The Contemplative Crisis

As I travel across Melbourne, I have frequently stumbled across the skeletons of former churches, lying half buried in the suburban landscape, half forgotten by all except perhaps a long term resident or those with the eyes  trained to see their ribs and frame still standing out from the renovations.  These former churches, once the focus of a vibrant Christian community, have now been converted into stylish homes; others have been converted into trendy office space for architects. One former church building quite near where I live is now a karate school. I found out that another of the same denomination was bulldozed and is now a car park in a neighbouring suburb. A few have been bought by another denomination, recycled and renamed to emerge as a new church.  All these former churches have one thing in common;  they were small, they belonged to a small denomination (with a congregational form of government), and they were essentially independent.

Most were given birth in the enthusiasm of the post-War Two period, when this country was flooded with immigrants, many of whom were British. The suburbs were expanding and as they did so, the community built both new houses and these small independent churches. They had begun the inevitable human journey of the cycle of life: first birth, then adolescence, maturity and finally decline into old age and ultimately, death. Because they were small, independent and often sectarian, they were isolated from the mainstream of society.  As the society changed, their isolation was made more acute. The three denominations which did not survive the late 1960’s social convulsion particularly well were the Churches of Christ, independent Baptists and Open (Christian) Brethren.  These churches were branches which had consciously cut off themselves off from the broad tree of Christianity and they withered as a consequence. Like children who had rejected their parents, they could not receive the life from their wider Christian family or their parents.  They quite consciously rejected formal theology and preferred slogans (eg: “No creed but Christ”), they were suspicious of clericalism and did not want a ‘minister’ as each member was thought to be able to do the work. In a rather idealised way, they attempted to go back to the basics of the New Testament before it was (in their opinion), corrupted by the later institutional church.  (In the Churches of Christ this is called ‘Restorationism’.)

I tell this story for a reason: the Emergent Church sounds and looks suspiciously like these churches whose ruins I see poking up through the suburban landscape.  They are self consciously rejecting the institutionalism of the mainstream and large independent churches in preference for small fellowship groups. For those burnt out and bruised by their experience within the Evangelical Church, particularly the ‘mega church’ of programs and impersonal worship, the Emergent Church appears attractive. Divisions over homosexuality, congregational fights over mission verses social action and the implicit or even explicit requirement to support right wing political agendas appear to be resolved by leaving and joining an Emergent church. Add a few spiritual practices from the past to this cosy arrangement, and it seems like the future will be good. I doubt it will however.

History does not so much as repeat itself, it alerts us to the propensity of Christians to ignore the past to their own peril.  In rejecting the traditions of the church and claiming to be beyond ‘institutions’, they will repeat the mistakes which are seen throughout the pages of church history, where either blind and arrogant leaders demand unquestioning allegiance, or there is a breakdown into anarchy as each person does what is right in their own eyes. The structures which have developed over centuries have been forged on a anvil of heated argument and sometimes at the cost of much blood. Wiser heads than mine have applied themselves to these issues and I would consider it silly to ignore them. Classical doctrines in the Emergent church appear irrelevant to their desire for intimacy and authenticity. It is true that doctrines like the trinity are not particularly exciting or cool to talk about, but they do prevent us from deep hurt when someone comes along and teaches that Jesus adopted his self knowledge as the messiah and embarked on a mission to explain his ideas. Salvation is at stake.

And just a practical issue which needs to be raised: how will they teach their children the basics of the faith? Some form of informal school usually gets established to do this. The label might change, but it’s still a Sunday school. Then a roster needs to be agreed on and before you know it, a new institution has been established. The early church itself was an institution from its inception and continued with Jewish institutions and practices.  An institution is any group which has customs and regular practices which are habitual and has agreed principles and beliefs which they subscribe to.  The very word, ‘to institute’ means ‘to begin, or commence’ with a practice that is regularly carried out. It is only in the later part of the nineteenth century that professions and companies developed certain practices and a culture we would identify as ‘an institution’. Perhaps, at the chance of overstating my position, we remember that marriage is considered as an institution, yet many of those in the Emergent Church would not consider rejecting marriage as a valid and meaningful way of life. It’s a pity they do not do the same with the historic, institutional Church in all its variety and cultural forms.

