jonnybaker

grand challenges for theology for the 21st century

grand challenges for theology for the 21st century (apologies for my lame contribution!)

sinead o connor theology

i have always liked sinead o connor. she never takes a preditable path. her voice blends a beauty, a frailty and has a passionate anger that rails against injustice that can only come from someone who has suffered. i remember seeing her at glastonbury several years ago and when she sang famine feeling like i was listening to a prophet.

she has suffered abuse at the hands of religion and famously ripped up a picture of the pope on stage and has vented her anger in public at her abusers. but she has also sought refuge in the solace of spiritual traditions and the mercy, grace and healing that come from finding a god of compassion, mercy, justice and kindness who is unlike those who claim to represent him. she calls god jah or U, and seems to have found inspiration and comfort with rastafari. there is a whole tradition of setting the old testament to music in reggae and sinead aligned herself with that tradition in her last album musically.

her latest album theology is just out. i bought it on impulse not having heard anything on it, intrigued by the dedication on the sleeve to a theology professor for his classes on jeremiah who suggested to sinead that she set some scriptures to music. well thank god he made that suggestion. because theology is pretty much that - a range of old testament scriptures woven tenderly into song. it's pretty, beautiful and powerful. i'm sure sinead must have read walter brueggemann in her classes? at least she fulfills the two roles of the prophet as he describes it - to evoke grief/lament about what has been lost and where we have become numb and to evoke amazement about god and the new world that is possible of healing, justice, and mercy.

the album has two CDs - one session recorded in dublin with just an acoustic guitar and the other in london with a wider range of musicians. i love the acoustic one. i don't listen to much music like this either. but this has so much soul it almost brings me to tears when i listen to it. it will be hard to beat though i kind of hope people do some remixes of some of the tracks too.

sinead seems to have stolen a bible from somewhere in desperation one christmas eve (judging by the lyrics of something beautiful) and found healing in the pages and poems of scripture. she thinks god agrees with her that it should have been free anyway... fair point! and it makes perfect sense that she has found a companion in jeremiah as he walked a path of suffereing in his own life out of which his message was hewn. there are songs that draw on psalms (33, 91, 137 and 104 i think) and songs of songs as well. as well as tender lament and love songs celebrating god's mercy she still has a few choice lines as do all the prophets for the oppressors who distort the name of god for their own ends.

i've heard religion say that you're to be feared
but i don't buy into everything i hear
and it seems to me you're hostage to those rules
that were made by religion and not by U

you can listen to a few tracks on sinead's myspace pages if you want to check it out. as well as her own songs she covers by the rivers of babylon and i don't know how to love him, as well as a curtis mayfield track.

the album opens with the lines

i wanna make
something beautiful
for U and from U
to show U
i adore U
oh U

you succeeded sinead - thanks. and may you continue to find the healing and mercy of god. [i'd love to hear what you make of the new testament and the person of jesus sometime as he carries forward the traditions and wells of spirituality you are drinking from and they 'broke his windows' for it]

heard a rumour that she was invited to greenbelt but sadly can't make it as there's something else in the diary. i hope she makes it another year.

the whole album is worship trick 7 [series 3]. virtually every track fits to be played and listened to in worship.

Technorati Tags: sinead o connor, theology

discussing pete rollins book

churchandpomo is beginning its series of 5 engagements with pete rollins book. the conversation really happens in the comments so you need to visit the site and not just your newsreader...

i have had conversations with people who love the book and people who have serious reservations about it so i hope that this is a space that really gets stuck into the issues.

everything the church uses was stolen from somewhere else

the july-september 2006 journal crucible has a focus on the church and popular culture. there is an interview with tom beaudoin and one of the questions asks him to reflect back on his book virtual faith. i love his reply...

