Glocal Christianity

Eros versus Agape

When romantic love eclipses sacrificial love in Christian worship, is it any wonder that Christian witness suffers?

 

Service of Shadows

Earlier this evening we held the Tenebrae service once again. This year my eldest son joined me. I had to get him to promise to be really, really quiet (and prove to me during the set up that he could go for 5 minutes without talking). It was a challenge for him to be silent for that long, but he did well. Realising it was a privelege, he rose to the challenge. Reinforces for me what I've observed before, that in the right context, making entry harder can actually encourage people to take discipleship more seriously.

Is the Church of England watering down baptism?

Have you heard that the Church of England has voted to wash some Bible imagery from its baptism rite? What's your view?

Here's mine. On the one hand, I'm all for cultural sensitivity. On the other hand, I'm also for scriptural authenticity. Critical contextualization involves striving for both. So when it comes to contextualizing Christian rites - whether we're talking baptism or ordinary Sunday services - what I like to ask is, where are our sacred stories in the alternative worship styles we're experimenting with? Are the stories washed out or are they contextually sharpened? 

You be the judge of this. Here's what they consider problematic:

In it we are buried with Christ in his death. By it we share in his resurrection. Through it we are reborn by the Holy Spirit.

Here's what's proposed instead:

Heavenly Father, bless this water,that whoever is washed in it may be made one with Christ in the fellowship of your Church, and be brought through every tribulation to share the risen life that is ours in Jesus Christ our Lord.

Christian funerals after Christendom

Just finished reading an article on the changing face of funerals. In it the author asserts:

"It is possible to see all these changes in terms of threats but the alternative is to see them as opportunities and to welcome every request for a Christian funeral service. Some Ministers are very reluctant to conduct such a service for those who were not professing believers and active members of a church. However it is not the Minister who is the ultimate judge of the deceased but the Lord “to whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hidden”. In any event, the deceased has passed beyond our reach and those whom the Minister will serve following a death, and to whom he or she will speak at the funeral service, are those who are still alive here on earth."

As noble as this sounds, I however the caution of ministers in conducting Christian funerals for non-Christians. Because unless they're universalists there are limits to the comfort they can offer the family of the deceased non-Christian. I've seens some ministers handle such situations well, but there is a definite art to it. 

A lurking problem here, that often goes unrecognized by non-Christians even more than Christians, is the Christendom expectation that the church serve as chaplain for society, rather than the seed of an alternate society. This expectation was unhelpful enough when Christendom reigned, but it can go completely pear-shaped in post-Christendom situations.  

100 of the most unique nativity scenes on display in Rome

Nativity scene may not be your scene, but I find it fascinating to see how different people from around the world intepret the birth of Jesus. This is a video of a nativity scene exhibit in Piazza del Popolo in Rome.

Jarrod McKenna on Christmas

Christmas Food Court Flash Mob, Hallelujah Chorus

This is a video of a Food Court Flash Mob singing the Hallelujah Chorus. Quite well executed!

Franciscan benediction

This song is based on a traditional anonymous 'Franciscan benediction'. It is composed and performed by Josh Spier (TEAR SA Coordinator) and features violinist Niki Vasilakis. You can download this song from the TEAR website.

The history of Thin Places

Okay, so to return to the story of Thin Places. First I have to locate it historically. Thin Places began back around 2002 as an offshoot of Community of Hope, a ministry to New Age seekers at Mind Body Spirit Festivals that I’d been part of since 1997 or thereabouts. I could write a whole bunch of posts about this too, but for today I’m simply going to refer you to the book, Jesus and the Gods of the New Age, which covers this in a whole lot more detail.

Thin Places began as a conviction that we needed to take things further than just parachurch outreach, that we had to more deeply integrate worship and witness within contextualized community. So I gathered together a bunch of people, some of them converts from the New Age movement like myself, some of them just Christians with an interest, and started experimenting with alternative worship.

By this stage Neo-Paganism had began to edge out New Age as the cutting edge of alternative spirituality so we began to ask ourselves, what would a more ecologically sensitive and symbolically aware Christianity look like? We started experimenting with alternative liturgies in homes and nature. We aligned our gatherings with the seasons, eight each year, and enjoyed ourselves immensely. Some of us became more integrated with the Neo-Pagan community and became involved in alternative gatherings such as the Winter Magic Festival.

There were however weaknesses to this approach too, which became more apparent as time went on. First of all, the nomadic element. Not everyone was as willing to travel, which led to irregularity in the group numbers. Second of all, reflective liturgy didn’t work as well for us once kids came on the scene. Thirdly, it was still weak on the discipleship side. Fourthly, and most importantly, I realised that in some ways we’d over contextualized, though in others not enough. Eventually these factors led us to move on, and Thin Places is no more, but I’ll have to continue this later.

Related articles on Thin Places

The wheel of the year and the tree of life
Encountering New Religious Movements: Thin Places

Encountering New Religious Movements: Thin Places

Folks, I have been asked to provide some background on the Thin Places missional worship experiment I led some years ago for some US seminary students studying the book, "Encountering New Religious Movements: A Holistic Evangelical Approach". Thinking my responses may be interesting for some of you as well, I've decided to blog some of what I have to say.

