10 posts tagged “european church”
Here's a fun one for you. Pope Benedict begins a visit to France this week... lots of pomp and ceremony and a pilgrimage to Lourdes. And here's a quote about the visit from one Sandro Magister, a respected Vatican expert who writes for the Italian weekly L’Espresso:
"The German pope hopes to use the trip to boost the influence of the Roman Catholic Church in France, a country he considers “the sick man of Christian Europe,” Magister said.
Well call me impudent, but am I alllowed to say that it doesn't seem likey to boost the influence of the Catholic church in France that it's figurehead leader calls the nation 'the sick man of Christian Europe'? I'm not sure that many French people will be thrilled to be labelled thus, and I'm not sure how many Christians, Catholic or Protestant, would want to be associated with such a judgement. Europe in general is an interesting and challenging place to do mission - I have lived and worked in the UK, France and Holland, and engaged in mission in several other countries - and each country has its own ways of making life difficult for the church, but the myth that France is in a 'sicker' place than any other nation is foolish and mis-guided.
It is a myth also believed by many Protestants, and it's about time we stopped spreading it. There remain challenges for the Gospel in France, of course, but there are also signs of hope and renewal: and there is a very beautiful purity and commitment amongst French Christians - again, both Protestant and Catholic. Yes there are less Christians proportionately than in many other countries, but there is also less nominalism; less confusion about the meddling of church and state; less sloppy merging of faith with lazy ideas. And some of the French people who have walked away from the church have done so for some of the most noble and laudible reasons: it is possible to argue that secularism in France gained the ground that it did not because the people were not Christian enough, but because the church was not Christian enough. Liberty, equality and fraternity are not goals alien to Scripture: it is just tragic that a particular generation - and many since - were not able to find them in the church.
Perhaps we should pray that Benedict will come out of France with a more optimistic view than he goes in with?
This month sees the launch of an unexpected new web-site hosted by German NGO 'Europe for Christ'. Christianophobia.eu details definitions and examples of behaviour that is 'phobic' (irrationally fearful) of Christianity. It also suggests responses, urging Christians to "participate in the public square with self-confidence". The site quotes Jewish scholar Joseph Weiler, a professor of international law at New York University, who says "European 'laicité,' as distinct from American secularism, is not simply an ‘I don't happen to believe in God.' It is a kind of faith in itself. It is a positive hostility to religion, which in Europe means Christianity. This is why I did not hesitate in my book to speak about Christophobia." The term has now been used in both European Union and United Nations literature.
Of particular interest on the site are the quotations from journalists and scholars who have noted the rising tide of 'Christianophobia' across our continent - see examples here.
Though it may seem at first to be a gimmick, the site has a very serious purpose - to draw attention to instances in European politics and public life where the rejection of Christian input is founded not on ration
al argument but on irrational fear, and to promote the reasonable acceptance of the Christian voice. "The attitude in Europe is becoming very hostile", says site founder Gudrun Kugler, "We work on the issue and publish these cases in order to alert. Our work is not about self-pity. It is about solutions which must include the
political level. Christianity constitutes a large part of the humanism Europe is famous for. It gave much -- and it still has a lot to offer."
We had a great New Years week in Brussels with the Bless Network on annual retreat. 32 of us gathered, including 10 children, and we were able to relax together, pray for one another and reflect on the work of God across Europe - especially in the Netherlands, UK, France and Croatia, where all of us are either based or working on a regular basis. We are so excited by all that God is doing through his Church across this continent, and by the opportunities that there are to engage in creative, life-changing mission....
On the way home we stopped for a few hours in Antwerp, a Flemish-speaking and histrically Catholic City. Many of the city's finest buildings have been converted, at ground floor level, to house trendy shops and cafe's - but at first floor level and above, they betray their ancient roots - including a massive reverence for Mary and her baby Son. These pictures show some places where statues of Mary and /or Jesus still adorn city-centre properties -
I was struck by this juxtoposition of images - the remnants of an ancient faith watching over the comings and goings of consumerism - because it seems to capture something of the confusion of contemporary European culture. For the most part we have walked away from the reverential (superstitious?) lifestyle that would place the physical form of Mary or Jesus on town-centre buildings. This level of religious sensibility is seen as at best quaint and outmoded and at worst dangerous.... but what have we replaced it with? There is only one answer - shopping. Shopping, regularly interspersed with a double-shot Latte in at a 'third place' temple - is our new religion. It draws us, inspires us, tempts us and demands the sacrifice of our every last cent, and we look to it to feed the deepest of our needs.
