Prodigal Kiwi(s) Blog

Dave Tomlinson on Faith Without Borders

Dave Tomlinson, and Anglican Priest and author, recently spoke at London’s Moot Community Advent Course 2014. Drawing on his two most recent books (How to be a Bad Christian and a Better Human Being, and The Bad Christian’s Manifesto: Reinventing God) he gave an address on the theme “Faith without borders”. What if we think of the term ‘Christian’ as a verb rather than a badge or a sign of belonging to a holy club? What if we stop dividing people into categories of ‘believers’ and ‘non-believers’ and instead learn to see God at work in the world and to join in on that work.

Dave Tomlinson is the Vicar of the Church of St Luke’s West Holloway in the Diocese of London. 

You’ll find the 38-minute podcast here. 

Local Theology

Was having lunch with a great friend yesterday and we were discussing, over a beer, the great struggle of many churches to be incarnational – to enflesh genuine “good news” at the level of the local, the ordinary and the everyday. I guess, for me anyway, there was an implicit critique with respect to the churches (local) inability to do good local theology; to take place, context, culture, history etc. seriously. Local theology is contextual theology. 

Two books I’ve found helpful are:

Constructing Local Theologies (1985) by Robert J. Schreiter.

Let’s Do Contextual Theology: Resources for Contextual Theology (2009) by Laurie Green 

It brought to mind this recent post from my Canadian blogging friend Len Hjalmarson, who highlights another book on the subject: 

“…[Clemens] Sedmak writes, “There is a growing awareness that theology is not an instant product that we take from the shelf and put some (local) water in it in order to have an enjoyable drink. Theology is a specifically local adventure if it wants to be relevant for a particular culture. As Michael Amaladoss says ‘The flowering of local theology is a sign of the rootedness and maturity of a particular church.’ And also a sign of the rootedness and maturity of theologians… 

…Maybe our theological imagination needs to look more like this [see diagram to the left]. The role of the particular setting where the church is in dialogue with the gospel has become larger than ever. This is because we are giving ear to marginalized voices; we are opening a wider ground for conversation, and listening to voices that are far away. We are recognizing that conditions have changed and culture has shifted — we have to listen anew in order to wrestle with questions that are new. So I propose a larger role for culture in this trialogue… 

Doing Local Theology: A Guide for Artisans of a New Humanity. New York: Orbis Books, 2002. 182 pages.

Len’s complete post here. 

Discernment: The Importance of the Other. The Importance of Difference.

Communal or collaborative discernment and its practice is something I’ve long found fascinating. There’s much to be said for a collective approach, especially when we think of the complexity we face everyday, especially when we think of the sheer scale of data that is available to us today. How do we make decisions? How do we listen well? How do we work in healthy ways with difference and conflict? How do we bring discernment into business? Can we actually even bring the practices of discernment into business? 

The following is an excerpt from an article on the paradigm out of which Pope Francis operates; a paradigm very different from the approach so many of us are very used to: somebody higher up in the hierarchy makes a decision and our task is to implement it. Tell us what to do and we will do it. So, the author of the article I’m referencing can write, “…The previous two Popes made decisions the rest of the Church was expected to implement…” It’s a truism, but its not just true of the Catholic Church.

Just prior to typing this I had been engaging with a documentary on economics; on the increasing disparity between the “haves” and the “have not’s” (for Kiwi readers, the documentary was in the very good Nigel Latta TV series Nigel Latta(see TV1 on demand, here). How do we make practical sense of the information we are given in a show like this? How do we engage widely (i.e. collectively), creatively, intelligently, imaginatively, courageously and passionately to the challenges of creating a different economic paradigm?

I need others to read the signs of the times. I know I don’t need sameness. I know I need to join with others, in all their richness and diversity, to wisely attend to my own micro-challenges and those of the wider macro-context, of which I am a part.  

“…Discernment is necessary if one is going to read the signs of the times. It is no secret that the Catholic Church faces major problems that need to be assessed and responded to in an appropriate way. An appropriate response is not simply to change everything in order to “get with the times”. On the other hand an appropriate response may also not be simply reaffirming everything as it has been. A process of discernment should empower the Church to assess critically where things are and how, at this time, it could and should respond. Maybe change is necessary – maybe things need tweaking.

And, it is not unusual for there to be many different ideas and some ‘messiness’ when one does embark upon a process of communal discernment. This should not give rise to anxiety and defense – which leads to division – but rather a sense that there really is something that needs to be carefully discerned which is critical for the future.

[Pope] Francis has opted for a “Jesuit way of proceeding”. This is rooted in the teachings of St Ignatius, founder of the Jesuits. To discern means to engage in a process of trying to discover the will or desire of God in a given situation. Discernment includes a time of reflection, prayer, talking, listening, some division, and even some debate so that different perspectives can emerge. At the opening of the recent Synod, the Pope asked all present to speak boldly and listen with openness – two key concepts in communal discernment…”

Source. 

Apologetics? A Conversation with Alister McGrath

“Alister McGrath clearly loves apologetics, and so did I. The cut-and-thrust of defending the faith, the hours spent wrestling with life’s mysteries and condensing them down into easily memorisable sound bites (I found it helped if they could be reduced to no more than three points, which preferably started with the same letter, or rhymed).

