On words and meaning

In 2001, American writer/philosopher David Foster Wallace wrote a famous review of a dictionary.

Just ponder for a moment how a review of a dictionary might become famous.

It’s one of my favourite essays because while it does what it says on the tin, it also explains huge swathes of disagreement in modern life; it accounts for why so often we talk past one another in disagreements while using the same words.

It’s because the same words mean different things to different people based on an underlying understanding of how words work; what DFW called ‘a usage war’ — we’re seeing the fruits of that war, and most of the time we don’t even realise that’s what happening. He said, of introductory essays published in dictionaries:

“They’re salvos in the Usage Wars that have been” under way ever since editor Philip Gave first sought to apply the value-neutral principles of structural linguistics to lexicography in Webster’s’ Third. Gave’s famous response to conservatives who howled when Webster’s Third endorsed OK and described ain’t as “used orally in most parts of the U.S. by many cultivated speakers [sic}” was this: “A dictionary should have no traffic with … ‘artificial notion of correctness or superiority. It should be descriptive and not prescriptive.” These terms stuck and turned epithetic, and linguistic conservatives are now formally known as Prescriptivists and linguistic liberals as Descriptivists.

In one sense the war between prescriptivists and descriptivists is a war between objectivity and subjectivity; modernity and post-modernity; or conservatives and progressives. On the one hand are those who think words necessarily have an objective meaning, dictated by their ability to describe an actual thing, and only ever that thing. The meaning is fixed etymologically. Dictionaries tell you what a word actually means. On the other hand, there are those who think words are subjective; that our words are always analogies coming from our perspective attempting to describe reality in intelligible ways, but always limited — and also contested and subject to change, and meaning is dictated by usage. Particularly how the user conceives of the meaning of the word; but also how that word is understood in particular interpretive communities — and we must be mindful of that context, not just etymology.

I might be a nerd; but it fascinates me that this approach to language actually, fundamentally, plays out in disputes across those trenches — between modernists and post-modernists, and conservatives and progressives (and post-modern conservatives and modernist conservatives and post-modern progressives and modernist progressives). There are often things at stake in the definition of these words and how they’re used too; take a couple of examples; there’s currently a debate being waged within the LGBTIQA+ community, and within the feminist community (as much as those can be monolithic communities) about the meaning of words. Those communities are typically progressive (in many ways that we would understand that word). And yet, traditional feminists fought very hard for the word ‘woman’ to mean a particular thing; they’re now labelled as “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists” (TERFs), because they won’t broaden the label to mean something new — to assign the label based on a constructed gender identity, rather than an objectively observable biological reality (anatomical sex), even while recognising that gender is constructed. For members of the LGBTIQA+ community this same issue plays out for, say, gay men, who have lobbied for the recognition of their rights to love other men, only for the meaning of the word ‘men’ to also be contested. The contest is a language usage war.

I tend to be a descriptivist, because I think that better reflects the reality of how language is used, though deep down I’d prefer a more prescriptive approach to words and meaning. But this means we have to be careful, as individuals, when engaging in discussions, to notice not just what others are saying but how others are using words. It’s very easy to insist that other people are using words the way we believe they should be using them, and then crucify them, rather than entering the contest of meaning for words or terminology by bringing a broadened perspective, or arguing for a particular manner of usage.

One person responded to my last post about ‘toxic churchianity’ by saying I’d lost his interest in what I had to say by using the phrase ‘toxic masculinity.’ He suggested there is no such thing as ‘toxic masculinity’ — there’s just the objectively positive good that is masculinity and anything else is actually not masculinity. This was a ‘prescriptive’ approach to language, that doesn’t grapple with a larger cultural conversation around what the meaning of ‘masculinity’ is, and where some proffered definitions might sometimes need contesting and qualifying to distinguish them from others; I’m comfortable entering that contest for meaning, and that conversation, because of how I think language works.

For a prescriptivist, language is ‘ontological;’ to name something is to describe it as it really is prescriptively, on every occasion. A word means what it means. This is a lot of weight for language to bear; and it limits the creative/artistic/poetic use of language where we can use words to create things that are not. This has interesting implications for how we exegete the Bible too — if words always mean what they etymologically mean in a prescriptive, technical, dictionary sense then we are assuming a certain sort of approach to writing from the authors of Scripture (a modernist one). This ontological thing is at play in a debate currently taking place within the conservative church, in a similar way to the debate playing out in the progressive communities described above. There’s a debate about how Christians who experience same sex attraction should describe themselves; and whether they should use the label gay. This debate, from a conservative prescriptive perspective is a no brainer; because to use the word ‘gay’ is an ontological claim about who a person is; and in Christ, one’s identity is transformed. In that theory of language, it makes no sense to use the label gay. But here’s why I’m not convinced by that argument; I don’t think language works that way, or that this is the claim being made by those people who use the label gay while pursuing a traditional Biblical sexual ethic. When you listen carefully to these brothers and sisters they say they use the label to describe their experience; or story. It’s not an ontological claim in terms of being an objective fixed reality (though I do think ontology/personhood/identity actually works narratively, not simply as a fixed objective reality too; I think a materialist, objective, ontology is a modern construct that we often impose on ancient texts, like Genesis, where ontology there is more relational and functional, and connected to a narrative — so my approach to language is theological, but this is circular, and prescriptivists would say the same thing about their exegesis, their theology, and their approach to languge). If we insist that words work a particular way; if there was no contest; then I think one camp in this debate could insist that the other use words in a particular, objectively correct, way. But I don’t think there’s much space for Christians, especially english speaking Christians, to insist things like that — because as people reading translations of texts from ancient languages, where the complexity of language has to be part of the fabric of how a translation is produced, we know we are experiencing the subjectivity of language as we read the Bible and dig into the Greek or Hebrew to find the semantic range of a word. We read a Bible that has puns, and deliberate ambiguity, and word play built in because words do not always have objective fixed meanings. Also, on the belief that words and labels function ‘ontologically’ and in prescriptive rather than descriptive ways; and the idea that a Christian cannot identify (ontologically) with their sin as though that is a prescriptive reality; someone ought to tell the writers of the New Testament who refer to Rahab as “Rahab the prostitute” and Simon as “Simon the Zealot”— those are descriptions of part of their stories, not a prescriptive ontological claims about them.

Understanding how we use language is important; but the debate is not neutral; adopting a ‘descriptive’ framework — one born to some extent out of post-modernity’s reaction to modernity — is now politically loaded. George Orwell famously noted how political regimes with nefarious intent blur the meaning of language through doublespeak and the creation of very technically correct prescriptive looking language to describe things in particularly opaque (though technically correct) ways; and we see this in modern bureaucracy where ‘public relations’ is used (or “effectively utilised”) to prop up powerful status quos. Progressives (and I don’t mean that pejoratively) want to change the meaning of words through pointing both to the contested nature of understanding, but also to the dubious authorities that gave words their meaning. Sometimes word meanings should be contested; etymology is a useful guide for description and employing words carefully to describe reality as we understand it. DFW notes that descriptivism is the air anyone educated after about the 1970s in the west lives and breathes.

“For one thing, Descriptivism so quickly and thoroughly took over English education in this country that just about everybody who started junior high after c. 1970 has been taught to write Descriptively-via “freewriting,” “brainstorming,” “journaling,” a view of writing as self-exploratory and expressive rather than as communicative, an abandonment of systematic grammar, usage, semantics, rhetoric, etymology. For another thing, the very language in which today’s socialist, feminist, minority, gay, and environmentalist movements frame their sides of political debates is informed by the Descriptivist belief that traditional English is conceived and perpetuated by Privileged WASP Males’? and is thus inherently capitalist, sexist, racist, xenophobic,’ homophobic, elitist: unfair.”

We’re not going to solve this dispute about how words work any time soon, but understanding that the way words and language works is contested might help us listen better to each other in areas of disagreement. It might also help those of us who care about objective truths contend for understandable descriptions of reality.

March 5, 2020

On Toxic Churchianity: church growth, bullying, abuse, narcissism, and leadership

There’ve been a bunch of stories circulating recently around church leadership — and especially around bullying uses of power and authority. Especially after Steve Timmis was stood down by Acts29 for abusive and controlling behaviours.

Team ministry is ridiculously hard. I’ve spent six years in a large staff team, not as the senior pastor, and with my boss leaving unexpectedly last year I’m not looking to have a new senior pastor in this season of life. This isn’t because I was bullied. I am familiar with other team ministry scenarios in our denomination and it seems there’s no easy model. I don’t think the problem is team ministry, or submission to a leader in that context. My experiences, and this desire to no longer have a boss isn’t the result of bullying, but I do think some of it is the result of a toxic approach to church that spreads way beyond our church and our denomination. This toxicity is the air modern pastors breathe (and the air, by extension, that modern congregations breathe).

