Summer seems to have finally arrived. And we are on family holiday.
Out with the artist brushes, oils and canvas... a few beers perhaps and some nice red's!

And so we are looking forward to rest, relaxation... as well as some exploration with Gillian's folks out visiting us from Scotland. So we are set to explore te Waka-a-Aoraki/Te Wahi Pounamu (the canoe of Aoraki/ the place of Greenstone) - i.e. the South Isalnd.

Off we go then into new places...

[2] Jazz Improvisation

Simply put improvisation is ‘improvisus’ Latin meaning “ not seen ahead of time.”
What I think strikes me is the exploratory nature of this, the possibilities of the risks.

Jazz improvisation as ‘conversation’ then involves soloing = which means one taking the lead; trusted by others to improvise, while comping is the others supporting. Even improvisers need others and must themselves in due time play such comping role. This seems to involve collaboration and teamwork to a degree even where words are not required, a look, nod or eye are enough to deliver/pass the message. Listening and responding then are of the essence and sensitivity. These form part of the opening of the space for ideas, for response and the taking on board others ideas. Such leadership requirements seem to me to suggest that we must learn to live less out of ur competencies and trsut the work of the Holy Spirit in us and among us, to work through us. It is a far more demanding and risky business to allow the Spirit to 'improvise' through us because we don't see too far ahead. It demands faith of a sort rooted and being built up in Christ - a faithful obedience. I think this is the sort of scripted life Brueggemann directs us to. I also think it is what will lift us in our leadership beyond the endless sense of despair as we see the edifaces crumble, number decrease, etc., etc., and further it will save us from 'false' platitudes of hope.

Organisationally/structurally, the implications for how churches wrestling to find a form that maintains the missionary participation today may revolve around the improvisory nature of life in the Spirit. How much structure is needed in this Post-bop genre will be an interesting one of course, and no-one can see ahead on that! Some studies have shown how the second/third generation of a movement sees all the initial intensities wane and growth rate slows. ( Noted by Donald E. Miller : Reinventing American Protestantism). I’ve also been reading Prayer and the Priesthood of Christ in the Reformed Tradition by Graham Redding (T&T Clark 2003) It covers several paradigm shifts in theology from early Fathers through to reformers and Scottish reformers. It takes a good look at worship and prayer and how our notions theologically about Christ’s priesthood have been affected. Anyway, it strikes me that looking at it from a Jazz improvisation perspective, we can see that in each historical period the emphasis, debates, creed forming, the liturgy, confessional standards were in part developed in relation to the focus of the times. That was why in looking back some aspects of their theology were not as developed. Some was spontaneous, some built on years of understanding, practice (pastorally) and ‘thousands of experiments’ which was exactly what Calvin’s Geneva was in a way and what Thomas Chalmers undertook in the poor house areas of Glasgow and Edinburgh and seeking Godly Commonwealth too. From a historical/doctrinal perspective there is much we can learn that would make us think, reflect and hopefully better understand where we are , but also with a sense of improvisus. This is not to say that we are more Jazz/swing or bebop about handling the past, for present and future, I do actually see in Acts 10 Peter go against the bounds of tradition and go 'outside' in conversation(postbop). Jazz improvisers are interested in creating new material, surprising themselves and others in spontaneous ways with the music. Jazz equally has no prescription of what is to be played.

“Spontaneity… is but the outcome of years of training and practice and thousands of experiments”. (Hauerwas, Against the Nations 1985: 52)

Keep improvising! Keep experimenting and risking!

[1] Jazz Improvisation

Sorry for the previous theorizing and its labour. But now to turn to the metaphoric use of Jazz that seems to be increasing for the church emergent.

I confess I like it and delved into organisational science to discover a debate going on for some time now in regard to this metaphor and it’s usefulness in organizations generally.


I’ll come back to this another day. But what at the outset I think is striking are the genres of improvisation and the degree of improvisational structure in each shift.

