Radio Godbotherers went really well last Sunday night, including
- Jamie Calder, SJ on Identity
- Charles Sherlock on religious issues in the media
The podcast is below
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Just been listening to Rowan Williams on Fresh Expressions, which is the UK Anglican’s effort at supporting new ways of doing missional church.
Here are some of the “enemies of renewal” that he identified:
1. Entertainment: “give them (young people) a god who can be the object of their unreconstructed emotions, and distract them endlessly from being left naked before God”. Ouch
2. Problem solving: beware problem solving as ‘plugging gaps’. “We are in a danger of putting an end to that lifelong task of listening and absorbing that is involved in growing into the space Christ has opened for us”
3. “Trying to fit God around the edges of your identity, rather than allowing God to shape us from within”
Great stuff. He is one of the pioneers in attempting to integrate inherited church with emerging/missional church. Luckily, the Bishop in my diocese has a similar mindset (Andrew Curnow).
This an extract from my regular newsletter for supporters of Seeds Bendigo:
Friends, I’m finding it difficult to write you this letter at the moment. I’m finding it difficult to put into words what is going on in Long Gully, both for me and the community around me. This is not because anything particularly negative is happening, but because it’s increasingly clear that the work of ‘being neighbours’ is a mysterious one.
I’ve been catching myself saying “It depends….” a lot. Why?
I love models, and patterns; finding common things across different places is very satisfying to me. However, much as I would love to have a formula that can be ‘multiplied’ in other places, I often find that so much of what we do is very specific to our place, and the people in that place. Is it good or bad to have lots of programs? Depends on the people and the place. Should we have a paid role in the community we are serving? Depends. Should church services be held in ‘church buildings’ or somewhere else? It depends. Is it better to stay in one place for decades, or move on quickly? It depends.
To give a specific example, we don’t tend to have a lot of our neighbours over to our place. It’s not for want of inviting; it just doesn’t seem to be something they feel comfortable with. A while ago, this would have created quite a bit of anxiety for me, because home-based hospitality was the crucial in my early years of mission. But I now realize, this depends on the character of the people and place.
Why all this ambiguity? I think it is due to 3 factors: place, people & time. All of these work together to alter the way we live out our faith. When we look at Jesus in the Gospels, and at Paul and the early church, the way they did things altered according to circumstance. Jesus called some to follow, others to stay; Paul travelled constantly while others stayed put.
So what stays the same across time, space and personality, and therefore what we need to get right, is not models or patterns or formulas, but character. Both working on our character, and also being shaped by the character of God, the colour of which is most clearly shown in Jesus and the fruits of the Spirit.
Thanks to all who tuned into Radio Godbotherers last Sunday! Unfortunately Charles Sherlock wasn’t able to make it but we had Neil Gray from Eaglehawk Salvation Army, and an interview with Simon Moyle.
Below is the latest podcast, which can also subscribe to through iTunes
Next show: Sunday 18 July, 2010
Time: 6-8pm AEST
I hope you tune in: if you are in Central Victoria, the frequency is 106.7FM, and you can also listen online, and follow us on Twitter.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Great piece from my friend Mark Sayer’s website, inspired by Alan & Deb Hirsch’s book Untamed.
G’day all. Here is the first Radio Godbotherers podcast. I had a blast doing this – thanks to Andy, Erin and Hannah who were guests on the program as well as Jenny who held my hand.
It’s a pretty big file – next time I might chop out the songs..but then again, that might be boring.
Hope you get to have a listen!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Quarterly Essay is one of my pleasures. A long essay is the most elegant form of the English language and my most treasured authors are virtuosi in the form, authors such as CS Lewis, GK Chesterton and Wendell Berry. Add to that list Waleed Aly, who has penned the latest Essay with the title What’s Right? The Future of Conservatism in Australia. I’ve read about half of it and am loving it.
His main point, I think, sheds light on a key tension within my own movement, which in the fashion of Wendell Berry, I will call the Movement for biblically-based Christ-centred Spirit-empowered evangelism + justice-making + church-planting + community-growing + disciple-forming + godly child-rearing + creation-caring + music-making + other good stuff which we haven’t thought of yet, which tends to exist on the fringes of inherited church structures.
Why doth it shed such light? Aly He points out that conservatism has an ‘organic’ approach to change. He doesn’t mean home-grown food. He means that change is tied to what has gone before, it ‘grows’ out of the past, as a plant grows from its roots:
…human society is organic. It is something that has evolved slowly and naturally, incorporating the wisdom of generations and gradually leaving behind those things that have proven themselves to be folly
Conservatism has no place for complete breaks with the past in order to forge a new and bright future, and when you put it like that, you can see why it has it’s roots in the French Revolution, which certainly tried to erase the past in order to blaze a new and more excellent future, mostly by killing its opponents.