i still think the basic claim of the book is right... people can and do use popular media culture as a way of working on their own spirituality to constitute meaningful symbols for themselves and their communities...the fact that popular media culture is an imaginative palette for faith - not to mention how we interpret what that means - suggests that theologians have their work cut out for them... the church has to take that imaginative palette seriously... if part of the pastoral task of the church is to communicate god's mercy and god's freedom in a way that people understand then you have to use the language that they're using, you have to use the metaphors and forms of experience that are already familiar to them. you can't ask people to believe in something their own experience forbids them to believe; that's just elitist ministry. we still have that going on in some places, where it's believed people need to be converted from one cultural system to the church's cultural system. i believe there's a lot of value in the church's cultural system and i would defend it a great deal. but all the aspects of the church's cultural system itself - its candles, its mass, its worship, its songs - were at one time secular cultural systems. everything the church uses was stolen from somewhere else and turned in an ecclesial direction for the sake of the gospel. so i am not asking the church to do something the church hasn't already done!

slog - churchandpomo

i recently stripped a whole load of blogs out of my newsreader. when i started blogging there weren't too many to follow but now it's like holding back the tide!...

but even so occassionally a new blog comes along that grabs my attention.

churchandpomo is the latest to do so (thanks jason for the tip off). the aim of the site is

to bring postmodern theory and contemporary theology into conversation with concrete faith and practice of the church. The posts and articles at churchandpomo.org will, from different angles and with different questions, undertake to answer questions such as: What does postmodern theory have to say about the shape of the church? How should concrete, in-the-pew and on-the-ground religious practices be impacted by postmodernism? What should the church look like in postmodernity? And how might the church understand and acts within contemporary society (politically, economically, symbolically, tangibly).

jamie smith whose book i blogged about is one of the people behind the blog. his book is part of a series on church and postmodern culture which has some very interesting looking titles forthcoming (e.g. caputo: what would jesus deconstruct). they are calling it a slog (slow blog) which i kind of liked. and in august will be introducing a series of engagements with jamie's book. then in september are setting up a dialogue with pete rollins around how (not) to speak of god . i'm looking forward to that. i actually love jamie and pete's books even though they have different takes on how to respond to postmodernism.

so a blog with a lot of content by the looks of it - if that's your thing sign up to the feed or join in the conversation. i have linked, subscribed and all that...

how (not) to speak of god

congratulations to pete rollins on his first book (the first of many i suspect) - how (not) to speak of god. the book is in two halves. the first 'heretical orthodoxy' explores a/theology of the emerging church. the second looks at the outworkings of that in the ikon community in belfast with outlines of several of their worship services. it's a fabulous contribution to the emerging conversation... pete draws on christian mystics to offer wisdom for how to live in the way of christ in a postmodern world. as a philosopher he also offers a way of engaging with the postmodern deconstructionists. it is a fascinating and original take. he has a way with words often seemingly speaking in paradoxes and riddles. though it's a short book it's one with weight and one you need to read a few times (at least i did). language makes the world and pete is definitely weaving the universe in a different way with a new vocabulary.

when i first read about postmodern culture and thought several years back, christians were all very defensive about truth - the postmodern critique of big stories captured in lyotard's famous quote 'i define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives' was seen as threatening, opening the way to relativism. in contrast i was actually quite energised by it. the notion that objective truth simply isn't available to us because we are all situated/embedded and so can't possibly have an objective view is a big relief and pretty obvious! it also explains why the christian church at times while claiming to have the truth clearly hasn't - it has at times legitimised oppression in the name of god. so a critique that says that all our claims on truth are limited as we can only see in part makes sense. but what it doesn't mean is that truth doesn't exist. we just can't grasp it fully... i concluded back then that minimally christians needed a lot of humility about truth claims and they needed to be lived out rather than shouted out.

pete shares this postmodern insight. we need our theology (speech about god) but all the while recognising that this very speech will fail to define god. it is our speech after all... god is the god beyond god. humility or to use pete's term a powerless discourse should characterise our way of being. here's a piece that suggests how christians should be in the world...