Classical- Minimal = functional hierarchy – formal structure, linear, rigid

Trad. Jazz/swing – constrained = process, flexible

Bebop – extensive = network, complex and structured, organic

Postbop – maximum, new content and structure emerge = functional anarchy, emergent, spontaneous, mutually constructed conversation, chaotic

(see Michael Stack “Jazz Improvisation and Organizing” in Organisational Science vol11/2 2000, pp 227-234)

Within this framework, perhaps we find ourselves in the midst of a conversation throughout the Church at this time between similar genres or in a transition/paradigm shift. I would dare suggest then that missionary thinking has engaged the church with some constrained impro. of Jazz/swing which significantly moved us beyond classical. From the tradition I know, it seems tome that Trad Jazz/Swing fits. There has been room for some fresh impro. with constraint and new flexible structures have been taking shape. Basically impro. here allows for a degree of marginal differences but it is all kept within the bounds of the larger scheme of ‘expected behaviours’.
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I also would say that church planting, (and perhaps the likes of cell/house church,etc) have in recent decades given rise of more extensive impro. And are more your Bebop genre with emphasis seen on networks of relationship, organic growth changes but still having complexity of structures. Bebop utilized the ‘bad’ notes of swing to create new interesting harmonies. I take this to reflect the bricoleur-like approach of utilizing whatever is to hand and making something of it.
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But I dare to suggest that what we are now seeing through the breadth of emergent, Alt. Worship (and those who say they have ‘left church’ and those who argue that they still care but want the newer stuff ) is more Postbop – where the basic structure of a tune was not fixed, the structures themselves could be improvised so – notes, structure, harmony emerge spontaneously. Though I dare say even these postbop musicians had a previous background in jazz /swing. This was truly though ‘playing outside’ the norm the box, the accepted structures. It was walking the wire without a safety net. However, even here there is emphasis on rehearsal – playing the same old tunes, same old chord changes, does provide the ability to spontaneously create embellishment... further in relation of this to organization, Zack says, “ it requires practicing communication that builds a deeply shared language, worldview and an understanding of the group’s purpose, mission, and belief system, one part of which is to abhor complacency…” there is a need to have openness to new ways, a need to suspend judgement and even interpretation to accept the apparent anarchy, noise, and confusion that may merely represent unfamiliarity rather than chaos. Hence with a postbop emergent view there is much that is spontaneous carries maximum freer improvisation in which everyone is reacting and listening and thinking ahead to everyone else, connected in interactive ‘conversation’, (perhaps this is a significant part of emergent) which has infinite possibilities and so the group may never find resolution or return to the original point…

Towards improvisation!

Therefore in finding a way forward in mission, we need not only critique the present, but find a continuity with the past and reframe this in relation to the Jesus' Story which is the Christian point of departure. The radical strategy for mission is the reclaiming and reinterpreting the tradition in such a way that it is consistent with its roots and yet adequate to the new situation. That is a process of improvisation with constraint. Three types of constraint are at work in music; continuous, cultural and occasional. Begbie explores the parameters of each, particularly relevant are metre and syncopation, harmonic sequence and idiom each contributing to a framework of constraint that allows for a flexible responsiveness as music engages with the present particularities. In this way the improviser works with boundaries.

