Scary Thoughts

 

(Warning: there may be some movie spoilers in this week’s post.)

This weekend was halloween. I decided that I would get involved by watching a scary movie, which is quite a thing for me, because I am a coward when it comes to those kind of movies. I am the guy in the cinema who is looking down into his pop corn, or doing that thing where you’re looking at the screen but not focusing your eyes, so you don’t have to look at the monsters about to the eat the little girl. For example, I recently went to watch a scary movie with friends and I found the one other guy who was as chicken as I was. We sat next to each other sharing my ipod for the frightening scenes. People chasing each other down dark hallways isn’t nearly as unnerving with a Black Eyed Peas soundtrack to it.

Fellow spineless movie goers should give it a go.

So I got into the spirit of this ‘pagan festival of all things freaky’ and went down to the video shop on the ground floor of my building and rented ‘Stigmata’.

Turns out it wasn’t actually that scary, but I did get some interesting stuff out of it.

The premise is that there are 3 Catholic priests who have been ordered to translate a scroll found with the Dead Sea manuscripts. It is written in Aramaic and as they continue to translate they are more and more convinced they have found a text written by Jesus Himself. After passing on the work to their superiors the whole project is suddenly shut down and the translators disbanded, mostly because of one passage.

In the text, Jesus is supposed to have written:

“The Kingdom of God is inside you, and all around you, not in mansions of wood and stone. Split a piece of wood… and I am there, lift a stone… and you will find me.”

The story goes on with one of these priests dying and ‘possessing’ a young woman in order to get this text, which the church is suppressing, out to the world. The idea is that Jesus never meant the church to become about buildings and institutions, but rather to be about the spreading of the Kingdom of God, this alternate reality Jesus came to announce. This threatens the church and causes a desperate scramble to cover this stuff up and ensure the survival of their institution.

There is one specific scene where a Russian priest, one of the original translators, is standing in a beautiful cathedral, ranting away to Gabriel Burnes’ character about how he doesn’t believe in the need for any of this any more, and he doesn’t need an institution to connect him with God. I forget the exact wording but I do remember being struck by the scene.

I know this is a fictitious story, but a few things struck me.

One is that I think this is something Jesus would have actually said. It seems to fit with His message and mode. He spoke about ‘breaking down the Temple and rebuilding it in three days’, which we know, from hindsight’s vantage point, was His way of saying that the Temple system was going to be destroyed and replaced by something which He would begin with His resurrection. But is this just about a new covenant? Or is there something more specific going on? Is He pointing to the fact that this old system of emphasizing buildings, rituals, structures and hierarchies was to be abolished and replaced by something very simple, started by a group of fishermen who would get people to meet in organic communities? Jesus never instructs them about ‘how to build a church’, ‘who to select as pastors or priests’, ‘how to have a service’, ‘how to form a committee’. Everything He taught them related to living life together and effecting the world with positive change by connecting it to God… without heavy religion. In fact every time He comes up against this heavy religion He seems to be tipping tables over, or making whips, or calling them some pretty rough names.

It seems Jesus wasn’t a fan of this stuff… and yet that’s exactly what we went on to build.

The second thought that hit me was that this notion is everywhere. Popular culture is awash with commentary on this disparity between what Jesus did, and what the church stands for in many instances.

I also watched ‘Angels and Demons’ this week; the new Dan Brown movie. Wasn’t that great a movie to be honest, but it also had some interesting elements. At the core of this story is a deranged cleric who is willing to go to great depths to protect what he sees as the ‘sanctity of the Catholic church’. Over and over again in the movie Langdon (who is the Atheist symbologist trying to unravel the recent spate of crimes) comes up against the rigorous religious rituals held for hundreds of year by the Catholic church, and it’s no accident that the writer and director keep putting them in front of you to represent a block to things like ‘justice’ and ‘human goodness’.

It seems that the stories we are telling in popular culture, when it comes to the church, are about a clutching need to control and suppress any opposition; a kind of desperate and insecure ‘circling of the wagons’.

Before the Protestants among you assume that’s good negative attention for the Catholic church who are so religious in your minds, do you really believe the rest of the world sees you any differently? Just go and watch movies like “As it is in Heaven”, “The Invention of Lying”, “Religulous”, “Jesus Camp” and “Saved”. Even stuff like the “Golden Compass” series makes a clear enemy of the religious institutions.

This is in sharp contrast to the early church who, according to Acts, “enjoyed the favour of all the people”. Not that ‘popularity’ is the goal, but it does speak volumes about our posture in the world, and the stories that are being told about us should be enough to get us asking the tough questions.

The third is the battle we have ahead of us; for all those who resonate with the need for a complete ecclesiastical overhaul. The resounding feeling I had coming away from these movies is one of trepidation, and a kind of preemptive weariness. I know we have so much to lose by giving up our structures and hierarchies, our institutions and our brands of ‘heavy religion’. I know that because I have been there. In fact it cost me my job at the end of the day. I can only imagine the fear for someone who has to support a family with their church salary. How could someone like that follow their conscience? Would it be wise? Would it even be right? Isn’t it better just to shut up and ride it out? And because so many have so much to lose from the questions I am asking in this blog, I know that resistance has been, and will continue to be fierce.

I don’t want to give up though. Not because I am persistently anti-church, quite the opposite. It’s because I am so pro-church that I want to see it become everything it should be; to drop the distractions that keep it from being the positive force it should be in the world. I don’t know how to do it yet, or what my role is, but this blog feels like a good place to start.

I want to live to see the day popular culture is telling redemptive, peace-bringing, grace-extending, and life-giving stories about the church, because that’s what they see in us.

(Thanks to those who posted last week. Was good to hear from you.)

Who are you?

I’ve found myself short of time and inclination to write a post this week so I thought I’d try something different.

I have a little stats function in the back end of my wordpress blog which tells me that a bunch of people out there are reading. It would be great to know who you are.

So here’s my idea.

I would love it if as many of you as possible left a short comment at the bottom of this post just saying who you are, where you’re from, and why you’re following along. I know it will take you a minute but I would really appreciate the contact. To be honest, I have been questioning whether this is a worthwhile endeavor or whether I should just pack it in and knuckle down to finish this book. So if you have a moment please use it on this, and encourage a blogger with flagging motivation.

Are you game?

Sunday Stage

There’s a great line from the series ‘Friends’ where Joey introduces himself to a lady as “Doctor Drake Ramoray from Days of our Lives”. When she replies that she doesn’t own a TV, he is shocked. His incredulous response to her is, “No TV? What is all your furniture pointed at?”

I think it’s a worthwhile question to ask; what is all our furniture pointed at? And why?

In your average protestant or charismatic church the furniture is pointed at a stage. Usually on this stage are two things; musical instruments and a pulpit.

In your average sacramental church the furniture is pointed at, well, also a stage actually. Although they may prefer to call it a dias. On this raised platform there is an altar draped with cloth, displaying various iconography.

In both these cases it’s very clear what church is about. We are going to come in, sit down in the chairs/pews, all face the raised platform, and watch the show, engaging only where we are invited to.

