10 posts tagged “faith and culture”
I'm part way through Tim Keller's 'The Reason for God' and finding it excellent. Keller has carved out a niche as the thinking man's pastor for Manhattan, and he brings to this book the fruit of hundreds of deeply engaging conversations with New York's sceptics and cynics. The result is a wonderful summary of all the reasons you might not want to be a Christian: and the fact that none of them really hold up. Keller's trick is to apply to doubt the same questions that doubt applies to faith. He does it with humour and style. This is the best book I have found in a long time to give to those thrown by the writings of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and co - and the closest I have come to reading Francis Schaeffer since reading Frqncis Schaeffer...
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."
Premier Radio, the UK hub of a Christian radio, TV and magazine network, have published a fascinating four-page report on 'why people believe'. You can read an introduction here or directly download the summary in .pdf form here.
The two authors of the report - a clergyman and a human-rights lawyer - interviewed a wide range of believers, and from their converdsations identified 500 'reasons for believing'. The report explores the most significant of these, in terms both of theism in general (why believe in God at all?) and of Christianity in particular (why this faith above others?). It makes for interesting reading, not least because it reflects actual reasons for belief. This is 'embodied apologetics' - a series if insights into the faith-choices people make rather than a stream of abstract theory. As such it is refreshing. Our era is far more open to authentic experience than to logical possibility. A single clear reason for one person acknowledging the existence of God has more power today than a thousand arguments for its theoretical possibility.
Listening to the BBC World Service today (as mad dogs and Englishmen do - going out in the midday sun is not currently an option), I was introduced the the concept of the 'Slash Generation'. This is a term used to capture the way the new generation describe their work-life or career in terms of several slashes - "I'm a musician / DJ / game designer". I think the idea orginates with Marci Alboher in the USA, whose website heymarci.com tracks the development of the concept and whose book, below, fleshes it out.
This is a concept well worth exploring in the context of Christian mission. All the team involved in the Bless Network are bi-vocational: we have a policeman-slash-church-planter, an IT specialist-slash-charity-manager and several missionary-slash-local-church-workers. The model has enabled us to grow a missional network without over-burdening it with huge central personnel costs - and it has many other advantages.
At Crossroads, too, we have many 'slash' workers on our team: part-time staff who have other jobs, either running their own businesses or pursuing employment in a more secular field. I can think of at least four who have three or four components to their slash careers. The juggling is not always easy, but there are real gains to be had in terms of motivation and personal development, as well as avoiding the creation of an 'other-worldy' bubble of church employment. The concept of 'tent-maker' missionaries has long been established in societies where open, full-time mission is impossible: but it is now emerging as a significant model for mission in Western culture.
I sometimes describe myself as a pastor / writer or a missiologist / poet. When my youngest son was asked in a school asignment last week to say what his Dad does for a living, he really wanted to avoid the whole pastor or church-leader conversation, so was happy to go for the 'writer' tag. The slash, so to speak, saved him.
The 'slash' concept also points, very importantly, to the blurring of work / leisure distinctions. Where e-bay traders who are over 40 might describe what they do as a hobby, the young tend not to - it's just one of their slashes. In fact the word hobby is disappearing from our language, with its implication of leisure activities pursued with no external purpose. I'm not a teacher whose hobby is stamp collecting, I'm a teacher-slash-stamp-trader.
To the extent that this shift nudges people towards more creative whole-life-planning, and attaches renewed importance to secondary (perhaps vocational) pursuits, it is very good news for Christian mission. How might the Kingdom grow if all young Christians were encouraged to include at least one missional or vocational commitment amongst their slashes?
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...
Time Magazine this month has a profile of Rob Bell, Pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church and founder of the 'Nooma' video series. Rob is a great communicator. His two books (so far) are 'Velvet Elvis' - an imaginative, readable and thouroughly refreshing exploration of what it might mean to follow Jesus in the 21st Century and 'Sex God', a surprising and very inspring attempt to find the connection between two of the most important three-letter words in our vocabulary (links below).
This is a preview of the latest 'Nooma', the 18th in the series, called 'Name'.
Thanks to Andrew Rogers for the link to a Guardian online article by Terry Eagleton. The literary critic and theologian considers the political impact of Jesus and asks whether the Messaih can truly be seen as a social revolutionary. His carefully considered conclusion is that Jesus is both less revolutionary and ultimately more revolutionary than the greats - Lenin, Marx etc.
A great artticle to stimulate thinking in this Advent season. Also gives me an irresistable opportunity to cite Eagleton's scathing review of Richard Dawkin's The God Delusion, which begins with the immortal line "Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology." Read the full review here, and see Eagleton's Wikipedia profile here.