I’ll suggest why below, and unpack some of my reflections. I have, as unpacked in some posts towards the end of the year, been developing certain convictions about church and leadership (and church size) as a result of my experiences in the challenging environment of a large team, a complex system, and the relational dynamics that come with both.

I’m not speaking about my experiences as though I can detach myself from the church environment I am part of; I have been involved in leadership and decision making as our church evolved and designed a complex system over some years in pursuit of the mission to make disciples in an increasingly post-church Australia. There are parts of this system that are expressions of what I’m going to suggest is toxic churchianity; the type of system where power games become possible based on results. My former senior pastor’s story is not mine to tell, it’s his, but I’m reasonably confident his reflections on the system have landed in similar places to mine. And so, not just because it’s best practice, but from my own experience, I want to be careful to charitably read the motivations of many people in ‘high authority’, complex, systems; these are often leaders who passionately want to see growth in God’s kingdom. Churches, especially those with a team of staff, do need organisation, and structures, and management, and very few of our leaders are trained to operate in those structures. The kinds of leaders who find themselves in large systems are typically exceptional in such a way that in a market driven, consumer, approach to church they are likely to build a platform; which includes growing churches beyond the size that a community is manageable.

In church planting literature around church size dynamics, famously a paper by Tim Keller, there’s a recognised transition point from ‘pastor sized church’ to ‘program sized’ at 150 people. 150 people is also a sociological barrier called ‘The Dunbar Number’ — an established sized for safe, relationally connected, community. Church growth leaders celebrate those who can redesign church systems, around redefining the role of the pastor/leader, in order to push past that barrier. Our consumer culture of church celebrates those leaders who achieve big growth for the sake of the kingdom. I’ve seen church leaders (plural) be disciplined by one organisation for toxic behaviour only to be embraced by another sister organisation because they get results (ie grow a church or ministry) and must be, therefore, faithful and competent ministers of the Gospel. That’s toxic; we’re not talking Vatican level problematic shuffling someone around within one system, but instead NRL level one team picking up a player after another team removed them for bad behaviour. 

Most pastors are not trained to run the systems and teams required to operate a church bigger than 150, and none I know would list that as the passion or calling that drew them into ministry. Most love God as revealed in Jesus, love the Bible, and love people, and want to work in the intersection of those areas; few want to apply that love for people just to managing staff and leaders. The shift from ‘pastor size’ to ‘program size’ requires more control, influence, or authority to be excercised by the leader (at least in the literature, and in practice).

This isn’t to say abuse isn’t possible in pastor sized churches; our model of church typically assumes that is a stage the pastor must lead through, such that some of the leadership styles of later stages need to be adopted in order to get to those stages and make the transition less jarring. Pastors with personality disorders or authoritarian streaks are probably going to enact those personality types in smaller groups/churches too, just with a different group of people in their sphere; so Stephen McAlpine’s account of life in Timmis’ church (smaller than 150) was mirrored in the way Timmis allegedly acted in the Acts29 network. That said, I do think there’s something protective in the ‘killing of ambition’ necessary in committing to pastor-sized churches as a healthier norm. This alone won’t mitigate toxic churchianity, but when pursued alongside really good structures around accountability, and clear, cruciform, thinking about the role of the pastor or any leader in Christian relationships, such that leadership is about integrity, example, and influence rather than power and authority as understood by the world, it’ll address some of the issues.

Here’s a controversial thesis: a church actually sacrifices health and some of the fundamentals of church community in order to move from ‘pastor size’ to ‘program size’ in Keller’s model; and that sacrifice is echoed in the person of the leader unless there are really deliberate structures in place to mitigate that effect. A commitment to growth through all barriers, at all costs, under one leader, is toxic for both church and leader.

In cultures that celebrate and reward results (through influence and bums on seats), and systems that are geared towards results, there’s a corresponding pressure put on leaders to achieve results. I think an across the board move to pursuing church communities bigger than 150 in the name of mission, and measuring oneself against the ability to do this (and against those who have), we’ve fundamentally changed the nature of church and pastoring; and, in a documented way, we’ve started embracing worldly forms of leadership and authority in the church. When this process is healthy it’s about gleaning wisdom — God’s truth — about how systems and communities operate, but when it’s unhealthy, we’re plundering Egypt and building golden calves rather than golden decorations in the Tabernacle.

We don’t have a great (or consistently applied) paradigm for co-opting worldly truths, and this is especially true when we adopt worldly metrics for success (in the name of mission). This was what I wrote my thesis on at college; considering how Christians might adopt worldly wisdom around public relations and persuasive communication. And my answer was ‘cruciformity.’ We have to consider how the paradigm of a crucified king turns worldly wisdom on its head; while not rejecting it. I think this allowed Paul to learn from Roman orators, but respond to a church in a city obsessed with worldly metrics and style (Corinth), and allowed the compilers of the Book of Proverbs to graft in stacks of Egyptian wisdom, bracketed by reminders about ‘the fear of the Lord’ being ‘the beginning of wisdom.’ This is true both for how we approach wisdom about persuasion and communication from the business world; and how we approach wisdom about leadership.

The Church Growth Movement kicked off when missionary Donald McGavran returned from India to the U.S, realised it had become a mission-field (post-Christendom) and so sought to apply organising principles from the world of business to the world of church, where those activities and the forms/mediums/methods we adopt were unaffected by the Gospel, Christianity became just another product to sell (and buy), and the church became another business system. The senior pastor became CEO. This is an inevitability. Lots of senior pastors in team ministries in big churches have to operate like a CEO; the question then is how they should operate in that chair (cruciform wisdom), and how much we want to repeat that structure as the goal of church ministry (possibly not).

It’s possible to build big faithful systems with pastor as CEO, but it’s much harder than it looks (and we’re not well equipped to do it well). Too many Christian leaders, especially protestant evangelicals who have over-emphasised ‘sola scriptura’ are media illiterate; we’ve rejected ‘forms’ to be ‘word alone’ without realising that is a form; and we don’t notice all the other forms we embrace (like multi-purpose buildings or meeting in shared public space, rather than the architecture of a church building or home), or homogenous groupings within churches, or the management styles and structures we adopt in our teams. This is a problem because when our motivation is getting the content of the Gospel to as many people as possible, it’s that intention, rather than the content of the Gospel, that dictates the forms we adopt — whether forms of persuasion, or communication, or forms of leadership, or church structures. The church growth movement, which problematised the 150 barrier (see for example, this piece from a popular leadership blog), rather than seeing it as a natural limit, at its worst, established an uncritical embrace of business growth principles, which impacted our use of forms across the board. It’s important to recognise how this co-opting of business principles has impacted how we approach leadership and success, and how that then impacts how we use the content of the Bible to justify those forms; so, how Bible verses are then weaponised or sloganised (something particularly shocking in the Timmis revelations). It’s interesting to note the parallels between how Bible verses are used to justify abusive or bullying leadership in pursuit of the mission of the Gospel, and how domestic abusers are recorded weaponising the Bible to justify their behaviours (and how the Serpent twists God’s word in Genesis 3, and in the temptation of Jesus). 

Cruciform patterns of team ministry are very difficult to reconcile with models of leadership that come from the world; those models that emphasise top down authority, vision, and control in pursuit of results/metrics that the leader is kept accountable for meeting. This pressure placed on leaders to secure results — this toxic culture — is to abuse in church, what toxic masculinity is to domestic abuse (and on this, read the bracing, but necessary See What You Made Me Do, a deep dive into domestic abuse by Jess Hill). It’s the air we breathe that has led us to sanctify a utilitarian approach to church.