Everything may point at the stage now, and has done so for centuries, but it didn’t when the church began. When the 1st century church met they did so in each other’s homes, not in auditoriums. What they got from this is an unparalleled sense of community. They met looking into each other’s faces, seeing each other’s fears and hopes and being able to support each other as we rarely do today. This kind of thing happens more in modern day ‘cell groups’ but we don’t call these ‘church’, ‘church’ is what happens on a Sunday. For instance we will say, “I’m off to church,” on a Sunday morning, but not when we’re heading to a cell meeting during the week. This isn’t just semantics. It reveals something quite troubling about Christians today; ‘church’ is about the ‘Sunday show’ in the minds of many. I know that sounds inflammatory, but I’m not using the phrase to be deliberately unkind. I’m trying to point out that the early church would have been characterized by community and action, where as what we call ‘church’ is characterized by a very passive form of participation. In fact, if we were able to drag an early church member through time to visit one fo our churches I think they would be very confused.

“So that’s it till next week?”

When they taught, in the early church, it may have been in a group setting but was was more likely to be throughout the week in the grit and grime of daily living. Perhaps the closest current equivalent we have is ‘life coaching’. Just look at the way Jesus taught. He walked the roads, with His group of 12, teaching them about how to follow His way in the morally, politically and religiously complex nation that was Israel at the time. The problem with the way we do teaching now is Pastor’s, like I used to be until recently, try and deliver a homily which is generic enough to fit everyone’s situation. So most of what we say may sound good but it doesn’t really move many to change the way they live their lives. I don’t imagine this was a problem in the early church where elders were providing spiritual direction, peers were providing support, and teachers were teaching all in the context of close knit day-by-day community.

Our version of church just doesn’t match up. Look at this quote from a pastor in the book I’m reading at the moment:

“I came through the whole system with the best education that evangelicalism had to offer- yet I really didn’t receive the training that I needed… seven years of higher education in top rated evangelical schools didn’t prepare me to (1) do ministry and (2) be a leader. I began to analyze why I could preach a great sermon and people afterwards would shake my hand and say, “Great sermon, Pastor.” But these were the people who were struggling with self-esteem, beating their spouses, struggling as workaholics, succumbing to addictions. Their lives weren’t changing. I had to ask myself why this great knowledge I was presenting didn’t move from the heads to their hearts and their lives. And I began to realize  that the breakdown in the church was actually based on what we learnt in seminary. We were taught that if you just give people information, that’s enough!”

Worship is the same.

This Sunday passed I helped out a friend by playing in their worship team at church and really enjoyed myself. I never get tired of seeing people connect with God through music. My big worry is though, that people never make the effort to worship God outside the doors of the church. Do we communicate that we have to be sitting in our rows, facing the worship team on the stage, for worship to happen properly? Do people subtly think, “I need the ‘Worship’ team to ‘worship’. It’s in their title after all.” Do we minimize it because what we point our furniture at communicates what we think is important?

Now this is genuinely a hard post to write because I love both of these things. I believe in them too. I still believe there is power in a well delivered message from scripture. I still believe that there is immense value in those who are gifted to play instruments and sing, using these talents to create music that inspires and connects people with God… but church was never meant to be reduced to these things. They should be present in the real life community that is already functioning on genuine love for each other, real mutual support, and society/world changing action and influence.

They should be present, but perhaps not the focus.

And yet these are the things we point our furniture at.

The negative effects of this king of stage-focused church are obvious. It communicates there are professionals and lay people, something the New Testament never supports. It says that when we meet professionals are going to do something and the congregants are going to receive something, and then we’re going to go home. It detracts from community. It communicates that church happens once a week with all of us pointing at a stage. Worship happens on Sundays as we sing along with the band. We are taught once a week with a sermon by the pastor which we hope is good enough to keep us awake until the closing song.

Have we swapped mutual support for professional clergy,

a common space for a stage,

community for a show,

our worldwide mission for our comfortable auditoriums?

There’s a great line from the series ‘Friends’ where Joey introduces himself to a lady as “Doctor Drake Ramoray from Days of our Lives”. When she replies that she doesn’t own a TV, he is shocked. His incredulous response to her is, “No TV? What is all your furniture pointed at?”

It’s one of my favourite lines in the whole series and I think it’s a worthwhile question to ask; what is all our furniture pointed at?

And why?

In your average protestant or charismatic church the furniture is pointed at a stage. Usually on this stage are two things; musical instruments and a pulpit.

In your average sacramental church the furniture is pointed at, well, also a stage actually. Although they may prefer to call it a dias. On this raised platform there is an altar draped with cloth, displaying various iconography.

In both these cases it’s very clear what church is about. We are going to come in, sit down in the chairs/pews, all face the raised platform, and watch the show, engaging only where we are invited to.

Everything may point at the stage now, and has done so for centuries, but it didn’t when the church began. When the 1st century church met they did so in each other’s homes, not in auditoriums. What they got from this is an unparalleled sense of community. They met looking into each other’s faces, seeing each other’s fears and hopes and being able to support each other as we rarely do today.

This kind of thing happens more in modern day ‘cell groups’ but we don’t call these ‘church’. ‘Church’ is what happens on a Sunday. For instance we will say, “I’m off to church,” on a Sunday morning, but not when we’re heading to a cell meeting during the week. This isn’t just semantics. It reveals something quite troubling about Christians today; ‘church’ is about the ‘Sunday show’ in the minds of many. I know that sounds inflammatory, but I’m not using the phrase to be deliberately unkind. I’m trying to point out that the early church would have been characterized by community and action, where as what we call ‘church’ is characterized by a very passive form of participation.

One of the main things we sit to watch on a Sunday is the sermon.

When they taught, in the early church, it may have been in a group setting but was was more likely to be throughout the week in the grit and grime of daily living. Perhaps the closest current equivalent we have is ‘life coaching’. Just look at the way Jesus taught. He walked the roads, with His group of 12, teaching them about how to follow His way in the morally, politically and religiously complex nation that was Israel at the time. The problem with the way we do teaching now is Pastor’s, like I used to be, try and deliver a homily which is generic enough to fit everyone’s situation. So most of what we say may sound good, but it doesn’t really move many to change the way they live their lives. I don’t imagine this was a problem in the early church where elders were providing spiritual direction, peers were providing support, and teachers were teaching all in the context of close knit day-by-day community.

Look at this quote from a pastor in a book I’m reading at the moment:

“I began to analyze why I could preach a great sermon and people afterwards would shake my hand and say, “Great sermon, Pastor.” But these were the people who were struggling with self-esteem, beating their spouses, struggling as workaholics, succumbing to addictions. Their lives weren’t changing. I had to ask myself why this great knowledge I was presenting didn’t move from the heads to their hearts and their lives. And I began to realize  that the breakdown in the church was actually based on what we learnt in seminary. We were taught that if you just give people information, that’s enough!”

But it isn’t, is it.

Worship is the same.

This Sunday passed I helped out a friend by playing in their worship team at church and really enjoyed myself. I never get tired of seeing people connect with God through music. My big worry is though, that people never make the effort to worship God outside the doors of the church. DDo we communicate that we have to be sitting in our rows, facing the worship team on the stage, for worship to happen properly? Do we minimize it because what we point our furniture at communicates what we think is important?

Now this is genuinely a hard post to write because I love both of these things. I believe in them too. I still believe there is power in a well delivered message from scripture. I still believe that there is immense value in those who are gifted to play instruments and sing, using these talents to create music that inspires and connects people with God… but church was never meant to be reduced to these things. They should be present in the real life community that is already functioning on genuine love for each other, real mutual support, and world-changing action and influence.

