Allelon

Where do we go from here?

2009-01-20T18:31:48Z

The failure of a dominant narrative & the need for a new social imaginary

I was recently introduced to a magazine called Prospect by an Anglo-Irish friend, Colin Greene. It offers a regular series of cultural and political essays that cover current affairs, the arts, economics and culture. The lead article in the latest edition is by Robert Skidelsky. Entitled “Where do we go from here?“, it addresses some key issues in the current global crisis. (You can also connect with several short pieces Colin Greene and I have written.) Skidelsky argues that the current financial crisis is a failure of the market system: it is a crisis generated by the system itself, not some outside agent or actor. He then outlines three levels of failure.

First, institutional: banks, regulators etc., succumbed to the ‘efficient market left to itself’ hypothesis.
Secondly, the crisis was intellectual. Alan Greenspan’s confession to the US Congress earlier this year epitomizes this failure: ‘I never saw it coming!’ Why? Because he wore a set of intellectual lenses that blinded him to alternative explanations.
Thirdly, the crisis represents a moral failure in a system that worships the absolute priority of growth that has made our moral compass thin and degraded our capacities to imagine an alternative way of life.

Skidelsky explores these issues in more depth through the rest of his article. What struck me are the parallels between this analysis and the challenges that have faced Christian life in North America for several decades. The three sources of crisis, institutional, intellectual and moral, are also at work in the life of the church. The institutional crisis is the failure of church leaders to grasp the ways institutions are socially constructed systems. The institutions of denominational life framed in the early part of the 20th century are no longer tenable. This has nothing to do with theological traditions or ecclesiology, but how those traditions are socially constructed in a particular time and place. Nor is this crisis reason to enter the silly season of debunking institutions. The very nature of our sociality requires us to form institutions. This crisis is the failure of leaders to grasp the way institutions are socially constructed in and for the social imaginaries of a particular time and place. Inevitably leaders became too comfortable within systems they could manage and control and in which they had security and success.

The intellectual crisis is profound. At precisely the time when the church needs local and academic theologians able to re-enter the Tradition to re-imagine Christian narrative in the midst of a radically pluralized culture(s) a significant percentage of denominational and local church leaders are without the training or intellectual frameworks to do this work. As a result much of the current engagement is shaped by platitudes and pragmatisms that prevents the church re-imagining new ways forward in this Heideggarian ‘space’ where it now finds itself. The operative frameworks remain those of modernity — pragmatism (try this it works here) and romantic idealism (I have been to the mountain top and seen the vision (and shape presumably?) of what we need to be). These imaginations remain captive to the forms of modernity from which their authors are claiming to liberate us even while others are seeking to name the new emerging intellectual territory we need to inhabit (see Barry Harvey’s Can These Bones Live? and Greene and Robinson’s Metavista: Bible, Church and Mission in an Age of Imagination as two illustrations). The language of ‘postmodernism’ and ‘missional’ are largely catch-alls and short hand for not having to do the hard work of thinking or entering the Christian tradition or be surprised by the ways the Spirit is at work in the local and the ordinary.

The moral crisis is the most difficult to address because, in Christian circles, moral language is preloaded with notions of guilt and sin. There are many levels to this moral failure and one doesn’t want to make light of its reality. In a culture built on spending, debt and ever expanding pie the notion of ‘growth’ remains at the heart of the North American church. One has to be careful, growth is not wrong; that is not the point. Models of church growth drive too many churches and leaders; not just in terms of seeker driven churches but among missional and emergent leaders whose underlying methods and proposals are new forms of church growth wrapped up in a different language game. The North American church must discover an alternative imagination from growth. It is not that they are so difficult to find; it is that we are so captive to the imagination of success, individuals and need-centered imaginations.

Skidelsky’s article attempts to address the question: Where do we go from here? The next RJ will propose some responses to that question from the perspective of being the church in a ‘metavista’ world of multiple, interacting social imaginaries.

Anne Rice and the Catholic Church in an Age of Discontinuity

2008-12-11T22:50:25Z

I was listening the other day to Canadian national radio (CBC). Its Tapestry program interviewed Anne Rice, author of The Vampire Chronicles (Interview with a Vampire was turned into a movie). After many years as an atheist, she recently returned to her Catholic faith. (The Tapestry podcast is of the interview is available for download in .mp3 format.)