The challenge is that the toxicity of the system we operate in actually rewards narcissists or people who operate with thoroughly worldly paradigms; which is why stories are starting to circulate about the disproportionate number of narcissists in Christian leadership; and I don’t just mean the narcissistic behaviour that is a product of a system that rewards results and requires a brash sort of leader, though that is bad, I mean that the system attracts those with the personality disorder in a documented way). The trick is that we need to distinguish between those who can’t manage teams well because that’s not what pastors are trained to do, but these are the ‘rules of the game,’ those who are playing that game according to the toxic conventions for the sake of the mission of the Gospel (to get bums on seats and souls into heaven — there’s an overlap here between an understanding of the Gospel as calling for conversion rather than discipleship and being part of the kingdom that is fundamental too), and those who are genuinely very dangerous and abusive narcissists. It won’t always be that easy to tell the difference, and perhaps this is why we need Chuck DeGroat’s upcoming book When Narcissism Comes To Church. The first chapter, available as an excerpt, is worth reading ahead of its release. This diagnosis alone makes me think the book should be essential reading by all church leadership teams – whether staff, or elders – to invite some self-reflection. I’d suggest those leaders who don’t want to subject themselves to this sort of scrutiny are raising a red flag… in the same way that church leadership teams or denominations might suggest mandatory psychological assessments of pastors and employees (which we’re doing around the results of the Royal Commission into Institutional Abuse of Children, so it wouldn’t be hard to add a test around narcissistic tendencies/coercive control/abuse) and it would be a red flag if a leader refused. Here are a few passages from the book:

“This sad abandonment of the humble way of Jesus shows up today in pastors of large and small churches, in beloved Christian celebrities, prolific clergy authors and bloggers, dynamic church planters, and seemingly godly men and women. The frightening reality of narcissism is that it often presents in a compelling package. Narcissism is the “glittering image” we present to the world…

When I started doing psychological assessments for pastors and church planters, I saw that narcissistic traits were often presented as strengths. Narcissism can be interpreted as confidence, strong leadership, clear vision, a thick skin. A colleague of mine often says that ministry is a magnet for a narcissistic personality—who else would want to speak on behalf of God every week? While the vast majority of people struggle with public speaking, not only do pastors do it regularly, but they do it with “divine authority.” In my own work, which includes fifteen years of psychological testing among pastors, the vast majority of ministerial candidates test on the spectrum of Cluster B DSM-V personality disorders, which feature narcissistic traits most prominently (as we’ll see in the next chapter). The rates are even higher among church planters…

For centuries, ecclesial systems have been structured hierarchically, privileging particular people over others. Male leaders, the educated, people with resources, or the well-connected traditionally have greater access to power than others. Structures are not necessarily to blame for narcissism, but particular structures do create an environment where it can grow unchallenged. Historically, Christendom’s conflation of church and empire undermined the “kenotic configuration” of the church, replacing cruciform humility with hierarchy, patriarchy, and power. The grandiosity, entitlement, and absence of empathy characteristic of narcissistic personality disorder was translated into the profile of a good leader. Those affected by narcissism’s bite were led to believe it was their fault—a lack of humility, a failure to submit.”

Chuck DeGroat, When Narcissism Comes To Church

DeGroat makes a distinction between narcissistic pastors (or church members), and narcissistic systems; and his definition of a narcissistic system doesn’t require a narcissistic pastor, but is simply the ultimate expression of the toxic Christian culture we find ourselves in. Toxic churchianity.

The psychological profile for types of staff/leaders this success-oriented approach to church attracts isn’t just limited to senior leaders. It’s not just senior leaders who, in a culture of toxic churchianity, abuse others. While there are plenty of horror stories about senior pastors abusing their authority, this toxic culture makes team ministry a power game. And anyone can be a player; and sometimes this means the senior leader isn’t the perpetrator, but the figure with the biggest target on his or her back. And our church structures, culture, and polity can stack the playing field in all sorts of directions.

Team ministry is particularly difficult in those contexts where the senior pastor has something like tenure (in a denominational context), or CEO-like authority without accountability (in an independent context); our Presbyterian system gives team ministry a different spin by giving some members of staff equal ‘power’ in the denomination. The Presbyterian system is not immune from abuse (and abuse is more likely to happen in small churches than large ones because we don’t have that many large ones). The Presbyterian system isn’t really geared to team ministry, though may have some protections against abuse in team settings if it is allowed to operate properly as an accountability structure. There are also teams I’ve observed where to mitigate ‘toxic churchianity’ other staff (those not recognised officially by the denomination) are empowered or recognised within the congregation whether with portfolios, or by cultural practice. Our church functions with a hybrid of both. This is a nice safeguard, but is just as open to abuse by staff playing the toxic churchianity game.

While a flat structure can mitigate abuse from a senior leader, the flatter a church structure, within a toxic churchianity culture, the more any leader, or team member, is empowered to be a bully or abuser, and the more dangerous a team member with a personality disorder, or just particular ambition and vision within a ‘toxic churchianity’ framework, becomes. The senior leader becomes a target to discredit and remove. This is an interesting challenge in non-hierarchical Australian church contexts that tend to be more ‘egalitarian’ (and I don’t mean around questions of gender here). Abuse in Anglican or Catholic contexts seems more likely to come from the top down because of a hierarchical structure, but outside those contexts (and histories), churches tend towards either flat structures or the elevation of senior pastor as CEO. In my observations, in these structures, it’s easy to abuse or gaslight a senior pastor from the “second chair,” or to abuse others in a team context, in a system where that second chair person might be seen to be a leader because they get results in the metrics assumed by a congregation. It’s not impossible to do this in a more hierarchical context either. Icing the boss — even with false accusations of their abuse of power in this current climate — can be a short cut to leading a big church where one might pursue one’s “big vision.” As an aside, Bonhoeffer’s “God hates visionary dreaming” quote is a nice antidote to some aspects of toxic churchianity because ‘vision’ plays a big part in justifying bad behaviour in our toxic context. And, to be honest — precisely because I’ve been caught up in this toxic culture (because it’s the air we breathe) — where I’ve been most tempted to act out in the complexity of our team environment has been in times where I’ve wanted to leverage criticism of our model (and senior leader), and my own ‘vision’ to push towards the changes I’ve wanted to see happen. That’s a fraught space, and navigating it is part of what has pushed me to question both our model and the culture that produced it (and that we perpetuate). The healthiest parts of our team culture have been those where we’ve genuinely pursued voluntary, mutual, submission — but it’s very easy for that dynamic to be abused if it isn’t clearly bedded down in team culture and even codified (so that it’s voluntary in the sense that to depart from it is to depart from participating in the team).

I’ve seen a bunch of examples of this abuse from the ‘second chair’ in my (relatively short) time in ministry — as well as far too many examples of abuse from senior leaders (and not just the ones that get documented publicly). The problem is, the more the spotlight is rightly focused on abused from senior leaders, the more the toxic second chair employee will wield that as a means of securing their own agenda. Abuse of power in Christian communities isn’t limited just to the most obvious candidates. It’s not just senior leaders who are attracted to participate in narcissistic, toxic, churchianity. Different church polities and cultures will put power in different hands, and the more market driven a church is the more that power actually sits in the hands of “the market” — the congregation — and the ‘popular’ rather than right decisions being made (church leadership can become as poll driven as political leadership). It’s this sort of popularity driven approach to church that is perhaps easiest for ‘second chair’ leaders to wield against the leader in the first chair; with the greatest capacity for disunity in the body. This can put a church leader in an impossible situation where exercising power or authority — over either the second chair leader who is acting poorly, or the congregation — becomes self-protective, but also self-fulfilling. The second chair leader can gaslight the first into acting and then crucify them, or have them crucified by the mob. DeGroat tells a story of a situation like this in his book, and I’ve seen this happening. But, he also warns that in narcissistic systems — in toxic churchianity — the idea of an abusive ‘second chair leader’ can help the senior leader play the victim (and yet, a narcissistic second chair leader will do the same thing if their bad behaviour is called out):

“Moreover, when the narcissistic leader is under attack, his response is defensiveness and a victim complex. Narcissistic leaders experience a victim-martyr-hero identity that postures them as the inevitable targets of frustrated subordinates. Their persecution complex actually enhances their status among some who view them as a hero for standing tall amid the battle. The system comes to the rescue of the leader at the expense of his victims. The lack of feedback, fear of disloyalty, and victim complex make it hard to engage, let alone change, this system.”

DeGroat

We don’t have great structures in place, or a good culture, that presents a healthy response to this sort of dynamic (except perhaps for “pastor sized” churches), or if we do, we have a low level of trust, or expertise in those structures for situations like this. A good culture would be one that emphasises character and virtue in approaching ethics, rather than duty or utility, and one where charismatic leaders of character are empowered and sacrificially sent off with people and resources to plant other pastor sized churches; rather than people and staff being hoarded within single entities under a single leader. Our broken, sinful, system is made up of broken, sinful, people.

We all approach Christian leadership and ministry, in Luther’s words, simultaneously justified and sinners. The control against that is meant to be the Gospel; the form and content of the Gospel; a theology of the cross. But also, a robust understanding of the levelling power of the resurrection — that we all share the same Spirit, are all part of the same body, are all called to serve, because we are all one in Christ Jesus. No ‘one’ is more one than others. The church is not Animal Farm.