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The key phrase Begbie uses is 'Freedom-in-relation-to-constraint' (186) through which we gain new personal identity. The danger today is that many seek to be original and creative, but regard freedom as unrelated to the past and tradition. The unease with temporality makes the new mission 'mediocre'(219), the antithesis of freedom. Contingency[i] and constraint allow the church in mission to relate to the particular context in such a way that failure and error can be incorporated. It gives the space to fail without complete disaster, as constraints help carry you through and in this risking new things are learned. The cadence therefore required is a restful restlessness(244) which saves us from activity as busy-ness that leads to lifeless monotony. On the one hand then, the structures give form and meaning to the improvisation; we don't have to make it happen. Yet equally these structures free us for mission and new fruitful possibilities. Significantly, it means identity is found in the repetition of the Eucharistic practice, rooting the community of faith in God's newness and to participate in His mission. From this restfulness comes the restlessness to be willing to give and give back.[ii] This removes a focus on technique and strategy or programme and means in terms of freedom, that we take more seriously the others identity as a person.[iii] The church therefore, does not exist for itself, but for the sake of passing on the Gospel. The mission praxis here too recognises there is no longer a need to have control over others, that power is relinquished. Indeed, music's contribution to our understanding of God's mission and that of the church is a reframing of present roles and responsibilities. With regard to the mission of God and of God's people, the shape of freedom, as restful restlessness, will have a gentle rhythm that is to be learned continually. This frees us from a having to get it right or to happen and so recover the cadence in mission – a provisionality which helps define the church less in terms of building and more in terms of people. It means letting go of traditional organisational and structural baggage; seeing ourselves less a part of a fixed institution and more participants forming the mosaic of an eschatological community. I think that is something of what it is to be emergent in the Spirit today.

In eschatological perspective, the church is the end-time community, called to life by the Spirit, … It is a community, travelling from context to context, emerging in different cultural spaces, putting up signs of the coming kingdom and providing safe environments for people who try to make sense of their world with the aid of the gospel. It lives on the basis of the pneumatological contextualisation of Christ.

(Kirk and Vanhoozer, To Stake a Claim, 225)

I like that! I think that's what we are seeking to do.

FOOTNOTES (all from Begbie)
[i] See p184. Importantly, contingency has the force of newness.
[ii] See chapter 9.
[iii] A useful image of this and the learning process in relation to discipleship is provided in p227/8

Beyond our equilibrium ?

Our life of faith consists in moving with God in terms of the dynamic of tension and resolution in a process of anticipation and hope. Now I realise that some of these recent posts may seem rather removed, but in wrestling and reflecting theologically I believe that we can learn to live faith today. So, I want to pick up on Paul Fromont’s posts on 2nd January Walter Brueggemann - 19 Theses and 4th January Unpacking the Box within which we think we have confined God – and take these alongside my own process with Begbie.
If we accept a non-linear view of time and if we move beyond homogenous notions and modes, indeed more deeply understanding and experiencing God as Trinity, being caught up in/participating the ‘dance’, then our faith will always be developing, growing changing, deepening, but never have arrived, always in process, beyond our time of equilibrium. Accepting such notions then can we not be more honest about the things of faith and Christ?
Brueggemann’s 19 theses emphasis the scripted life, but I think it is not in terms of a script that confines, but is liberating into the counter – story, text and indeed drama of God's mission (missio Dei)
1. That script is not monolithic, one dimensional or seamless. It is ragged and disjunctive and incoherent. Partly it is ragged and disjunctive and incoherent because it has been crafted over time by many committees. But it is also ragged and disjunctive and incoherent because the key character is illusive and irascible in freedom and in sovereignty and in hiddenness, and, I’m embarrassed to say, in violence – [a] huge problem for us.

2. The ragged, disjunctive, and incoherent quality of the counter-script to which we testify cannot be smoothed or made seamless. [I think the writer of Psalm 119 would probably like too try, to make it seamless]. Because when we do that the script gets flattened and domesticated. [This is my polemic against systematic theology]. The script gets flattened and domesticated and it becomes a weak echo of the dominant script of technological, consumer militarism. Whereas the dominant script of technological, consumer militarism is all about certitude, privilege, and entitlement this counter-script is not about certitude, privilege, and entitlement. Thus care must betaken to let this script be what it is, which entails letting God be God’s irascible self.