Why then, is tradition regarded to be as something inherently negative, restricting or lifeless by Emergents? It depends on your perspective. After 27 years of marriage there are some things like the daily tradition of kissing my wife goodbye for the day which is sometimes perfunctory, but most of the time, a good tradition which sustains trust and intimacy between us. There is little reflection or self consciousness by Emergents of why they have a default position toward the latest, the immediate and the rejection of the past. Most of their attitude is due to being children of this culture/age, which has led one North American church leader, John Piper, to identify those who join an Emergent church as “upper-middle-class, white, [and a] departure from orthodoxy…”.    [1] There are alternatives to the Evangelical Church and the mega church of programs, such as moving back into the past, by joining a Roman Catholic Church, or an Orthodox Church or the Anglican Church (and others, such as the Lutherans), but this will need to remain the subject of another blog for another day. In the meantime, I would like to suggest that the Emergent Church, like many other experiments in ecclesiology, will pass. The difference this time will be that there will few historical monuments to their existence as they do not have the money or interest in building a physical structure to house their faith. This of course, matters little to God or to me, but I wonder how many well meaning and good people who seek to follow Jesus, will become disillusioned by the failure of a loose knit organisation to sustain their faith and protect it from the excesses of powerful personalities and then drift away entirely from God.

[1] http://michaelkrahn.com/blog/2010/03/24/john-piper-the-emerging-church-was-an-upper-middle-class-white-departure-from-orthodoxy/

My friend has recently arrived back in Australia from his studies in Bologna, Italy. This is his post.

One of the joys of undertaking doctoral studies in Bologna was the discovery of the university city’s many ‘gems’, in this case, the Olivetan Benedictine community of Santo Stefano in the heart of Bologna. The Olivetans are part of the Benedictine family having been founded by Blessed Bernard Tolomei in 1344. The complex of Santo Stefano in Bologna is known as the ‘sette chiese’ or seven churches, an enchanting collection of buildings and places of worship that date back to the second century. The first church is a replica of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Tradition has it that the whole complex of Santo Stefano is built over an ancient pagan temple.

During my eight month stay in Bologna, I would join the monks for morning prayer every day at 7.45am. Even before opening the Liturgy of the Hours, I was always struck by the awesome sense of history that surrounded me and in which I was immersed. Often I would try to imagine the diverse range of personalities and characters that had shaped the monastic complex, that had come to pray there, those who had lived there and had shaped its life, liturgy and history. I often felt a powerful sense of wonder at the many people who had gone before me over the centuries long before my arrival in that ancient city. Joining the monks for the sung office always seemed to take me to ‘another place’, especially a strong and tangible connection to a venerable tradition of monastic spirituality in Christian history.  Whenever I visit and pray with a monastic community, I always have this feeling of wading in a deep pool of history, tradition and spirituality.

The psalms in the scriptures are ancient songs that touch the reality and rhythms of our daily lives.  They have been sung and prayed by members of the various monastic traditions over the centuries. As the psalms of the day are intoned and chanted, the ‘today’ of our lives is joined to this ancient tradition and our hearts are lifted in praise to God. The great strength and timelessness of the psalms is that they speak to our reality and touch the rhythm and cycles of daily life – our moods and feelings, our joys and sorrows, our fears and uncertainties, our supplications, dreams and desires. This daily reality and cycle of prayer comes before the God who hears the cry of his people and who never abandons his people to darkness and death. He is the God who fills his people with hope and gives them courage for their journey of faith.

I find that the psalms often echo the reality of our lives and speak words when at times words are beyond us – in moments of emptiness and pain, in the daily grind of life, in the midst of suffering and death, in our desire for courage, in our search for justice and in our struggle to be faithful to God’s call in our lives. For me, the daily grind of doctoral research was only possible, and was made somewhat bearable, only after having started the morning with the monks and uniting my prayer with the needs of the Church and the world. The chanted psalms of the day were ancient and timeless voices of the past that spoke to the reality of my life and the world around me.

Jesus has died and the hot cross buns have been eaten. It is Easter time and more particularly, Easter Saturday, a time during which nothing seems to be happening. We are awaiting for the resurrection to come at daybreak on Sunday morning. Most will barely give a second thought to the significance of this holy period and are waiting for the time to come when they will be finally able to gorge themselves on chocolate Easter eggs.

I had gone into a large Christian bookshop to buy some books to give as Christmas gifts and just inside the door was a prominent display of suggested purchases for Christmas. The title of the book “10 Minutes A Day with Jesus” grabbed my attention. Next to it was another devotional book probably aimed at women looking for something to give their husbands. It had the title: “The One Year Book Of Devotions For Men On The Go”. Now I was intrigued. Both books promised that I could have a Bible reading, think about it and pray, all in about ten to twenty minutes. I picked up the devotional book aimed at men with such a busy life that they had only at best ten minutes in their day for God and had a look. The book was well laid out. The content was generally good. It had some insightful comments on the text which I thought might make good material for sermons or bible studies. It made some thoughtful suggestions about how to apply the text to our daily life. I even considered buying it.