We need church systems and structures built not just to maximise the dissemination of the message of the Gospel, but also the forms of the Gospel; and that’s much harder, slower, work that will require a vastly different form of ‘leadership’.

We need leaders currently operating in the privileged positions this toxic churchianity has provided them to lay down that power wherever possible, and to be prepared, as church communities, for the light to be shone not just on the behaviours of those in the big chair, but those in the second chair — or anyone in a congregation who seeks to wield power in pursuit of their own vision of church.

An interview I heard with an expert in spiritual abuse in the wake of the Timmis story pointed out that power-brokers in church life — those who might become spiritually abusive — are often not employees at all, but those with relational or financial power within a community. These are forms that need just as much reshaping through the form of the Gospel; and our communities need to bring not consumerism and worldly metrics but that grid of Gospel faithfulness — an alignment of medium and message — to assessing leaders, and participating in church life.

Next time someone (whether a member of staff, or leadership, or a leader from the pew) tells you your church needs to be bigger, and to push through a particular barrier by implementing certain change or behaviours, don’t ask them ‘how’ they’re going to achieve those results or ‘what’ they are doing; ask them why that’s the target and be prepared to push back against assumptions and methodologies that sound like they come from a business textbook without any thought as to how the cross is our paradigm. 

Because this is the air we breathe, when it comes to church, this toxic churchianity will keep being perpetuated and recycled unless we resist it. Good men who have embraced this as their default will misuse authority the culture tells them is their right by their position; a right reinforced by a theology of calling and the belief that overseers are given by God (which they are). Church leaders are given by God for the service of the body, in manners shaped by the form of the Gospel, not just its message. We need to be careful when condemning people for behaviours that are damaging without identifying the toxic culture we all buy into and enable when we approach Christianity as consumers, because it’s possible we’re enabling exactly the behaviour we’re condemning by perpetuating a particular vision of kingdom faithfulness.

The answer the excerpt chapter of DeGroat’s book on narcissism in the church — both in leaders and systems — gives is humility. Leadership and systems shaped by the cruciform, self-emptying, example of Jesus in Philippians 2.

“The long, sordid history of the church testifies to our arrogant love of power, position, wealth, prestige, success, and privilege. As Henri Nouwen says, we long to be relevant, spectacular, and powerful, the toxic cocktail refused by Jesus in his wilderness temptation but gladly embraced by many pastors today. But given changing ecclesial dynamics and a growing social movement that takes clergy narcissism and abuse seriously, the church and its servants may be in a season of needed humiliation and reckoning. My hope is that we will respond to it humbly.”

De Groat

Given that toxic churchianity is an approach to church not shaped by the Gospel, but the beastly, diabolical, power games of the world — those same powers brought to bear in the temptation of Jesus by Satan — and so is a culture shaped by sin, and sin that is currently not exposed, humble leaders will welcome exposure, we will welcome light being brought to bear on our practices. Toxic leaders will flee the light; will reject accountability; will resist external voices and personality testing, and transparency. Humble leaders, even those operating in CEO-like systems, in big churches, will embrace these.

Cruciform leaders are those who embrace the way of Jesus. We were reading Ephesians together as a team last week, in preparation for a series teaching it in our church later in the year, and I was struck by the relationship between the start of chapter 5, and Paul’s subsequent words about darkness; and how much spiritual abuse and bullying, like sexual abuse, is a ‘fruitless deed of darkness.’

Follow God’s example, therefore, as dearly loved children 2 and walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God…

For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth) and find out what pleases the Lord. Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. It is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret. But everything exposed by the light becomes visible—and everything that is illuminated becomes a light. 

Ephesians 5:1-2, 8-13

We can’t allow this toxic churchianity stuff, and toxic church leaders, to fester in darkness. And those of us who are leaders who have been breathing in the toxic culture need to expose our own hearts, and our own way of operating, to the light of the Gospel.

March 2, 2020

Exiles?

It’s a common trope (and one I’ve maybe engaged in a little in the past) to frame the Christian life in the post-Christian world as a life of exile. Part of the post-Christendom reality and the apparent aggressive shunning of Christian assumptions about life is this sense that we are now outsiders from the corridors of power, or the seat at the table, we might once have occupied; in those good old days when the church was an ‘estate of the realm.’

There’s lots of theological reasons to run with the paradigm of exile, and it can be a reasonable sociological observation, but I’m finding myself increasingly uncomfortable with the paradigm (and with things I’ve said in the past). I think it’s fundamentally true that following Jesus as king positions one in opposition to human power as it is used in ‘cursed’ patterns in kingdoms that the Bible paints as beastly (like Rome). We are ‘exiles’ in as much as Babylon is our frame of reference for worldly societies. And yet, the history of the western world, as laid out nicely in Tom Holland’s book Dominion, is profoundly shaped by Christianity, so no western culture is capable of being exclusively Babylonian. As Mark Sayers puts it in This Cultural Moment we live in a time where people in the west want ‘the kingdom without the king’ — we’re trading off the fruits of Christianity but don’t want the source of that fruit given space in political decision making.

Exile is on my mind right now because, like many churches, we’ve slated a teaching series on the book of Daniel; because Daniel is an exemplary figure when it comes to navigating life in Babylon as a faithful presence. All the cool kids are doing it. I read the new David Kinnaman book Faith For Exiles to help frame some reasonable application for life in these complex times. It’s a reasonable book, but I find myself longing for a Christian approach to life now — whether it’s a political theology or simply an approach to discipleship (and evangelism) — that recognises the way exile functions as a paradigm in the Bible.

The question of exile is not primarily about whether one lives in the Promised Land in political power (though it is true that this is an element of exile). The question of exile, for Israel, in the Old Testament, is about living in God’s presence, under God’s rule. So Adam and Eve are exiled from Eden, and in a sense that begins humanity’s exile from God, while Israel is created as a non-exiled nation through the exodus, and they lose that status in the exile when they become just like the nations. Exile is predominantly framed by our relationship with God and his powerful presence, not the kingdoms of this world.

We’re working our way through Luke’s Gospel at the moment, where Jesus has set about bringing a homecoming of sorts; an end to the exile via a new exodus (he speaks concerning ‘his exodus’ literally in the Greek during the transfiguration). Jesus’ coming to Jerusalem and his judgment on the physical temple reveals that while its rebuilding happened after Israel returned from Babylon, Israel was still, ultimately, exiled from God. Waiting for the day of the Lord. Waiting for God’s glorious presence to re-animate the Temple. The tearing of the Temple curtain at the execution of Jesus shows that hope will not be realised. The temple is judged. Israel is ultimately, at that point, exiled from God. Jerusalem becomes Babylon (it’s interesting that Jesus’ apocalyptic section in Luke 21 seems to take a bunch of imagery from Isaiah, and especially from Isaiah’s pronouncement of judgment on Babylon in Isaiah 13) to apply it to Jerusalem, and then in Revelation John seems to do the same thing — equating Jerusalem with Sodom, Egypt, Babylon, and Rome.

It’s true that to be caught up in God’s presence again makes you an ‘exile’ from Babylon, or the cities of the world, but I’m not sure it’s the most hopeful description of our reality, and indeed, in the places where the New Testament encourages us to “live as exiles” in the world its actually in those places that our coming back to the presence of God, and being his presence in the world, are most stressed. We need to be careful with how we use the metaphor — acknowledging that the beastly kingdoms of the world are ‘exiled’ from Eden, and from God’s presence — and that we are now God’s presence in this world precisely because we are no longer exiled.

In Ephesians 2, where Paul is using a pronoun that probably applies to gentiles within his logic in the letter, Paul says the exile experienced in Adam — not being part of God’s people — is over for gentiles through Jesus and the coming of the Spirit. Such that:

Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.