I would add to this by noting what he does in his handing of the psalms – as a movement and flow involving orientation (where all is perfectly in order and balanced), disorientation (where and when things are ragged, confusing, painful and messy), re-orientation (a newness to life brought about by God’s grace and fresh perspectives and life).
Such faith is not settled and fixed, it has a sense of tension and resolution to it and can somehow see the transient more in the daily-ness of living.
So what is the trouble if the Archbishop raises honest questions and what if we don’t have answers? Is that the point? Must we have answers or are wqe called to something else in response?
In the Telegraph (UK) -
"In a deeply personal and candid article, he says "it would be wrong" if faith were not "upset" by the catastrophe which has already claimed more than 150,000 lives.
Prayer, he admits, provides no "magical solutions" and most of the stock Christian answers to human suffering do not "go very far in helping us, one week on, with the intolerable grief and devastation in front of us".
(for some ongoing discussion on this one go to Jason Clark's Blog)
In the rawness of life perhaps this awful event may act to everyone, the church included, like God’s megaphone (see Craig’s blog) as it threatens and disrupts everyone’s convenient, comfortable equilibrium. If we dare to unpack the box in which we have confined God, perhaps these events may fill us with passion and give voice to another counter script, indeed, our responses in the longer term beyond giving aid, is also to give a voice to the lament (which we have sanitised and cleaned up in our churches and liturgies) of disorientation that the world feels letting experience touch us in new psalms that give voice to how we feel today in the face of such destruction.

Praying the psalms.

"I cry aloud to God, aloud to God, that he may hear me' Ps77

Not thinking straight

How do we understand history? Straight Lines ? The myth of progress of course and other brands of progressivism tend to regard it as a linear movement along straight lines towards some goal. Begbie however directs us to consider how musical temporality is structured upon layers of metrical waves of ‘intensification and release. Directionality is one thing; one-dimensional linearity is another’ (59)

fig 1.Metrical waves

He further notes how linear models:
1. mask or downplay the role of discontinuity
2. linear metaphors often had the effect of minimizing the place of radical and qualitative novelty, which creates a view of the future in mechanistic terms.
3. such also tends towards uniformity. Homogeneity can effect how we understand transience.
Rather then, ‘Musical time is thus not about a line split into equal parts but about waves of tension and resolution.’[i] It is therefore not so much concerned about moving in a straight line, but a varied wave in which there is a sense of ‘carrying from’ and a ‘reaching beyond’ through each present. Musically this means that the wave patterns and the multi-leveled connections of the matrix ‘the first wave lives on in the second, the first and second in the third and so on.’ In that sense therefore the past is not lost forever.
Therefore past and future can be experienced in and with the present. Time is viewed as interpenetrating – a constant intertwining, unlike the old concept of time being seen as 3 exclusive elements. ‘The present is no longer the ‘saddle’ between the two abysses of past and future, but rather that ‘in which’, ‘now’, ‘not yet’, and ‘no more’ are given together, the most intimate interpenetration.’ (63)
It seems to me then that if we consider time differently and our lace in it historically in whatever emergent way you care for the church today, then
1. we can consider God’s newness among us differently. As Brueggemann states in Texts that Linger, Words that Explode , regarding Jeremiah 31:31-34 and the ‘new covenant’. I a context of grief and bewilderment comes the extraordinary articulation of new covenant. The old one, which they broke, cannot be counted upon. ‘But the new covenant! The term is clear. It is “new” If it is new, then there is indeed a season of discontinuity between what was old with Yahweh and what is now given’ (10) He notes that we can see it is re-newal or a revivifying what is old, but that would merely assert continuity. We often speak of renewal, but I wonder if our time perspective would awaken us to a sense of ‘newness’ and so discontinuity even for those of us within institutional frameworks.
2. the creative novelty throughout emerging churches will follow a different rhythm and melody. It will mean for instancve I think, that we begin to lay aside in mission and emegring, reforming missionary churches notions of progress that I am tentative about suggesting are a part of our fabric and nature and we are not yet free of. IS this part of our deeper issues today?The interweaving of times would truly see the church as an eschatological phenomenon which may bring and extend newness beyond itself in mission. Do we see this in what more and more people are stepping into, even in the institution in places?
3. We would live with the lack of uniformity. Is this a danger in any movement of newness? But more significantly, beyond merely saying each context is different, we will begin to appreciate more the transience in life and plug into the cultural climate of the ‘spiritual’ in real and meaningful ways for and with Christ. There are also implications for understanding worship afresh and positively as a kairos experience.
4. I think throughout all this is a call to live in the ‘in-between’ as kingdom living invites us to that place of tension and resolution with a sense of direction, which I think is what we lack today in mission.

