Chaos Theory

This week I’ve been learning about Appreciative Inquiry (excuse the American spelling).  It’s a way of helping organisations discover what they value and how they can build on that.  It appeals because it doesn’t talk about what went wrong or who is to blame, just that things have changed.

Part of the course focused on a model of organisational life which suggested that for an organisation facing crisis to survive it has to consciously embrace the chaos of the wilderness.  For most established organisations this kind of step is difficult.  We like certainty and structure.  After all, what kind of organisation isn’t organised?

Well… I can think of two.  Youth Work and Emerging Church.

By not being organised I don’t mean without any rules or structure.  The rules and structures are small, limited to that particular group.  It’s not that they don’t relate to something bigger, they do, but they are not controlled by that bigger organisation.

This lack structure means that they can be creative and adaptive.

That kind of group needs a particular kind of leadership.  The kind that works collaberatively, values and develops other’s talents and gifts and isn’t too precious about who’s idea it is.

Substance

In his comment on part 1 of this little series of posts John grasps on of the key criticisms of both Emerging Church and of Youth Work… lack of substance.

I often hear that both are prone to style over content.  Both suffer from a tendancy towards the flash and attractive.  I’ve seen it and can hold my hand up and say that I’ve also done it.

But I’m not sure that lack of substance is a fair criticism of either Emerging Church or Youth Work done well.

At the heart of both seems to be a desire for relationship.

Youth work has struggled to get past the attractional model where we put on some big fancy event that lots of young people will come to and hope that for some strange reason that will be enough to get them to stay for the rather naff games and poor attempts at bible study where we tell them what the Bible should mean to them.

Emerging Church is informed by a similar process where big church for grown ups had a go at being all interesting and attractive.  It was called ‘Alternative Worship’.  Churches discovered that presentation mattered and that people wanted to be involved but many of the ‘Alternative Worship’ experiments were little more than a reformatted version of the standard church service.  People saw through it and discovered that, like attractional youth work, all that glitters is not gold.

Substance is the goal for both.  Depth of relationship, participation, learning, sharing and growing together seem to be the key factors in youth work… and in emerging church.

The cycle has been the same.  Attractional followed by a move to deeper more substantial communities.

I wonder if that is because those who now inhabit leadership positions in the church and experienced the attractional youth work model are now being joined by a younger generation of leaders who have grown up on incarnational youth work and who experienced youth groups where they were loved and valued and experienced opportunities to know God?

It seems to me that both areas are rediscovering something that has been lost.  Both youth work and emerging church are pursuing models where stillness, spiritual practices, relationship building and learning in a collaborative manner are all valued.

These seem to me to be the practices that grow from the values of community work I outlined in part 2.

It also grows from a sense of disconnection.  I heard Mark Lau Branson talk about how he has abandoned the lectionary because the people in his church don’t understand the context of these weekly fragments of scripture as they jump around the highlights of the Christian story.  That seems to bear out my own experience and those of many worship leaders I meet.

I think that’s partly the fault of the attractional youth work model which focused on highlights, particularly from the Gospel because that was the most important bit and the rest didn’t matter much.

Church has been the same.  Scotland has never been big on Bible Study for adults.  The 15 minute sermon on a Sunday morning has been the main teaching for the majority of adults.  In any other context 15 minutes a week would be laughable.  Can you imagine trying to learn a language, to play an instrument or to build a relationship by spending 15 minutes a week on it?

Youth work is about building community.  Church should be too.  Emerging Church seems to be up for going deeper… but still needs to guard against the ‘cool for the sake of it’ phenomena which happens when any group of creative people get together… apparently.emerging

Holy CITY 09-10
Revised Standard Visions: Imagining another world
25 Oct/ 29 Nov/ 20 Dec/ 31 Jan/ 28 Feb/ 28 Mar/ 25 Apr/ 30 May
@ 7pm, Renfield St Stephen’s, 260 Bath St., Glasgow. www.holycity-glasgow.co.uk

Climate change, the credit crunch, the still-unfulfilled demands of justice & peace… our generation faces a multitude of challenges…

The history of faith and culture speak of each generation facing similar critical times, when prophets and visionaries have re-framed and re-formed the way we think about our world. It’s said that ‘without a vision, the people perish’.  Holy City’s 2009-10 programme addresses this urgent need in all its facets, and seeks to explore the re-imagining and re-visioning of faith, our lives and our times.

Holy City is the Glasgow city-centre monthly, ecumenical workshop & worship event. It’s enabled by the Wild Goose Resource Group of the Iona Community, in collaboration with a motley crew of Glaswegian citizens.

I’m working on a sermon for Sunday.  A couple of things have been swirling around my brain for a while.

The first is Shane Claiborne’s ‘Jesus for President’ stuff where he talks about the revolutionary kingdom.  The subversion of the Gospel of the Caesars and Mark’s mocking of Caesar in the way he depicts the Crucifixion as a coronation.

The video I posted of Rob Bell sharing his thoughts on the Good News echo these thoughts.

So that’s where Sunday’s sermon is going.  The kingdom of God is a subversive revolution.

I remember the fuss about this picture of Jesus depicted as Che Guevara, the revolutionary who was a key player in the Cuban revolution.  People were genuinely outraged.  I hope it was because they wouldn’t associate Jesus with violent revolution but I have more than a sneaking suspicion that people just don’t see Jesus in the revolutionary role.

