discipleship | mission | practical theology

“Children are part of our geography of hope.” An almost throw away comment by Wade Davis in his 2003 TED talk endangered cultures around the loss of language and ethnocide. I completely agree, children are part of it, but it got me to thinking about what ‘it’ is and what else is part of it? I love the idea of a geography of hope.  It demands you to ask questions like, What is the terrain like?  Is the going tough or light? Is the land fertile? and Tell me about the landmarks?  Here are some of my first thoughts

The dreams and visions and ideas and desires of our children should be like the planning office for this geography.  Questions about how and what and where and when should we, those with the power, do, should be examined by the imaginative, joyful unhindered minds and hearts of those who will inherit the benefits and costs of such doing.  Such a planning office should be culturally cross-referential: the doing in the west should be examined by the minds and hearts of the east and likewise those in the east, and north and south by those in the west and south and north.  The force of this is not driven by ideas about our children being the ‘world of tomorrow’, which clearly they are, but because when Jesus said ‘unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven’ [Matt 18:3].  For a long time my children equated height with age; if you were taller, you were older.  An easy mistake for someone who has almost their entire biological chronology set on growing.  As an idea though, it is at the end of the day, daft!  For a long time now we have equated age, learning and experience with wisdom and insight.  How daft is that!!

In this geography of hope the going will be tough.  Not generally, but by choice.  Wisdom, faithfulness, honesty and joy come because you work at it, it’s tough by choice because hope is cultivated through hard work.  I don’t mean being hopeful is hard work, but the way to become hopeful, being full of hope, is by working hard at growing wisdom, faithfulness, honesty and joy; the flora and fauna of this geography of hope.  And to grow such things as these at the centre of your being and the being of a community demands hard work.

The going will also be slow in this geography of hope.  At least it will seem so for those whose current geography is an upward desire to upgrade.  Once the wheel began to roll, the desire for speed grew in strength and results.  The arena in which this desire for speed is unleashed changes from time to time and culture to culture.  In my world, which is indicative of many in what we call the technologically advanced, this arena is captured by the word and concept of upgrading.  A counter-movement to this is to mend-and-make-do, which is always much slower than replace-and-upgrade.  At the moment for me this is about my lawn-mower, which has a cracked petrol tank; the battle is between my patient efforts to repair and the height of my grass.  The deeper battle is about our efforts to mine, trawl, squeeze and suck all we can from each passing moment instead of wishfully hastening onto the next with the empty hope that by doing the same in that one and the one after that and the one after that we will somehow achieve more than we did in the last one.  Hope is fuelled by what we carry from the past, which we can only really appreciate if we experience what it was.  We will therefore travel much slower in a geography of hope.

In this geography of hope, the significant and noticeable landmarks will be small gatherings of people who are committed to each other, to place and to Jesus; and these expressions of church will be found in the most unexpected of places.  When we find ourselves encountering depth, if we take time to notice, we will find people whose sense of self is concentrated and distilled from their relationship with the divine, with other people and the space and place where they are.  This is in sharp contrast to the movement of the age which has dislocated people from the land of their ancestors, from the place of their birth, from the people of their family, from their neighbour and from their selves; and in that process has found that they have been dislocated from the divine.  The challenge to find oneself is not answered by running and escape, but through stillness and staying.  The geography of hope is not based on finding fertile ground somewhere else, but staying and working the ground until it becomes fertile, until you begin to feel yourself putting down your roots, establishing yourself where you find yourself and becoming stable and embedded enough to survive the sharp frosts and the long hard days of winter.  And winter turns to spring and your bare branches begin to bud and hope begins to blossom.  A hope that is shaped not by the things that change, but by the things that don’t, which is what a landmark is after all.

These thoughts are of course riddled with my own heart and passion.  I wonder what your thoughts are?

I am clearly building on the foundations of others here.  Firstly there is Andrea Donderi whose web post has seems to have generated a few ripples through the blogsphere.  This in turn has been picked up by Oliver Burkeman writing in the Guardian, which has in turn been picked up by a few others including now me.  The original web post, which you can read by following the link above, lays out two types of people: Askers and Guessers…

In some families, you grow up with the expectation that it’s OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. This is Ask Culture.

In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you’re pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guess Culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won’t even have to make the request directly; you’ll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.

The post goes on to explore a few of the issues that arise when Guessers and Askers live, work and play together.  Whilst these observations are interesting, what struck me was how these two cultures work in the life of a congregation.

