Having put quite a bit of time into unravelling the issues between the Students’ Union and Christian Union in Reading, I was dismayed to see The Times today reporting that some Christian Unions in the UK are considering legal action against the Student Unions on their campuses because:

Christian Unions claim that they are being singled out as a “soft target” by student associations because they refuse to allow non-Christians to address their meetings or sit on ruling committees.

While each situation is different as it rests on the constitutions and practices of the various bodies, the points put forth in the article do little to suggest that the CUs are being victimised. They are rather the most visible group on most campuses to not fit within most SUs’ equal opportunities policies or democratic and financial systems.

One of the key aggravating factors in our experience was the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship who often seemed to be the source of scare stories (which I never saw corroborated) of CUs that have been hijacked by other groups, and purported ‘legal advice’ about the relationships between CUs and SUs that massively misunderstood the issues we had found to be central. I’ve not had any contact with that organisation in a few years now, but at the time I couldn’t help but feel there were individuals within it who relished confrontation.

We (Martin did a lot of the work) tried to come to an understanding about the two bodies’ relationship on our campus and found that the main issues were not the expected hot buttons, but were more about whether the CU actually wanted to be an SU society, whether they were willing to hold open elections, and whether their financial management was compatible with ours.

That process allowed us to agree that for the CU membership in the SU was not vital, and that the SU could nevertheless provide some facilities to the CU because of the two organisations’ friendship (given certain provisos).

The press reports leading up to today’s news have certainly lacked clarity. Hopefully the CUs will step back from the brink and some new arrangements can be made that step round the current confrontation.

Update (4th Dec 2006): For clarity, at the time of these conversations I was a post-graduation sabbatical officer of RUSU and Martin was a non-sabbatical officer. I was never a member of the CU but attended a number of meetings and had many friends who were members. We have both now left the university.

Tags: christian unions, student unions, ruth gledhill, uccf

One of the highlights of our last visit to Nashville (way back in April) was getting the opportunity to hear Will Campbell speak. I hadn’t known much of the man beforehand, but his incredible stories had a deep impact. His outspoken critiques of the Southern Baptist Convention’s hijacking of USian Christianity may also have had a role in endearing him to me…

The Nashville Scene recently had a great profile of Campbell that’s well worth a look. Now I really must get round to checking the library for his books.

(thanks to Kevin for the link)

A review also posted at amazon.com of Eric Jacobsen’s Sidewalks In The Kingdom:

The urban sprawl that blights the USian landscape has had more impact than merely the growth of ugly landscapes. It has broken apart communities, led to less healthy lifestyles, and increased ghettoization. Jacobsen’s book sets out to introduce Christian groups into the new urbanist agenda, calling for walkable neighborhoods, more community-focussed building practices, and support of local business where real relationships can be borne. While this may well be a good primer, anyone who has read any other new urbanist material or who is looking for a thorough theological account may be disappointed.

Jacobsen sets up false dichotomies (community-building is apparently not a part of evangelism for him) and doesn’t dig into the environmental arguments which should be so central for Christians (and indeed, for anyone who cares about the future of the planet and its people). He also talks of how he believes he’s the only Christian member of the Congress for New Urbanism, but without recognising that perhaps he’s the only one who goes out of his way to advertise himself as such. It’s good to see Christians publicly engaging with the vital issues of urban planning, but it would be good to see more serious engagement with urban theology.

In the car on the way to Dana’s church this morning (we’re spending Easter in Chicago, staying with Dana, Kari’s sister) we passed quite a number of orthodox Jews, on their way to school and work. I was reminded of studying Judaism in school and chuckling at the thought that the orthodox will not travel more than a mile on the Sabbath.

In retrospect, I was too quick to join in the laughter. There’s a lot to be said for a rule that ensures the congregation and place of worship live in close proximity. Naturally there’s a chance that those who are not among the faithful will be driven from the area, but at the same time it enforces a commitment to the locality, means that the act of attending weekly (or thereabout) gatherings does not involve consumption and environmental degradation, and ensures that the community of faith is also a community of daily life. An appealing notion.

sabbath | community

Tags: sabbath community

Brandon pointed me to this piece on how Zach Kinkaid from the excellent Matthew’s House Project was fired from Oklahoma Baptist University because of an editorial he wrote. As the editorial loaded up, I was expecting it to be a response to some controversial theological issue, but discovered instead that he lost his job for criticising a wealthy church’s decision to flee the inner city in favour of a more comfortable suburban setting.

