unfettering posture

Here on Highgate Martin has, after study leave, been raising the sort of questions that Dawn does in her book, which begin to probe under our skin, so to speak. (ie no longer just the usual banner headings of postmodernity, but getting beneath to the ways such ‘devices’ fetter us.). It is quite stricking how, for example, too often we hear around the churches the financial limiting to what might be… the scarcity fetters us in deep, profound, practical ways and is so deadly to the church.
Chris Erdman and indeed Paul Fromont continue to stimulate my thinking about the ‘posture’ of leadership that sets us free, fills us with hope as witnesses to the abundance found in Christ for us as his people. I’ve been gradually piecing something together based around the older traditional spiritualties of the Christian faith and been considering the ‘Rule’necessary for us as a mission community of grace to help us in the practices’ of the faith. We see 3 key areas for us here in terms of Worship, Habits and Helps. (Live worshipfully, help others and have the habits of faith) Considering this then, I see my posture as missionary in all this to be one of paying attention (prophetic), patience and to relate and care. There may well be more to add, but for now this seems to be clear to me. We operate presently with 3 hubs ofr worship and activity: at the Roslyn end it happens 1( all age and story based) and 3 (communion with reflection and time together) Sundays. I’m looking to develop a ‘new’ worship focus, like Steve Taylor (undertaking Espresso as a new cafe church (experimental stages). In our context though I want part of what we do to form something of the overall rhythm and pattern of our communal life and from this spawn other ‘groups’. On Easter/Holy Week we ran 7.15-7.45 am/pm reflective services. Following these feedback (if seen as a test run) reveals that it provided a safe place (someone not connected with ‘church’ popped in and in their need we ha a pastoral time, their comment was that it felt a ‘safe place’. So… I’m hosting a gathering soon to run this past some folks interested and willing to participate together in. Images of Caim and coracle seem apt for us now as one aspect affirms God’s presence, the other the trusting, journeying, risking and a ‘spiritualty of the insecure’.
So I am seeking out others to have conversations with, as I also sense that in the intimacy of the space we have in the sanctuary at Roslyn we not only put this in place each week for Highgate, but that it could be wider.

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My dream, if you ask? To offer a ‘Place to stand’ that is a place
of worship where people come closer in their walk wit God through various forms,
but perhaps especially through the Ignation, Benedictine, reformed and other
spiritualities informing us; a place of quiet, to cease and rest; a place
of hospitality; a place of learning, my hope would be to have teaching on
mission that helps and encourages and that there is a sense of and dynamic here
of worship, learning (study and reflection) and some experience of this in
community that is set in and around mission contexts in Dunedin. My
posture, our posture then in mission one of faithful obedience.

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Beyond the device-use of church

Reading ‘Unfettered Hope’ continues to stimulate reaction in me and challenge me (and the church) to consider faithful living today. For some time I have begun to see the challenge in mission to move beyond and go deeper in worship, in spiritual formation as disciples and with neighbour to make friends in our communities (wherever they be geographically). Dawn highlights and speaks of these 2 matters as focal concerns::

'Focal concerns’ are those important aspects which give our lives
meaning and purpose and toward which we direct our attention. The root here is
‘focus’ meaning hearth. A useful metaphor for us. In terms of Christianity the
focal concerns are love of God and love of neighbour. So she asks do we live by
such focal concerns?

The device paradigm Dawn outlines (after Borgmann) teaches us that the notion of a device removes from us the burdens we experience with a thing. Eg a hearth,(thing meaning something which cannot be separate from its context, tasks and skills and experiences related to it, and how we engage it, learn and relate to it and one another. (Borgmann instances the machinery of a fireplace and what it is as a hearth thing.) Further, the device paradigm is concerned more with commodities(ends) rather than machinery (means). She notes the following -

Death of culture; LOSS: Truth, authority, community; Quick-fix,
breakdown in disciplines/practices; Pluralism; Rejection of actuality of ‘sin’.