What has this got to do with the above-mentioned movement? There is a tension in this movement, and therefore within myself, between wanting change to happen slowly, in continuity with the past and at the same time calling for massive reconstruction of the whole of our culture according to the radical vision of Jesus Christ. I want to move with the slowest person in the community, but I want the war to stop now. I want to value the past, the traditions, the hand that has fed me, but woe betide the church structure that stands in the the way of the prophetic voice of Jesus through the ages. Waleed Aly would call these two approaches to change ‘conservatism’ and ‘revolutionary’.
Both of these approaches to change are needed in our movement. There are times when decisive, sudden and un-usual (that dash is intentional) change is needed, and times when slow, organic change is needed. I would also say that these approaches to change depend on each other. Revolutionary change will struggle to last, if happen at all, if the slow and incremental and organic changes have not been taking place. And organic approaches to faith will simply wither and choke on their own reverence for the present and past without the tectonic slide of revolutionary change.
(The image to the right is called “The Foreign Tree”. According to the site I got it from: These painted engravings ridicule the unrest wrought by French revolutionaries by contrasting French subversion with British stability. The “British Liberty Tree” (depicted in the preceding image) is assigned to the mock Latin genus of “Stabilissimus,” while the more sickly looking “Foreign Tree” in this image is put in the genus “Subitarius.” Notice in the background of the latter, a guillotine, symbol of all that is wrong with France.)
On the good word of Mark Sayers, I used some of my birthday money to buy “A Secular Age” by Charles Taylor. I’m about a chapter in and I can already tell that it’s going to stretch my thinking about our culture and what it means to be Christian in it. I thoroughly recommend it.
At the same time, I was asked to speak at the AGM of the Bendigo Chaplaincy Committee, a band of stalwarts who support the various chaplains in Bendigo. Here’s part of what I said, and you can read the whole speech here:
Charles Taylor, author of “A Secular Age”, puts it like this:
The shift to secularity…consists…of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.
Our culture’s whole approach to religion has changed: in our public spaces, in our individual beliefs, and in the soil in which faith takes root. Most of us are conscious of these changes, but our minds haven’t caught up with the reality. So, in some way, our minds still operate in the past, where God was central. But the rest of our culture is living in a different world.
What do these changes mean for chaplains? Chaplains mostly know these things – I’m saying them because chaplains rely on us, and we need to have a realistic view of the context they work in, and realistic expectations of what they can achieve.
- God and public space: Chaplains used to occupy public space in schools through sermons at Easter and Christmas, Christian reflections in school newsletters and the like. As a teenager at a state school, I clearly remember the chaplain preaching at Easter and Christmas, and as a primary school student, being taken to the local church for an Easter service. Now, it’s becoming rarer for chaplains to give a Christian message at state school assemblies, as was once common. We can’t expect our chaplains to publicly proclaim the Christian message in compulsory school activities. We can’t expect Christians to be given privileged access to schools simply because we are Christians. That time is going and will soon disappear.
- Individual Belief and Practice: when few people believe or practice a religion, is there a place for chaplains to foster religious practice in schools? When parents are not religious themselves, is it ethical for a chaplain to encourage religious practice in young people and children? In any case, chaplains are not building on a foundation of familiarity with the stories of Abraham & Jesus. More likely they are confronting an ignorance of these. We can’t expect chaplains to spend lots of time discipling young people, producing biblically literate young people
- The atmosphere of belief: it is difficult for chaplains to encourage belief in a context where belief is now seen as odd, and unsupported by the majority of institutions in our country. Chaplains now have to rediscover what it means to create soil in which the seeds of faith can grow. That is a hard task, because we haven’t had to do it before.
G’day all!
I’m starting a new radio show on Phoenix FM. It’s shape will evolve, but I’m wanting to publically engage the community with great music, discussion of contemporary issues concerning faith, spirituality and church. It hopefully won’t be stereotypically “Left” or “Right”.
The first show’s theme is “The Rise of Spirituality” and will feature Andy Vincent from Cornerstone Community, an interview with Brent Lyons-Lee on his book Emerging Downunder as well as me fumbling with the confusing array of switches, slides and dials that I will be grappling with!
Date: Sunday 30th May 2010
Time: 6-8pm AEST
I hope you tune in: if you are in Central Victoria, the frequency is 106.7FM, and you can also listen online
We had Jamie Calder from the Jesuits come and speak at the last Seeds Seminar on “Identity Politics”, the ways in which our individual identities are shaped by the dominant stories of our culture.
I interviewed him the next morning about himself and his thinking on this subject. I’ll use some of this on my upcoming radio show (30th May, 6-8pm, streaming at phoenixfm.org)
You can also subscribe to my podcast on iTunes
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