They should be present, but not the focus.

And yet these are the things we point our furniture at.

The negative effects of this king of stage-focused church are obvious. It communicates there are professionals and lay people, something the New Testament never supports. It says that when we meet professionals are going to do something and the congregants are going to receive something, and then we’re going to go home. It detracts from community. It communicates that church happens once a week with all of us pointing at a stage. Worship happens on Sundays as we sing along with the band. We are taught once a week with a sermon by the pastor which we hope is good enough to keep us awake until the closing song.

Have we swapped mutual support for professional clergy,

a common space for a stage,

community for a show,

our worldwide mission for our comfortable auditoriums?

Dinosaur and Battleship

I went to an incredibly frustrating meeting this past week. There is this group of people wanting to form small communities who meet in each other’s homes and explore issues of spirituality with one another. Sounds good right? Sounded good to me too, like something I would be really interested in. I’m hungry for community at the moment and really keen to join (or start if I have to) some kind of small community who just try and ‘be’ church, without the institutional red tape.

As promising as this group sounded though, this wasn’t what I had been looking for.

Unwittingly, I had walked straight into a business meeting. We hadn’t been there for more than 20 minutes and we were already talking about marketing, organization, vision statements, leadership structures… for crying out loud, a sub-committee had already been formed, and it wouldn’t be the only one that night.

I politely sat through the rest of the meeting, but I won’t be back.

I am desperate for a group of people who are willing to meet around the important things like connecting people with God, building a community who care for each other in real terms, and then stepping out to bravely change the world in a myriad little ways everyday. I just don’t care how we market, or what the chain of command is, or which committee is responsible for which task… we’re not a business, we’re a community.

What is wrong with us?

What is it about human beings in our era that leaves us so obsessed with institutionalizing everything. I have no problem with finding ways to make things run smoother, but I have a huge problem when the structure feels like the whole point. Individuals are ignored, community gets put on hold, and the world suffers a little longer while we create more efficient institutions.

I know I sound a bit hippie but stay with me.

I read this quote this week:

“The real trouble is not in fact that the church is too rich but that it has become too heavily institutionalized, with a crushing investment in maintenance. It has the characteristics of the dinosaur and battleship. It is saddled with a plant and a program beyond it’s means, so that it is absorbed in problems of supply and preoccupation with survival. The inertia of the machine is such that the financial allocations, the legalities, the channels of organization, the attitudes of mind, are all set in the direction of continuing and enhancing the status quo. If one wants to pursue a course which cuts across these channels, then most of one’s energies are exhausted before one ever reaches the enemy lines.”

John Robinson

New Testament Scholar

I may sound like I’m pretty clear on this stuff but to be honest, thinking about it, I’m not sure I wouldn’t fall into the same trap. How do we keep this thing from becoming ‘the dinosaur’, ‘the battleship’? How do we make sure church is still ‘light on it’s feet’ and effective.

Last night I went to a friend’s house for a braai and we ended up talking about starting an informal little community where we just explore what it means to be church, without all the institutional fluff. It’s a conversation which seems to come up regularly in my day to day, and not because I keep bringing it up. But I have this fear: what if I end up just making another institution. We would soon be faced with questions about what to do with our time together, and my propensity to want to organize stuff would soon tempt me into defining, marketing, structuring and branding. And whose to say that I don’t just start bringing in all the old ways of doing church into this new community. I’m sure I am more conservative than I realize when pressed, and I have a suspicion that it would be an uphill battle for me to resist the temptation to take over and codify what we do to the point where it looks like any other church, and again becomes about the wrong things.

So I decided that before I move anywhere with this stuff, I need to make some objective commitments to myself about things I will not do if I join or start a small community. I didn’t get very far, but here are some of the things I scribbled down on a bit of paper:

I will not structure a community which places some in a more important position than others. I don’t believe in the lay/clergy distinction and I will avoid all semblance of the pastor/priest fallacy. Everyone needs to make the community work as a collective; you know, the whole 1 Corinthians 12 idea.

I will not fall into the trap of using lots of resources on ourselves. I want to commit to pooling resources which then get used to meet real needs in people’s lives, not to buy prettier stuff for ourselves.

I will not act like my way of understanding God is ‘more right’ than anyone else’s just because I have studied theology. I will not bully people with knowledge, but will participate in a group to learn, more than to teach or impress.

I will work hard to separate my spiritual preferences, or learned patterns of relating to God, from what the Bible actually says. I will avoid at all costs pushing my spirituality onto others as if it’s the only way to do things.

I will let leaders surface naturally (like New Testament ‘elders’) even if it isn’t me, but if it is I will remember that leading is less about position and more about responsibility to serve.

I will not perpetuate the idea that church happens in meetings, but strive to live out the idea that church is this group who love God, and each other, and who get stuck into life bringing good and Godly change wherever they go.

I will listen.

Taking a cursory glance at each of these I noticed that most of them have to do with my own ego. With this in mind hopefully I am on the road to recovery from my institution-building addiction, but I suppose only time will tell.

I went to an incredibly frustrating meeting this past week. There is this group of people wanting to form small communities who meet in each other’s homes and explore issues of spirituality with one another. Sounds good right? Sounded good to me too, like something I would be really interested in. I’m hungry for community at the moment and really keen to join (or start if I have to) some kind of small community who just try and ‘be’ church, without the institutional red tape.

As promising as this group sounded though, this wasn’t what I had been looking for.

Unwittingly, I had walked straight into a business meeting. We hadn’t been there for more than 20 minutes and we were already talking about marketing, organization, vision statements, leadership structures… for crying out loud, a sub-committee had already been formed, and it wouldn’t be the only one that night.

I politely sat through the rest of the meeting, but I won’t be back.

I am desperate for a group of people who are willing to meet around the important things like connecting people with God, building a community who care for each other in real terms, and then stepping out to bravely change the world in a myriad little ways everyday. I just don’t care how we market, or what the chain of command is, or which committee is responsible for which task… we’re not a business, we’re a community.

What is wrong with us?

What is it about human beings in our era that leaves us so obsessed with institutionalizing everything. I have no problem with finding ways to make things run smoother, but I have a huge problem when the structure feels like the whole point. Individuals are ignored, community gets put on hold, and the world suffers a little longer while we create more efficient institutions.

I know I sound a bit hippie but stay with me.

I read this quote this week:

“The real trouble is not in fact that the church is too rich but that it has become too heavily institutionalized, with a crushing investment in maintenance. It has the characteristics of the dinosaur and battleship. It is saddled with a plant and a program beyond it’s means, so that it is absorbed in problems of supply and preoccupation with survival. The inertia of the machine is such that the financial allocations, the legalities, the channels of organization, the attitudes of mind, are all set in the direction of continuing and enhancing the status quo. If one wants to pursue a course which cuts across these channels, then most of one’s energies are exhausted before one ever reaches the enemy lines.”

John Robinson (New Testament Scholar)

I may sound like I’m pretty clear on this stuff but to be honest, thinking about it, I’m not sure I wouldn’t fall into the same trap. How do we keep this thing from becoming ‘the dinosaur’, ‘the battleship’? How do we make sure church is still ‘light on it’s feet’ and effective.

