malcolm chamberlain

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' is a great post from Steve Hollinghurst, and well worth a read especially if you're a church minister in the UK! I've lost count of how many times I've read or been told that England is a Christian country, and it's often a statement masking a more sinister unspoken view that either verges on racism or anti-youth sentiment. Steve hits the nail on the head when he writes:

"the reality is that a modern democratic society can never by identity be a 'Christian country' and the use of this phrase does not promote the Church's influence i think it actually undermines it. it simply serves to remind everyone that the church is a thing of the past, that we used to be a Christian nation and that whilst some bits of that legacy where good we no longer need the Church to tell us that, we the citizens now decide what are 'good Christian values' and what are 'bad traditional religious morality'. anyone caught using the phrase 'we are a Christian country' is at best well meaning but irrelevant and at worst a power mad oppressor who wants to run the country their way and not our way. Christians need to wake up to this and start admitting we are not a Christian country." (bold highlights mine)

I've recently been teaching the 'Mission in Britain Today' module on a regional course training people for lay and ordained ministry in the anglican, methodist and baptist churches. Interestingly, the session on post-Christendom has been met with differing, sometimes strongly held, views. Some people do grieve the passing of Christendom; that is until we start to dig a bit deeper and read our history in the context of the New Testament and the mission of God. I'm of the belief that continuing to live with a Christendom mentality is perhaps the thing, above any other, that paralyses the church with respect to mission.

It seems that Steve is in agreement...

"... when we stop trying to claim some privileged position because 'we are a Christian country' and admit we are not we then get freed up to start fulfilling a calling to offer vision in our nation in the only way we can, by inspiring individuals, whether in government or in the local street, by what we say and what we do."

Read Steve's full post 'here'

Labels: mission, post-christendom, religion

I really enjoyed being at the Mind Body Spirit Northern Festival over the weekend. I spent much of my time talking to people about their spiritual experiences and searching, praying for people and explaining how we continue this tradition because we believe that Jesus the healer lives on and is with us by his Spirit, and (a new experience for me) giving readings from the Jesus Deck (a contextually appropriate form of applied Bible reading really!)

I think what struck me about the whole experience is how genuinely open people are to engage with 'the divine' and look beyond themselves in order to better know themselves. It's not stretching the point to say that I found a greater sense of openness to 'God' at this festival than I often find in many churches. In fact, people are so open that they are prepared to try all sorts of things and pay quite large amounts of money in the process (though we charged nothing at Dekhomai). I met and prayed with one young man who had already been to the Reiki healers and had his Aura read (at the modest cost of £25). It was the latter experience that was now concerning him as the 'reading' was not very positive. As we talked and prayed he expressed how he had felt a weight lifting from him - maybe a genuine activity of God.

I guess my overall reflection on the experience (and I'm sure it's overly simplistic) is that festivals such as this are in many ways an indictment on the Church, rather than an external expression of 'evil' competing with the Church. Many people I met had been raised through church or had some church experience in their background. For a whole range of reasons they were now continuing their spiritual journey detached from the Church. These people largely responded positively to Dekhomia because Jesus remained central to their spirituality, even though they had openly rejected the Church.

Which all raised a series of questions for me... what led these people to give up on the Church in their spiritual exploration? (I may have some handles on this one though!) More importantly, how do we (is it even possible to) enable people to freely journey in their own spiritual exploration within church communities, even if their present understanding is, in places, at odds with orthodox Christian doctrine and theology? Can we provide the space for such a journey centred on Jesus which will, potentially at least, negate the need that many feel to plough so much of their hard-earned money into Mind Body Spirit festivals? I'm reminded of an elderly lady who was a member of the first church I was a minister at who was greatly loved by everyone in the church and seen as a pillar of the church community. She had a strong belief in reincarnation... was it right that the church still counted her as 'one of us'?! Right or wrong (I'm not really into dogmatics) at least she was able to develop her relationship with Jesus alongside others who would challenge and encourage, rather than being cast into the void at the mercy of the multitude of confusing and contradicting messages.

But I say 'is it even possible to' because maybe consumerism has seduced our lives so fully that even spirituality and the search for God has been made an essentially individually 'purchased' thing. Many people I met over the weekend had 'consumed' several spiritual experiences through what was on offer at the festival and were still floating around, with little or no anchor points, looking for the next experience to 'buy'. If this is the case, then surely the Church has been complicit to some extent in this individualising of faith and spirituality, and must now find ways of being both contextually rooted (speaking the right language) and yet also counter cultural if we are to stem the tide and help people to (re)discover Jesus. I guess in some small way this is what Dekhomai and the stand at the festival was and is trying to do.

Labels: musings, post-christendom, spirituality

Alan Hirsch has an interesting post 'here' exposing the attractional model of mission as "literally out-moded" in a post-Christendom context. What is particularly intriguing is the fact that at the end of the post Alan feels the need to write (perhaps prompted by past misunderstandings of his argument)...

"another ambiguity can be explained by saying that while a more missionally defined church moves from a come-to-us mentality to a go-to-them mentality, nonetheless all expressions of church should be attractive. That is, we should always be culturally compelling. Don’t mistake not being attractional for not being attractive."

