Expressions DVD 2

The CofE has produced it's 2nd DVD on 'fresh expressions' of church, here is the blurb on what it contains:

All over the country, Christians are beginning new initiatives to connect with those who are currently outside the church. Presented by Diane Louise Jordan, this DVD focuses on four specific areas where fresh expressions of church are breaking new ground:

Work, rest and play - Fresh expressions of church in places of employment (20 minutes)
A new harvest? - Fresh expressions of church in rural areas (20 minutes)
The Lord is here - Fresh expressions of church in the sacremental tradition (20 minutes)
Generate - Fresh expressions of church for young people (20 minutes)

In addition there are six discussion starters. These feature experienced contributors, who will help you and your team unpack your thinking about contemporary mission and fresh expressions of church.

1. Why is being mission-shaped so important? (6 minutes)
2. Listening to your community (6 minutes)
3. Starting a fresh expression (6 minutes)
4. Sustaining fresh expressions (6 minutes)
5. Discipleship (6 minutes)
6. The allotment - a short story ( 6 minutes)

This is an excellent training tool for those interested in contemporary mission and fresh expressions of church.

If you want to buy it go here, alternatively order it through a bookshop and save the postage. I'll try to review it here in a week or two once my copy has arrived.

Life on Mars

What to do at 9pm on a Tuesday now that this excellent series is over? Maybe read the book my wife got me at Spring Harvest 'Get more like Jesus while watching TV', which sounds like a win-win to me. In the meantime, meditations on Mars.....

1. What's the plot? (skip to 2 if you already know the plot)
Sam Tyler, a police officer in 2006, has a car crash, ends up in a coma, and 'wakes up' in 1973, working in the same police station but otherwise everything is different. He asks 'am I mad, in a coma, or back in time? Maybe if I can find out the reason, I can get home'.

Throughout the series Sam gets snippets from 2006 - he overhears conversations among the doctors round his bed, or gets messages through his TV set and radio. He also keeps bumping into people from his own past, including himself as a young boy.

In the final episode, Sam is first nearly persuaded that he does belong in 1973, but suffers from amnesia, and that the voices he hears are as a result of an accident he was in. He goes on an operation with his police unit, who are about to be gunned down by armed robbers when Sam suddenly wakes up in 2006. He gets back into his 2006 life, but finds it incredibly dull - police work is confined to meetings and paperwork, and he no longer feels 'alive' in the way he did in his coma world. So he jumps off a roof (stay with me here - this bit didn't make sense to me either), re-enters the 1973 story in time to save his police colleagues, and ends the series having decided to stay in the 1973 world, because he feels more alive there.

2. Strangers in a strange land
The Bible talks about Christians belonging to one place whilst living in another. Philippians and other books talk about us being citizens of heaven, and worship and Scripture are two things which keep us in touch with where we really belong. Sam is living in 1973 but knows he doesn't belong there, and is kept in touch with his true home by his own dreams and occasional 'voices'. these sustain his hope that one day he will wake up and escape.
At the same time, Sam brings his insights from 2006 into the police world of 1973 - recording interviews, organising things, gathering proper evidence rather than just beating suspects up etc. Most of this is strange to his colleagues, but they gradually come to realise that he has something to offer, and isn't just a weird guy.

How far is this a parallel with what followers of Jesus are supposed to be in a world where we don't belong? The Jews in exile in Babylon are encouraged to bless the people they are living amongst, whilst keeping alive a hope of return to where they belong. I doubt that this template was in the minds of the 'Life on Mars' writers, but it's a good way of helping us to think about where we truly belong, and what sustains hope and integrity in the midst of all that.

3. Staying connected to home
For Sam it is dreams, voices, and the media (TV, radio, newspapers) which send him messages about his true home. What keeps us connected to God, and helps us to remember that this isn't the real world compared to God's kingdom?

4. Hope and fantasy
Of course, all this parallel drawing falls apart because Sam opts for the dream world instead of the real one. He opts for the world in which he feels most alive. The series says something important about our society in 2007, and how hard it is to feel alive when we are surrounded by red tape, political correctness, legislation and litigation, and senses numbed by overconsumption. In the words of U2 'I feel numb.... too much is not enough'. Can Christians offer an alternative world where, in the words of Jesus, people can be fully alive. Not a fantasy world, but a way of living in the real world.

ASDA Easter

At our cafe service on Easter Sunday morning, we broke a loaf of bread to remember Jesus as part of the worship. What nobody noticed until part way through the service was that the loaf, kindly provided by a church member, had the word ASDA along the side, and there it sat in pride of place next to the bottle of wine.

Thankfully we had the usual coffee break in the middle, during which we asked folk to come up with an Easter acronym for asda. The following was so good I even remembered it:

After
Sacrifice
Death
Abolished

So, the competition starts here. Any more asda acronyms? How about Tesco? Or if you really fancy a challenge, Sainsburys?

Christ is Risen!

Happy Easter everyone.