Last night I went to a friend’s house for a braai and we ended up talking about starting an informal little community where we just explore what it means to be church, without all the institutional fluff. It’s a conversation which seems to come up regularly in my day to day, and not because I keep bringing it up. But I have this fear: what if I end up just making another institution? We would soon be faced with questions about what to do with our time together, and my propensity to want to organize stuff would soon tempt me into defining, marketing, structuring and branding. And whose to say that I don’t just start bringing in all the old ways of doing church into this new community. I’m sure I am more conservative than I realize when pressed, and I have a suspicion that it would be an uphill battle for me to resist the temptation to take over and codify what we do to the point where it looks like any other church, and again becomes about the wrong things.

So I decided that before I move anywhere with this stuff, I need to make some objective commitments to myself about things I will not do if I join or start a small community. I didn’t get very far, but here are some of the things I scribbled down on a bit of paper:

1. I will not structure a community which places some in a more important position than others. I don’t believe in the lay/clergy distinction and I will avoid all semblance of the pastor/priest fallacy. Everyone needs to make the community work as a collective; you know, the whole 1 Corinthians 12 idea.

2. I will not fall into the trap of using lots of resources on ourselves. I want to commit to pooling resources which then get used to meet real needs in people’s lives, not to buy prettier stuff for ourselves.

3. I will not act like my way of understanding God is ‘more right’ than anyone else’s just because I have studied theology. I will not bully people with knowledge, but will participate in a group to learn, more than to teach or impress.

4. I will work hard to separate my spiritual preferences, or learned patterns of relating to God, from what the Bible actually says. I will avoid at all costs pushing my spirituality onto others as if it’s the only way to do things.

5. I will let leaders surface naturally (like New Testament ‘elders’) even if it isn’t me, but if it is I will remember that leading is less about position and more about responsibility to serve.

6. I will not perpetuate the idea that church happens in meetings, but strive to live out the idea that church is this group who love God, and each other, and who get stuck into life bringing good and Godly change wherever they go.

7. I will listen.

Taking a cursory glance at each of these I noticed that most of them have to do with my own ego. With this in mind hopefully I am on the road to recovery from my institution-building addiction, but I suppose only time will tell.

The Calf Path

I have people questioning me often asking what rite I think I have to question 1500 years (Catholics), or 500 years (Protestants), of tradition.

The answer is simple.

I don’t think tradition is ALWAYS right.

I was watching Men in Black on TV the other night and there is this great scene where Will Smith’s character, J, has been inside MIB headquarters and is reeling from the shock of what he’s seen, strugging to accept the new reality that there are aliens driving cabs in NYC etc. Tommy Lee Jones’ character, K, gives him 12 hours to think it over. He can either accept the reality and join MIB, or he can decide he wants nothing to do with it and be “flashy thinged” in the morning so he remember none of it, slipping back into blissful ignorance. K leaves him with this final thought: “1500 years ago everyone KNEW that the earth was the center of the universe. 500 years ago everyone KNEW that the earth was flat, and 15 minutes ago you KNEW that we were alone on this planet. Think of what you’ll KNOW tomorrow.”

History is littered with instances of ideas being accepted by the masses which retrospectively we all acknowledge were wrong. I think it’s our responsibility to be questioning whether the things we take for granted are actually the best ways to do things… especially when it comes to the church. I am more and more convinced that the church, when functioning as it should be, is an unstoppable force for positive change, but over time we have become hamstrung and weighed down by practices which keep us separate, aloof, and distracted. To turn around and say, well that’s how we’ve always done it as Pentecostals, or Baptists, or Catholics, just isn’t good enough. At some point we have to hold ourselves up against the story of scripture and ask ourselves whether our particular denominational founders made some fundamental mistakes which we could correct with a little courage. Otherwise we will slip into the same historical mistake of simply retelling the wrong story, until a brave ‘Capernicus’ comes along.

Tradition is useful, sure. But it doesn’t trump the scriptures, and if you’re willing to read them without your denominational filters on, as I challenged you last week, you have to have the courage to change when you come across things which don’t match up.

I was recommended a book recently by my friend Philen (who incidentally has an awesome blog at www.mylifemyafrica.org about the work he is doing in the townships). At the beginning of the book there is a great poem written by a guy who died almost a century ago, which describes better than I could what I am talking about. Indulge me by giving this a read. It’s brilliant!

One day, through the primeval wood,
A calf walked home, as good calves should;

But made a trail all bent askew,
A crooked trail as all calves do.

Since then two hundred years have fled,
And, I infer, the calf is dead.

But still he left behind his trail,
And thereby hangs my moral tale.

The trail was taken up next day
By a lone dog that passed that way;

And then a wise bell-wether sheep
Pursued the trail o’er vale and steep,

And drew the flock behind him, too,
As good bell-wethers always do.

And from that day, o’er hill and glade,
Through those old woods a path was made.

And many men wound in and out,
And dodged, and turned, and bent about;

And uttered words of righteous wrath,
Because ’twas such a crooked path.

But still they followed – do not laugh -
The first migration of that calf.

And through this winding wood-way stalked,
Because he wobbled when he walked.

This forest path became a lane,
That bent, and turned, and turned again.

This crooked lane became a road,
Where many a poor horse with his load,

Toiled on beneath the burning sun,
And traveled some three miles in one.

And thus a century and a half,
They trod the footsteps of that calf.

The years passed on in swiftness fleet,
The road became a village street;

And this, before men were aware,
A city’s crowded thoroughfare;

And soon the central street was this,
Of a renowned metropolis;

And men two centuries and a half,
Trod the footsteps of that calf.

Each day a hundred thousand rout,
Followed the zigzag calf about;

And o’er his crooked journey went,
The traffic of a continent.

A hundred thousand men were led,
By one calf near three centuries dead.

They followed still his crooked way,
And lost one hundred years a day;

For thus such reverence is lent,
To well-established precedent.

A moral lesson this might teach,
Were I ordained and called to preach;

For men are prone to go it blind,
Along the calf-paths of the mind;

And work away from sun to sun,
To do what other men have done.

They follow in the beaten track,
And out and in, and forth and back,

And still their devious course pursue,
To keep the path that others do.

But how the wise old wood-gods laugh,
Who saw the first primeval calf !

Ah ! many things this tale might teach -
But I am not ordained to preach.

The Calf-Path
Sam Walter Foss (1858 -1911)

Common Ground

I’m really enjoying the scriptures at the mo. Since leaving the institutional church I have continued to read the scriptures regularly, but they seem to be taking on a different tone. I’m able to read them a way that I haven’t been able to before. It’s hard to explain, but it’s sort of like someone has been reading over my shoulder my whole life, which is annoying, because it constrains you, and suddenly, they’re gone, and I can relax and just enjoy the words on the page.

I’m no longer reading things that Jesus said, for example, and having the last voice I heard preach on that passage reverberating in my head, giving me the good evangelical answers to everything. I must say, things look different when you strip off your particular brand of theological armor. More light gets through.

But the other reason I’m appreciating the text more is that this blog has opened me up to conversations with a broad range of Christians from very different traditions. It’s led to dialoguing around this church stuff with people from a lot of different Christian mindsets: Anglicans, Catholics, Baptists, Charismatics etc. It’s so interesting moving between them and having these different conversations because each group have a very different set of things which they want to protect, and even more varied reasons why these things are worth protecting. This kind of venture means you have to have some point of commonality which you can take into all these discussions and it got me thinking about where that commonality lies between our fractured shards of church.