I was held by the beauty of her language, the journey that took her so far into darkness searching for bearings after the death of a daughter and the end of all possibility of believing in God. I was struck by the deeply literate ways she described the journey into atheism and its long returning. You can read it in Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession. Anne Rice is no naive fool filled with romantic illusions about the church. She’s indwelt church history, so knows its glory and broken humanity. She also knows the philosophies of our time better than most.

We keep asking about the signs of the times in these days of disorientation. We know ourselves as living in a clearing (or a deep forest — it depends on the metaphors one chooses) where the markers that gave us direction and place are gone. The metaphor of exile doesn’t work in this space. I am struck by how some people think all this can be neatly explained by invoking the post everything liturgies believing this incantation dismisses so much. It’s disconcerting how too many conversations suggest the historic churches are done. When I listen to Anne Rice my suspicion these claims are thin are confirmed.

I was trained for several years in a Jesuit seminary. I listened the other day to a Jesuit teaching (that is what they do) a class of evangelical leaders about the nature of the call God places on our lives. These men and women were enthralled by the way he wove together Scripture and contemporary thought to help them understand that God is up to an amazing task in creation. They applauded when he was finished. I loved what this Jesuit said: Jesuits don’t teach subjects; they call people to life. He explained that, of course, a Jesuit is trained in a set of subjects. But a good teacher listens first to the person(s) before him/her, then brings a series of resources (subjects) into the conversation that call the other forth as the image of God in a community of faith (I’m reminded of another teacher, Parker Palmer, who is a Quaker and would say the same thing).

I wonder if the church that shapes Jesuits and where Anne Rice finds again the presence of God stands a better chance of addressing our culture(s) in this strange new clearing than most of the gurus and books I find coming from those who proclaim the ‘post’ church? At least we need to give this some consideration.

The Cutting Edge & the Humour of God

2008-11-24T22:56:29Z

Ever get tired of trite phrases? There are few that get me going. “Cutting edge” is one, “movement” another. In churchland we’ve lots of (in the spirit of Foucault) power words signaling who’s in and who’s out; who’s de guerre (or flavor of the month) and who isn’t.

I think the “cutting edge” is shifting around. I think it’s part of God’s humor — that irritating way the Spirit messes with all the people, systems and ideas we’ve declared no longer ‘in’ and breathes fresh life into old bones so they become the new ‘cutting edge’.

Take the old Anglicans for example. I can claim identity here. As a baby I was carried up the short street we lived on (Burleigh Road South — named after Lord Burleigh, aka, William Cecil, who served kings and queen in the 16th century — a definite misnomer for a non-cutting edge neighborhood like Anfield in Liverpool) to St. Cutherbert’s church (long torn down and replaced by the dull flats of urban, post war renewal) where I was baptized and given a God-parent. Cutherbert was of Lindisfarne fame so, perhaps, that is why the Cutherbert thing stuck.

Imagine — Anglicans are moving to the ‘cutting edge’ and creating a ‘movement’. A Google search of “Fresh Expressions” will show that God is up to something in the UK. Then, last week, I was in Toronto. The weather was amazing for November and the dry leaves crunching underfoot brought back memories of the great years I spent there in the ’80s. John Mclaverty and I were meeting some folk at the main offices of the Anglican Diocese. The inside of their building was under renovation. All the staff was crunched into a big room. Desks were pushed up against each other, wide bands of bright red tape stretching across the floor covered telephone lines. Meeting rooms around the sides were crammed with stacks of blue, plastic packing cases. Everything was impermanent. Dave Robinson and Heather Steves comprise the congregation development team. We sat with Dave and Heather for an hour as they shared stories of what was brewing and emerging in churches around the region. We listened with a sense that the “cutting edge” had moved. God was up to something among these creative people. Later we met with Bishop Colin Johnson, a thoughtful, attentive leader who flashes wry smiles in the midst of conversations. He’s a Bishop who has built a team committed to seeing the mission of God flourish in this Diocese. It was a wonderful two hours of conversation and stories.

When we left, the word under-construction ran through my head. That’s what’s happening! The “cutting edge” has shifted. God, with a great sense of humor, keeps turning up in all kinds of places that our labels keep missing.