For the next week I shall be eating chocolate, drinking beer, and maybe even going to a session or two at Spring Harvest Skegness. And since its nice weather why not go outside rather than reading this blog?

Goth Eucharist

One of the pioneering churches in what's called 'fresh expressions' is St. Edward King and Martyr in Cambridge. Here is a link to the Goth Eucharist which they host every fortnight. It very helpfully gives you an outline of what happens in one of these services, the kind of music they use, and has a very good page on what they're trying to do. I mentioned this service at a meeting last week and had to explain afterwards what a Goth was, so if that person is reading this, click the link and you'll find out!

The church itself also holds a BCP communion service, and a discussion/seminar style service, and is a great example of a church taking risks to make sure more people get the chance to hear about Jesus.

Whilst I'm here, another excellent link for the mathematically inclined http://smaller-than-life.blogspot.com/index.html which takes songs, well known phrases and sayings, etc. and turns them into Venn diagrams. If you need a smile, have a look.

Easter, Dover Beach

Ok, it's only Good Friday, but this is worth posting anyway. Story devised by Tom Wright, and you can find the original context at http://www.ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Resurrection_Postmodern.htmhere.

"Let me end with a parable, returning one more time to the story of the two on the road to Emmaus. To understand this parable, you need to know Matthew Arnold s poem “Dover Beach.” In it Arnold describes—from within his mid-nineteenth century perspective—the way in which what he calls “the sea of faith” has emptied. Once, it was

. . . at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d;

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating to the breath

Of the night-wind down the vase edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.3

Two serious-minded unbelievers are walking home together, trying to make sense of the world of the mid-1990s. The dream of progress and enlightenment has run out of steam. Critical postmodernity has blown the whistle on the world as we knew it.

Our two unbelievers walk along the road toward Dover Beach. They are discussing, animatedly, how these things can be. How can the stories by which so many have lived have let us down? How shall we replace our deeply ambiguous cultural symbols? What should we be doing in our world now that every dream of progress is stamped with the word “Babel”?

Into this conversation comes Jesus, incognito. (It is just as well that they do not recognize him, since modernism taught them to disbelieve in all religions, and now postmodernism has rehabilitated so many that Jesus is just one guru among dozens.) “What are you talking about?” he asks. They stand there, looking sad. Then one of them says, “You must be about the only person in town who doesn’t know what a traumatic time the twentieth century has been. Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx were quite right. We had a war to end wars, and we’ve had nothing but wars since. We had a sexual revolution, and now we have AIDS and more family-less people than ever before. We pursued wealth, but we had inexplicable recessions and ended up with half the world in crippling debt. We can do what we like, but we’ve all forgotten why we liked it. Our dreams have gone sour, and we don’t even know who ‘we’ are any more. And now even the church has let us down, corrupting its spiritual message with talk of cosmic and political liberation.”

“Foolish ones,” replies Jesus. “How slow of heart you are to believe all that the Creator God has said. Did you never hear that God created the world wisely? And that he has now acted within his world to create a truly human people? And that from within this people he came to live as a truly human person? And that in his own death he dealt with evil once and for all? And that he is even now at work, by his own Spirit, to create a new human family in which repentance and forgiveness of sins are the order of the day, and so to challenge and overturn the rule of war, sex, money, and power?” And then, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, and now also the apostles and prophets of the New Testament, Jesus interpreted to them in all of the scriptures the things concerning himself.

The three arrived together at Dover Beach. The sea of faith, having retreated with the outgoing tide of modernism, was full again as the incoming tide of postmodernism proved the truth of Chesterton’s dictum that when people stop believing in God, they do not believe in nothing, they believe in anything. On the shore there stood a vast, hungry crowd. They had cast their bread upon the retreating waters of modernism, and now they discover that the incoming tide of postmodernism is bringing them bricks and centipedes instead.

The two travelers began wearily to open a small picnic basket, totally inadequate for the task of feeding so many. Gently Jesus took it from them, and then in what seemed like moments he had gone to and fro on the beach until everyone had been fed. Then the eyes of them all were opened, and they realized who he was, and he vanished from their sight.

Then the two travelers said to each other, “Did not our hearts burn within us on the road, as he told us the story of the creator and his world, and his victory over evil?” And they rushed back to tell their friends of what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known in the breaking of the bread.

Actually, that is not a story. It is a play, a real-life drama. And the part of Jesus is to be played by you and me. This is Christian mission in a postmodern world. Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God"

Depression

Came across a thread on another blog last week about a vicar who's not been offered jobs with responsibility by his bish because of mental health problems in the past. It struck me that that probably reduces the pool of clergy who can do responsible jobs to about 50.

Depression, and mental illness, is pretty epidemic at the moment. Oliver James Britain on the Couch is a pretty good description of what's going on, though once he starts explaining why he goes into lots of 'evolutionary biology' which sounds like a fancy scientific way of speculating about what the past was like. There's an online article on the same subject here.