The answer is obvious I suppose.

It’s the Bible.

Now we may have vastly different ways of reading the bible in our corners of Christendom but each group insists on using the scriptures, which means we do have some common ground. But, whilst I believe the scriptures to be invaluable, the sad truth is that when it gets dragged into our denominations it gets hi-jacked. We do this because we often approach the text like fighting siblings approaching their mum, begging her to take their side in the argument, and chastise the other for the error of their ways. We tend to shove it through our particular set of filters so it supports the way we do things as a group.

This is nothing new. Christians throughout the ages have used scripture to back up some of the worst abuses perpetrated by their group. The Crusades, The Inquisition, Slavery, Apartheid, to name a few. At the spearhead of these movements there were often clergy members with open bibles and sincere faces. The problem certainly isn’t with the book; it’s with those who twist it to support their own ideas.

And if it happened in these obvious ways throughout history, we would be more than a little naive to think it doesn’t happen in a million ways in our smaller church contexts everyday.

In general I have three basic gripes about how we treat the text:

1. The first is this habit of ‘proof-texting’. This is the way of reading the bible where we just jump between our favorite verses because they say what we want them to say. There is little or no regard given for where these sentences fit in with the overall text. It’s obvious why this kind of selective reading makes it very easy for any text to say anything.

2. Secondly, I don’t think that our reading of scripture should require long explanations for people to understand them. I have heard, as I’m sure you have, some of the most ludicrous applications of the bible; like the time I was told by a pastor that the bible says “women who have short hair must cover their heads in church, but long hair is ok!” You can usually tell something is wrong because the quoting of some verse is usually followed by a very long and involved explanation of some kind.

3. Thirdly, and this is the one I am most passionate about, people don’t care about the context. There is so much more to be gleaned from these pages when we get into ‘where it was written and why’. I am anything but a biblical literalist. I just don’t think the bible works when we drag it kicking and screaming into our context to apply it literally on every point. I’ve found that even those who do “take the bible literally” tend to do so fairly selectively anyway. If you want this text to come alive, read a bit of history, learn about Jewish culture, get into the context! We would never treat any other historical text with the same contextual ignorance we treat the bible.

Something which has helped bring these things together for me is to focus on the narrative of scripture. The great, expansive story of God interacting with human beings. If I do this when I read it means I can’t proof-text because the story makes no sense when you jump form verse to verse. I don’t need to get into long explanations because I’m not reading it to make a point. It also means I get into the context because I love to read historical accounts of the way the world was at the time, things make more sense and the picture becomes clearer. I know this idea of Narrative is a very trendy Post Mod kind of view, but I think there is a lot of truth in it and all the talk about the importance of ‘Meta-Narrative’ has surfaced because we have forgotten this very basic idea, and we need to be reminded. It has risen as a reaction to the ways in which we have reduced the bible to a book of proofs; a scientific text. It just isn’t!

My challenge to you is to pick up the bible again and approach it as a narrative. Read for the sheer joy of the story of God interacting with humanity. If you don’t understand some thing, don’t stress, keep going. You don’t have to have all the answers, just let the narrative wash over you and I bet you glean more than you ever imagined.

And as a group? Well, as we mourn the division we see rife among people who say they follow the same God, perhaps we could do worse than to sit together and tell the story again… and again… and again… without trying to use it to prove a point.

Guest Blogger #1

This week I’ve asked a friend of mine to contribute a post. We both find ourselves in a similar place and I thought it would be nice to have another voice other than mine every week. I’m hoping to do this sort of thing more regularly; invite others to contribute to the direction. If you have something you’d like to share please email it to me at seantucker@mweb.co.za.

So without further delay, I give you, John Smith:

“So I’m standing at the counter of this musical instrument store debating between buying a tuner for my guitar or a new effects pedal. It’s a hard choice. It’s also long counter and at the cashier some four or five meters away from me is a large gentleman dressed in a tan suit with a white open collar shirt. He’s dressed really smart for a shop that is normally packed with punks, Goths, and metalheads. I’ve seen men like this in this store before though, they’re normally the kind of guys who are nearing their ‘middle ages’ and are spending their hard earned businessman Rands on an electric guitar (it’s often a cheaper and safer midlife crisis act than buying a Harley Davidson or having an affair). However, I got it wrong with this gentleman. I was wrong in judging him and wrong about my judgment (a common mistake and maybe that’s why I mustn’t judge, but I digress). This argument breaks out between the cashier and our tan suit clad gentleman:

“How much discount?” he asks. “You see I’m a pastor and this equipment is for my church. Surely you’d give me a substantial discount?”

“Sorry, the most discount we can give you is 5%. Same as everybody else” Replied the  cashier.

“But it’s for God. How much discount for God?” Replied our pastor

My name isn’t John Smith and I’m not the SA rugby captain, nor the brother of the father of Economics (Adam Smith). I’ve kept myself anonymous for a few reasons, one of which is to protect my identity lest you judge my guest post here by my socio economic background and not what I have to say (no different to my judgment of the pastor in the recollection above). But more importantly, I’ve kept myself “John Smith” because I feel just like that – another anonymous face in a sea of congregants who are asking themselves in churches around the world – “Is this really all there is to church?”, and perhaps more alarmingly: “Is the boundary of the Kingdom of God really so completely different to the boundaries of our church?”.

I am not a pastor. I have never been formally theologically trained. I don’t have a ‘heavy’ testimony resplendent with drugs and prostitution. I have no desire to enter into the formal priesthood. I’m simply a John Smith, with a John Smith education and a John Smith job. I am not academically qualified to step into the hallowed sanctuary of a pulpit, and after what I’m about to say, I’m unlikely to be invited to do so either.

I’m just like many of you.

I love God. I have experienced what I believe to be the Kingdom of God crashing into earth on numerous occasions. I battle my own selfishness on a daily basis as I wrestle the tension between partnering with God (in my workplace, my marriage, and my social group) in the restoration of all things, and living the life that Cosmo and Men’s Health would have me believe is the best way to live – to suit me and me alone.

Like Sean I left my local church a few months ago. I didn’t leave in a hail of bullets and with the hounds of heaven/hell/high church (you pick one) snapping at my heels. Like the John Smith’s I know and have met before and since, I left quietly with a sigh.

A long, weary, disappointed sigh.

There are many reasons why I’ve left my local church. It wasn’t an easy decision, and whilst the reasons are many, and I doubt my decision daily, it had to be done. I felt like I was dying in church. It seemed like it was only when I died that I would encounter the Kingdom of Heaven, and actually go there permanently. I was fed up waiting to die and had a hunch and a smattering of experiences to suggest that Kingdom of God was actually bigger than the boundaries of the church. This notion wasn’t something hidden by the church leadership, but because they’d never really lived outside of a church reality, was something they hadn’t experienced for themselves.

And that was the start of the problem.

Sean wrote some posts ago about a construct or dominant logic regarding a “Centrifugal” and a “Centripetal” posture held by churches. This idea gave me words to explain the way I was feeling about church, that it has become an institution addicted to itself. That’s a broad and inflammatory statement, but you need only look at the published financial statements of most churches in a variety of traditions to see that 80% of their budget is spent internally, i.e. for the benefit of its members. This makes sense economically, as it’s those members who paid the money to the church in the first place and thus feel they should agree where and how it should be spent. But since when was the church meant to be an economic institution run by ‘he who pays the piper’ (calls the tune)?