I slowly began to realise though, that you can’t argue someone into a relationship with Jesus. Even if you convince them of the plausibility of the resurrection or the reliability of the gospels, their lives rarely seem to be transformed…” 

~ Tim Nash from Nomad Podcast. You can read the rest of Tim’s reflection on apologetics here, and listen to the Alistair McGrath podcast here. I need to say too that my views vary very little from Tim’s. I’ve seen much violence done to people through modernist approaches to apologetics. 

Dave Tomlinson - The Bad Christian’s Manifesto

I hadn’t realised, until having differ with wonderful friends yesterday evening, that Dave Tomlinson has a new book out – a follow up (of sorts) to his 2012 publication: How to be a Bad Christian…And a Better Human. I loved this book – one of Dave’s best.

I loved the subtitle too, and thought of it again yesterday as I was reading some information about Kenda Creasy Dean’s latest publication Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church… “…Dean places the blame for this theological watering down squarely on the churches themselves. Instead of proclaiming a God who calls believers to lives of love, service and sacrifice, churches offer instead a bargain religion, easy to use, easy to forget, offering little and demanding less…” In other words, what kind of human beings does church belonging produce, and how is a Jesus-following life (an altogether human life) actually lived in the ordinary and the everyday?

Anyway, back to Dave. His latest publication is The Bad Christian’s Manifesto…Reinventing God (And Other Modest Proposals).

“Dave Tomlinson, author of How to be a bad Christian, thinks that a lot of our overly religious, formal ideas of God need to be reinvented - and a lot of our spirituality, too. What does it look like to live well and die happy - from an unapologetically generous Christian point of view? Join Dave as he considers virtues, vices, friendship, morality, [and] mortality.”

“Dave Tomlinson was a house church leader for many years and is now an Anglican priest. Unable to accept the narrow restrictions of his tradition, he founded the legendary Holy Joe's, a church in a pub in Clapham for disaffected church drop-outs. He is now Vicar of St Luke's, Holloway, a thriving parish church in north London. He is the author of the seminal The Post-Evangelical, I Shall Not Want and Re-enchanting Christianity, and is a regular guest on Radio 2.”

You’ll find a review of the book here. 

Unexpected Gifts: Discovering the Way of Community

This seems like a good follow on from yesterday’s Gone Girl post. Marriage is after all a miniature form of community.

“…Ironically, as much as we yearn for deep friendships and meaningful communities, many of us seem to be unable to find our way into them. Even if we know we’re made for community, finding one and staying there seems almost impossible. Though we hate to admit it, if we stay long enough in any relationship or set of friendships, we will experience failure, doubt, burnout, loneliness, transitions, a loss of self, betrayal, frustration, a sense of entitlement, grief, and weariness. Yet it’s these painful community experiences, these tensions we struggle to navigate, that hold surprising gifts…” From the Preface of Unexpected Gifts: Discovering the Way of Community by Christopher L. Heuertz, with a Foreword by Richard Rohr, OFM. 

Alan Jamieson offers a brief review of this 2013 published book. He begins:

“I have just finished reading 'Unexpected Gifts: Discovering the Way of Community' by Christopher L. Heuertz.  

Jean Vanier, himself a world guru on community life, says of the book –"Unexpected Gifts is a prophetic book about the wisdom of community. For nearly two decades, Christopher Heuertz has led the community Word Made Flesh, whose goal is to serve and be with the most miserable and oppressed people of our world, hidden in war-torn lands, slums, and red-light districts of big cities. The community founded in the evangelical church has become ecumenical; members from different churches united in their desire to serve the poorest of the poor, are inspired by Jesus." This high praise by Vanier is backed up by a foreword from Richard Rohr. 

Chapter One looks at community, under the subtitle 'Why bother?', he answers by suggesting that, while God created humanity out of love, God also created out of loneliness, saying: "After all, love, by it's nature is self-giving and needs a subject. And if there is such a thing as divine loneliness, I imagine our need for relationships is one of those subtle indicators that we actually are made in the image of God (pxiv)." 

He is very clear about the difficulties and failures in trying to build community. "I've always been in a variety of communities. The most authentic ones are on a continual journey of failing miserably. In those circles of relationships we've let one another down and disappointed one another: Many of us haven't been the kind of friends we hoped we could be to one another. We haven't always fought fair. We've made plenty of mistakes. Sometimes we have given up on one another. But I believe tragic flaws bear unexpected gifts. I trust in the reasons to stay, even though I've experienced more than adequate excuses to leave most of the communities I've participated in…" 

You can read his complete post here. 

“Without authentic relationships, community is merely a backdrop for someone’s experience of self-discovery, and community members are used up along the way” (p 120).  

David Tacey: The Invitation to Engage with the Present Challenges

“…What if it [the church] ignores the present challenge or does not care enough to take up a dialogue with the world? The yearning for sacredness, spiritual meaning, security, and personal engagement with the spirit are the primary needs and longings of the contemporary world. What is happening if the institutions of faith are so bound up with themselves and resistant to change that they cannot make some contribution to these needs?

