Posts Tagged ‘ liquid modernity ’

Zombie Categories 2: Congregation / Church

“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.((1)) 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.((2))

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.”((3))  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!

  1. For those who have grown up with interactive white boards at school an OHP is an overhead projector. A sign of my age that I think I need to explain what this is. [↩]
  2. Today, most of these churches will have a video projector and song projection software, so the immediate observation is no longer possible. [↩]
  3. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, London: Polity, 2000: 6 [↩]
2010
03/30
CATEGORY
Cultured Faith
Mission and Ministry
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Liquid Mission: staying and going in a liquid culture

I’m at a gathering for those interested and responsible for evangelism in local churches in the Diocese of Oxford. Bishop Stephen is here as a key speaker and in the middle of some great and revelent exposition of Acts he drops this in:

Welcome to those who are from our larger churches. Please tell your friends at larger churches to come to gatherings like this. We need your experience and wisdom. Can I also tell you that we need people from larger churches to be ready to go. To go to places in the diocese that are in need of mission, new housing estates for instance. And places where parishes are struggling, desparate for mission but with little idea or people to put it in to action.

I’ve paraphased a little, but this is basically what he said. What struck me about this is that in most of my chrisitan experience there has been a theme of staying. Whether that is in a home group or small group, youth group, congregation, cell and church staying, enjoying the comfort zone of growth and friendship is a clear theme.

Our culture has a different theme, movement, fluidity, flow and movement. It is fairly easy to argue that our much cherished freedom, particularly of movement, has been at the cost of security of place and stability.

You would think that the ‘be prepared to go’ that Bishop Stephen encoraged would fall on easy ears and find churches and people ready to stand up for. However, as the Bishop also noted, we don’t celebate success in other, neighbouring, churches very easily, in fact probably not at all. We like success in our own patch and find it uncomfortable in surrounding places.

And yet at the same time we are a faith that has at it’s core vlaues a ‘go’. Each one of these churches that we feel like we want to stay in was planted by some who left, arrived and planted the Gospel amongst a group of people.

Being someone who used to work in a large church, who considered the idea of sending people out as a resource to other local churches, but who never managed to get to a place were we could do it, I still find the idea of not planting a new church but helping a perhaps smaller one capture and move on with a vision for mission very exciting.

I wonder whether they might be willing to accept such help.

2009
11/06
CATEGORY
Mission and Ministry
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