Alan Roxburgh: Response to Colin Greene on the Economic Crisis

2008-12-11T21:27:34Z

The Blind Leading the Blind

[Karl] Polanyi’s thesis is that there can be no self-regulating market. The functional ideology behind the last quarter century of economic life in the West has been, of course, the orthodox conviction that the self-regulating market is the form of economic life whose laws, if left to themselves, will cause all human life to thrive.

Who can forget the image of Alan Greenspan, this past October, sitting before the US Congress to answer questions about the economic meltdown? It took shape during his long tenure at the head of the Federal Reserve. Greenspan had been before this very same Congress many times over the past decades. Congress had attended to him with the reverence and silence one would greet a Bishop or Pope. Greenspan is the quintessential ideologue of the self-regulating, ‘free market’ shaping the economic policies of the West for some two decades. There he sat as Congress wanted answers to why this crisis had happened on his watch. All Greenspan could offer was the reflection that we’re all shaped by ideologies - he prevaricated, choosing to confuse frameworks with ideologies – and the penultimate confession: ‘I never saw it coming.’ Why? Because of this ideology, this belief that would and could not be swayed by any counter argument, that markets regulate themselves.

Not far behind such ideology lies Rousseau’s romantic idealism about human nature – apparently when individuals are left to themselves, out of self-interest they will do the right thing! At least John Locke was enough of a realist to believe that when the men came back home from the (economic) hunt, their claws blood red, the women at the hearth would be able to ameliorate and domesticate the law of the jungle, which is the selfish drive to get and win at all costs.

What has happened since 1989 (end of the East-West power struggle and then State economies) has been the systematic dismantling of institutional frameworks intended to protect people from the greed and ravages of the free market (note the shift, it is no longer home or church that protects society but the legislative powers of impersonal government). The protective legislative systems developed through much of the 20th century were dismantled with great rapidity after 1989 in the flush of the new economic order of globalization (the free market globalized and, therefore, made even more unaccountable to any social end other than itself). In retrospect, the past twenty years looks like a time when we recklessly embarked on a blind journey shaped by laissez faire principles stripped bare of historical memory. This is the side of globalization we tend not to talk about in the midst of the panegyrics about Friedman’s so called flat world.

Shaping the Imaginaries

We know that economic systems impact and transform the cultural imaginaries of a society. They shape how we use language (from person to laborer, from land to real estate) and then, from within this language, we are shaped also through the way we see, treat and understand our relationships to other human beings and the creation. Polanyi’s argument wasn’t new but it did focus the essential condition of social life under the language games of free-market capitalism. He wrote that the so-called self-regulating market was a radically new development in human history with no parallels in any other time or society. It disembedded and disconnected both human beings (whom we now euphemistically describe as ‘labor’ or ‘workforce’ and study in terms of economic units or purchasing demographics) and the creation from their social relationships of belonging formed by a teleology of ends and turned them into impersonal, rationalized commodities that are a function of money and market value. This transformation occurred in the early part of the 19th century when money is reified as an end in itself so that human beings and the creation become means subject to and defined by the inevitable laws and invisible hand of the euphemistically termed ‘free’ market!

Prior to this time, according to Polanyi, economic activity was embedded in and a subset of human social community. Money (where it existed) and economic activity were a function of and controlled by, social norms and rules rather than the other way around. There wasn’t a separate, determinative economic system encompassing all other forms of social life. Polanyi argues that from the 19th century onward there emerged a double movement within Western societies. On the one side, is the self-regulating market with its claim of heteronomy and commitment to being the primary metanarrative of modernity. On the other side, counter movements continually seeking to safeguard human social life as primary. These movements (see, for example, Robert Owen’s alternative models of work and social organization) keep presenting counter imaginations to human life and our relationship with the creation.

At stake in this continuing tension and our current crisis, for Polanyi, is the question of what it means to be human and the sources where a society goes to find the language for that conversation. How do we define what it means to be human if it is other than labor, work force and homo economicus? If it is not the invisible hand, the determinative laws of capital, and the market that define that question, then what? Critical to this question of what it means to be human is the question of how a cultural imaginary and its language games, such as the free-market, come to penetrate, disembed and, finally, determine all other social imaginaries in a culture? How does that happen? If we can’t address this question about social formation and the shaping of imaginaries it will be difficult to imagine an alternative at this particular point in time.