To take this one step further, this internally focused church has spilt over into the communities it claims to serve. Take our tan suited pastor for example; his expectation is that the community should give TO the church, and not the other way around. Since when does God need a discount for sound equipment? Sure, if the cashier offers a discount – take it, but since when do we expect this from the church itself?

Having completed a university project many moons ago on the SA music industry, I learned that over 60% of the revenues generated from the music industry in South Africa came from Gospel or church music.

Now I’m not sure if that fact has changed or not, and I have no reason to believe it hasn’t – but assuming it hasn’t that would mean that if the cashier gave a discount to all of those representing a supposedly poor and needy God, that music shop would go out of business. And so the logical conclusion of this expectation that generosity (read: discount) should flow INTO the church and not FROM it, would be a bankrupt industry. Unless of course the music shop in question attempted to recover its profits by hiking prices to non-church patrons. Surely, the concept of grace (a massive concept, but for the sake of this post, I mean the unearned and unsanctioned generosity of God) by definition extends to those outside of the church? The mad, the bad, and the sad?

Now the noble defenders (and I mean that) of the church may argue that my counter top experience at my local music store is an isolated incident. I wish it was. I may have gone to church on Sunday if it was. But it isn’t. Smaller examples of this idea that resources flow into a church and stay there are –

Some church friends asking me to buy raffle tickets to help them raise funds for their new church sanctuary.

Having a car boot or jumble sale and asking for donations from the community for the sale so the church can raise funds.

A physio friend of mine has been asked numerous times to provide a free service to some of the members of her church. Her 6 years of studying complete with 2 post graduate degrees cost her a fortune, and now she must provide the service for free (and thus forego the opportunity to earn a good wage to feed her family) because “nothing should charged between brothers and sisters in Christ”.

The list could go on. Now, I do understand that running a church costs money and that employees of the church are entitled to salaries and that buildings require maintenance and that requires funds. What I do have a problem with is when the church tries to appropriate those funds and resources from those who won’t experience the ‘benefits’ of those expenditures. I have a problem when churches expect people to be generous to them (“give generously” is a time touted from too many pulpits), and yet is rarely a term used to describe the church itself (as a place that “gives generously”).

And so as I leave the building in search of a wider body of Christ, I am opening myself up and challenging myself to be generous. I am looking for many other John and Joan Smith’s who believe that God doesn’t need a discount, but rather is so unbelievably wealthy and so extraordinarily generous that he doesn’t hoard resources (money, skills, and time) but rather makes them available to everyone – the Goths, the metalheads, the punks, the mid life crisis John Smith’s, AND the tan suit clad pastors for the restoration of all people and all things.”

Superstition

I think I made a mistake last week by not explaining myself very well.

I seemed to have made some people mad, especially my friends who are discovering the richness to be found in a more sacramental form of worship.

My intro said: “I know I often come across like a raving iconoclast, as if I think nothing is sacred… I suppose it’s close to the truth thinking about it. We make way too many things sacred. I think the only things that are really ‘sacred’ are God, and His creation trying to connect with Him. If we assign ‘scared-status’ to any other object, how is that different from bog-basic superstition?”

People seemed to have a problem with the fact that I used the word ‘superstition’ in regards to some of the things we do in church. This is a genuine concern of mine, but I realize I didn’t make myself very clear, and it was unfair to just throw out a term without speaking about why I chose to use the phrase.

I took too much for granted.

I’m sorry.

So this week I’d like to clear it up and explain my thinking.

Firstly, I used the word ‘superstition’ deliberately. Superstition is ‘ascribing some sense of karmic power to an ordinary action’. It suggests that if we control very small little actions in our day to day, we can make huge changes to the direction our life takes in general.

For example:

If a black cat crosses your path, you will have bad luck, and bad things will happen to you in your life.

If a you attach a rabbit foot to your key ring, you will have good luck, and good things will happen to you in your life.

Small actions equal huge cosmic consequences.

The problem is that I think this kind of thinking has crept into institutional church.  We get dangerously close to acting like we can manipulate God. It’s one thing to act like we are getting the universe on our side, it’s another thing altogether when Christians act like we can twist God’s arm. And that’s not ok in my mind. I’m sure few people think this way consciously, or ever act this way deliberately, but then our subconscious does a great job of keeping us from acknowledging our true intentions in so many day to day areas, why not here too?

Let me give you some concrete examples, things which I have actually heard out of the mouths of Christians, so I’m not sucking this stuff out of my thumb:

A Charismatic once told me that ‘unless you have had an experience with the Holy Spirit where you fall on the floor and laugh uncontrollably you are not a proper Christian’.

A Sacramentalist once told me that ‘if you died having sinned after your last Communion then God cannot forgive you that sin and you are bound for purgatory, or worse‘.

A Baptist once told me that ‘if you drink alcohol you have let the devil into your life’.

A Catholic once told me that he was praying for people in purgatory so that when he dies they will be able to put in a good word for him with God, and get him through purgatory quicker.

In my own messy past I have said stupid things like, “If you don’t have a quiet time every day, then God won’t listen to your prayers. Why should He?”

I’m sure you have plenty of your own examples.

We all do it more often than we would care to admit. We all have our lists of things we have to do to get God to do nice things for us… although we would never admit it. How many of us begin to put much more effort into our spiritual lives when things go wrong? Is it because we are quietly bargaining with God hoping that IF WE… THEN HE WILL? It’s one thing to constantly fight the idea that maybe we can influence God this way, it’s quite another when these things become institutionalized and upheld by our leadership.

Catholics will tell you that God ‘dispenses grace’ through performing a number of rituals and saying a series of prayers. Do it right and God WILL give you grace.

Some Charismatics will tell you that if you speak in tongues then God’s Spirit lives in you, but if you don’t have this particular gift then there is something wrong.

Other Charismatics will tell you that if you pray in a positive way, believing that God will give you lots of money, then He WILL give you lots of money.

The way some groups view and use the symbol of the cross is very borderline.

Every group has their own… some more subtle than others.

I don’t find that in the early church. If anything Paul is telling people that it doesn’t matter whether you are ‘circumcised or not’, ‘eat meat offered to idols or not’. These outward actions don’t buy you favour with God. The best we can hope for is to live our lives genuinely trying to connect with God asking Him to be with us through everything that comes our way. We can pray and ask Him to change things, but there are often times when, in His wisdom He doesn’t. Do we then throw in the towel because we aren’t able to manipulate Him into making our lives sweet and happy all the time, or do we try and connect with Him even in the dark nights to see what more we can suck out of the marrow of life? It’s why the New Testament is so big on us sharing in the suffering of Christ, instead of trying to barter our way out of pain.

Secondly, I was accused of being judgmental of traditions from a safe external vantage point. On the one hand I agree that I am not a part of any church tradition at the moment because I am taking the time to work some of this stuff out. But on the other I have not criticized a tradition which I haven’t, at one stage, been heavily involved in:

Catholic (Sacramental): I was baptized and confirmed Catholic.

Baptist (Evangelical): I was baptized and then studied at Baptist Theological College, and was ordained as a Baptist Pastor.

Anglican: I pastored young people for 3 years in the Anglican Church.