Such ‘white flight’ seems to have been a fixture of the USian church experience for some time. In a culture where the success of a church is measured on numbers it makes sense to make it a comfortable place, and to find cheap land for huge (and generally ugly) expansions. But it’s ironic that a demographic that was so much in favour of Bush’s “faith based initiatives” is fleeing the very areas that need such initiatives. If there’s one argument I’d use against routing urban redevelopment funding through churches, it would be that churches by and large couldn’t care less about the urban poor.

Our most recent conversations about this topic haven’t arisen so much from the movement of churches, but from the begging letters we’ve received from Kari’s old high school, which is moving south of its present outer-Chicago setting because their “constituency” has done likewise. Put another way, all the white CRC people who provide the majority of the school’s funding have fled areas which are increasingly multi-racial, and the school is following them out. “Christian education” was founded for the good of society, but it too has increasingly become about the comfort of its wealthy base.

In such a setting, it doesn’t seem extreme to reiterate that large parts of the church are still insidiously, institutionally racist. The very best faith-based initiative right now would be to demonstrate a personal commitment to the communities that need help. Instead, people are losing their jobs for speaking the truth.

Tags: White Flight | Churches | Oklahoma Baptist University

Tags: White+Flight Churches Oklahoma+Baptist+University

This interview with New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan (via NT Gateway) makes for interesting reading. Crossan is not a writer I often find myself in agreement with, but his comments are well worth consideration. I share Mark Goodacre’s amusement that “the major new stress in Crossan on Paul and early Christianity as anti- Roman Empire is that this brings Crossan closer to Wright than ever before, does it not?”

I actually started writing some comments on this piece at the end of last year, but they got lost in the works, and I’m not sure I was reading the piece correctly anyway. But with no January Series lecture today, I returned to it and found something that resonated in the wake of Tuesday’s lecture.

In any system, where the economy is booming, it doesn’t boom for everyone. And there might be very conservative people for whom the raw excesses of a booming economy are destroying the values they hold dear. I’m thinking of people who might find the whole dislocation of family life in the big cities intolerable.

So now Christianity offers a society to pagan city-dwellers that it fits in–it looks like the associations we know existed at that time. This Christian society believes in a God who is just, and here’s how that justice works out: We share what we have. If I break my wrist and can’t work for a week, I get supported by this community–and then I’m expected to share with the community. It’s a socio-economic safety net, in other words. But it also gives you a world run by a God who cares about you.

That dislocation of family life loomed large in Eugene Rivers’ talk at Calvin, and shifts in the nature of the family are quite rightly something we should be considering carefully. But these shifts are a natural part of history, and a similar shift probably resulted from the changes people made when they joined the early Church. Crossan’s words speak to me of space and support in wake of changes, with time to consider the strong and the weak in the new paradigm. Perhaps a more useful model for engagement than that expounded on Tuesday?

To continue the ongoing discussion with Brandon, it’s quickly apparent that we could easily be criticised for trying to cling to a notion of community that may be more nostalgia than reality. Much of the ecclesiology we have inherited was developed when most people lived in a rural setting. If a small population is gathered around a tight, isolated geographical centre then the notion of community that develops is going to be very different than when we live spread out across an urban sprawl, or what emerges in densely populated larger expanses.

In his book “Liquid Church” Pete Ward talks about church as existing in the relationships between people and picks up on the themes from Bauman’s (excellent) “Liquid Modernity” that push us towards social network theory as a way of understanding how modern relationships work. Network Church is another topic on which good writing can be found at Steve Collins‘ site Small Ritual.

For the uninitiated the idea, roughly, is that very few of us these days have a ‘closed set’ of friends and acquaintances, but instead we’re all parts of various networks. Those networks have various points of intersection and different parts of it gather geographically at different times. A sense of broader community can come for a small group when they talk about friends elsewhere in their networks or are made aware of previously unknown connections. That sensation is a large part of what made sites like Friendster so popular.

I don’t expect to ever be within a ‘closed set’ and it’s probably a stretch to suggest that the modern institutional church really believes that either, but arguments can certainly be made that within the institution there are certain forms of network connection that are more approved of than others, and that there exists in certain sectors an understanding of in/out (christian/non-christian) far too short of nuance. If we believe (as I do) that modern urban life is more ‘open-ended network’ than ‘closed set’ then there is some clear rethinking to do about what church truly engaged and embedded in this context means.

In a sense this is what some would argue that ‘cell churches’ are and what mega-churches are devolving into. Greg at ‘theparish’ argues that when your sense of community comes from the small groups within a larger ‘church’, that the small groups should really be described as ‘church’. There’s a lot of merit in that argument, though that semantic shift is only really meaningful if thinking about the meaning of church in praxis flows with it.