The observation in many congregations is that 80%+ of the work is done by >10% of the people.  This kind of observation is often true for the finance of the church too, where around 20% of a congregation give 80% of the money.  Perhaps ecclesiastical life is being lead by Guessers who only ask the Guessers who can’t say ‘No’.  Leaders of congregations can find themselves spending time working out who to ask to do something or give something based on what they know of the person and how likely they are to say “Yes”, which often turns out largely due to the fact that they can’t say “No”.  Quite unconsciously, the leader can be perpetuating the congregations dependence on a few Guessers who can’t say “No”.  They can’t say “No” because they discern correctly that the leader has asked them because they are likely to say “Yes” and so perpetuate their own position of shoring up the congregation with their effort and availability.

Perhaps it is time for the leader to try on the skills of being an Asker.  An Asker spend time thinking about the question.  How to ask in a clear and straight forward way, being able to outline the cost of saying “Yes” and the support and training that will be on offer in order for the “Yes” to become attainable and sustainable.  They will also need to be able to paint a picture of what life will be like, both for the person being asked and the congregation as a whole, if they say “Yes”.  Such Asking leaders will need a think skin, because the will be some “No”s.  They will also need to be prepared to be surprised, because there will be a bunch of “Yes”s that they will not have found without asking.

As I reflect on my time in church leadership with this question in mind, it strikes me that most of the times of growth were when I was being predominately an Asker.

The paper I prepared for the British Sociological Association, Sociology of Religion Study Group Conference, as detailed in the previous post here, had a few last minute changes.  Here is the version as given.

“Because of individualization we are living with a lot of zombie categories
which are dead and still alive.”
[Ulrich Beck & Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization, Sage: London, 2002: 203]

Maybe 10 years ago you would have been able go into any evangelically inclined church building and find some kind of filing system for OHP slides. The kind of churches that dispensed with hymn books to allow more physical worship freedom during the service. It usually saved a bunch of money too since they did not have to keep buying new books every time they wanted to sing the latest songs. You would be able to discover all kinds of interesting things about the congregation by looking at this OHP filing system and it’s content. One of the most common observations would be that the ‘i’ section of the filing system is the largest. In fact I challenge you to find a church where this was not the case. Great wads of songs beginning with “I…” the worshipper, although not just the worshipper but specifically the individual worshipper.

I remember going to Brainstormers, an annual youth leaders conference, back in the late 90′s. The theme of the conference centred around the passage in Ephesians where Paul talks of Christ as our peace; peace between groups of us who at odds with each other. “For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. [Ephesians 2:14]  They did it very well, including having the visual impact of a person actually building a wall on stage during the conference, which was then demolished at the end.  Despite all this theological reflection on the issues that divide us, all the songs chosen for worship were really songs between God and “I…” as the individual worshipper.

Every Sunday in gathered congregations up and down the country our hymns and songs perpetuated and promote individualisation.  Even as we are gathered theologically as a body, as one in Christ, as brothers and sisters of a forgiving God we would still prefer to sing “Thank you for saving me” and not “Thank you for saving us“.  There is little sign of this changing and a survey of lyrics of recent worship albums and visiting a couple of evangelical congregations will confirm.  This is not to say that middle-of-the-road Church of England, more traditional and even catholic congregations are actively promoting a different approach.  Hymn and song books such as Hymns Ancient and Modern and Common Praise have a fairly rich stream of  “I…” the worshipper present in their lyrics too.

A common reply to this being pointed out is that the context of the sung hymns and songs is corporate worship, a gathered congregation: of course we are singing it together and we make the mental adjustments as we do.  The problem with this rather weak position is that the hermeneutic, the predominant perspective of those in the gathered congregation is life-as-an-individual.  Almost the entire cultural context in which we live is individualised.  Customised individual choice is king.  There is no remaining place where the individual is contextualised in a social network of relationships that has any permanence to it.  Everything is in a state of fluidity, and the individual is both the navigator and the shipwrecked.  So when they come to church and sing as “I…” the worshipper, the congregational context has very little theological and ontological cash value.

The theological idea of a congregation, or local expression of church, has both a practical and a ontological stream.  The congregation is part of the universal body of Christ, which is formed and sustained by the Spirit.  Each member of the body, each person, has been and is joined to the rest and is a fellow heir of Christ.  “Don’t you know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” [I Corinthians 3:16].  Most people are surprised to discover that the ‘you’ in this verse, the subject, is a plural you, Paul was addressing the congregation, not the individual Christian.  Practically the idea of a congregation is a community of disciples that are loving each other towards maturity in Christ.  Called and encouraged to bear with one another in peace and love, telling the truth to each other and allowing each other to be their unique part of the community.