Ephesians 2:19-22

In 1 Peter, Peter writes to “God’s elect, exiles scattered throughout the provinces of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia” (1 Peter 1:1) — where there’s a juxtaposition of the two ideas of being God’s chosen people while being exiled in the gentile (Roman) world. The profound statement he makes in his opening (which might primarily refer to Jewish Christians) is that while they might be ‘exiled’ among the nations, they certainly aren’t exiled from God. It’d be a mistake, I think, for us to adopt one half of this paradoxical existence in our narrative, in a way that shapes our political theology. I suspect some of our ‘exile’ language — even amidst a call to be a faithful presence — might miss the triumph of the cross, and what is achieved through the pouring out of the Spirit into God’s new temple. The moment that exile from God, from Eden, and from the temple and the promised land profoundly ends (for funsies, I reckon the events of Acts 2 actually take place in the temple, where the church was meeting daily, and where ‘exiled’ diasporan Jews were gathered for the Pentecost festival). While we’re to live as exiles in the world — this is a posture we are to adopt, not one the world pushes us into (though by nature a beastly empire won’t deliberately make a bunch of room for God’s people). It’s not a reason for fear; or one we need strategies for. Our strategies — or disciplines — should be those that allow us to be a faithful presence — God’s temple — in the world, not one that starts with the foundational assumption that we are being excluded from the world, but that we have now been included in God’s people within the world. As Peter puts it:

… you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.”

1 Peter 2:9-12

It’s not us who are the exiles; it’s the nations still exiled from Eden; still cut off from the presence of God. It’s only that we’re home with God, as he makes his home in us, that we become exiles to the world. The real exiles as Paul and Peter write are the nation of Israel, who’ve joined the nations in opposition to God, and expressed that by rejecting their Messiah. Those who don’t have the Spirit.

This sort of posture might remind us that the Gospel is actually good news; and that it creates an alternative kingdom as it makes us citizens of heaven who are then ambassadors to a world that so desperately needs what we have. This might allow us to adopt a more positive, less defensive, approach to both discipleship and politics even as we live amongst nations and communities that occur along a spectrum of those influenced by the fruits of Christianity in the western world, and those who, through idolatry, have become more beastly or Babylonian (or Roman). Those who because of their idolatry are further away from God; digging further into the conditions of exile. If ever we speak of exile without emphatically speaking of our new citizenship, we run the risk of making human power our frame of reference, rather than God’s presence, and that’d be a diabolical mistake. It’s the sort of thing that has Israel become Babylonian in its approach to Jesus; they’ve spent so long thinking like Babylon, and Rome, when it comes to worldly power that they marshall that sort of power against God, and in doing so the kingdom is taken from them and given to others — other exiles from Eden, brought home to God.

February 27, 2020

The Good(er) Place

Warning: Contains Spoilerish discussion of the finale of the Good Place, and the whole series.

After we finished watching The Good Place, closing the green door on the final chapter of the story of four misfits from earth saving each other, and the entire universe in the process, I turned to my wife and asked ‘if heaven was just me for eternity, how long would it take for you to choose non-existence?’

She didn’t answer.

But that’s one of the profound questions asked in the Good Place’s exploration of the afterlife. What is worth living forever for? Is mastery of every craft imaginable enough to keep you occupied? Once you’ve read all the books, or played the perfect game of Madden — once you’ve achieved your ‘end’ — reached your telos — what can sustain you for an eternity? Is love, even love for a soul mate, enough?

The Good Place has punched above its weight when it comes to tackling philosophical questions — the Trolley Problem episode (which gets a callback in the finale) will no doubt make it into university lecture theatres for a Jeremy Bearimy or two. When we tackled the question of hell as a church about 18 months ago we showed a clip from the Good Place where arch-demon turned arch-itect, Michael, explained the scoring system that secured your place in the afterlife. We thought we were clever when we argued modern life is more complicated than the system allows, and our participation in systems built on sinfulness means we can never hope to escape the consequences of our sin on our own steam — and the Good Place writers obliged by making that season 3’s narrative arc.

Without spoiling season 4, having discovered that the system is fundamentally flawed, so that nobody can earn their way into the Good Place anymore, the team of humans; Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani and Jason, with the supernatural assistance of Michael, and super-computer Janet, have to come up with a better system.

They basically design purgatory, a process of testing and refining that will ultimately let any and every human earn their own salvation; so that people can find their way into the Good Place again. The problem here is that the system is geared against the human, so fixing the system allows humans to extract themselves from its corruption, over time. The darker part of human nature — that we might ourselves be the problem — is not part of the philosophical anthropology — an optimistic humanism — served up by the show.

This is the best and most just system humans can devise, it’s also the most hopeful. Even the demons get on board — they too have been victims of ‘the system’ — and at this point the writers might have been able to pack up having delivered a literal ‘happily ever after’ to every human.

But they don’t. There’s a moment a few episodes from the end where most shows, with happy endings, would finish. Eleanor and Chidi sitting on the couch, looking out over a glorious vista, reflecting on how paradise is having time — an eternity even — with the person you love. But the writers want to press in to just how satisfying (or not) that sort of eternity might be…

And this is where season 4 gets interesting. We get a pretty serious and imaginative attempt to depict the after life; a take on heaven that never tries to take itself too seriously, and ultimately serves as a vehicle for the show’s final philosophical message — life here on earth can be a bit heavenly if we muddle our way through towards self-improvement and more compassionate relationships. It’s life now that has meaning, especially because life and love might (will) one day end. You can have infinite Jeremy Bearimys to work this out, or four seasons of the Good Place.

The Good Place (the place, not the show, or rather, the place as depicted in the show) offers an individual the chance to continue their personal development — the process they’ve used to secure salvation — or simply to enjoy the fruits of their labour. It’s a place of rest, work, and play. There’s continuity with life on earth in a way that is profound and comforting. The old order of things has passed away. Death is dead.

Something about the picture of heaven the show offers up reminds me of C.S Lewis and J.R.R Tolkien without enchantment. It’s not that the hypercoloured reality the Good Place serves up is not imaginative, it’s that in a cosmos where everybody saves themselves and heaven revolves around one’s particular individual desires — even if only the good ones — there’s a hollowness. And it’s this hollowness the show presses into powerfully, without really resolving in a way I found satisfying.

Chidi and Eleanor meet one of Chidi’s philosophical idols, who reveals that an eternity in the Good Place with all good things on tap, a gushing, never-ending stream of goodness has left people incapable of much thought or imagination at all. Heaven has become monotonous. Even the Good Place is broken, and our band of heroes has to fix it.

Their diagnosis is that the joy offered by the Good Place will only truly be joy if it can end. Death is what gives life its purpose and pleasure its meaning. If when you’ve lived a full life you can walk through the door and push out into nothingness. The Good Place ultimately serves up the best end as euthanasia — ‘the good death’ — only not to end one’s suffering, but to finish one’s pursuit of pleasure and desire; to find satisfaction and so stop searching.

If it’s fleeting and to be enjoyed in the face of death. There’s something very much like Ecclesiastes in the mix here; Ecclesiastes without any sense that ‘life under the sun’ might point to some greater reality. A telos beyond the self. And here’s where The Good Place offers a less compelling version of heaven than Lewis, Tolkien, or the Bible.

Lewis wrote stacks on joy, on its fleeting, ephemoral, nature here in this world — though he saw our pleasures now anticipating the pleasures of the new creation, throwing us towards a more substantial reality than the one we enjoy now. He says moments of pleasure we experience now are pointers to something other-worldy, magical, heavenly even… in The Weight of Glory he describes these moments as echoes of a future time and place: “For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” But for Lewis even the fulfilment of these things — the hyper-coloured reality — is not actually what these pleasures point to.

What they point to is God.

God and his glory.

God is missing from the Good Place. And it’s that God is missing, and that the desires of the characters can be fulfilled in the goodness of pleasure as an end, or telos, that makes walking through that final door — euthanasia — seem ‘good’.

Death is not good.

God is.

And God is missing from The Good Place.

And I’d say that’s why nobody wants to stick around for eternity (and why I’d be ok with Robyn not wanting to put up with just me forever).

The Good Place is a fairy story without God. And I mean this in a pure sense; it’s a very enjoyable tale, it is mythic and beautiful, and fundamentally human in all the good ways it should be (and what a killer twist at the end of season 1). But it seeks to do what Tolkien says fairy stories should do — offer consolation — by offering a picture of a “good death” when perhaps true consolation can only be found in a truly good life.

Part of the problem is that the Good Place, with its unabashed humanism, has every character acting as the hero in their own story. Everyone who gets to the good place has pulled themselves in by the bootstraps. They’ve worked to save themselves. They’ve achieved. All they have now is the fruit of their hard work; or more work; which is satisfying for a time, but not forever. Even true love for another person can’t, in the honest appraisal of perhaps the smartest TV writers ever, sustain life for eternity.

This left me feeling sad. Not because I didn’t want to say goodbye to Chidi, Eleanor, Tahani, and Jason (oh Jason)… but because I don’t want to say goodbye to those I love at all. What euthanasia attempts to hide now doesn’t look any more compelling to me in hypercolour; death actually is a terrible thing. Existence trumps non-existence. Light offers consolation; darkness doesn’t.

