I have enjoyed blogging this year and it has helped me to reflect and explain my thoughts, but all things come to an end (thanks to Jonny Baker for the free year of typepad blogging).
I am now putting my online efforts into a new blog by John Wheatley and I. The Street Pilgrims blog will be used for updates on Streetspace WSM, reflections on mission and community living.
Links are below
I hope you can join me over there
Churches. The very word can either fill you with a warm glow or a shudder of frustration. I encountered both in India. India is a country filled with many contradictions with extremities in wealth, language, educations, religions etc. This makes for a diverse and beautiful country. One church I visited was a small Tamil Church. The other was a large modern Church.
Tamil is a local dialect for Bangalore's region of India. The church was a small white building with corrugated metal roof. The people were excited to see us and kept playing down their "small church". While the majority of the songs & sermon were in Tamil it followed a Church of England order of service and they kept us up to date with what was going on. The time afterwards was precious, sharing cake, stories and even teaching me to play one of their drums.
The start of the large church had great visuals, videos advertising a youth camp and the values of the church. This was followed by a large band worship experience with a pentecostal summary where the minister sings and ministers alongside the band. The sermon was about corporate worship and how best to receive and participate in it with verses used as evidence throughout the whole Bible. From beginning to end not one person approached us, but we were directed to follow a sign for a newcomers meeting, we didn't.
The two experiences of church were so different and helped me understand what I think makes a great church and community. Small is beautiful & hospitable.
As explored in the earlier post on a missional catalyst, the tools used will form the image of Jesus we hold. A story by Lesslie Newbigin (1989, p3) is an example of what happens when Jesus is domesticated within a culture:
"In the great hall of the monastery, as in all the premises of the Ramakrishna Mission, there is a gallery of portraits of the great religious teachers of humankind. Among them, of course, is a portrait of Jesus. Each year on Christmas Day worship was offered before this picture. Jesus was honoured, worshiped, as one of the many manifestations of deity in the course of human history"
This story represents how Jesus can be domesticated within a worldview, in this case the Hindu worldview. In Korea, merging Christian traditional sacraments with a strong Shamanic culture helped produce a prosperity gospel. In the UK, consumption of Christian products, identities & services have introduced a dualistic market that is built on the same notions of success as the "secular" gospel.
So how have I domesticated Jesus within my world view and that of the young people I work with? Some honesty here...
SELF: The notion of myself, the individual, me, leads to misinterpretation of the story of God written for community. e.g. "I need a place to be fed"
CARE: Jesus is someone to appeal to in challenging times for comfort & if you are comfortable then thats a good thing. He only pushes a select few to a place of discomfort, foolishness and anger to help change a world.
HAPPY: if you are Happy, then you are leading the Christian life, look happy & we'll get others to join us. This is meant to be attractive to a culture that is seeking the same superficial happiness by staying young, spending money & letting our desires rule us.
Pre-Iraq i used to think...WAR: its ok to fight and kill and believe that God is ok with it, as long as its for the right reasons. If we are doing it for our own concepts of freedom or crisis that threatens "our kingdom"
I'm sure there's more...
Within missionary stories a common theme is the use of a tool, a missional catalyst, to present an attractive message to a foreign culture.
This has drawn me to reflect on the missional catalyst I might use with young people, but as with all the above examples the tools used can end up corrupting the very message you hope to give. The medium is the message! What tools might be for us today in the UK to present a radical Jesus?
In order to discover the "tools" for a post-Christian society, i agree with Richard Rohr in "the need to create a kind of counter system that sees to it that we are less dependent on the old system" - a new social/political world view to re-imagine the gospel for a foreign landscape.
When asked what Communion represented, I remembered this story i had read within Andrew Root's paper: Youth Ministry as Discerning Christopraxis a Hermeneutical Model;
Loaded in the back of a truck and headed deep into the Bavarian Forest sat prisoners heading to the concentration camp at Flossenburg in the final days of World War II. In one corner sat pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, next to him was a Russian soldier. As they travelled the Russian soldier and Bonhoeffer talked, becoming friends as the soldier taught the pastor Russian. When the truck stopped for the night and it became clear that many of the prisoners would soon meet their demise, pastor Bonhoeffer was asked to administer communion. He agreed and stood to begin, but the Russian soldier remained sitting, explaining that he was a communist atheist and therefore it would be hypocritical for him to partake. Upon hearing his response pastor Bonhoeffer sat back down and is reported to have stated, “Then neither will I partake, for how can I be sure that in leaving you for the communion table I would not be leaving Christ.”
During communion it is often the individual receiver that is emphasised but taking communion while others are excluded splits rather than builds community. In this case, perhaps it is in the denial of communion you are partaking in Christ's ministry rather than merely remembering it.
Recent Comments