malcolm chamberlain

Things have been very quite on this blog front recently, but I'm breaking the silence (!) to post this interesting interview with the three main Political Party leaders concerning their attitude towards the church. It's well worth a watch...

Of course, this isn't the only, or maybe even the most important, issue that should concern us as Christian voters. The people at the 'Robin Hood Tax' have made it easy to canvass our politicians views on that issue, which could well expose their attitudes towards poverty and wealth more generally. I only sent the email yesterday and have already received an extensive reply from our local Green Party candidate. Click 'here' to send it to your candidates.

Finally, in the wake of the controversy surrounding Gordon Brown's inadvertent cock-up yesterday, Kester Brewin has written a great parable with tongue only slightly in cheek. Find it on his blog 'here', but it's worth reproducing in full...

Labels: church, community, justice, news, politics

Chris Moyles and his breakfast team talk about an experience they had of 'lively' Christian worship. Stay with it until the end - it's a fascinating insight to perceptions of the church...



hat tip... Church Times Blog

Labels: church, popular culture

In preparation for a round table discussion with Tom Sine, that I'm involved in tomorrow, I've just read the first two chapters of The New Conspirators (I thought I'd better!)

The chapter 'Emerging, Missional, Mosaic and Monastic' is an excellent, and pretty up-to-date, overview of what Sine describes as 'four streams of renewal' in the church at present (the four streams being those in the chapter title).

Last Friday I was interviewed by BBC Radio Merseyside as part of the run up to 'Back to Church Sunday', and was asked if I was concerned by the state of the church and, in particular, by its decline. I said that I wasn't, because I was hearing so many stories of new life and (to use the phrase) 'fresh expressions' of church that were much more rooted in the realities of communities, cultures and real life. I mentioned that, for me, a faith that didn't touch base with, and affect, reality was a faith not really worth having!

For people who are concerned about the state of the church, the first two chapters of Tom Sine's latest book will come as both an encouragement and a challenge. An encouragement as you read of the many ways in which new communities of followers of Jesus are taking root and making a difference, and a challenge as your eyes are opened to these new realities and your existing church (and faith) paradigms are shaken, even subverted. The kingdom of God is, of course, so much bigger than what we've allowed it to become in our Christian sub-cultures, and Sine's book is a wake up call to join in with the missio dei.

I love the invitation at the start of the book to "become a part of something 'really, really small,' a quiet conspiracy that is destined to change our lives and God's world." (p23) I'm really looking forward to reading the rest of the book and to meeting and discussing with Tom Sine tomorrow.

Labels: church, community, mission, post-modernity

Jonny has posted some really helpful and challenging posts about worship, arising out of a symposium he was involved in at London School of Theology. He makes some pertinent points (and echoes those of others) about fully contextualised worship grown "in the soil of your local culture". Read his posts here, here and here.

Labels: alternative worship, church, musings, popular culture, worship

Ok, so it might just be a pretty long (7 minutes) advert for this book and course (which I haven't read/participated in, so can't comment on), but it is worth a watch all the same...

Labels: church, churchless faith, post-christendom, spirituality

'This', from Bishop Alan's blog, is brilliant - a warning to those who spend too much time hunting for 'dodgy'! Go read...

Labels: church, debates, religion

just trying out an idea here...

I was in a discussion earlier today in which we were comparing Jesus' non-directional teaching and non-hierarchical 'church' structure to that which we find in Paul's letters. Where Jesus seemed intent on rejecting status (see Matthew 23:8-12) and on asking more questions than he gave answers, Paul seems equally intent on introducing structure, firming up theological convictions and making requirements of 'leaders' that set them apart from the rest (e.g. Titus 1:5-9, assuming Paul wrote Titus which I'm happy to accept). This cursory reading of both Jesus and Paul has led many people to set them up against each other and plump for the teaching of one as their 'key texts'.

As we were discussing this I started wondering if it could be argued that Jesus was engaged in deconstructing the inherited religious patterns, by his teaching and example, subverting the status positions found in his society and the powerplay of directive teaching. If so, can we argue that Jesus was intentionally engaging in encouraging people's faith journeys on from a stage 3 inherited faith (using Fowler's model) towards stage 4 and beyond?

Following this through, we could then argue that Paul was merely beginning the process of reconstruction, trying to make sense of his own religious heritage, the teaching and practice of Jesus and the social context(s) in which he found himself. At times Paul can seem a bit confused with himself - not surprising for someone moving through a stage 4 towards a stage 5 faith!

If this were the case, we could draw a couple of interesting implications...