Both Tolkien and Lewis depict heaven — in new, restored, creation terms — as a case of “further up, and further in” — growing deeper in a sense of glory in another, rather than in ourselves. Delighting and knowing more of God and his goodness, not simply the goodness of created stuff.

In Narnia, at the end of The Last Battle, one of the characters (the Unicorn) when discovering the ‘new creation’ — the new Narnia — sees that it is a fuller version of reality anticipated by the goodness, pleasures, and beauty, of the previous one. It’s his Weight of Glory in story form, in this new creation “every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more.” and the unicorn, upon arriving, shouts:

“I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that is sometimes looked a little like this… Come further up, come further in!”

Tolkien’s Leaf By Niggle is a beautiful picture of the afterlife that was, in some ways, echoed in some of the more satisfying depictions of heaven offered in The Good Place. It has Niggle, an artist, enjoying the coming to life of the beautiful works of art he created — true art, that reflected the creativity of the creator of beauty — and pressing ‘further up, and further in’ to that beauty, taking all the time in the world to come to terms with the goodness of a new, restored, reality.

“He was going to learn about sheep, and the high pasturages, and look at a wider sky, and walk ever further and further towards the Mountains, always uphill. Beyond that I cannot guess what became of him. Even little Niggle in his old home could glimpse the Mountains far away, and they got into the borders of his picture; but what they are really like, and what lies beyond them, only those can say who have climbed them.”

This little short story from Tolkien, and Lewis’ ending of Narnia, throw us towards the source of actual satisfaction — or at least show us that consolation is found not by completion, but by pushing deeper into love and goodness. They suggest such a ‘push’ works better, eternally, when you are pushing towards something, or someone, infinite.

The Good(er) Place — one that offers actual consolation — is the place where God is.

This might seem like pious waffle and a way to overthink a TV comedy — but the hollowness of the vision of the afterlife offered by The Good Place is not just because euthanasia seems like a terrible consolation; an eternity of pleasure in beautiful ‘things on tap’ rather than joy in the one who made beauty is also not consoling. Where The Good Place doesn’t achieve the emotional highs of the ending of Narnia, or The Lord of the Rings, or other fairy stories is in offering the best imaginable ‘euthanasia’ — a good death — while offering none of what Tolkien calls a ‘eucatastrophe’ — a ‘good catastrophe’ — an interruption of the natural ordering of things that thrusts us towards our telos, particularly the goodness and fullness of God.

The Good Place is ultimately a tragedy, not a comedy (or fairy tale) because death is not defeated but embraced. Comedies and fairy tales have, by not simply ‘satisfying’ endings where our desires are met, but happy endings where they are exceeded. They have a eucatastrophe that brings a sudden joy, a taste of consoling truth, to the audience.

The Good Place doesn’t console, or bring joy, in Tolkien’s terms, because its good place is not true. Tolkien says:

“The peculiar quality of the ”joy” in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth. It is not only a “consolation” for the sorrow of this world, but a satisfaction, and an answer to that question, “Is it true?”

For Tolkien the goodness of the Bible’s story — the story it tells about the afterlife — is that we are not the hero, and that the change brought by the hero is not simply time enjoying the fruits of our own victory, but that we are raised from the dead. ‘True’ consolation looks forward to the renewal of all things, secured by God’s ‘eucatastrophic’ interruption of history in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Who’d want heaven without the God who renews all things? Without Jesus?

Because The Good Place has each person in heaven there as a result of their own efforts, there is no ‘telos’ beyond the self, and one’s improvement, but also nobody to glory in or love; no experience of grace; no desire to ‘push further up, and further in’ into the knowledge of the author of beauty; the true consoler. Where the throne in heaven in the Bible’s story is occupied, and the centre of the action, in The Good Place, everyone gets a throne, everyone rules their own little kingdom, and nobody wants to stay. The Good(er) place offers something more satisfying than the green door on the good place, it offers us a throne, and one on it, and invites us to push ‘further up and further in’ to knowing and glorying in the infinitely good and loving one on the throne whose glory will take an eternity to wrap ourselves up in.

Here’s how the Bible describes the Good(er) Place… with God at the centre.

“Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away. He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!””

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.

— Revelation 21:3-5, 22:1-5

In the real good place, nobody will want to leave.

February 6, 2020

Limit your freedoms, and take your time, for the sake of the future of the church (and the world)

Clocks cause secularisation.

This might seem like an odd flex; but that’s the argument I ended up settling on in an essay I wrote recently in a subject unpacking Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age and its implications for being the church in the secular world.

One of Taylor’s basic starting assumptions is that our shared ‘social imaginary’ — the way we approach reality — has been ‘disenchanted’ — and while an inclination towards magic, the supernatural, and even religion might still exist in our world, part of what he means is that even in churches (where some belief in the supernatural is foundational) our view of time and space has been flattened. Where once churches marked a spiritual calendar as well as the passing of actual time, we now just see things in linear terms — and, like the rest of society — we’re increasingly particularly interested in the present reality; in the moment, or the instant. Our horizon for action and decision making has been massively reduced. We see this in the work of other thinkers too, and the way we make short term decisions, the way we view ethics in utilitarian or bureaucratic  terms rather than the virtue ethics of the past where we were less focused on the instant an ethical decision was being made, and more focused on shaping ethical character that would be brought to bear on those decisions. We’ve also flattened out our understanding of space so that only our present, observable, physical reality really matters — not only do we not conceive of space as both natural and supernatural (and of God as being present in the natural world as well as some supernatural order), we seem to have lost the ability to think long term about the shaping of space and its ability to provide for more than just our immediate needs and pleasures (see ‘climate change’).

We live in an age of instant gratification; where our horizons for decision making have been pushed into the very ‘here and now’ at the expense of the future (and certainly with an increasing, often optimistic, ignorance of the past). We’ve lost a sense of time and space being part of some grand narrative; partly because along with that disenchantment of space and time came a loss of the sense that God is at work, playing a very long game, as the author of space and time. The God who meticulously orchestrated history to centre on the death, resurrection, ascension and rule of Jesus — the lamb slain before the creation of the world — has been pushed to the margins, and so too has any sense that the world exists as a stage for a grand story that is bigger than the stories we write for ourselves.

This shrinking horizon is fed by what and how we consume; we live in an age where our whims and desires can be virtually gratified almost instantly; want the thrill of orgasm; no longer do you need to invest years in cultivating a relationship that leads to marriage; you can open your browser and self-sooth with pornography, or there are apps for hook-ups, or apps that take the hard work out of dating. But it’s not just sex, our consumer whims can be satisfied in ways that appear to satiate our hunger temporarily (think Uber Eats), but on that front we’re increasingly removed from the physical means of production of our food (we’re not even going to the restaurant where the food is made any more, let alone the paddock or the meatworks).

It might even be bugging you, as a reader, that you’ve already read 600 words and I don’t seem to have done anything with that initial statement that clocks cause secularisation. You’re too busy for this. Your attention span has been stretched. This format of information delivery does not mesh with your desire to understand the point of this piece right now. Why are you even bothering with this, you might be asking. How many tabs are open on your browser? And how many notifications are displaying on your email tab, or your Facebook tab, just beckoning you to click away (for me it’s 4,300+ on my gmail tab, and (1) on my Facebook tab).

700. How many of those words did you skim?

In his book Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, Douglas Rushkoff describes the way the collapse of narrative and the rise of the ‘present’ has led to a certain sort of apocalyptic fascination (the type also explored in How to Survive the Apocalypse by Alyssa Wilkinson and Doug Joustra). Towards the end of his book he describes the relationship between ‘present shock’ and living as though the end of the world is imminent; what would you do if you found out you had a day to live? Chances are, you’re already doing it… because that’s how we live.

“Present shock is temporally destabilizing. It leads us to devalue the unbounded, ill-defined time of kairos for the neat, informational packets of chronos. We think of time as the numbers on the clock, rather than the moments they are meant to represent. We have nothing to reassure ourselves. Without a compelling story to justify a sustainable steady state for our circumstances, we jump to conclusions—quite literally—and begin scenario planning for the endgame.”

We don’t say no to our impulses for a variety of reasons; but one of those is that in our liberal, enlightened, secular world — where there is no grand story, no God, no reason to limit our freedoms (or in the Christian version, God died to totally set us free so we can do whatever we want within the boundaries of his love) — we have become the gods of our own lives; the authors of our story. Our job, as humans, is to be who we were made to be (and who our inner self tells us we should be). To be true to thyself; and to express that truth by living freely and authentically in the moment, as an individual.