Is this progress? Are we really more mature and effective, as the tribes of Europe, with the new religion of shopping in place of our older faiths? Is 'super-size me' really a better prayer than 'forgive me father for I have sinned'...?
Whilst pondering this question, I also came across a postcard that set out to imagione what actually happened in Bethlehem all those years ago....
TimeOut, London's highly regarded news and events magazine, recently devoted a whole issue to the religious life of the UK capital, under the title 'God is a Londoner'. Religions of all types and traditions are thriving in the City, according to the reports - the magazine even created a photo-shoot of religious fashion, showing what the trendiest young Christians, Jews, Sikh's and Muslims are wearing. One very striking article was written by atheist Tim Arthur, who visited Kensington Temple, one of the UK's most thriving, ethnically diverse Pentecostal churches.
Led by Colin Dye, who has the distinctive of having trained and danced with the Royal Ballet before becoming a pastor, 'KT's' has grown massively in recent years, developing a high-energy, dynamic worship style. Surpisingly, the Time Out article sees these as very positive and welcome developments. Tim Arthur concludes his article:
"As an atheist I have serious problems with the church’s views on many areas of morality, yet they do reach into the community and offer help and comfort for many lost souls. They were also some of the most welcoming and generous people I have spent time with. I believe they are wrong, but I admire their strength of conviction. They are acting out of a bona fide passion and love for the truth they believe has been given to them through direct experience of the divine. Watching these people transported to other realms you realise that Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are missing the point. For these people it is not an intellectual argument – God is as real to them as you and I. They know he’s there because they experience him. They know Him. As Dye says, ‘If you say God’s alive then it makes sense that there would be some direct access to his presence.’
This is only one article - a few thousand words amongst the millions printed every month: but it offers yet more evidence that faith is alive and well in the major urban centres of Europe.
My good friend Jason Gardner from the LICC (London Institute for Contemporary Christianity) has an excellent article in Youthwork Magazine this month on 'the Rise of the Tesco Church'. As far as I can tell the article isn't available on-line yet, but keep an eye on Youthwork in case this changes.
Jason looks at the growth strategy of Tesco in the UK, and more recently around the world, and wonders if the same pattern - long established in the USA with Walmart - is also evident in the church. The growth, in centres of urban population, of large, highly-resourced churches seems to bear this out, and may well present the same challenges to the smaller neighbourhood churches that small-scale retailers experience when Tesco comes to town. I agree with Jason that this is a change driven more by demographgics than by choice or design, and that our primary question should not be 'are we happy about this?' so much as 'how can we make the best of this for the sake of the Kingdom?'. I came to Crossroads Amsterdam with the conviction that there is indeed room in the major cities of Europe for large, well-developed churches - so long as they are ready to act as 'hub churches' for missional engagement, and be outward-focussed and self-giving rather than inwardly-obsessed and self-serving.
I also wrote some notes recently on the fact that this is not the only significant development in the European church. I see it as one of three areas of growth - all of which offer significant opportunities for mission.
Where Jason calls this first model 'Tesco Church', I have come to think of it as 'Ikea Church' - the large, regional centre that draws individuals and families and resources them to 'self-build' their faith experience. Most people both love and hate Ikea, and there are two positives of the retail giant that I believe are transferable to this scale of church:
The first is that at Ikea on an average weekend, tens of thousands of people move through the same essential experience and draw from the same range and catalogue, and yet most leave feeling that they have just done something genuinely original. No-one else, they figure, will combine this bookcase, that print and that rug in quite the way I am going to. Ikea delivers 'mass customisation' - the combination of economies of scale and customisation of outcomes. This remarkable feat is made possible by digital technology and was predicted ten years ago by Michael Moynagh in the Tomorrow Project as a key direction for the church. The second, related achievement of Ikea is to make high-level design accessible to ordinary consumers. Some of the designers involved with Ikea are, quite simply, brilliant - they are among the best of their generation. But they have been persuaded to turn away from elitism and make design available to all. Can 'Ikea Churches' do the same for theology - making PhD level thinking relevent and accessible to everyday Christians?