___________

Footnote

[i]

Begbie uses tension in the general sense of character of a music event which arouses a sense of anticipation, that matters cannot be left as they are. Resolution is then the closure or dissipation of the tension. This dynamic can be a process, but also a place.

Bible and Mission 2 - Theology, Music and Time

Having spent some time earlier posts on Bauckham's matters of History and particularity in Bible and Mission. I now wish to retrun and develop from there some other thinking that has been spurred on again from what I have read in Chris Erdman's Blog. There you will find wrestling with the future-past dynamic and matters of Jazz! Take a look.

Therefore I want to move on beyond historicity matters to our consideration of that dynamic which I would suggest is significant ot the mission of the church today. Indeed, it has been a concern in recent years for me that in church planting and now I suppose in emergent church contexts that we can do much without reflection upon things and we betray any praxis. I other words we need to think and reflect theologically and upon practice.

So.... I want to take some time to begin to develop some initial thoughts that have been with me for some time now, but held back on. It may not be knew, that's not the point, rather i want to make sense of the mission ecclessiology of today and that requires me to engage in matters of time and space/place dynamics. It requires some eschatological approach. I want to therefore begin with Jeremy begbie in the next wee while and go on to explore the improvisation issues from there as we may learn from within the metaphor explored in Organisational Science.

INTRO...

Into the dislocations of our times as we experience them, we may usefully place Begbie's explorations[i] into the ways musical phenomena can open up some of the central themes of the Christian faith - in particular those which are formative of an emerging missionary church - and in doing such theology, offer refreshing new models, as well as release faith from the damaging habits and dominance of tradition(s) and thought which have hindered and hampered its work in the past. In other words, in this transitional period, Begbie makes a beginning to challenge the church to engage in doing theology which is in touch with the temporal context and the zeitgeist, therefore seriously offering a way through this inter-phase from modernity to post-modernity, which further permits us to engage with relevance in our mission task.
It is in relation to issues of boundary and change[ii] at this threshold that I wish to critically review Begbie's work. While there are deficiencies due to the boundary constraints of literary conformity, he does encourage us to utilise our imaginations and do 'theology through music.'(4)[iii] Begbie's concern with the temporality and practice of music are useful in the paradigm shift from the tidy efficiency and linearity of modernity to intentional engagement with the pure escapism of postmodernity. Music's time and practice help shape our mission praxis as embodied action and participation in Christ as a dynamic or gravitational field 'which draws us in, we participate in a process, a journey in and through sound.'(18).

Footnotes
[i] The purpose he sets before us, is to allow music to serve, enrich and advance theology in relation to our understanding of God, God's relation to us and the world. More particularly, to do theology 'through music'(4) and in so doing expands and heightens sensitivity to the theological dimension of social and cultural thought and practices.
[ii] Music shows us in a particularly potent way that dynamic order is possible, that there can be ordered being, and becoming, form and vitality, structure and dynamics, flux and articulation. For something to be subject to persistent change need not imply disorder. (86)

[iii] Begbie does state that 'This book is only a preliminary attempt to address this issue.'(4) I would suggest that while it demands a great deal of intense reading, even without a deep musical understanding, I did find it possible to enter a dialogue as reader with the text in a way that used my imagination to carry out the theologising that Begbie did seem to do very little of, yet needed to do.