This is the pattern of this world.

Now imagine applying that pattern to the church.

Is it any wonder that our approach to church — to relationship with God and others — is mediated through the question of what’s best for me in an instant? A church doesn’t have the means to supply my needs or the needs of my family right now, so right now I’ll decide to go to one that does. A church isn’t helping me to grow in my knowledge or godliness or chosen metric right now, so right now I’ll go to one where there’s a better alignment with my priorities. A church doesn’t feel like deep community right now, and I don’t feel connected to the people, so I’ll leave and start a whole batch of new relationships right now hoping for instant community.

We make our decisions based on the minute hand of the clock; not viewed through the prism of a lifetime, but if Rushkoff and Taylor are right this is because we are being formed this way by a culture that has lost its narrative, and that bombards us with stimulus that keeps our social imaginary truncated not just by disenchanting space and time and their relationship to God’s eternal plans, but by promoting both ‘freedom’ and ‘choice’ as the essential basis of the good human life, and ‘right now’ as the ultimate horizon for that freedom. This stops us placing limits on our immediate individual freedom for the sake of others, and the sake of ourselves. It means our ethical paradigms and our approach to decision making are built entirely on pragmatics or utility. This is the spirit of our age; this is the pattern of this world.

We’re meant to be different. God’s grand story is one where individual freedom is not the chief value; relationships are. Love is. Love of God, and love of neighbour. The desire for freedom and instant gratification were the motivations behind the fall of mankind in Genesis 3, and they’ve been a debilitating and deadly problem for us ever since. We are not made for freedom but for self limiting for the sake of others. In a great article titled ‘The Ethics of the Fall: Restoring the Divine Image through the Pursuit of Biblical Wisdom,’ Brendon Benz makes the case that to limit ourselves, freely, for the sake of relation is to be truly human; to manifest the image of God. Which is to say that the image of God is not something we bear purely as individuals; but something that we bear in communion with one another; which challenges a modern sense of “I” or “self” as God. Benz says of the idea that “that God is imaged only when two or more are gathered in the freely self-limiting relational character of God,” that this means:

“… An individual neither posses the divine image as a substance of his or her own being, nor images God in isolation. Rather, the imago Dei is manifest only in relation (Bonhoeffer 1997: 64–65; Barth: 228–30; MacDonald: 314–20; Sexton: 187–206). In the words of Moltmann (1993: 218), while “the self-resolving God is a plural in the singular, his image on earth—the human being—is apparently supposed to be a singular in the plural.”

Consequently, the “one God, who is differentiated in himself and is at one with himself, then finds his correspondence in a community of human beings, female and male, who unite with one another and are one.” Such an account serves as an important corrective to what E. Gerstenberger critiques as “the heightened sense of ‘I’ in modernity,” which he partially traces “to Old Testament origins” and “the anthropological doctrine of” individuals “‘being in the image of God’” (287).”

The fall, then, is a failure to self-limit both in terms of humanity’s relationship with God, and this image bearing function, and, to self-limit for the sake of the other; a failure to give up freedom, but instead a choice to be an “I”.

The story of the Gospel is the story of Jesus’ self-limiting sacrifice for our sake; as an act of mercy; with his eyes on an eternal future, not the short game. This is what we’re meant to have in view as we give our own lives in worship to God (and as we do that together — offering our bodies (plural) as a living (singular) sacrifice.

Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. — Romans 12:1-2

Benz concludes his piece with an observation that our image bearing nature is restored in the church, by the Spirit; which restores our task of imaging God in the world, in and through our relationships to each other — not simply as heroic individuals; and, in fact, not as an “I” at all. To image God we have to give up some of our freedoms to one another, in relationship — our bodies have to become a living sacrifice. Benz sees this transforming our relationship with each other, and with space (so also, with time).

“Thus, in the creative, life-giving encounters among humans, and in the creative, life-giving encounters between humans and the rest of creation, Spirit does not stem from the self, but is present when those involved freely self-limit in order to relate.”

We Christians need limits; not unfettered individual freedom — which is the pattern of the world; the good life according to our neighbours in the secular age we live in where everybody is experiencing present shock, and so feeling utterly disconnected from a big story and living every moment as though it is our last. We Christians have an utterly different view of space, and time.

One of my favourite books this year was The Common Rule by Justin Earley. Earley makes the case that true freedom doesn’t come from doing what you desire in any given moment (in part this is obvious because our desires are so profoundly shaped by external stimulus, especially our environment and culture), but rather from doing what we were made for (or being who we were made to be). His book lines up nicely with the thesis of Benz’s piece.

Earley says the common narrative of our time is that to “ensure the good life, we have to ensure our ability to choose in each moment,” he asks “What if true freedom comes from choosing the right limitations, not avoiding all limitations?”

Now. I was accused of sounding like a cult leader in my recent piece about church because I was encouraging people to limit their freedoms; the freedoms won for them via the Gospel. I think this is such an anaemic picture of the Gospel and the Christian life. We are free from slavery to sin and death, but we are freed to become servants of God. We are freed to give ourselves to the life-giving work of the kingdom of God. This is what happens when we individualise the Gospel so that it’s a message of personal salvation and freedom from all responsibilities, rather than seeing the good news as the good news of a new kingdom with a good king. A king who calls us to loyalty, who pours out his life-giving spirit to transform us into his image — the image of God again — and invites us to start living in his kingdom now not just as freed people who do our own thing, but as children of God who are united to God, and so to one another, by the Spirit. The Spirit which is a spirit of unity, that draws us together into the body of Christ so that we might self-limit in relationships to manifest the image of God in the world. If I was wanting people to ‘self limit’ to submit to some human authority or institutional structure (like ‘my leadership,’ or ‘my vision’ or ‘my church’), then that would be cult like. But the New Testament clearly expects us to submit to one another, and that submission, like a marriage covenant, involves a self-limiting of one’s freedoms for the sake of a relationship and a function in the world. My marriage covenant limits the expression of my sexuality, and of my economic freedoms, and all of my decisions really because Robyn and I make our decisions as ‘one’ rather than as ‘two’; and in doing this we reflect the relationship between Christ and his church, but also we reflect the image of God as Adam and Eve were meant to. Church communities, as they come together as the body of Christ, and self-limit for the sake of relationship with one another do the same — and this self limiting starts with the leaders. If leaders aren’t doing this then the community they lead isn’t a body of Christ, it’s a group structured around the leader.

2,500 words, and still nothing about how clocks cause secularisation. So now, let me explain.

The first mechanical clocks were created in monasteries to help the monks track sacred time; they were designed so that monks could follow their ‘common rule’ and pray at the designated times each day. They regimented life in the monastery with a new sort of precision. They changed our ability, as humans, to measure time — bringing more precision, and ultimately they started to shift the monastic account of time from ‘kairos’ to ‘chronos;’ and they spread out from the monastery into the villages. Town squares started being dominated by a large clock, which brought synchronicity to the village’s practices, workers would leave home in lockstep, and arrive home at the same time — becoming more like automatons than people were previously; the way people spent time began to be ruled by these machines that operated like clockwork. Village life began to operate like clockwork. More precise measuring of time made for more precise accounting of time; workers, and then all village life, was ruled by the clock. The more linear and measurable and machinelike time felt, the less enchanted it felt. The pressures of the clock, of being in the right place at the right time, of productivity, of machine like efficiency began to shape people; the mechanical advances that produced the clock began to be applied in factory settings, and soon machines were more prominent features of people’s lives and imaginations. At some point the presence of clocks and their effects on time started encroaching on how people conceived of space; of the physical universe. We started viewing reality as machine like, and God as a clockmaker. The clock, and then other pieces of technology, started to dominate our social imaginary, and eventually the clockwork-like processes of space and time produced deism, the idea that God had created the universe and then stepped back, that space and time were just ‘natural’ products of a God and we didn’t need to worry about an enchanted, supernatural, dimension of space and time, and then eventually we kept the clockwork model but did away with the need for a clockmaker; and as this all happened clocks were becoming more and more precise, and present, ruling more and more of our lives, and ultimately helping to contribute to our fixation with the moment; with the now and what I’m doing this second, at the expense both of an enchanted understanding of the universe where the clockmaker intervenes with reality, and of the future.

The clock began to set a limit for our thinking and imagining, tying us to this space and this time. Flattening and hollowing our experiences and our decision making. Producing (or being partly responsible) for the conditions Taylor describes in A Secular Age and that Rushkoff describes in Present Shock. The patterns of this world.

Patterns we Christians need to break.