The second model which is growing alongside these large-scale churches (I resist the term mega-church as it seems to carry overtones of the Death Star) is the 'Googlechurch'. This is a movement which includes many strands of the 'emerging Church' along with the Alternative Worship movement, some expressions of the missional church movement and the fast-growing 'Household Church' networks. It consists of small-sacle, local, organic churches, very often with a high commitment to art, community transformation or both, working at an experimental and very permissive level to draw people through relationship into faith (see the blogs of Andrew Jones, Jonny Baker and Alan Hirsch). There is far more diversity in these movements than most of the literature so far gives credit for - to talk of THE emerging church as if it was one, coherent movement is as off-target as to talk of THE American church or THE Black Majority Church - but I use the term 'Googlechurch' because the one thing that does link all of these diverse movements is their embrace of new technology and the internet. It is the inter-connectedness of the web that has made the fragmentation of these organic groups possible: they are the first truly indigenous church-plants of the Google generation. These groups have quite extraordinary missional opportunities amongst the young, amongst largely professional urban populations and especially amongst media-savvy and aesthetically sensitive social networks.
The third emerging model is the only one, perhaps, to offer hope to the more traditional denominations - it is the 'Boutique Church' offering an experience of worship that appeals directly to particular niche or people-group. Classical musicians, for example, often find the standard of music in our indie-rock-meets-country-lyrics mainstream churches intolerable at the level of toothache. Highly educated scientists, too, often struggle with the hug-me-and-we'll-all-feel-better churches. Even though 'Ikea Churches' appeal across a wide demographic, and the 'Googlechurch' picks up many of the dissenters, there are still those who long for the beauty, mystery, solidity and wonder of the older churches - those Andrew Walker and Luke Bretherton call 'Deep Church'. Leaders called to develop these churches have the joy and challenge of creating an authentic worship experience for a (perhaps) small but (probably) discerning group - like the butcher who gives up the 'Friday night family meat pack' offers in favour of 'exclusive home-made leek and mustard sausages'.
The great thjing about these three groups (if this is an accurate picture) is that they can co-exist; can each thrive in the emerging cultures of the 21st Century: and can be a massive support and help to each other. To do this, though, they need to do three things:
1. Acknowledge one anothers existence and their shared goals - setting competition aside and pursuing unity in diversity.
2. Stop judging each other according to their own inwardly-derived criteria ('you're too big and market-driven'; 'you're too weird and experimental'; 'you're out of touch with contemporary culture').
3. Learn not only to work together, but to complement one another and even prospser one another's efforts, openly and gracefully swapping members, sharing converts and celebrating one another's strengths.
The Europe of the 21st Century has good news for each of these three strands of church-development. There are sound sociological reasons to look for growth in all three. But there are also very sound reasons for acknowledging that no one of these models is THE answer we are looking for. Big or small; mainstream or niche; coporate or organic - we all NEED each other...
According to a recent survey carried out by a Swedish business magazine and reported in Der Spiegel online here, more Swedes trust IKEA than trust the church. Despite the fact that an estimated 80% of Swedes still 'belong' to the Churches, they still ranked the furniture giant, along with other brands such as Volvo, Ericsson and Saab above the Church as institutions worthy of trust. Swap the brand-names for Phillips and Douwe Egberts, and you might get the same results in the Netherlands.
No question - retail therapy is the new Redemption, buying power is the new Pentecost and the out-of-town Mall is the new Temple....
The world's religious news agencies are buzzing with reports of Pope Benedict's latest pronouncements. The Pope, who upset many Muslims some months ago by quoting an ancient scholar's assessment of Islam as a violent faith, used a recent presentation in the Vatican to do some bridge building. He didn't comment directly on Islam or other faiths, but took pains to assert that Christianity is not a European faith, but is firmly rooted in the Eastern, Semitic cultures. Citing the 4th Century Saint Ephrem the Syrian - known as one of the greatest poet-theologians of the early church - Pope Benedict expressed the Church's ongoing debt to its non-European roots. Christianity has had "a multiplicity of cultural forms ever since its inception.", he said, and whilst it has had a transforming influence on European history, there is great error in the popular presentation of the faith as ' a European religion that was then exported to other cultures'.
This is a great reminder that the Christian faith has always been meta-national. It is a world-faith, drawing inspiration from - and bringing transformation to - every human culture across whose path it travels. Ironically the greatest hope for the renewal of European Christianity may well lie in the re-discovery and celebration of its non-European roots and fruits. Find reports of the Pope's speech here and here. For more on St. Ephrem the Syrian visit Wikipedia here and here .