We need to think carefully about what sort of community we are looking for, what sense of community we need, and how that manifests itself. And we need to do that without jetissoning 2000 years of ecclesiology. I sincerely believe that the development of the mega-church concept is a result of ignoring serious scholarship on the effectiveness of churches (on mulitple criteria) and instead embracing management/marketing techniques that tell us “if you’re not everywhere, you’re nowhere” and “bigger is better”. They are, to use a cliche, of the world, but not in it. I hope I’m trying to be aware of my needs, aware of the history of the wider community I try to be a part of, and critical of both.

This post is a response to Brandon’s response to my question:

What is it about church/the bar that means the bar isn’t a replacement for church?

I started to respond in his comments, but the response was getting lengthy enough that I thought I’d move it over here.

Since moving to the US I’ve had a hard time adjusting to the different understanding of “neighbourhood” that seems standard here. I’ve found the way its expressed hard to adjust to and feel like it rarely happens in what would seem to me a coherent sense (I’m thinking of at least having residences, shopping, churches, entertainment close enough together that for some people walking between them is a regular part of behaviour). That happens in some larger cities and occasional other spots, but is rare.

Probably the place where I get the strongest feeling of community here is in the local coffee shops. I was at Common Ground today and had conversations with seven different people, some of whom I have known for a while and some of whom stopped to ask me questions. The number is perhaps a little lower usually, but there are a number of us who frequent the place and with the addition of wifi it’s even more common for people to spend long periods of time there.

That space is probably one of the strongest “community” locations I’ve found myself in for some time. I think that (to use a term very popular at Calvin) an intentional focus on expressing “worship” together through some sort of ritual is the one box in my understanding of church that this coffee shop experience doesn’t check. It fits much of what Steve Collins talks about in his discussion of ‘third place’ here and here. There is no explicit focus on being transformative but the profiling of locally produced art, the interest in fair trade issues and the space for groups to congregate hints in that direction.

None of our attempts to fashion ‘church’ is entirely effective and intentional or not, this feels like a pretty good attempt. There are many questions, but the one I’m most often left asking is how to move forward from this place?

ADDENDUM: I should probably add that these are early days. Over time it will become clearer whether the initial sense of community deepens and grows, and that will be more telling.

Salon.com today ran a fascinating piece on 24-7 Prayer’s work in Ibiza. It’s a lengthy but worthwhile read (should you have a salon account…)

The article does a great job of giving a real insight into the motivations of the teams 24-7 sends to Ibiza each summer. It manages to give a sense of the way that while they have a clear agenda that is in opposition to many of the chief draws of Ibiza as a holiday destination, they are not seeking to condemn and are genuinely interested in building relationships, and in enjoying the more wholesome sides of Ibizan life.

While 24-7 grew out of a sphere of the UK church that I am not particularly comfortable with, it’s manifestation in Reading was one of the few places where I’ve experienced true ecumenicalism and I was always impressed by the work they did with local troubled kids who found in its former building a place to hang out and be respected. Talking with Andy Wilson when he visited in October it was clear that there are a lot of interesting conversations taking place within the 24-7 leadership.

The rootedness in the local community so evident in Reading is harder to accomplish in a place of such transient population as Ibiza. It was reassuring to read in the article that most of the focus of the 24-7 teams was in building up relationships with the less transient population of club promoters and local business owners, people who are located there long enough for real relationships to be developed and to whom longer term service could be offered.

I’m still processing much of what’s in the article, but after six weeks concentrated on the oppressive role of a condemning, negative church in US politics, it was certainly a refreshing read.

This one’s probably for serious New Testament studies and postmodernism geeks only, but I couldn’t let NT Wright’s “Taking the Text with Her Pleasure” slip by without mention (okay, so it was originally published in 1996, but I’ve only just found it online).

While reserving judgement on its critique of John Dominic Crossan’s “The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant”, I couldn’t help but fall for passages like:

Michelle turned her attention to her implied readers.  There were lots of them, she thought with pride. The New York Times review had done its work well.  But who were they?  The natural assumption might have been that a book with a postmodernist implied author would have a postmodernist implied reader.  So, indeed, it seemed.  ‘In the end, as in the beginning, now as then, there is only the performance.’  ‘These words are not a list to be read … they are a score to be played and a programme to be enacted.’  Did this not send a signal to all implied readers that, if they weren’t already postmodernists, they had better become such at once?  Michelle sighed with content.  It is a comforting thing for a book to feel integrated, to have implied author and implied reader shaking hands with each other across the intertextual void. 

and

I suppose that’s important; but, strictly speaking, modernists have holes, and positivists have nests, but the Son of Postmodernism ought to have nowhere to lay his head.