In this way the emerging conversation is demonstrating an ability to stand up and engage in a powerless, space creating discourse that opens up thinking and offers hints rather than orders. In short the emerging community must endeavour to be a question rather than an answer and an aroma rather than food. It must seek to offer an approach that enables the people of God to become the parable, aroma and salt of God in the world, helping to forma space where God can give of God. For too long the church has been seen as an oasis in the desert - offering water to the thirsty. In contrast, the emerging community appears more as a desert in the oasis of life offering silence, space and desolation amidst the sickly noursihment of western capitalism. It is here in this desert as we wander together as nomads, that God is to be found. For it is here that we are nourished by our hunger.

brian maclaren writes a foreword in the book in which he says this is one of the most rewarding books of theology he has read in ten years! there's a recommendation (and i'm sure pete must have danced round his kitchen when he read brian's generous foreword). way to go pete! good luck with the book and the conversations it sparks...

theology of kissing

theology of kissing

how (not) to speak of god

how (not) to speak of god
pete rollins is doing a weekend with the othona community in dorset june 11-13. more details here.

looking forward to pete's book of the same title later this year.

musings on the stranger

at CMS today we had the privilege of meeting dr anthony gittins who has done a lot of theological reflection on the stranger. i must get his book. here's a few notes I jotted from his presentation...

In an increasingly multicultural world isn't it time to stop thinking of ourselves at the centre and realise we might just be marginal or irrelevant? So let's start by thinking of ourselves as the other rather than the other as the other. What advantage would this displacement give us theologically and missiologically?

Matt 25 sheep and goats story has a passage which describes Jesus as a stranger. We have taken that to mean we should be kind to the stranger rather than become one.

Luke 24 Emmaus road story. At heart of the story Jesus presents himself as the outsider, the marginal, the stranger. In other words Jesus accomplishes something as a stranger that they couldn't get on their own.

In what way can a missionary be the stranger? not in the centre and no longer in charge? There is a dangerous assumption that the missionary should become assimilated or at the centre. Maybe this is flawed thinking! Sometimes when a missionary feels a stranger they try and overcome that and flip into a controlling mechanism.

The purpose of the Christian life is a kenotic(?) one - Philippians - an emptying of myself that I might be filled up.

The sociology of the stranger.
1. The stranger is never self defined. He/she is always defined by the host who in fact determines how the stranger will be treated.
2. The stranger is acutely ambiguous. The stranger must learn to live with ambiguity. As soon as the stranger can't live with ambiguity and tries to control things they become irritating to the host. Many of us who are highly trained find it difficult to be appropriate strangers and live with this vulnerability. In many languages the word for stranger is the same as guest. We can easily get confused. We are OK with being a guest but not so comfortable with being the stranger.

In anthropological literature, the stranger is the person who is on the very evry edge of somebody else's life. They stand to gain a lot from them if they are a resourceful person. But they stand to lose a lot if they look nice but have a hidden agenda/gun/knife. So scrutinising the stranger is very important before inviting him/her across the threshold.

Three phases of the process...
a) preliminary - before you get to the edge
Very short lived. Lots of cultures have proverbs about strangers smelling sweet on the first day, but it doesn't last long. A few days later they want to know if you are willing to reciprocate and play your part.
b) the edge - limin
You are neither in or out. It's predictable unpredictability. You think you are beginning to learn but you keep falling flat on your face. It brings you to your knees emotionally, physically and in every way. You have no idea what to do. The people who were there for you before are no longer there. The local community are still checking you out wondering when will this stranger let go control and ask for help? (move from control to mutuality). Maybe living in a state of mutual indebtedness is one of the great fruits of this liminal phase.
c) post liminal/incorporation - still an outsider but no longer a stranger (aside - we need to accept that we will never become an authentic insider)
This is the stage of being an outsider participant - the best possible thing a stranger can be (An outsider non participant is only a tourist).

What is the advantage then of the stranger?
a) for the stranger?
b) for the host community?

Technorati Tags: the stranger, mission, hospitality, theology

changing theological education

i have just got back from a 24 hour meet up between CMS, fresh expressions and theological educators (colleges and courses). the background to this is that there is a proposal for a new route/pathway to ordination which will recognise pioneer ministers - in practice this means people who will lead missional/emerging/fresh expressions of church. rather than expecting them to be the pastor/teacher type there is a recognition that there is a different gift/skill set and training requirements. you can read more about it here and download the guidelines  if you are interested. this goes to the house of bishops in january and is pretty likely to be approved. we were discussing what training is appropriate for this group. then there is the wider issue of training for all sorts of people (not just those likely to get ordained) who are involved in and leading fresh expressions. it was an interesting time, good to catch up with the fresh expressions team and others and to meet new people. things are definitely changing.

Technorati Tags: theological education, emerging church