There's plenty of mental distress in the Easter story. Peter breaks down and cries when he realises he doesn't have the guts to stand up for Jesus. Judas commits suicide. Jesus himself is 'troubled to the point of death', and you can sense the darkness hanging over him through the last supper, and into the Garden of Gethsemane. On the cross Jesus cries out to the Father who seems to have abandoned him (though there are various ways to interpret 'My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?' - any good Jew would have known this to be a quote from the start of Psalm 22, it would be like singing the first line of a song, you go on to sing the song through in your head. As they went through Psalm 22 in their heads they'd have got to some startling references to the crucifixion, written centuries before, and found the Psalm was giving them insights into what was really happening. Find the Psalm and read it if you don't believe me).

Then after Jesus death we get grief, numbness, bewilderment, people regressing to familiar activities, or wanting to be alone ('I'm going fishing'), they are devastated.

So the Christian faith, of all places, should be a place where we can allow grief, depression, devastation and blackness to be expressed. These are things we shouldn't be afraid of. And people who've been through them have things to teach the rest of us, and can draw alongside others in depression and grief in a way which others can't.

This time last year I was taking anti-depressants. Not because I'm a sad person - most people probably have me down as an optimist, pretty energetic, look on the positive side kind of person. But life throws enough crap at us that eventually we can't dodge it all.

A few weeks ago the vicars in my Diocese were summoned for a training day on child protection and issues around sexual abuse. It was pretty grim stuff, most of it, but I guess it's raised our awareness of some pretty difficult issues. I've yet to see a Diocesan training day on mental illness and how as Christians to deal with our own depression or to help others. Given that about 25% of us get hit with serious depression or other mental illness at various times, it's a bit of a gaping hole. The NHS isn't much better - presented with something like OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder, one of the more common forms of mental illness), many doctors would not spot the symptoms, or don't know what it is.

The disciples, on top of everything else, then have to cope with the resurrection of Jesus. I imagine that that might have been even more stressful than Jesus death! Maybe that's why Jesus hung around for another 40 days, to hold them together whilst they adjusted to the turning of the page of history. Yet despite all they'd been through, a few weeks later they'd be filled with the Holy Spirit and launched with power and grace into the market place to tell the world about the man who was raised from the dead.

Whatever we've been through, wherever we are, Jesus sticks with us and the Spirit can still fill us. Even if it feels like God has abandoned us, we complain in the language of prayer because we're not going to let Him get away that easily. There will be a time of waiting, Easter Saturday can last for a very long time, but then the stars will fade, the black night shade into dark blue, the tinges of red appear on the horizon, and we will feel the warmth of morning again.

In the words of R.E.M: 'when you think you've had enough of this life.... hang on.'

Going to church

A report out today from TEAR Fund, which you can read here if you've got time to go through 50 pages (though the charts are a nice colour), looks at patterns of churchgoing, and in the research asked people what would be likely to make them go to church more often.




One finding was that a significant number of people - TEAR fund estimate up to 3 million, might be open to going to church more often. However, for most of these it would be because a close family member started going, or if they were asked by a friend. Cold calling from the church (or leafletting?), according to the survey, wouldn't have a big impact.






Reading the comments on the BBC website is quite eye-opening: if you sort them by 'most popular' the two overriding messages are a) stop being so rude about Christians b) rude things about Christians, or comments from atheists or people who wouldn't dream of going near a church to find God.

Mission researchers have been saying for years that trying to get people to 'come back to church' is on the way out. Certainly out of folk who've never been to church, or who used to come to church but no longer do, it is a small fraction who are open to 'going to church'. 83% of those who have once been church members but left said they are 'not at all likely' or 'not very likely' to become regular churchgoers. Of those who've never been church members, 72% are 'not at all likely' and 23% 'not very likely' - 95% in all. Scary.

Scary, that is, if mission is about getting people to come to church. But is it? In the words of Jesus 'go into all the world and make them come to church.' Spot the deliberate mistake. And lets face it some of our churches are not shining adverts for the gospel - another story in the news today of a child abusing priest, and most of us have sat in cold, uncomfortable buildings listening to dirgeful singing, dull preaching and left feeling less inspired than when we went in. Be honest: church, cinema, concert of your favourite music, Doctor Who. Rank them in order of how inspired, exhilarated, stimulated and more alive you feel as a result of them.

Ok, going to church is not all about inspiration and zappiness, but there ought to be some relationship between Jesus talking about 'life in all its fullness', the gifts of the Spirit (including joy & love), and a community which Jesus says will cause people to praise God when they see it in action, and the church as it actually is.

Lots more to say about this but for the moment:

1. In mission, we need to stop starting with the church. It is not about how we get more bums on pews. We should probably get rid of the pews anyway. We need to start with what Jesus started with: discipleship, the Kingdom of God, living God's way. We try to have a mission-shaped church but often end up with a church-shaped mission.

2. 'How do we get more people into church?' is the wrong question. Again, that's not Jesus way. How do we help more people find Jesus is a better question. For the majority of our population, the church in its present mode is not part of the solution.

Cartoon courtesy of Dave Walker at www.cartoonchurch.com