… until it stops.

Dead air is usually radio’s worst nightmare. In this case though we noticed the silence much more than we had noticed the music.

I wonder if church is like that?

We seem so keen to fill every available space with words, music, prayers…

… perhaps we need some dead air, some silence that people will notice.

Did you grow up in a Christian home?

How do you know?

Those were two of the questions which were posed by Lucy Moore during Messy Church training on Saturday.

The assembled throng laughed nervously and made jokes about growing up in a bungalow and how they had never asked their house if it had accepted Jesus as its Lord and Saviour before confronting the fact that this is a hard question.

I grew up in a house with two Christian parents.  I went to church every week and Boys’ Brigade.  But that didn’t make it a ‘Christian home’.  Did it?  We prayed each night before bed.  Did that make it a Christian home?  My dad became a minister.  Did that make it a Christian home?

The question and answers led to an interesting discussion asking:

‘How do we model faith at home?’

So, I’m asking you:

Did you grow up in a Christian home?

How do you know?

And as an extra bonus question:

Would your kids (or future kids) give the same answer as you?

He points to some powerful and moving stuff but it led me to a question…

Do we avoid the dark side of faith in our worship?

The Bible has some rich resources for times of hardship and suffering.  Lamentations, Psalms, Job… all full of pain but honest and real and full of faith.

Do we weep in worship?

And if not, why not?

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Photo: Shereen M

I wonder if our impatience comes because we consume rather than create?

If we never plant a seed how can we appreciate the time it takes the plant to root and to sprout and to grow and bear fruit?

If we never build anything how can we appreciate the time it takes to plan, to lay foundations, to build?

If we never wait on anything how can we know the joy of fulfilment?  How can we ever know when something has arrived?  How can we know that things have changed?

Photo by Thomas Mathie

The Something Beautiful podcast gets all reflective for Advent.

We’ve roped in our better halves to bring you words crafted by a variety of  talented people, including Jonny Baker and Roddy Hamilton, and music from So Elated, Adeline and others.  We’ve borrowed it all and arranged it in a neatly wrapped giftbox for you.

We encourage you to stop, to listen and to wait, pondering Advent and what is to come.

Let me know what you think…

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

Principles and Values

Youth Work is based on some principles.  Different places have different core principles or core values.  In Scotland the core values outlined by Community Education Validation and Endorsement (CeVe) are:

• Respects the individual and the right to self-determination;
• Respects and values pluralism;
• Values equality and develops anti-discriminatory practice;
• Encourages collective action and collaborative working relationships;
• Promotes learning as a lifelong process;
• Encourages a participating democracy.

Of course these values apply to the full range of community work activity but within that they cover youth work.  I’d like to suggest that if we were to try to write a similar list of core values for the Emerging Church the list would not be very different.

The Emerging Church seems to me to be:

• respecting of the individual, placing strong emphasis on our own story or faith journey
• and the right to draw from different traditions and experiences to form our future
• based in a theology which values all and challenges inequality
• all about working together in all kinds of ways
• engaging people in worship, projects and experiences that are steeped in learning
• centred on people being involved in the life of the community

I wonder if these values that Emerging Churches seem to display are at least partly a product of the people driving new forms of church having been involved in youth work, either as young people or as leaders?

Youth Work and the Emerging Church seem to share a value base.  Is that coincidence?  I don’t think so.

People, these ‘bored adults’, have in many cases had a good experience of church as young people.  They have been encouraged to participate, to learn, to value and respect each other and to be responsible for planning and delivering their own activities.  Imagine their shock when they are faced with ‘church’.  Sit there, be quiet and listen…

Is it any wonder that people are seeking out ‘new’ ways to be church?  But then I suspect that many of these ‘new’ ways aren’t new at all… they were born in youth work.