Some kind of internal distraction process seems to be pulling the wagons off the trail, dragging them into a defensive, inward looking circle. To change the metaphor, perhaps the body of Christ is subject to the kind of illness in which the body’s immune system turns on the body itself, producing illness, despair and frustration.
He notes a series of dichotomies, saying “If these both/ands become either/ors, they are symptoms of sickness…”
He wonders about the wagon: are we moving forward or are we circling them. And he draws this into a discussion of cliques.
Human groups have a way of degenerating into self-serving cliques. One of God’s mechanisms for preventing this is to send along a healthy crop of alternative people to leaven and enliven them. Really strong cliques, however, have a way of making it pretty obvious up with what they will put in others. They can pray as hard as they want for growth. No responsible deity, however, would put more people into their sausage machine, until they grow up and become joinable.
I see Bp Alan’s words as a critique of strong parties on many sides of the current Anglican Canyon: anyone who seems to press an agenda at the cost of the Church’s being herself. I’m with James: I’m no longer threatened by those who believe differently than I, only by those who insist I must believe as they do - and who seek through trickery to change my beliefs to suit them.
But I see the post as a critique of many others as well: emergent to staunchly institutional, traditionalist and revisionist, liturgist and evangelist, Anglican, Catholic, Orthodox… whomever seems to be drawing the wagons into a circle rather than opening out into the world.
I was just saying today that the Church is Very Small. One of the folks on my RSS, Adam, has been called to Working with The Macrina Community, a church plant from St Gregory of Nyssa Parish.
Was having a talk today with a friend online about the Independent Sacramental movement. The conversation was all over the board.
Then I said we needed to start our own indy jurisdiction and I first suggested that we do Eastern Rite, but then I realised that would be stupid because I’d want no rites reserved.
The problem is the name, of course. The initial idea of The Autocephalous Orthodox Church of Lake Erie seemed ironically to say exactly what we wanted - sort of an Anti-jurisidiction, limited by a non-location. I might, in hind sight, want to add an Ethnicity to it just to poke even more fun: The White Anglo-Saxon Ex Protestant Orthodox Church of Lake Erie. We could be boring and exclusive all at once.
But then we played with some other ideas, weaving “emergent” into the mix, realising that the Indy Sacramentalists are the liturgical form of emergent church (in a lot of ways - the parallels hold). Really, the baseline isn’t a rite (Eastern, Western or even Danceing-Saints, old or new language, Taize, whatever). Ideally, I’d like a Church that looked like this OCA parish in Sacramento:
One could use that Church for Tridentine, BCP, Rite III or ER all just as easily. Move the furniture as you wish! Throw in a few chairs and you can have a Banquet Mass. It would need to be shaped by the community acting in faith.
So I suggested using the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral
which would seem to allow such a wide expression as we sought. Fellowship Of Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateralists (FOCLQ). That was a laugh: but my friend didn’t want the C-LQ to be “The thing” either.
I still like my Praxis idea, even though the conversation has never taken off. And I still love Revolution NYC, but for all their coolness, they’ve only once in all their years had a communion service which I find odd, given how much emphasis they place on hospitality. We both agreed that that was the thing.
And so, there, Sacramental and Emergent, where do you go…
“the Church can continue fulfilling her mission as the Sacrament of Salvation.”
But remember: the entire body will be saved and restored in the end.
It has nothing to do with Priests, though. I love the line that “If there is a lack of priests in the Church, the Church dies, and if the Church is not present in the world, the world dies.”
Like what did we do for the first 60-100 years? Jesus didn’t start the priesthood: man did. It seemed like a good idea at the time. But we’re getting over it, thankfully!
It exudes hope for the church; hope that comes through a process of deconstruction and reconstruction, but hope nonetheless. Tony talks about how emergent folk have a “hope-filled orientation toward the future,” and this book exemplifies that hope. After reading this book, one can’t simply accuse emergent Christians of “deconstructing everything to death.” Emergent Christianity, as Tony puts it, “is an effort by a particular people in a particular time and place to respond to the gospel as it (once again) breaks through the age-old crusts”
I was particularly struck by a few things in the post, but most especially I was stuck by something not in the post. As I read of mainline churches “getting into this whole ‘emergent’ thing”, I wondered what the implications might be. Mainliners are *heavily* invested in somethings that Emergents “downplay - or outright reject”. As in:
Emergents believe that church should function more like an open-source network and less like a hierarchy or a bureaucracy.
Emergents start new churches to save their own faith, not necessarily as an outreach strategy.
Emergents firmly hold that God’s Spirit - not their own efforts - is responsible for good in the world. The human task is to cooperate with God in what God is already doing.
Emergents downplay - or outright reject - the differences between clergy and laity.
Can you have a hierarchical clergy structure (Patr/Mtr/Abp/Bp/Pr/De/Sd/Rdr/lay or any combo of the above) if you have an “open-source network” in which you “reject differences between clergy and laity”?
Just wondering - as someone who was asked to help imagine an “emergent-style” Episcopal event… Where do you imagine difference goes when your service is designed to legitimate that difference?
