we hit upon the question which always arises in such discussions: Who are we communicating to? Those within or those outside our church? The issue is so complicated because I’ve been increasingly struck by how these different audiences seem to want to hear different messages.

Perhaps my point is best explained by an analogy from politics. Those of us keeping an eye on the US elections will be aware that opinion polls in key states suggest Mitt Romney’s plans post-November are increasingly likely to comprise an extended vacation. Those ‘47%’ comments are looking more costly by the day. But behind the debacle surrounding Romney’s ill-judged remarks at a fundraising dinner for rich donors there’s a bigger problem. To become acceptable in the eyes of many people in the Republican Party, increasingly a group obsessed over a handful of issues that polarise opinion (think small government, gun control, abortion), Romney ends up becoming unacceptable to the majority of US voters.

Could it be that we risk the same thing happening to us in the church? A few weeks ago I heard Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali promoting his new book Triple Jeopardy for the West. I came away unconvinced by his thesis, as robust a defence of Christendom as you’ll ever hear with a clear desire that the church should still be able to dictate terms to the rest of society. But drinking coffee with various members of the congregation afterwards made me aware I was in the minority. Lots of people were clearly pleased to have heard someone unafraid to ‘speak out for the truth.’

But the problem here is that truth is again seen as boiling down to a number of touchstone issues – just a few days ago, I had a conversation where someone complained to me that ‘we need to be speaking out’ on the redefinition of marriage debate. That sort of tub-thumping will certainly win preachers some kudos from some in their congregations even if it is breeding more and more of an unhealthy siege mentality among some Christians.

These conversations have reminded me of some words of Walter Brueggemann, in one of his most recent books on preaching, The Word Militant:

There is a long tradition of so-called prophetic preaching that is filled with anger, indignation, and condemnation, so that the preacher’s own juices of anger can run loose in the process.’

I suggest that we need to unlearn that common notion of prophetic preaching... it is clear that some of the most effective “prophetic preaching” in our time by such dazzling voices as Desmond Tutu… comes across as utterances of hope-filled, compassionate truth-telling largely free of rage. I suggest that we have misread the prophets to think them voices of simplistic rage, for hard truth can be told quietly if it intends to evoke a response rather than simply be an imposition of rage on the listener.

So what lessons do we learn here regarding communication? I offer two tentative conclusions.

• Our gospel is a large story of fall, redemption and recreation. It’s that big story we need to proclaim, over and above any ‘little stories,’ which often reflect our own vested interests. That doesn’t mean we never speak out on political or human rights issues, rather that we don’t define ourselves by the stances we adopt. Our posture must be one of love and not anger.
• Our message needs to be one of integrity – the things we say to the outside world are the same as the words spoken inside our walls.

Rob Bell, preaching and the local church – some reflections

Like many others in recent years, I’ve been stimulated and positively provoked by the ministry of Rob Bell. I’ve enjoyed his books (albeit with an increasing sense of frustration that he’s often better at deconstructing than providing answers) and also found his Nooma DVDs to be beautifully evocative, touching the heart as well as the head as all good preaching should. And I’ve even had the privilege to hear him once in the flesh, on his Drops Like Stars tour which explored the theme of suffering. I came away dazzled, impressed and frankly a little jealous – I doubt my communication skills will ever scale the heights I saw him attain that evening.

But I have to confess to being disconcerted and disappointed by some comments made by Bell in a recent interview given to promote his next book due out in 2013. You can read the interview here – what caught my eye was a section where he commented on the new freedom he’s found since leaving the local church setting of Mars Hill in Grand Rapids to become a freelance writer and speaker. The interviewer comments on how he’s able to speak more openly on a controversial issue and then says:

DAVID: What’s most remarkable about that segment of the video is: You seem so relaxed in saying that simple yet important thing. You’re smiling. You’ve got to be breathing a sigh of relief that you’re able to say this now without a panel of church elders to whom you’ve got to answer—or other critics in the church. So, what I want to know is: Does it feel good to get that off your chest?

ROB: I am smiling right now at that question. I am smiling.

It was a joy and honor and privilege to be part of a local church. It was absolutely amazing through all those years, but believe me—I know what you are describing here on a cellular level. Yeah. That’s all there is to say—yeah. I am smiling.

Reading these words makes me want to make a plea to preachers everywhere. Let’s never reach the point where we see the local church as something which cramps our style or limits our freedom. Every time I step into the pulpit I see a group of people with whom I’m in a covenant relationship, the leaders and members to whom I’m accountable. When I feel frustrated and I’m on the verge of ‘letting rip’ I hold back because I’m conscious that what matters most is sustaining those relationships. When I’m tempted to say something controversial or provocative I’m forced to weigh up whether the impact will be worth the upset, hurt and division which could be caused in this local expression of the body of Christ. Sometimes our critics are God’s gift to us.

And just one more plea, to the folks like Rob who’ve earned themselves the status and authority which goes with this kind of speaking and writing ministry. Remember that when you throw a hot potato, there’ll be someone somewhere still leading a local church who has to catch it and deal with the fallout...