Our contemporary situation is full of ironies and paradoxes. Chief among these is that our secular society has given birth to a sense of the sacred, and yet our sacred traditions are failing to recognize the spiritual potential. The gap between critical approaches to Christianity and the simplistic spirituality promoted in lots of churches lies at the heart of so much disillusionment with Christianity today. Many long for an expression of the Christian faith that reconciles heart and head, that offers a positive, engaging spirituality which is also committed to grappling honestly with difficult and painful questions, and which longs to make the world a better place…”

~ David Tacey (original source of quote is unknown me, but quoted in this talk (PDF) by Ian Mobsby). See this recent post. Tacey will be in Hamilton (NZ) early next year to explore some of these themes.

The Churchless

The Barna Group recently published an article summarizing some of their most US research on the “Churchless”. It coincides with the publication of a new book (excerpt here) with the same title. Here are excerpts from the article.

“…4. There Are Different Expectations of Church Involvement

Another intriguing shift among the churchless has to do with their expectations of church involvement. In the early 1990s, our research showed that nearly seven out of 10 adults, if they were to visit a church, would be most interested in attending the Sunday service. Today, weekend worship services remain the most common entry experience, but only slightly; now, only 57% of churchless adults say they would be interested in Sunday worship as their starting point. Today's unchurched are more likely to say they are simply not sure, reflecting their disinterest in churches generally, or are more likely to say they would prefer attending some activity other than the Sunday service.

A similar shift is afoot in terms of the number of churches they would attend. The churchless were asked in both 1993 and in 2011 if they would prefer to be involved in one church or multiple churches in their area. Two decades ago, even the unchurched expressed some sense of church loyalty (albeit hypothetical): 85% said they would expect to attend just one congregation. The recent study reflects a slight loosening of this potential loyalty, but the more notable shifts are among those who don't have a preference and who aren't sure. Together, these percentages doubled from 8% to 16%, reflecting growing cultural indifference to church involvement.

5. There Is Skepticism about Churches' Contributions to Society

Although many of the churchless hold positive views of churches, a substantial number also have no idea what Christians have accomplished in the nation, either for the better or for the worse. When the unchurched were asked to describe what they believe are the positive and negative contributions of Christianity in America, almost half (49%) could not identify a single favorable impact of the Christian community, while nearly two-fifths (37%) were unable to identify a negative impact. Of those who could identify one way Christians contribute to the common good, the unchurched appreciate their influence when it comes to serving the poor and disadvantaged (22%), bolstering morals and values (10%) and helping people believe in God (8%). Among those who had a complaint about Christians in society, the unchurched were least favorably disposed toward violence in the name of Christ (18%), the church's stand against gay marriage (15%), sexual abuse scandals (13%) and involvement in politics (10%)…”

You can read the complete article here. Thanks again to Gabe for bringing, from afar,  the article / Barna book to my attention. For a more Kiwi flavour I highly recommend Alan Jamieson’s research, his first publication being A Churchless Faith: Faith Journey’s Beyond the Churches. 

State of the colony: Resident Aliens at 25

“Twenty-five years ago, Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon sparked a lively debate about church, ministry, and Christian identity with their book Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony. The book called on Christians to think of themselves as "aliens" in American culture who were part of the countercultural ethos of the church and shaped by the biblical witness rather than liberal, capitalist, democratic culture. 

Several major themes in Resident Aliens—the importance of Christian formation in the church; the church as a community set apart from the wider culture; and the end of the "Constantinian" alliance between church on the one hand and state and culture on the other—have since become part of the mainstream theological conversation…”

You can read the rest of the article here. See also this 1991 article by Hauerwas and Willimon – Why Resident Aliens Struck a Chord (PDF).

What lasting impact has the book, and/or the themes it espouses, had on you…?

2015 John Main Seminar – Hamilton, New Zealand

Sadly I won’t be able to make it, however, I wanted to highlight that the 2015 John Main Seminar with again be held in Hamilton at Waikato University. The seminar is being given by the always-fascinating David Tacey (author of the Spirituality Revolution and most recently The Darkening Spirit: Jung, Spirituality and Religion) and will be based around the theme Spirituality and Religion in a Secular Age. The Seminar will be given over 3-days, the 15^th – 18^th January 2015.

It will be preceded by a 3-day pre-seminar retreat led by Laurence Freeman OSB. The theme of the retreat will be Meditation as a Modern Spiritual Path. 

Following the seminar with be 3-day pilgrimage:

“The pilgrimage is a journey to the Bay of Islands and the Hokianga, the cradle of Christianity in New Zealand, and will be led by members of the New Zealand Meditation Community. Christmas Day 2014 marks the bicentennial of the first sermon delivered by Rev. Samuel Marsden, of the Church Missionary Society and Anglican priest. This took place at the Bay of Islands. The first Catholic Mass was celebrated at Totara Point in the Hokianga on 13 January 1838 by the French missionary, Bishop Jean Baptiste Pompallier. The return trip will include a visit to the famous Waipoua Forest which hosts New Zealand’s largest kauri tree, Tane Mahuta.”

You’ll find all the information you need, here.