This pic shows Pope Benedict with his new 'Saturno' hat - there's a video report on MSN of the hat's public debut. There's something about this guy that is a lot more colourful and even fun-loving than his predecessor. It's just a hat, but in the world of Catholic pomp, a hat can mean a lot....
Ride 'em, cowboy....
Sometimes the way we invent or discover new words (and re-invent or re-discover old ones) can greatly impact our behaviour. Words shape our future and illumine our present. Before the word is spoken, we are confused; uncertain. We have too many options and not enough clues. Then a word is given breath (and sometimes it is just that: a single word, unaccompanied and unadorned) and clarity comes. We speak possibilities into being.
I blogged last week about the new word (at least new to me) 'metanational', and in the course of writing about it and reflecting on it I discovered it had brought along a friend.
The unexpected guest was the word 'ethnicities', which I realised can be hyphenated as ethni-cities. What are ethni-cities but cities increasingly defined by the many ethnicities to whom they have become home. Amsterdam is such a city: the world's most ethnically diverse urban jungle.
I am attracted to the hyphanated term ethni-cities because it makes possible the simple expression of a vision that has the power to change the face of our continent: the vision of building 'metanational churchs for Europe's ethni-cities'.
Is this what God is showing us here in Amsterdam, that metanational churches are part of his plan, and that ethni-cities are the best plce to build them?
If so we may need to re-visit some of our most preciously-held church growth ideas. The Homegenous Unit Growth principle for a start (whose wonderful abbreviation HUG is either highly apposite or deeply ironic, depending on how you view Donald McGavern's work). The HUG principle isn't thrown completely out the window by the metanational church, but it isn't invited in through the front door either. And our understanding of atractional vs incarnational mission, and of the relationship between language and culture might also come up for review. What of the place of 'youth churches' and similar 'mission-shaped churches' if metanational and metacultural diversity is our goal?
Might metanational church be the best expression and proof available to us of the Christian story being, in the memorable words of Brian Walsh and Richard Middleton, an 'anti-totalising narrative'? Pehaps this is too high an aspiration: but aren't metanational and meta-cultural unity, at the very least, goals worth pursuing?
In preparing to speak to the leaders of the International Baptist Convention at their gathering in Copenhagen, I was searching for a word to describe the place to which God seems to be leading us at Crossroads - a place somehow beyond the traditional understanding of 'international' churches. I came up with 'metanational', but then discovered that the word is already in use in the business world. The 2001 book 'From Global to Metanational' describes a commercial transition from international (offices in many nations) to metanational (learning from many nations) companies. The difference is summed up as:
"a company that builds a new kind of competitive advantage by discovering, accessing, mobilizing, and leveraging knowledge from many locations around the world."
Then I realised that, translated into the church, this is exactly what I was reaching for - a model that speaks of not only delivering to multiple cultures, but also receiving from many cultures. We discussed this in Copenhagen, and there was real resonance with the way other churches are moving. The International Baptist Church of Hamurg is a leading example - visit their web site at http://www.ibc-hamburg.de/
We came away convinced that God has a special place in his purposes for these multi-cultural, multi-nationality churches, modelling peace and reconciliation in a patchwork of Europe's ethnicities.
Having been told recently that Amsterdam is now officially the most international city in the world - with 177 resident nationalities against New York's 156 - I was excited at the prospect of pursuing God's vision for the church as a 'skin kaleidoscope'.
http://www.sanderchan.com/2007/08/worlds-most-international-city.html
Welcome to the metanational church!
The Amsterdam Olympic stadium was built for the 1928 games, and even at 80 years old it still carries a certain style. The slim tower made to house the Olympic flame, the low-line redbrick walls and the sculpted reliefs of Greco-Dutch 'ideal' sportsmen combine to give the building a timeless atmosphere, like an Ivy League college plucked out of time and place and dropped into modern Amsterdam. In a city in which space is very hard to find, this ancient arena still appeals.
With all the hype already generated for Bejiing in 2008 and London in 2012 it is remarkable to think that this facility last housed the games eight decades ago. Yet here is still is, with its five coloured rings and its tower of flame, still proclaiming the Olympic spirit.
Just two weeks ago the stadium hosted around 25,000 believers from all over the Netherlands, come to mark 100 years of the Dutch Pentecostal movement. Another 'flame' passed hand-to-hand a century ago; another spirit still proclaimed today; another movement that has massively impacted the world, and brings tribes and nations together in shared celebration.
History is marked and measured by such moments. What will the Christian legacy of the Netherlands be in another hundred years?