A Crisis of Meaning and Identity

In the end, argues Polanyi, the reification of capital with its resultant redefinition of human life and creation as subsets of market capitalism tore apart social community and, therefore, the basis of being human in the recognition and embracing of the other as genuinely other and not a commodity (here Levinas is of great assistance in clarifying the situation of late modernity). This is the reality in which we all now live; it is the crisis under the crisis. People like Zygmunt Bauman (In Search of Politics) chronicles the effects of this social dissolution, the liquification phase of modernity, and the consequent diminution of our capacities to cultivate thriving social community.

The malaise of modernity and its current crisis is not, fundamentally economic in nature. It is a crisis of meaning and identity – about teleology and ethics: Who are we? Where are we going? What does it mean, therefore, to be in relationship with the other who is not me? How do we begin to have these kinds of conversations again when the self-regulating market set out by the world of Alan Greenspan is irreconcilable with the kind of human thriving set out in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures? It seems to me that these are questions increasingly difficult for the primary institutions of modernity to address. That body to which we gave primary responsibility for watching over the social good of ordinary citizens (national governments) abandoned that role a long time ago. Surely, this crisis is precisely that which needs to be addressed at the local level. Isn’t this where churches in neighborhoods and communities need to be creating dialogue about the meaning of human thriving? It is these perduring social institutions of the Spirit’s creation that have the capacity to create safe spaces where people can cross boundaries in order to meet each other and, in that space, ask fundamental questions about the meaning of human thriving. What makes this such a difficult task these days is that the churches are still, whether in their traditional, emergent or missional forms, entangled in conversations about making the church work. We desperately need an alternative narrative. This, as we know, is what Newbigin did all the time. He kept pushing us to think about what it means for a focused Biblical imagination to enter and engage this space we call late modernity.

This article originally appeared as a three-part series at the Metavista Blog; reprinted with permission. Alan Roxburgh also commented on the original post:

Colin — I want to respond to your reflections on the economic crisis that is over-running the world these past months. In reading your blog I was aware of Karl Polanyi’s book, The Great Transformation. Polanyi was the brother of Michael — of Personal Knowledge — who significantly influenced Lesslie Newbigin’s thinking in terms of epistemology and the framing of the conversation with late modernity. Written in 1944, The Great Transformation became a 20th century classic translated into eight languages, sadly, however, the book is hardly known on this side of the Atlantic.

When Art Comes to Town: Reflection on Art as Public Mission

2008-11-21T00:30:13Z

The concept is simple; to employ art to tell the Christmas story. Seek tactile interaction – make a star out of wire, mark your home town on a world map, record the one thing you would take with you on a refugee journey – as a way of inviting people into the Christmas story.

The use of containers is a master stroke. A container provides a space in which a unique environment can be created, allowing a different part of a Journey to be created. A container has roofs and floor, allowing a Christmas story to be placed outside. They are lockable, ensuring security for art and electronic gear in public spaces.

In 2005 permission was gained by Side Door Arts Trust, in partnership with Opawa Baptist Church and Creative Communities, to place 8 containers, each container telling part of the Christmas story, in the square at the centre of Christchurch city. The Christmas story was to find a home outside the church and in the marketplace.

Ironically, Council regulations demanded a temporary building permit and required a wire fence. As soon as the Christmas story was taken outside the church, it acquired a fence! However the public response was excellent, with nearly 8,000 people visiting.

Building on the relationship with the Christchurch City Council, permission was sought in 2006 to place the 8 containers, not together, but separately. Each was wrapped in nylon fabric to represent a Christmas present, and placed at strategic tourist sites – the art

gallery, the museum, the information centre – around the city. Each container was also placed adjacent to the tram route, a major Christchurch tourist attraction.

The art for inside each container was prepared at Opawa Baptist Church. A hi-ab container truck transported the containers into town. Picture the scene as suddenly, nine days before Christmas, eight 20 feet long wrapped Christmas presents suddenly appear, scattered, throughout the city centre.

On the door of each container part of the Christmas Bible story was painted (in the style of Colin McCahon, a famous New Zealand artist). Inside each container a different theme is explored.

The results:

Stories of people emerging from church containers declaring “I am changed.”
People’s written responses at various containers indicating an honest and deep engagement
Over 15,000 people visited. (Note that there was no way to record if these visitors had been to other containers. So while unlikely, it is conceivable that a total of 2,400 people visited all 8 containers).