But what these well intentioned books offered, was in the end, inadequate and superficial. No one would advocate that we eat fast food every day as a healthy diet, let alone suggest to a growing teenager that the consumption of fast food will be sufficient for them to mature into a healthy adult. But ten minute devotional books are the equivalent of spiritual fast food. They might be useful for occasional consumption, but are no substitute for a good solid meal of meat and veggies. They suggest, misleadingly, that all we need in life is a quick devotion with God and that this will be enough when it will not be enough. I left the devotional books and went further into the shop to find something else.

My thoughts turned to the topic of a very important but related issue which every Christian faces sooner or later. The issue is whether Christian maturity can be achieved with little effort and quickly, or does it require hard work and a long period of time? The ten minute devotional books give the impression that maturity can be achieved quickly and with little effort – if the idea that we should be maturing is even considered at all. Reading the writings of John Cassian and other Desert Fathers of the fourth century highlight that maturity and how it occurred, was their concern also. Like us, they lived in a period of history undergoing much change in the church; it was riven with doctrinal controversies and sects. Charismatic individuals established new and exciting churches which attracted a large and excitable crowd. What concerned some who were sincerely seeking God like the Desert Fathers and Mothers, was the feeling that nominalism was sapping the church of its life. It was too easy being a Christian now that the Church was a legitimate institution of the Roman Empire.

For the Desert Fathers and Mothers, Cassian and Benedict, Calvin and Luther, William Law and John Wesley and many, many others, maturity was understood to be the goal of the Christian life. It has been a distinguishing feature of many religious movements in church history that maturity and how it is attained is recovered and then given prominence in the life of the Christian. These leaders did express it differently as ‘perfection’, ‘union with Christ, the Beloved’; ‘conformity to holiness’, or ‘entire sanctification’, but it was the centrifugal force around which all other Christians doctrines revolved. Within the Spiritual Direction tradition, it seems to have disappeared as a model for listening to and interpreting the life and experience of another person. There is much talk about ‘the journey’, but not much is said about the destination or what it looks like. Evangelicals focus on conversion through faith in the gospel, and in doing so, allow the focus of Christian experience to fall predominately on the beginning of the experience. Spiritual Direction tends to focus on the process of transformation; but perhaps we need a recovery of the teleology of Christian faith – maturity in Christ.

This blog post is an introduction to an essay on this topic which will be put under the ‘Essays’ button at the top in several days. 

Going  to church is not something I have much choice in, being a minister of religion. I’m expected to turn up each week as part of the job description, but this is not why I attend worship each week. In fact, it’s the other way around. It’s because I find worship something which is not what I would expect it to be, that I’m a minister in a church. Going to church for me is like the experience of climbing up a terribly high slide as a child and letting go. There is a suppressed squeal of ‘weeeeee’ as I let go (I’m a boy remember). These slides are often found in the local park but the best examples can be seen at the local agricultural show where they are extremely high with cascading polished steel bumps. Going to church and more particularly participating in public worship (which sounds terribly serious, formal and drab), is not something which we expect to be so different, but it is.

In recent years however, going to church has become more casual and for some Christians, an optional extra.  Our lifestyles have changed significantly from the era of the sixties and seventies (as in the last century, the 1960’s and 1970’s), when the husband was the sole bread winner and the shops closed on Saturday morning at midday, leaving the suburbs eerily silent except for the sound of the droning lawnmower or the roar of the crowd at the local football ground.  Saturdays are now taken up with shopping because for two parents working full time, there is little time during the week to do this essential task. But for some, shopping has also become a recreational activity and for others, the need to work on Saturdays has become a reality due to the deregulation of our working conditions and greater liberalisation in the trading hours of shops. As a consequence, Sundays have become the day for traditional family celebrations such as birthday parties or simply to get together.  Even the traditional sporting activities such as football, tennis and basketball which would be attended on Saturday mornings have been shifted into Sunday morning in recognition of this change in our working and consuming lives. What time is left over is given to the church. Going to church has become a discretionary leisure activity which is rated in its  importance alongside of going to the extended family’s birthday for a relative, or time to garden, attend to housing renovations or maintenance or simply rest.  Some choose not to go at all because church and more particularly, their experience of worship, has been disappointing. I notice that there are now many who are ‘post-Christian’, particularly from a younger age range who were once engaged with what I find a life giving experience (going to church), but are now hurt and disillusioned and have left. The causes of their pain and disillusionment are complex and varied. However, this aspect will need to be left to another time and place.