So, what do you think?  was Jesus ‘meek and mild’?  Or is there more to this Gospel than that?  Is the Gospel political?  Is it a call to subversive living?

I was in Glasgow today catching up with Thomas and on the way back I passed Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA).  There was a news article the other night about their sh[OUT] exhibition, this year’s social justice exhibition.  This year the topic is lesbian, gay, bisexual, intersex and transgender life with a particular emphasis on Human Rights.  Along side this exhibition is Made in God’s Image, which explores the intersection of sexuality and religion from and LGBT perspective.

As you can imagine the exhibition has not been without its controversy but, despite the subject matter, the thing that has caused the most ‘upset’ is an exhibit which is a film of a woman tearing out pages of the Bible and eating them, sticking them on her face, over her eyes and ears, in her bra.  Near to the screen is a Bible which people ‘who feel they have been excluded from the Bible’ can write on.

The idea of the piece is to highlight how the Bible has been used to discriminate against anyone who has a sexual orientation other than heterosexual.

The piece was created by a Christian, Jane Clarke.

Ms Clarke said: “Writing our names in the margins of a Bible was to show how we have been marginalised by many Christian churches, and also our desire to be included in God’s love.

“As a young Christian I was encouraged by my church to write my own insights in the margins of the Bible I used for my daily devotions – this was an extension of that idea. I still have that Bible, although it’s rather tatty now.”

The Bible has been placed in a glass case now at the request of Ms Clarke and visitors can write in a blank book next to the Bible, the pages of which will be inserted into the Bible.

I nipped in to see what the fuss was about.  Inside I met a BBC film crew and Lorna Gordon, the BBC’s Scotland reporter, doing a piece on the exhibition.  I wondered why.  It has already been on the news.

Inside I saw some great art, some stuff that I liked and some that I didn’t like and some stuff that was pretty explicit.

I also saw this controversial exhibit.  I didn’t like it.  It didn’t work for me but I get her point.

On the way out I noticed a group of people…

They were conservative Christians protesting against the exhibition.  I wanted to go and ask them if they had been in to see it.  But I didn’t.

I noticed two things.

The first was the irony.  A group of religious people protesting against an LGBT exhibition commenting on how religion has been used to oppress them made me laugh then feel sad.

The second thing I noticed was the irony.  The protesters had banners with ‘The Bible is God’s Perfect Creation’ on one of them.  Again the irony seemed to escape them.  Their complaint, apart from being against anyone not being straight, is that the Bible is being defaced, not that God’s creations, people, are being hurt and discriminated against.

I like the Bible.  I have lots of them.  I’ve written on some of them.  I’ve thrown some in the bin.  I’m not worried that I’ll go to Hell for that because it’s a book, a special book, but a book.  And the minute it becomes more than that it becomes an idol.

The intention of the artist was not that people should deface the Bible.  It was that people who have been excluded should be able to write themselves back into God’s story.  That’s a very powerful image.

The Bible is not the revelation of God’s word, Jesus Christ is.  The Bible is a recording of history, law, songs, prophecy, biography and letters.  I have no doubt that it contains God’s word but it doesn’t ‘contain’ Jesus.  He’s much bigger than the Bible.

I wish these people who protest were more upset about poverty, war, famine, drugs, violence or slavery.  Or perhaps I just wish they would go up the stairs into gallery and see the effect they have on people Created in God’s Image and have a bit more respect for people who are trying to tell us something important.

[UPDATE] Roddy Hamilton has written a much better post on this over at Abbotsford

The new episode of the Something Beautiful Podcast features an interview with Lawrence Moore, director of the URC’s Windermere Centre and author of Disclosing New Worlds, a fabulous lectionary blog.  It’s his story of his journey from Zimbabwe  where he served as a police officer in special branch through the civil war to a realisation of what he’d been involved in and a changed life and understanding of who God is.  Well worth a listen!

I was invited to lead a workshop at Holy City in Glasgow last night.  I mentioned before that I was delighted to be asked but now terrified…

Well, it wasn’t that scary!  In fact, I liked it a lot.

I’ve known about Holy City for ages and it’s been on my ‘I’d quite like to go to that’ list but I’ve never got round to going.  I’m so glad I did, even if it took an invite to get me there (perhaps a lesson in that?).

People gather from 7pm for a chat and around 7.20pm new songs are taught for the worship later in the evening and the workshops are plugged.  Then at 7.30pm people choose their workshop and go there for an hour.

There was a great variety of workshops last night, all around the idea of ‘telling’.

Mine was called ‘Telling Signs?’ and I tried to encourage people to talk about what signs of new life they were seeing outside the church and to ask what the church’s response to those should be.  I think it was a good discussion but in many ways the ‘Emerging Church’ is so nebulous that it’s difficult for people to grasp which part we are talking about… or to want to categorise these communities at all.

Worship was the most subversive act I’ve seen in a church for a long time.  We thought about telling… and those who because of a decission by the General Assembly are not allowed to tell and the issue they are not allowed to tell of… sexuality.

Deep words, beautiful music, conversation and actions in an amazing space with great people.

I’ll be back… next term.  And if you find yourself in Glasgow on the last Sunday of the month then you could do much worse than spend some time at Holy City.