1. Paul's project was not contra to that of Jesus, but was a development of Jesus' own ministry. It is desireable (or is it?) that deconstruction leads to a reconstruction where the latter takes account of the journey and the changed perspectives and so may look very different from the pattern held prior to deconstruction, whilst having some similarities. Compare Paul's church structure and pattern for leadership with that of 1st century Judaism - similarities and radical differences.
2. Paul, in reconstructing faith and community structure was doing so for the 1st century world(s) in which he lived and travelled. He wasn't necessarilly setting a definitive pattern that has to be adhered to by all people of all nations in all times.

Is it then the task of the church in every new context, be it cultural, historical or whatever, to be both allowing Jesus' teaching and ministry to deconstruct inherited patterns of faith and community, keeping us centred on the teacher rather than the teachings, the divine rather than the institution, whilst at the same time engaging in reconstructing new patterns of church and ministry that take into account the story so far and the social context in which we currently live? This sounds a bit like N T Wright's 'faithful improvisation' arrived at in a very different way!

This is clearly not a thought through theory, just something I'm mulling over! Any comments?...

Labels: church, community, musings, theology

an interesting question raised by 'zero_zero_one' to my last post...

"Another thought - can churches choose to opt out from being under the authority of a MALE bishop? Obviously at the moment there are only male bishops in the Church of England, but when female bishops come along will churches be able to say, for example, "The (male) bishop of our diocese voted against female bishops, we do not agree with this on a theological basis, therefore we want a female bishop or a male bishop who agrees that women can be bishops"?"

Labels: church, debates

Once again, Jon Birch hits the nail well and truly on the head...

Labels: church, debates, fun

	For	Against	Abstentions
Bishops	28	12	1
Clergy	124	44	4
Laity	111	68	2

The final amended motion was:

That this Synod:
(a) affirm that the wish of its majority is for women to be admitted to the episcopate;
(b) affirm its view that special arrangements be available, within the existing structures of the Church of England, for those who as a matter of theological conviction will not be able to receive the ministry of women as bishops or priests;
(c) affirm that these should be contained in a statutory national code of practice to which all concerned would be required to have regard; and
(d) instruct the legislative drafting group, in consultation with the House of Bishops, to complete its work accordingly, including preparing the first draft of a code of practice, so that the Business Committee can include first consideration of the draft legislation in the agenda for the February 2009 group of sessions.

for more information about this historic vote, and some interesting links, see the Church Times blog

I followed the debate yesterday through Ruth Gledhill's excellent live blog-cast (is that a new term?!) - well worth a read to fill in the gaps!

Let's continue to hope and pray that the code of practice and special arrangements being drawn up don't serve to water down the important step taken, by making women bishops appear to be 'second class bishops'. I agree that there are very complex pastoral considerations needed for those who in conscience can't accept this decision, but the Church, through it's recognised structures, has decided and this should now be regarded as the understanding and policy of the Church of England. Women will be bishops and, when that happens, should be treated by the Church as equal to any other bishop - anything less would be to treat with contempt the historic decision that Synod has taken which would be a travesty.

Labels: church, debates

So is 'this statement' from the Church of England a case of "well said' or last ditch wishful thinking and covering over the cracks? I tend to think that there is a lot of truth in the statement and particularly in how church statistics are unfairly compared to those of other faith communities, but it's also a little bit too early to be patting ourselves on the backs! Nice to see a mention of chaplaincies alongside fresh expressions too!

Labels: church, mission, religion

a great little post from Ben Sternke on missional church.

Labels: church, community, mission

Last night I began teaching a twelve session course, Mission in Britain Today, for the SNWTP; a partnership of the Anglican, Methodist, Baptist and United Reformed churches across Merseyside, Greater Manchester and Chester, training people for church ministry and leadership. I had a great time with the group I'm teaching and we began a fascinating discussion which is likely to continue throughout the course. I'm blogging about it here because I'm interested in your response too!

By way of introduction to the theme of mission, and as a basis for understanding mission, we looked at the concept of missio dei and discussed the implications of believing in a God who is constantly engaged in his (please note that I'm using the masculine pronoun here to personalise, not to genderise (sic), God) mission in and beyond the structures of the organised Christian Church.

As part of this discussion, I sketched the two well documented alternatives regarding the implication of the missio dei for the Church. The first (put forward by such as A.T. Van Leeuwen and J.C. Hoekendiijk) is the suggestion that the Church is pretty much incidental to the success of the mission of God. The argument goes that, since God is engaged in mission and uses various agents to bring about his purposes of justice and salvation, it makes little difference to the success of this mission whether the Church has got its act together or not - God will achieve his purposes with or without the Church. Nor is it significant to the overall mission of God as to whether the Church is growing or not - God's mission is beyond, though it does include, the Church.