Why do you attend church? I was exploring this question with someone recently and in our conversation it emerged that there were two reasons why they had attended church regularly but no longer do so. The first was when their children were young, they attended so that their children would receive a Christian education. The second reason was due to their feelings of guilt if they failed to. Not so much a guilt about offending God, but a guilt induced by not fulfilling their parents’ expectations.  A third reason many attend church is the uplifting social time they experience.  Apart from the first reason, the other two are not particularly important, although the social dimension is very important in affirming our religious experience.  When this person’s children had grown up (and were now attending church of their own volition), this person’s relationship with God was seriously damaged due to significant trauma in their lives. As a result, the reasons for attending had vanished because God had disappeared.  There is a fourth reason why some attend worship. It provides them with an outlet to give something back to God.  There are so many opportunities offered in the morning worship for service that it’s simply irresistible for the Christian driven by a sense of obligation to pass by the opportunity.  In my conversation with my friend, this emerged as a hidden motivation for my friend to attend church, so in fact, they had a fourth reason. Churches buzz with so much activity that its  members can become addicted to the adrenalin rush of serving.  I too became consumed by the church’s activities and a casualty of the adrenalin it released. Both contributed to may own need to leave ministry for an extended period when I became exhausted.

But going to church is not what I expected it could be, and that’s what keeps me coming back. They don’t have to be a place where I am expected to give or contribute, but a place where I receive from God. Protestants spoke so much about ‘grace’ in the past, they often forgot how to experience it and shifted from an ongoing experience of God’s grace into one of justifying their worth and status by  their religious works. They then passed this distorted view of grace onto the next generation like my friend.  What is worse is that today’s churches seem to speak little of grace and more about Jesus being my friend which is all very well, but I would like a flesh and blood God rather than a nice Jesus. So why do we go to church then? We go to put ourselves in a place where it’s more likely that God will turn up. It’s the one time in our week when it’s most likely that we will encounter God if we’re there looking, vigil like for him. Or to use another metaphor, coming to church for me is a wayside stop on the pilgrimage of looking for God and seeking God as we pass through a terrain with which we are unfamiliar with.  There I find bread and wine, fellowship and tender care which binds up the wounds and abrasions I have incurred during the week as I have trudged along the road.  There is no sense of coming to church with the overwhelming sense that I need to give something except myself, which is empty in any case whether I can recognise it or not. I come, because for so many like my friend, we have ‘gived out’ and have nothing left to give (to use my friend’s words).

I go because it is the prayers which give voice to the deep and unspoken things which have remained forgotten, hidden or simply neglected. These words provide a bridge for faith, giving shape to what is formless within, our inarticulated longings, expressing what we can’t express as we move between a place of faith and unfaith, because we are damaged, empty and seeking. We do not believe in words as magic; we wish we could, but we are now adults, our eyes are open knowing good and evil, but we believe in their ability to give form to what is formless within and this is the work of God’s Spirit within (Rom 8:26).

The church building itself is another reason I go in preference to trying worship at home. As a former builder, buildings are very important to me, particularly the ability of a building to enhance or detract from our day to day quality of life. The church itself is like a giant lens which acts to focus God’s presence into a focal point. Not all Protestants would agree, preferring to see the church building as either a lecture hall with the sermon the principle means in which we encounter God (in the mind) or the more extreme position, that the building is irrelevant; the people are the most important means by which God is mediated to us. The rented gym or school hall is therefore perfectly acceptable to this group.  For these brave souls in our suburbs, mission is the focus, not church buildings (which imply for them, a static view of God ), and the use of a public space provides the neutral ground for those outside the church to meet God half way. I am not comfortable with this position however, because in declaring everything holy and every place holy, the result is that everything becomes common and there is no singular place left, set aside to be declared holy and wholly for God’s use, and it is in the holy that God turns up, whether they are burning bushes, mountains, crypts, or beside the bed as children are born and parents die.

I often look at the building as being like a boat, as something that holds the congregation for the service of the liturgy. We are all one, even in our doubts, lack of understanding or lack of experience (of God) but this lack of understanding is not an issue because we have a shared liturgy (whatever tradition you use). The liturgy is the work of God’s people performed corporately; it is not just running through a set of empty words. Anglicans it has been noted, do not have so much a creed, but a prayer book which gives shape to their beliefs and a common voice of what they offer in faith to God.  I am just a prompter for their lines. But I digress a little. The congregation are like the rowers in the boat, this building.  And on the one side I stand and dip my oar in the water and pull with the words: ‘The Lord be with you’. And then they respond by dipping their oar in and pulling together with the words: ‘And also with you’. And so we begin to pull the boat forward together, toward God.  And it is in this boat that we are all carried, them and I. We are carried through the service by the songs, hymns, prayers, communion and released with a final blessing.  Going to church for me is an experience of letting go  like the child letting go of the sides on the slide, allowing himself to be carried by the gravity to the end and to land with the urge to do it all again. And at the end of the service just like the slide, we pick ourselves up again and return home. Going to church is to take myself of to a place where I think it likely that God will turn up, to sit in God’s boat in the company of other seekers and pilgrims as we row together with the aid of the liturgy, united by the one Spirit.