Charismatic: Lets just say I had my stage of being a full blown Charismatic.

I’m not criticizing these traditions as a whole. I am indebted to them each for drawing me closer to God and teaching me how to better relate to Him. Each experience has been invaluable, and I wouldn’t trade it. I wouldn’t be where I am today. But this gratitude doesn’t mean I didn’t see flaws which I am trying to work out retrospectively here.

Lastly I want to make it really clear that I am not dismissing the ways in which people chose to worship:

If you are better able to connect with God in a heavy, sacramental communion service, by all means do it. I personally really enjoy that type of communion service from time to time. It feels far more thought provoking and carries an element of the mystical which I quite like. (If you want to read an amazing book which will open you up to the beauty of much of the Catholic traditions get a hold of “Chasing Francis” by Ian Morgan Cron).

If you enjoy the more Charismatic approach to worshipping God, with all it’s enthusiasm and abandon, then go for it! I was there as a young 20 something. I loved it. Milk it if it helps you connect with God.

Whatever your mode of connection, whether ancient or modern, somber or lively, liturgical or freeform, loud or soft, long or short, go for it!

But don’t force it on others by using guilt or super religious talk. This is where we err by getting close to telling people that God responds to our way of worshipping Him. That’s superstitious. If you can show someone the beauty of your form of worship, and they see it for themselves, they will join in with you for life. But if you coerce them they will soon leave. Struggling denominations seem more keen than ever to prove to anyone who will listen that the way they do things is the best. I just don’t think we should be so exclusively prescriptive, and we have to stay away from this idea that if we do this thing God is obliged in any way to do anything back.

If we believe that we are just superstitious Christians.

Real Meals

I know I often come across like a raving iconoclast, as if I think nothing is sacred… I suppose it’s close to the truth thinking about it. We make way too many things sacred. I think the only things that are really ‘sacred’ are God, and His creation trying to connect with Him. If we assign ‘scared-status’ to any other object, how is that different from bog-basic superstition?

The whole point is that we mean what we do, and that it meets it’s intended goal: connecting with God and changing the world. Anything that helps us get there is great, but it’s still only a ‘prop’, it’s not the ‘point’.

Last week I spoke about Baptism, and how it’s meant to help people make a fresh start with God, leaving the mess you made behind, and identifying with a new way of living. When we make it about the details of sprinkling vs dunking, or what age is appropriate, and does it have to be done by a priest, in a church building etc, we miss the point.

The ‘prop’ becomes the ‘point’, and we miss the purpose.

So this week I want to have a look at Communion.

This idea began with the early church meeting together in each other’s homes and sharing meals together. These would have been rich times of community where families met to share with each other and connect. Whether they were in some quiet, free corner of the globe, or hiding in fear of Roman persecution, these meals would have been times to build relationships over food, to support each other, and to remember what Jesus did. At some point in the meal someone would have told the story of what Jesus had said at His last supper, when He had told His followers to ‘eat this bread’ and ‘drink this wine’, remembering His death until He came again. The ancient world was big into stories told at meals. This was in the midst of eating and drinking together, strengthening their bonds with each other and their commitment to this new way Jesus was teaching them to live.

Meals were important in their culture.

Meals are important in every culture I suppose.

Jesus never meant this act of ‘communion’ as a ritual. I think communion was placed in the context of a meal for a reason, namely, because of the all the other good stuff associated with it.

But over time we seem to have lost a lot of this good stuff.

Most Evangelical churches I have worked in are concerned with an ‘orderly service’. The problem is having to serve a room full of people so that they can get home in time to finish preparing Sunday lunch (their real Sunday meal), otherwise there will be emails on Monday morning complaining about the service length. For this reason most opt for the ‘crumb of bread and tot of grape juice’ communion. That means that everyone is handed their elements, and they sit in their rows staring at the back of each other’s heads, listening to the appropriately moody music played by the worship team, until they are given some signal that they can consume their elements. It is usually something like the Pastor saying, “Let us eat together” in the same drone narrators use when opening a Shakespearian play.

It’s a bit artificial isn’t? When compared to the way the early church used to share together? Practical, to be sure. But isn’t it losing something? There’s no meal and scant sense of community.

Most Sacramental churches I worked in get very complicated with their communion times (or Eucharists as they would prefer you to say). They have a long form liturgy which, for those of you who haven’t attended, is very similar to running lines with someone for a play. The priest says one set of lines, and the congregation repeats the alternating lines en masse. Now let me say that some of this stuff is beautifully written. My problem is I just don’t think many people are using this to connect with God. It is something many people just say to get through. It made sense in the Middle Ages where you were teaching theology to the illiterate masses through repetition, but we don’t have that problem any more.

Many of these churches wear robes while serving, have incense burning being swung around and candles burning. There is also a very specific way of laying the table or altar. Those who set things up before the service have to match the pieces that sit on the table (cup (chalice), bread (host), candles, cross (crucifix), napkin, bible etc etc) to a diagram showing where everything should sit.

Like I said, it’s very complicated!

It’s also very intimidating to someone who has never been through it before. I once sat in a service with someone who had trained for ministry and pastored kids in the Baptist church, but when she visited the Anglican church I was working at, she wouldn’t go up for communion because she found it too intimidating. She was terrified she would do something wrong. This is a trained minister; someone who basically lives in churches, so how will strangers to the church feel when they visit?

I doubt the early church would have had problems with making new comers feel welcome and involved.

Surely there’s a problem when we are scaring people away!

They also have this idea of ‘consecrated elements’. What this means is that a priest has to ‘bless’ the elements before they can be used or consumed by anyone. I don’t find this kind of ’superstitious elitism’ anywhere in the New Testament church. Maybe I’m missing something. I was talking to someone yesterday about this and they quipped that many people like the idea of these things being important enough to be done by someone in authority.

I’m sorry, but it feels like we’re giving ’sacred-status’ to things that shouldn’t have it, and it’s prohibitive.

Prohibitive?

Well yes.

I was once asked by my cell group one night, after a teaching on communion, if we could celebrate it together as a group. Like a good boy I brought it up at the following week’s staff meeting, asking if they would mind if I went ahead. After all I had led hundreds of communion services in the baptist church. Much like the baptism issue though, I was given the hairy eye-ball, as if I should know not to even ask.

Obviously no!

I challenged it for a bit, suggesting that these guys just had a desire to obey the scriptures and remember what Jesus did for them over a meal, as the early church did. It didn’t help. It clearly said in the church canons that it wasn’t allowed unless an Anglican priest blessed the elements, unless the table was set correctly, unless it was done at the altar, in the church etc etc.

I pushed it further and suggested that the canons were directly contradicting scripture and actually served to keep people from obeying the simple ways we are called to be church. That didn’t go down well.

Things got more tense.

Then one old man at the table, a man who I love and respect said, “Sean, you can do it, but just call it a ‘love feast’ instead of communion.”

At this point I lost my rag a bit. “So let me get this straight. You know that you are keeping people from stuff that is good. You want to find a way to make this happen. But the way you chose is not to ask the glaringly obvious questions about the validity of some of the stuff in your canons, but to ‘call it something else’. Basically to lie!”

I’m sorry. If that’s not a sign that we’re way off the map then I don’t know what is! I don’t happen to think tradition is all knowing. I believe we have accepted bad things as well as good things into our practice, and in doing so swapped some very good and simple stuff, for some very involved and prohibitive religious rituals.