For those of you unfamiliar with the book, it was co-edited by my friend John Morehead, along with Irving Hexam and Stephen Rost, and featured articles from a number of top scholars and innovative missiologists, a number of whom were also friends I'd met in the course of moving and ministering amongst people from New Religious Movements, locally and globally. This ground breaking book, published in 2004, ended up winning the 2005 Christianity Today award for Missions/Global Affairs.

In the course of its writing, Encountering New Religious Movements made reference to some of my activities in an article entitled, "Reaching Wiccan and Mother Goddess Devotees". For your reference, here are the pertinent bits, authored by Philip Johnson and John Smulo:

Thin Places

Our apologia is not just a cerebral exercise, but also translates into a missional approach to worship where Wiccans can experientially find the fulfillment of their quest in Christ. Bill Stewart and Steven Hallam have collaborated with us in designing an artistic reinterpretation of the sabbats that visually portrays Christ's mission. This artwork has been used as an evangelistic tool in the context of booth ministry.

Another practical outcome of this apologia is that it has recently (2002) inspired a lay missionary experimen known as Thin Places. The creative impetus came from our collegue Matthew Stone, who has for several years been involved in evangelism with New Age and NeoPagan devotees. The expression is borrowed from remarks made by George Macleod, founder of the modern Christian community in Iona. Macleod indicated that a "thin place" is one where the physical and spiritual realms are so close together that we sense that Gid us not far from us. It is a place of pilgrimage. In geographical terms, a "thin place" can be a transition point, such as where the earth and sky touch on a mountaintop, where urban dwellings touch the boundaries of a forest, or the coastline where land and water converge, and can become a sacre place for worship. Another nuance is that of transition zones or rites of passage in our lives - such a sborth, puberty, moving from school to employment, marriage, menopause, and death - where God's presence should also be felt and acknowledged.

Thin Places is a nomadic network of lay evangelical Christians in Sydney (some are theologically educated), who are committed to a missional theology of worship that gathers on each sabbat. By "nomadic network" we mean that the group is geographically scattered and that the local changes each time they convene for worship. This reflects the sociological realities of contemporary urban life where people network with each other across the eight points of the city's compass and do not necessarily associate identity and primary meaning in life with the suburbs in which they live. The motif of the nomad is grounded in the scriptural example of the Patriarchs, who were often mobile, and the wilderness sojourn of the post-Exodus people. In like manner, Thin Places invokes a "portable faith" that goes from locale to locale according to the six weekly cycle of the sabbats. The locales oscillate between private dwellings and open public spaces (e.g, beaches and parks).

Another motif in Thin Places is that of Christians in exile, which draws inspiration from the Israelite experience of exile in Babylon. the exiled Israelites were compelled to face up to what their spiritual priorities ought to be as they found themselves inhabiting a strange place that was multicultural and religiously diverse. Today's Australian evangelical cannot help but feel a spiritual exile because the Church is in a multicultural social context where other religions flourish and Christianity is no longer regarded as the definitive expression of faith. 

A multilayered missional theology informs the activities of Thin Places. There is recognition that, biblically, worship and misisons go hand-in-glove. The immanence of God's Spirit within the creation (Acts 17:27) grounds the basis for the notion of there being "thin places", precisely because God is near. This then links into a theology of the creation that acknowledges it belongs to the transcendant Lord (Psalm 24:1; Colossians 1:16-17) and that we are stewards of the earth. It encompasses the awareness that the creation praises God (Psalm 148), and animals are included in the new heaven and new earth (Isaiah 11:6-9; 65:17-25). A Christocentric focus takes centre stage, because the incarnation of Christ occurred in the sphere of the creaion. By the Cross and Resurrection, we see how th redemption of humanity and the renovation of the creation takes place.

Participants form a circle around an alter dedicated to God in Christ that is erected at each locale as a focal point for a contextula form of worship. Each one contributes with music, art, prayer devotional and meditative exercises, mutual encouragement through personal storytelling of what God is doing in their life, Scripture and communion. At these gatherings, the participants also tithe their time and resources to support prophetic practical action on issues such as the degredation of the creation, cruelty to animals, and social injustices.

Matthew Stone has encouraged the participants in Thin Places to cultivate friendships with Wiccans and Neo-Pagans. the aim is to invite them to the sabbat gatherings. As discipleship occurs, it is envisaged that a church for pagan converts will develop. Our Melbourne collegues, Bill Stewart and Peter Jolly, participate in "Pagans in the Pub," where opportunities for personal witness are unfolding. Mark and Mary Muss have recently settled in the alternate spiritual community at Mullumbimby, where they are establishing themselves as tent-maker missionaries through booth ministires in local markets and permaculture. Our collegues, Warrick and Diane Saxby, are tent-maker missionanies with Neo-Pagans in Tasmania.

There's more to the article of course, and the book, but that's the guts of my involvement. Next I'll share some of the artwork by Steven Hallam, some more about what we did, why we did it, and how my teaching and practice has shifted in the past 8 years through this and other experiences.