On Monday, the New York Times‘ Andrew Revkin blogged the end of the 1950s - or at least he blogged a movie preview about the topic: The End of Suburbia
Revkin promises to blog attempts to “uninvent” Suburbia. The movies to which he links, which are now on my “must see” list, seem very clear about the idea. But I’m rather certain Americans don’t, generally, want to hear it. Mrs Obama said the other night, the only answer our Republican Overlords have given us to the current crisis is “shop”. The only people making sacrifices are our men and women in green - and we’re not even paying them back. We’re not asked to save canned goods or darn socks or even to buy war bonds. We’re just told to shop more.
This isn’t working - our American Greed is draining the rest of the world of peace. And we’re killing ourselves in the process: I’ve been told that Buffalo has 20,000 houses for sale - 10,000 of them boarded up and ready to be bulldozed. One person leaves western New York every 30 seconds. Nature is taking over the eastern side of Lake Erie - and yet we are building here: row on row of little houses made of ticky tacky. I’m currently living in the first generation of those: people fleeing down down urban Buffalo. And the outward flight continues.
So what are the options?
Resources like Ernest Callenbach’s ecotopia books and other advocates for high density urbanism, point toward something that isn’t normal for us at all: sharing, common ground, a decrease in “private” property concepts (although not an elimination of them) and more of a community-oriented, communal model.
Today’s news, (coincidentally?) brings us word of Israeli-style Urban Kibutzes imported to the US. (Props to nextbook.) At the same time that the USA was selling the gluttonous lifestyle of suburbia, Israel was building a new nation using Kibbutzes - collectivist farms. These new folks focus less on the collectivist farming of their elder brothers and sisters and more on social activism, but collectivism still plays a part.
Instead of abandoning the communal model embodied by the kibbutz movement and idealized by the Zionist youth groups, one Israeli youth group determined to adapt the kibbutz to the modern age. That group, called Noar Oved ve’Lomed, began to send its graduates to found small urban kibbutzim, called kvutzot, throughout Israel. Instead of a connection to the land, these kvutzot organized themselves around addressing specific social problems.
Imagine that energy tuned to the artist/social activist communities found in Buffalo and other places, seeking to bring to urban areas new life and a financial fecundity that has long since left the city centre to move out to the strip malls and Wal*marts.
This is not an appeal to gentrify: many cities (eg, San Francisco) come back to life with artist(/etc) collectives and then promptly destroy the life those folks built by bringing in huge amounts of money from the outside to buy up and destroy what has been built. On the other hand, other cities (eg, Asheville) get all fetishistic about their “cool” revitalised centre, and force the strip malls up the sides of mountains.
In modern Israeli society, the challenge of pioneering is no longer draining swamps, clearing land of rocks, bringing produce to market and building roads. The swamps that must be drained are swamps of urban poverty. The “produce” that must be generated is often hi-tech solutions that are marketed abroad. The roads that must be paved are roads of understanding between different communities in Israel. (Source.)
So to it is here, the need is not to homestead in isolated communities across the prairie or to isolate within our mega-houses, mega-churches and hummers, but rather to work in our cities to heal and renew what we have broken. And to work with those people we would leave behind - usually abandoning peoples of other races the same way we abandon slums and boarded up storefronts.
This seems to me a Jewish parallel to the New Monasticism movement within the emergent communities where the focus is to colonise the “urban Desert” with the Kingdom of Heaven. (Although, I think many of the kvuzot folks would avoid such overtly religious language.) I see this kvutzot movement as sort of a middle ground - encouraging the advancement of sustainable development within cities while, at the same time, avoiding the extremes of pure socialism and pure capitalism. Perhaps, given the lack of either of those extremes in the world, this is a more realistic approach?
We are living in a time, in a world, where we have a burning bush of knowledge in the palm of our hand and yet, we feel no sense of urgency about making the case that this does not have all the answers.
A cool quote over at Synablog, from Tony Jones’ bookThe New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier:
In the blogosphere, we began taking heat for even announcing the meeting, especially my quote in the press release that I was excited to meet with the rabbis to ‘‘talk about the future and God’s Kingdom.’’ Some of my Christian friends made it clear that Jews could not possibly be involved in kingdom of God work because they did not profess belief in Jesus. To emergents, this kind of thinking binds God’s work to the church and implies that outside the lives of professed Christians, God is handicapped.
Rejecting this belief, I set to work with Shawn Landres, the director of research at Synagogue 3000, the group that convened the meeting …to bring together the emergent Christian leaders and the emergent Jewish leaders.
This is the self-ruled blog of an Christian attempting to follow God in the Way of Jesus... sometimes. I most identify with the Anglican and Liberal Catholic flavours.
«There is absolute truth in anarchism and it is to be seen in its attitude to the sovereignty of the state and to every form of state absolutism. […] The religious truth of anarchism consists in this, that power over man is bound up with sin and evil, that a state of perfection is a state where there is no power of man over man, that is to say, anarchy. The Kingdom of God is freedom and the absence of such power … the Kingdom of God is anarchy. » Nicolas Berdyaev,Slavery and Freedom
I who have written this story, or rather this fable, give no credence to the various incidents related in it. For some things in it are the deceptions of demons, other poetic figments; some are probable, others improbable; while still others are intended for the delectation of foolish men. (Closing lines of the Táin Bó Cúalnge)