I hear the distinction well, but would add that even when we focus on being attractive we do so, maybe unconsciously, because we are trapped in the attractional mission model. We try, as churches, to be relevant (and so attractive) to our surrounding context, but still expect people to come to us when we get the relevant thing right.

From my reading of the gospels, it's Jesus who is the 'attractive' one (if you'll excuse the obvious mis-implications of that statement!) For example, when Philip was telling Nathanael about Jesus in John 1, he was able to say "come and see" because he knew that in seeing and meeting Jesus, Nathanael would get it and be drawn (attracted) towards him. Jesus is the one who is attractive and, I guess, attractional (after all, he calls people out of their current situation to follow him). The problem is that the Church and much of what passes for Christian mission is often so caught up in trying to be attractive and relevant that it obscures, by clever programs and reasoned arguments, the One who truly is attractive - Jesus!

Our task in mission is to, like Philip, direct people to Jesus recognising his involvement already in their lives. This will lead us into incarnational 'sent' mission because that's where Jesus is, and it's 'out there', so to speak, in the ordinary, that people will find him and be drawn to him.

Labels: mission, musings, post-christendom

I don't normally get all retro and point people back to earlier posts, but the discussion that's been developing through the comments on 'this one' is well worth reading! If you get a chance, go take a look, set your imagination free and add your thoughts...

Labels: emerging church, mission, post-christendom

Alan Hirsch has posted a helpful (in its simplicity) description of Christendom, drawing on the work of Stuart Murray (read it 'here'). He also demonstrates how the paradigmatic shift of Christianity, from the margins to the centre of the institution, undermined the 'Jesus movement' that had previously been transforming the Roman world from the grassroots.

His quote from the Church Historian Rodney Stark is striking...

"Far too long, historians have accepted the claim that the conversion of the Emperor Constantine (ca. 285-337) caused the triumph of Christianity. To the contrary, he destroyed its most attractive and dynamic aspects, turning a high-intensity, grassroots movement into an arrogant institution controlled by an elite who often managed to be both brutal and lax."

Hirsch argues (and I happen to agree with him) that although Christendom has long since demised, the Church generally continues to operate with the Christendom mindset, or as he puts it, "Constantine is still the emperor of our imaginations".

For the Church to fully grasp and realise its missional calling, a similar but opposite paradigm shift is necessary to the one that took place under Constantine. Is this where the Emerging Church (in its best use of that term) is acting as a prophetic challenge to the institutional Church as it gets on with the business of seeing grass roots, culturally contextualised, communities of faith emerging? Is the 'Jesus movement', largely crippled for the last 1700 years through institutionalisation, finally being allowed to live again?

Labels: emerging church, mission, post-christendom

Without doubt, one of the most informative, uncomfortable and challenging articles I've read recently is Stuart Murray's 'Christendom and Post-Christendom' (which can be downloaded as a pdf from 'here'), which charts the rise and fall of Christendom in the West and looks at how the reality of Christendom has adversely affected both Biblical interpretation and approaches to mission.

Throughout his paper, Murray refers to the dissident marginal groups and movements in the Church, such as the Lollards, Waldensians and Anabaptists, who have consistently opposed the marriage of church and state, challenging the very foundations of the Christendom church. Their constant refrain has been one of reasserting the central place of Jesus, whose humanity and earthly ministry has been largely sidelined since the fourth century in favour of a more celestial 'emperor' type figure.

Murray argues that in the post-Christendom context we now find ourselves in (in the West) we need to rediscover the voices of these dissident groups and recover the impetus towards being a truly missional church. We must be prepared to reassess not only our models of church and mission, but the theological foundations that have underpinned Christendom faith for sixteen hundred years. We must re-establish the central place of Jesus - his life, ministry and teaching (and not only his death and resurrection) - at the heart of belief and ethics, both personal and social.

Murray's paper is riddled with quotable passages, but this is perhaps my favourite which seems to sum up the missional task in the 21st century Western world:

"Christendom is dead or dying. We live now in a post-Christendom society and we desperately need to stop thinking in Christendom categories. Europe has decisively rejected the institutional form of Christianity known as Christendom. Arguably it has not yet seen enough of Jesus to decide what to do with him. Perhaps it is time to read the Bible in a new way, to recover the Christocentric approach of the pre-Christendom churches and the marginal movements, to rediscover Jesus for ourselves and to follow him into a world that is heartily sick of Christianity but which might yet be intrigued by Jesus."

It seems that this has been the central agenda of the emerging church conversation, and of related books such as those from N T Wright, Brian McLaren, Kester Brewin and Steve Chalke. So, is the emerging church a new 'dissident group' in Murray's use of the phrase? And, if so, might there be a good reason for remaining at the margins of the Church so that we can continue to raise the prophetic call to Christ-centred discipleship? (As an aside, at a recent gathering of people involved in the UK emerging church, a significant proportion of those present had connections with the Church of England - the established church! Is this simply an interesting irony or a source of hope?!!)

Murray's article is well worth reading, as I'm sure are many more of the articles which can be downloaded from postmission.com

Stuart Murray is Oasis Director of Church Planting and Evangelism and Lecturer at Spurgeon's College, London, England

Labels: emerging church, post-christendom, theology