The second alternative to understanding the implications of the missio dei for the Church is that argued by such as Andrew Kirk and Wilbert Schenk. They emphasise the belief that, although God is indeed active beyond the Church and although the ultimate purpose of the divine mission is the Kingdom and not the Church, nevertheless the Church, as the community of those who have entered consciously into relationship with God, is central to God’s way of working in mission. The Church, they argue, is both an embodied sign of the Kingdom and a foretaste or sacrament of the Kingdom, and, furthermore, it is the only intentional agent of the Kingdom. Therefore, it does matter whether the Church has got its act together or not - although God is not restricted to working only through the Church, he has established and called the Church as the primary agent and visible sign in the missio dei, and so the mission of God will suffer if the Church is not fulfilling its calling. Likewise, Church growth is evidence of the success of the missio dei.

Of course, the proviso for this second alternative has to be what we understand by 'the Church'. Church growth does not simply mean more bums on seats in organised churches. But it does surely refer to the community(ies) who consciously identify themselves as followers of Christ engaged in the mission of God, rather than some vague and undefined concept. Indeed, it's this conscious identification that differentiates the Church from the wider Kingdom, of which it is a part.

So that was the gist of last night's discussion. Over to you... is the Church incidental and inconsequential to the missio dei, or is it the central agent through which God choses to work his purposes? Does it matter whether the Church has got its act together or not?

Labels: church, mission, theology

'This' is great - no need to apologise Jon!

Labels: church, churchless faith, fun

So 2008 is underway and it's a year of changes and new challenges for me! Just before Christmas I signed off on over 8 years of University chaplaincy to take up a new dual post at the end of January. It's a move that takes me back into parish church ministry, becoming 'priest in charge' (a term I really don't like!) of St Mary's, Wavertree in Liverpool. As has become my pattern since 1999, this is only one half of a dual post! For the other half I'll be the deanery pioneer minister for the Toxteth and Wavertree deanery, enabling and encouraging emerging church communities and fresh expressions of church in the area. This will keep me connected with the Dream network, in particular Dream in Liverpool City which meets in the Deanery, as well as giving me opportunity to hook up with some other exciting initiatives (such as this one) and joining others in dreaming up new approaches to mission in the area.

It's both exciting and daunting but it feels like a good move! The people of St Mary's are very friendly and welcoming - it's a church with a long and rich history that doesn't want to remain rooted in the past but wants to build on it in meeting the needs of its community today. I'm also really impressed by their commitment to fair trade and social justice, and look forward to belonging to this community. Watch this space to read reflections and news over the course of time!!

Labels: church, mission, musings

A conversation I was engaged in last night has got me thinking some more about missional church commmunities. It was a fascinating discussion in which we voiced the tension between the 'ideal' Christian community and the 'reality'. The ideal community is one where members are so committed to one another and to journeying together in relationship with Christ that they are able to put up with one another, 'warts and all', tolerating and even embracing differences. Furthermore, the 'warts and all' are not hidden behind the facade of false 'Christian smiles' and utterances of 'everything is ok', but are public and worked through in an environment of honesty and unconditional acceptance. And so, the ideal Christian community will be multi-generational and multi-cultural, where everyone is open to learn from and engage with the people and things they don't particularly like (music, traditions, beliefs, etc), as well as those they do.

The reality of course is always different to this - generally people belong to their particular faith community because it best expresses the kind of things they do like, and includes the kind of people they can relate to. And woe betide anyone who comes in and tries to change this balance too radically to a different way of doing things. Generally we don't put up with 'warts and all' because we tend to keep them hidden, and when they do rise to the surface we simply resort to criticisms usually behind the backs of the people concerned!

So how do we move from the reality to the ideal... is it even possible? It dawned on me (rightly or wrongly) during our discussion that to try to 'create' the ideal is always doomed to failure. It's not good enough to expect people to put up with stuff they don't like or people they don't get on with, and to judge them as not committed enough if they don't. Our Western culture is fragmented, in the sense that it encompasses countless sub-cultures within it, but one uniting facet is consumerism. Christians often start talking about consumerism very critically as if we've managed to escape it, but the truth is that we are all consumers, me included! It follows that in a fragmented consumerist society people will tend to only engage in voluntary activities that they want to be a part of, activities that they enjoy or get something from. We generally don't chose to do things that we don't enjoy unless we're paid to or have to.

If then, we want community to be missional - if we want to encourage people to identify with and belong to faith communities, these communities have to, first and foremost, be ones that people can relate to and so want to belong to. Gone are the days (thank God) of people rolling up to church because someone says they ought to, and enduring it because they have no choice in the matter.

It's true that at work or when shopping (two examples raised in last night's discussion) we may encounter and tolerate annoying people, but at work we are paid and have no choice but to get on with the job regardless (apart from resigning that is), and when shopping we're either shopping for essentials and so have to put up with the inconveniences, or our desire to shop in that particular store outweighs the inconvenience so we simply try to avoid the nuisance. Work and shopping for essentials are not really voluntary activities and the leisure shopping we do because we enjoy it - if we didn't we'd likely stop shopping in the places where the annoying people were.