I have been struck by the device paradigm because, I think that Dawn rightly highlights something of the power of this not only in society, but the church. And here it engages me to think more deeply about how we treat ‘church’ as device in so far as the debilitating effects – the fetters and shackles – make church and our experience(s) of faith less than real, more virtual. It concerns us in how we worship, how we relate to others (or not), and more…it all becomes a commodity and it has shaped our identity.

the commodities of our society are so attractively packaged and so
alluringly
advertised that churches sometimes don’t trust their own identity
and think that
they have to be similarly glamorous, even seductive, to
appeal to the seekers in
their communities, to announce their relevance, to
provide all that their
members need, to make a difference in the world. In
the process the churches are
adopting the culture’s device paradigm… and
thereby enter into a spiral of
weakening – becoming less and less what the
Church really is and then having
less to offer. My particular concern in
this book is that adopting these
misplaced priorities means that
congregations have no ability to equip their
members to question the
paradigm by which the church itself is functioning.(89)

I am especially struck by the virtual. Baudrillard speaks of simulacra where something virtual, simulated in the end becomes the real. I wonder in what ways beyond what Dawn mentions church has become a simulacra, when in fact we are missing so much more. If church is a thing and a part f the machinery then it involves us very differently. Reflecting through Lamentations, it might mean then that we become ‘communities of honest sadness’ (Brueggemann) who wrestle with issues and faith, but who know what it is to worship the living God, to live a daily faith, to be friends, to love and serve one another. In other words to organize our lives in ways that love God, love neighbour and begin to make a difference from the margins where we refuse to be DRIVEN any longer in ways that make the church a device/commodity a mere simulation of the God-reality it is called to be.

Unfettered Hope

Still thinking about pluralism, relativism and fragmentation I had been searching and listening for ways in which not just within culture, but the church the effects showed themselves and how we could name this and reform’ beyond these means of operating. In on this I came upon ‘Unfettered Hope’ by Marva J. Dawn and already it excites me (I’ve got to end of chapter 2 so far!)
I’ve read several books by Marva J Dawn, but I have to say that ‘Unfettered Hope’ is a marvelous piece of writing that offers a Christian reflective response to the “gigantic bluff” (used by J. Ellul) of the technological postmodern world.
In it she uses the word ‘fettering’ to ‘summarise the many ways that our feelings of hope might be stifled or squashed, that our hopes in the form of a possible event might be prevented or spoiled, that our hope for a condition in the world might be thwarted or restricted, or that our hopes in things or people might be disappointed or dis-illusioned.’ (Intro xii) How true this statement is. I think that this reading begins to help me get under some of what I have been wrestling with in relation to the various presentations of fragmnentation etc we see around us in society, but also in the church. But more of that reflecting later as I engage more with what Marva writes.

Of course she wants to give one way of thinking beyond these and that is in the ‘unique and unfettered hope of the Christian faith… that hope in the Triune God gives us the means for dealing with the diverse fetterings in our lives and frees us to be engaged in counteracting the fetterings of violence and injustices in our world.’

As I read on I will share more, but she sets out at the start with David Ford’s(The Shape of Living) and the response process to the world overwhelming us – 3 imperatives, 1:Name it; 2: describe what overwhelms us, 3: attend to the whole shape of living. Dawn will use this as her outline for process in the book.

This is pretinent to us beginning some readings and reflections in the book of Lamentations, beginning last Sunday. We started to explore the relevance of this for us today, we started by considering it as an act of truthfulness. (We will go on and look a Lamentations as an act of impassioned hope, the wish for justice, resistance and tears as the power for newness. [following Kathleen O’Connor]) As an act of truthfulness Lamentations is truthful about the brutality, suffering and tears of exile and fall of Jerusalem. There is no running away, not covering up in niceness it names the reality. Lament engages us with raw reality. We used Bruce Springstein’s ‘My city in ruins” and it’s images of 9/11, and an empty church, empty streets and in the question “tell me how do I begin again?” which moves the song profoundly towards HOPE.

Now with these hands I pray Lord,
Now with these hands I pray for strength Lord
Now with these hands I pray for faith Lord
Now with these hands I pray for love Lord
(Springstein)