The implications:

Don’t do this if your goal is increasing church attendance. It takes a lot of energy out of a church and you end up encouraging people to volunteer on containers during church time.
Ideally each container has someone for purposes of explanation, welcome and security. This requires a large commitment (8 containers for 9 days open for 3 by 4 hours slots = 212 volunteers).
This volunteer dimension allows people a practical way to “give” during Christmas. This needs to be placed alongside the busyness and rush that people face.
Another volunteer dimension is that people are exposed to the rhythms of the city. This allows a missional conversation. Equally, it raises issues of safety.
A project on this scale demands a huge variety of gifts – to create, to stand at a container, to publicise, to negotiate. It feels a lot like 1 Corinthians 12, with all parts of the body important and thus becomes the mission of a church community.

Unresolved tensions

The tension between whether the Journey should act like an interactive signboard or the foyer of a building. Should each container stand alone, as a signboard? Or should the Journey be like a foyer, that welcomes and points people toward church or Christianity in some way?
The concept of gift is important. Many churches offer subtle switch and bait operations. Should the containers be offered as a gift, with no strings attached? Or should they come with a subtle price tag. (This could include invitation to church services, a Christian tract, a takeway resource). Yet society at Christmas is so dominated by consumerism and when the church offers “switch and bait” have we not bowed down to the gods of consumerism in our culture? Each year this is debated. In 2006 the Journey simply offered a takeaway potential of a memorable moment.
Should the containers be grouped (as in 2005 in the Square) or separated (as in 2006 around the city centre)? The former allows greater visibility and increases the chances of completing the whole Journey. The latter increases visibility and curiosity and allows walking time for reflection. However it demands a greater effort if people want to then complete the Journey.
The Christmas Journey evolved under the leadership and creative talents of Peter and Joyce Majendie. They have prepared a teaching video “Art in public space as mission.” This is a four hour seminar in which they trace the creative process. This is available for sale from artcomestotown at www.emergentkiwi.org.nz

(This article was previously published in 2007.)

Seeking a Missional Imagination

2008-11-25T08:27:43Z

There’s been a dis-ease in the back of my mind for a while about the directions of the missional conversation in North America. I’ve written about one: it’s too ecclesiocentric. Most of what I read with missional in its title is about the church and making the church work with new formulas and programs. The missional conversation is about what God is up to in the world; church conversations are a sub-set we’ve turned into the main thing.

Another issue has been hard to put into words; but, yesterday I was reading the New York Times Book Review and saw how to address it. Russell Shorto has just released a new book, Descartes’ Bones. The picture on the cover is intriguing. It shows a headless skeleton. The reason for the image is in the plot of the book, which I won’t give away. Descartes lived in massively turbulent times when the tectonic plates of society were shifting. People were filled with anxiety and the question of God was up for grabs. It was a time, like ours, when established formulas and frameworks failed to address an emerging modernity.

Descartes desired to stop the turmoil, provide a solution that would fix the world and give God back his place. He was a devout Catholic concerned about his world. He gave us a new method and a formula (Cogito, ego sum) for fixing the world. In the end, he both shaped and profoundly misguided modernity. All this was the shaping of a now well-known body-mind dualism. He retreated into his head, disconnected from (it’s not possible but was what he believed he was doing) the ordinary, the local and the material (all of which was distrusted). Hence, the image of a skeleton without its head is a metaphor for this imagination. The head is disconnected from the body because the body can offer no real help or direction in shaping the way ahead.

I see this is an apt metaphor for what is happening today in the missional conversation. I read books that, basically, retreat into the realm of some ideal imagination that is supposed to provide formulas and methods for the ailing mission of the church in the West. We haven’t got past our Cartesian dualism with its romantic idealisms about the nature of God’s mission in the world. We need a different imagination. The basis of it is in a simple text that lies at the core of the Gospel: He came and pitched his tent beside ours.

Missional life isn’t formed in the ideals and formulas of those who retreat into some non-contextual space or create stories from elsewhere. It is formed in the concrete, ordinariness of the men and women who make up local churches and pitch their tents in neighborhoods. This is where the missional imagination emerges.

Beware of the Cartesian dreamers with their books, formulas and programs.