In the case of church we have a very different dynamic - it's generally a community where we can't avoid people (except in very large congregations) and where we have to put up the things that annoy us. My (educated) guess is that many people simply vote with their feet when they encounter uncomfortable differences, thinking 'why should I go to church to put up with stuff and people I don't get on with?' Of course, in all this we must still hold on to the ideal, but we can't engineer it and if we only operate in that model we're unlikely to engage anyone new, especially people with no previous church background. The level of selflessness needed to be committed to a community 'warts and all' is probably a fair distance down the discipleship path for most people - indeed many people who have been 'going to church' for decades have still not reached that point and hold out for what they prefer above any missional concerns. So why insist that people newly engaging with a community should be at that point immediately, and should 'shut up and put up' if they're serious about following Jesus.

So maybe this becomes an apologetic for culture specific communities, at least as a place of first connection with followers of Jesus. I guess the introduction of 'clusters' in some church models (e.g. "here') is an attempt to provide such spaces of belonging. These are not intended as end points with respect to engagement in Christian community, and are certainly not seen as exclusive 'clubs'. The intention is to allow the organic growth of safe and attractive community in which people can engage in the journey of discipleship with others, because they actually want to be there. At some point on the journey they may well begin to realise that they do actually need the 'warts and all' after all.

Labels: church, community, mission, musings

Ok, so this video is a parody (and quite a funny one at that), but the thing with parodies is that there has to be some kernel of truth behind it for it to work. Over the top it may be, but it's built on a perception that we need to work very hard to correct. Enjoy... but not too much!



hat tip... Matt Stone

Labels: church, fun

Here are links to two excellent posts that relate (in different ways) to my Tuesday post 'changing our minds'...

Paul Fromont (on 'Prodigal Kiwi(s)' blog) - Fullness of Truth
Richard White (on the Dream blog) - Jesus never spoke to prostitutes

Labels: church, musings, theology

A key part of the ethos of Spirited Exchanges is that it's ok to change your mind, even during a discussion! If we're all journeying in our relationship with Christ, growing to know him better, then it's likely... no, it's inevitable... that at times we will discover that what we previously thought to be the truth is either incomplete and less than the truth or is actually wrong. It's at these times that we need to be able to swallow our pride and concede the argument - to say, "actually, I was wrong on that, now I think this"!

The trouble is, that we Christians (or whatever we call ourselves) are not very good at this! We tend to see changing our minds as a sign of weakness rather than a point of growth - the beginning of a slippery slope towards losing faith! Paul Fromont posts 'here' a link to a paper by Canon Joseph Cassidy, of St Chad's college Durham, in which he writes, "…Spiritual freedom is rather a measure of whether I'd be willing to change my mind if God required it of me. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, urged his companions to aim for 'indifference': though it is a bit of a misnomer, in his terms indifference is a quest for equilibrium, a desire to be inclined to one option or another solely because it is closer to God's will for us. In other words it is a desire to be swayed by nothing other than God's will."

This reminds me of a conversation I was having with a friend last week in which we discussed the problem of power and intransigence in the church and compared it to the frequent cases in the Bible of God jumping out of the boxes that people had put him in. Perhaps the most classic case of this is Peter's vision in Acts 10, where God essentially instructs Peter to disobey the Word of God (not an easy one to reconcile with any notion of scriptural infallibility). Peter's obedience to God's will in this case opened up the good news of Jesus to the Gentiles for the first time.

And so, I wonder... what does the Church need to change it's mind over in order to be obedient to God's will and the missio dei in today's world? What do I have to change my mind over? What boxes have we constructed that we still only expect God to work in and through? Would we be willing to entertain the possibility that this is God's activity if it didn't fit those particular frameworks. I guess Peter could have easily concluded that his vision was 'demonic' once he 'weighed it' against his scriptures. Thank God he didn't!

Another friend of mine once told me that he felt 'called' by God to be a Bishop in the church, but not remotely called to be a vicar (or equivalent). Is he wrong? Is he power mad? Or is our system wrong that sets bishops in some kind of hierarchical arrangement? After all, isn't a bishop simply a member of the community of faith (the Church) with a specific ministry - no more important and no less important than any other member of this community? Why can't someone be called to this specific ministry without a call to other ministries first?

Don't get me wrong... I'm not overly hung up on this one. I guess it just may illustrate one such example of a box we may have put God in that he needs to spring up from and out of. I'm sure there are many more. Suggestions on a blog comment to....

Labels: church, musings, theology

King of the Hill surveys the US church scene in a great clip 'here' - it lasts 5 minutes or so but it's funny so worth it!

I've edited this post to remove the embedded clip because it you can't stop it automatically loading, which is a tad annoying when you've already seen it! So go see it here!

hat tip... Jonny Baker

Labels: church, fun