Back in 2000 Zygmunt Bauman outlined his liquidity metaphor as an attempt to understand our present social situation.  His thesis is that the ‘melting of the solids’ drive of modernity has reached “the bonds that interlock individual choices in collective projects and actions – the patterns of communication and co-ordination between individually conducted life policies on the one hand and political actions of human collectives on the other.”  It seems to me that ‘congregation’ and ‘church’ have become next to useless as human collectives in the politics of discipleship.  To all intents and purpose, ‘congregation’ and ‘church’ are zombie categories.  They are no longer places where my individual choices as a follower of Jesus are given the power they need to be transformative.  Instead I am sent away to work out my own discipleship-politics in my own strength and to bear the burden of there inevitable failure.  A burden that as a disciple, I was never meant to bear alone!

I have recently re-read Gordon Lynch’s Losing my Religion [I'll be reviewing this else where] in which he describes his own move away from evangelicalism.  There is a huge implicit assumption throughout the book that everyone involved in evangelicalism will want to move away and continue their journey elsewhere: whether that be within a Christian context or not.  There are a number of issues I want to engage with from this book but it is the idea of journeys, spiritual journeys, that I want to start with here.  But first, what are Zombie Categories?

Ulrich Beck, a professor of Sociology teaching in Munich and London, has this idea of Zombie Categories: categories that are dead and still alive.  Ulrich believes that “because of individualisation we are living with a lot of zombie categories…”  His ready example is ‘family’.

Ask yourself what actually is a family nowadays?  What does it mean?  Of course there are your children, my children, our children.  But even parenthood, the core of family life, is beginning to disintegrate under conditions of divorce.  Families can be constellations of very different relationships.  Take, for example, the way grandmothers and grandfathers are being multiplied by divorce and remarriage.  They get included and excluded without any means of participating themselves in the decisions of their sons and daughters.  From the point of view of the grandchildren the meaning of grandparents has to be determined by individual decisions and choices.  Individuals must choose who is my main father, my main mother and who is my grandma and grandpa.  We are getting into optional relationships inside families which are very difficult to identify in an objective, empirical way because they are a matter of subjective perspectives and decisions.  And these can change between life phases.

So a zombie category is a social concept which is still in use but which has lost the content, or substance, of its original or intended use.  It is still in use because we have romantic ideas about restoring or getting back to a place of substance, or because we actually have not noticed this change has taken place.  I don’t think Ulrich is saying that we should be performing resuscitation on these categories, it is not necessarily about trying to restore these categories to former glory.  Instead, it is more about facing the reality that we no longer mean what we think we mean when we reference these categories.  We therefore have the option of redefining our category, or recognising that we do in fact work with a redefined category, or stop using it for what it is not.

I would like to suggest that journeys, discipleship journeys, spiritual journeys are a zombie category.  It is not at all that spiritual things don’t happen in our lives, or that we don’t grow as a disciple.  My point is that the category ‘journey’ is not helpful.

Most of our physical journeys today are over very quickly.  We could be the other side of the world, in a different culture with a different language, climate and landscape within 24 hours.  Even our very short journeys, into town or to a friend’s place, are generally over in minutes rather than hours.  Personally I have very little patience for these everyday journeys: I leave at the last minute and I drive too fast.  And I have too little patience for my spiritual disciplines!

When the category of ‘journey’ was used in relation to discipleship the actual physical journeys that people undertook where much more gruelling.  Walking to the next town, although a common occurrence, would nevertheless be measured in hours not minutes and in pain not comfort.  Travelling to a different part of the country would not have been undertaken lightly by ordinary folk like you and I.  A short look at some writing like Pilgrims Progress by John Bynam, will bring these categories of spiritual and journey together.

Again I need to point out that I am not saying that our spiritual life, our following Jesus, is not at time gruelling, difficult and drawn-out.  My own testimony will stand as an example of that.  I am saying that maybe the category of journey is not as helpful as it used to be.  We still use this category prolifically; it is still alive, but also somewhat dead.

If our category of journey has been empty of its substance and it is indeed a zombie, then continuing to use it as a framing concept for our discipleship might have adverse affects on that discipleship: our discipleship.  Today journeys are all about A-to-B and little about the path.  Journeys are about the ‘fastest route’ selected on the sat-nav.  Journeys are about air-conditioned cocoons removed from the elements, isolated from encounters with the environment through which one passes.  Journeys are to and not via, they are uninterrupted movements without the space for another.  Journeys need drive-through tactics for fuel and convenience only.  Journeys are too long and so need a thick layer of headset entertainment to ensure that it is not wasted time.

Discipleship, following Jesus, is all about the path and little about destination, choosing the narrow route along which we notice and listen, seeking encounters with others as we travel via their lives, willing turning aside for their convenience ensuring that each moment is not wasted but is filled with Presence.

The idea and concept of journey offers little substance for us when thinking about our discipleship and spirituality.  It is nevertheless used both casually in conversation, from pulpits and platforms in church services and by reflective and academic minded writers as a framing metaphor for containing and understanding our call to follow Jesus.  I wonder whether the time has come to put it out of its misery and shoot it dead.