The best communion times I have shared were always the more social informal ones. Sharing a curry with my Something Orange buddies in JHB, and then telling the Jesus story at some point and having communion.

Celebrating communion with Coke and cake… shock horror!.. because I was leading a youth camp and we just felt the need to have communion together, and that was all we had at hand (unsurprisingly).

Real meals…

I don’t think the artificial mode we have slipped into is the best. I know it’s the most convenient because of the sizes of our churches, but maybe that’s part of the problem. Maybe a great deal of church happens better in smaller groups, in homes, among people who are in each other’s lives.

What makes communion, communion?

Does it have to be bread used?

Does it have to be wine? (the Baptists don’t think so:)

Does it have to be in a church building?

Do you need an ordained person?

I don’t think so.

What if church was more genuinely communal? What if we ate together more often in real community? What if we got back to some of some of the reasons why Jesus set this thing within a context of a meal in the first place? Surely what we would gain would far outweigh what we would lose?

A Fresh Start

I think Baptism is a beautiful idea.

My simple definition is that it is a ‘washing off’ of an old way of living and a ‘rising up’ to a new life and direction.

But Baptism was not originally a Christian idea. We just nicked it.

Historically, this idea of using water to cleanse yourself from a previous way of life and committing to a new one, is all over the place.

For example, the Jews had a ritual of immersion called ‘Mikvah’. When I went to Israel as a teenager I remember visiting a pool which the Jews used for their rite of ‘Mikvah’, it was basically a series of stone steps leading down to a pool set in the recess of a city wall. Mikvah was done as a sign of purification before God before entering the Temple to worship. It was a way of washing off the things in your life which made you ‘unclean’ (and they had a long list of these things).

However it wasn’t only performed to gain you access to the Temple, but it was also an important step in converting to Judaism in the first place. After you had undergone the Mikvah ritual you were considered purified and restored to God. You then had the right to participate in all the religious activities of the community. The interesting thing about this idea was that it could, and would, be repeated many times in an individual’s life time.

I suppose it makes sense if you think about it. John the Baptist didn’t baptise people as a Christian… Jesus hadn’t done anything yet. John baptised people as a Jew, using a very common rite to convince people to make themselves right with God by rejecting the negative habits they had picked up and turning towards a new, fresh life with God. A clean start, with a commitment, and a crisp dip in the Jordan river.

It’s not just the Jews though. You would be hard pressed to find a religious group who don’t have some historical idea of ritual cleansing before the gods. You will also find over and over again, this idea of baptism being used as a way of initiating people into the community. I don’t have a problem with this. I think it’s a great practice. We are using the God-given element of water, and the simple idea of washing off the dirt, to make meaningful, tangible commitments to God about the way we live.

That’s great.

Unfortunately, as with so much other good stuff, we seem to have distorted things somewhat.

Especially over the last 500 years, we have used this idea of Baptism as a differentiator for denominations.

How does your church do it?

Do you sprinkle?

Do you dunk?

Are the candidates babies?

Are they teenagers?

Is it in a font in the church?

Is it in a pool under the stage?

Is it in flowing water?

Does it really matter?

Have we not just taken a really good and simple idea and made it a cause for division instead of one which brings people together, and closer to God?

What I find funniest is that, it seems to me, that we all believe the same things anyway. Every denomination has 2 basic elements in this regard, which they all agree on:

1. It’s good to dedicate your child to God in some kind of ceremony. It makes the parents aware of what they’re doing, and calls the community to commit to raising these kids too.

2. It’s also a good idea to have a second ceremony when the ‘child’ is of age where he/she can make their own public, cognitive decision to follow after God.

Now the Anglicans and Catholics will call the first: baptism, and the second: confirmation.

The Baptists and Methodists etc will call the first: dedication, and the second: baptism.

This causes endless fights between churches, but it seems to just be different terminology used for the same things. I have seen arguments between churches which actually agree that the second should be called ‘baptism’, but one church ‘sprinkles water over the head’ and the other ‘dunks in a pool’, and this difference means they can’t be friends!

I had an interesting example of how seriously we take this stuff: I was trained with the Baptist church here in South Africa. I was ordained as a Pastor and placed on their list of recognized ministers, but a few years later I found myself working with young people in an Anglican church. At which point I received a call from none other than the Baptist General Secretary (which I’ve always found an odd title). He was doing me the courtesy of informing me that I had been struck from the list of Baptist recognized ministers. It happens to any minister who ‘betrays them by defecting’:) I said that I understood, even though I didn’t, and he did the obligatory ‘wishing me well in my future’. It was as he put the phone down that the kicker came. Literally just before the click of the phone going down, before there was any time to respond, he said, “Well don’t go baptizing any children now…’

Click.

Come on now, grow up!

We belittle this act when we make it about such petty things.

As with many of the things we do religiously in church, I think we would do well to strip it back down and see what good stuff there is at the core.

The best example I saw of Baptism, the one that hit me the hardest, was in the recent HBO series ‘Rome’ (sacrilegious, I know). Season one tells the story of the rise of Julius Caesar and his eventually assassination at the hands of his friend Brutus. Brutus flees the city after the event, realizing the public aren’t actually as grateful as he had expected them to be. He and his co-conspirators find themselves on the run to Greece. Season two shows Brutus a grief stricken, remorseful, mess of man. The problem with this is that his allies are rallying troops and they need Brutus at the top of his game to lead them, rather than sulking around in his own tent. The turning point comes in this scene where Brutus walks down to the nearby river, strips naked and wades in. Once waist deep in the water, he raises his hands to the sky and falls backwards beneath the surface. The man who emerges (in cinematic slow motion obviously:) is a new human being. He goes back to his tent, shaves off his beard, changes into his uniform and comes out to rally the troops and march on the forces of Octavian and Mark Anthony. He uses the rite of immersion (a popular one at that time) to put his past behind him, and walk a new way.

Sadly, his troops were massacred and he was killed, but you get the point.

I preached a message in my previous church where I spoke about this idea of Baptism in similar terms. Many of the young people came to me afterwards and expressed a desire for the same opportunity. I went to the leadership in the church and asked if it would be possible to do some kind of ritual with these guy, maybe down on the beach, where they could just express this longing to turn from the mess, and move back into line with God.

I was told it was out of the question!

They got quite cross actually.

Reasons they gave included:

1. I wasn’t ordained in the Anglican church, and Baptist ordination didn’t count.

2. It wouldn’t be in the church building, which isn’t allowed.

3. Many of those asking had been baptized as babies so they couldn’t.

My problem with this is that these guys wanted to do this as a genuine response to God, but our religion choked out any chance of them responding without feeling guilty for disobeying leadership. I had to tell them I couldn’t help… but I may have told a few of them to take a swim in their own time:)

What would it mean for a church to strip down the religiosity around baptism, without losing its meaning? What would it look like.

There is something beautiful about water as an element isn’t there, but does it have to be water?

What if we stopped using baptism like a membership card?

Are all the extra conditions we add really necessary, or just more paranoid measures of control?

Are our differences in practice at all important to God, and so do they really matter?

What if our churches simply offered a place to come and make a fresh start, to wash off the mess we find ourselves in and get back into step with God…

…in simple terms…

…like John offered…

…like Jesus received?