Our approach to church, as leaders and members, is so often dominated by the short game. We want silver bullets. We want growth. We see a culture obsessed with the immediate and bombarding us with stuff. There are so many messages out there clamouring for our time and attention in this distracted age and our instinct is to get the Gospel out there amongst the distraction, and the way we think will get the greatest cut through is to compete with that distraction with the forms of the world; the forms that give us 24 hour news cycles with no time for developing connections to a bigger story; that give us ‘instant’ hits for our desires whether via pornography, Tinder, Grindr, or UberEats; that truncate our attention span; that pull us out of any sense of a big story in order to have us consume our way to (momentary) happiness; that rely on our addiction to that happiness with quick fixes and instant gratification; and that then apply this schema to our relationships — whether family, or church, rather than valuing a long, slow, obedience in the same direction with the same people.

The patterns of this world are broken. Deadly.

We don’t need unfettered freedom; the Gospel is not just a message of freedom from your personal sin, it’s a message of freedom to be who you were made to be. And you were made to be in relationship with God, with others, and with God’s world — as cultivators of fruitfulness. People who plant orchards and bed down into places as a testimony to the God who authors a story that takes more than one life time to be revealed, and to the nature of his kingdom. A God who is patient, and careful, who orchestrates, who sweats the small stuff. Who doesn’t value character above results, but for whom character is the result.

There are people out there deeply concerned with how much our clocks are shaping our experience of the world; people determined to break us from present shock. Ironically, one of those people is Jeff Bezos, from Amazon, who ultimately is the person profiting most from the patterns of this world and our obsession with instant gratification, and whose whole company is designed to make consumption as frictionless and fast as possible… Bezos has joined a group of other people sponsoring a clock that aims to alter our ‘social imaginary’ — to break us out of short term thinking; to free us from captivity to the instant and to silver bullet solutions to our problems. This group of people realise that problems like Climate Change are systemic and don’t need individuals making short term consumer decisions (like recycling), that we need more than mindfulness and things that offer momentary escape from the status quo built on self-denial (McMindfulness by Ronald Purser is a good book for showing how much we’re told that individuals are the solution to the world’s problems, and then we’re given mindfulness as a form of medication against the anxiety such an overwhelming challenge produces, by the very corporations who should actually be making the changes). This group wants us to see time differently, to approach problems playing the long game. To encourage us to realise that change of any substance, whether in ourselves or society, takes a long march in the same direction, not a flitting about following every whim, distraction, or better option that presents itself. They’re a group called “The Long Now” and they’re developing a 10,000 year clock; built inside a mountain (pictured back at the top, all those words ago). They’re hoping to shift how we assess our decision making by reminding us that we’re part of something bigger; part of a story even — they want to challenge us to be good ancestors. The inventor of the clock said:

I cannot imagine the future, but I care about it. I know I am a part of a story that starts long before I can remember and continues long beyond when anyone will remember me. I sense that I am alive at a time of important change, and I feel a responsibility to make sure that the change comes out well. I plant my acorns knowing that I will never live to harvest the oaks.

Perhaps we Christians don’t need a clock because we already have an entirely different sense of time because we know the author of the story, and we know the ending of the story we belong to, but perhaps there’s something we can learn from this project to challenge the way we’ve been suckered into a world dominated by the clock (and then the computer screen, smart phone, and smart watch; the ‘I’ things).

What would happen to our churches if we rediscovered ‘kairos’ time so that we weren’t ruled by ‘chronos;’ and if we organised our lives and relationships, and visions, around the long now, not the present shock we find ourselves living in. What if we need a new sort of monastic approach to life where we refuse to be totally ruled by the moment?

What if at exactly the point we start to feel ‘tired’ of the same people, and routines (or liturgies), and songs, and we’re itching for a change in environment, that’s the moment that those parts of our life are most capable of working on us deeply? What if a rut is a good thing and freedom to choose whatever gratification we’re looking for in any given moment is the enemy of genuine godliness and contentment? And the sort of relationships where we bear the image of God as we limit ourselves?

Maybe the change worth celebrating in the Christian life comes from a deep and abiding connection to God and to his people. Maybe connection to God and to people takes putting down roots rather than chasing a quick fix that will produce fast ‘growth’ in a particular metric. Maybe it’s actually the walking together with your brothers and sisters that produces the growth, the love, and the self-limiting, that will present the image of God to a distracted world disconnected from a deeper sense of time and place; a world that has lost the organising idea of a story for our lives, let alone the idea of a story authored by someone else; let alone a story authored by God, that we’re brought into by his Spirit.

Maybe we need to change our thinking so that our questions are “what will I look like, and this church look like if I’m still here in 20 years” rather than “will this church meet my needs next year”. Maybe we need to imagine our relationships, whether we feel deeply connected or not, with an entirely different horizon to ‘right now’… Maybe we need to give things time to germinate, and flourish, before cutting ourselves off from them and grafting ourselves in somewhere else. Maybe that’s actually what love is — not just a feeling, not just short term gratification, not just an orgasm, but long term commitment through the ups and downs of life; and maybe that’s where transformation actually happens.

So look, to the people who suggested that the Spirit might call us to leave a church, and that this is an expression of individual freedom, I want to say that if there’s a spirit causing disunity, and if that call can’t be discerned by more people than just you — that is, by those you are called to image God with in relationship, as you self limit (or love) for the sake of the long term growth, maturity and fruitfulness of one another — then this is more likely to be the “spirit of the age” than the Spirit of the living God. And you should be careful. Maybe we should take the clocks down, and our watches off, and start measuring time and seeing space differently; as enchanted again; so that we aren’t conforming to the patterns of this world one tick or tock of the second hand at a time.

December 10, 2019

Why the problem with the church is the “church” (not with the people who leave)

I’ve appreciated the conversations that happened off the back of my “I can’t do this any more” — many friends have reached out to express concern about what might prompt such a raw post, some pastors have contacted me because I hit on a shared experience, but mostly I’ve appreciated the pushback (even from those who suggest it sounds like I want to authoritatively lead some sort of cult). The pushback I’ve most appreciated is from those who fear a message like this, from a pastor figure who has some authority might bind people who’ve been abused or traumatised to churches that will then continue that traumatising or that abuse.

That’s a legitimate concern to be raised in this sort of conversation; especially if I’m essentially arguing that our covenant commitment to one another in the church — the “bride of Christ” — is similar to the covenant commitment we make in marriage.

I want to say, like a pastor might say ‘marriage is a fantastic thing that God has made for the joining together of two people as one, and its value is ultimately not in ‘feelings’ or what it does ‘for me’, but in a lifelong commitment to love one another in sickness and in health; for better and for worse, as a picture of Jesus’ love for the church (Ephesians 5). I also want to say as I teach on marriage, that divorce is a necessary provision in a fallen world for the protection of people from abuse, and to provide a way to escape trauma when a covenant is broken.

So I want to say that belonging to a church is a fantastic thing that God has given us, as a gift, by uniting us to Jesus and one another by the Spirit; that belonging to ‘the church’ is expressed by belonging to ‘a church;’ and that the value of that relationship comes through covenant commitment to unity with one another. This commitment is expressed and lived out through forgiving and forbearing; through love as an act of sacrificing self interest for the sake of others; and for being in relationship for the long term on the basis of the covenant commitments we make to one another at certain junctures (like baptism, membership, and even sharing ‘communion’ or ‘the Lord’s supper’ with one another). In 1 Corinthians, Paul builds the metaphor of the body and our belonging to one another in marriage, to explain why believers should not unite themselves to others in sexual immorality; he argues that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit; and then in 1 Corinthians 12 that same Spirit is uniting the members of the church to one another so that we also belong to each other. This sort of belonging is as open to abuse as Paul’s teaching on marriage in Ephesians 5. I am certain that these verses can be used to force people into submission to church authority.

But, just as there are grounds for divorce in marriages that do not reflect the Gospel, but ‘Babylonian’ narratives about self, and power, and domination of others, so too there are grounds to leave a church. I think the duty of a believer in such circumstances is, perhaps, similar to the duty of a Christian spouse leaving a marriage where both partners have made a covenant with one another on the basis of a shared faith. I think sin should be rebuked, repentance and reconciliation sought, other parties involved, and the rights, safety and wellbeing of the victim protected above those of the perpetrator.

To be clear, the bone I’m picking in my recent post is not with people who leave the church; it’s with a church that perpetuates a view of itself that makes leaving the most normal course of action for someone as an expression of the free market and individual choice. Our problem is that we’ve perpetuated a thin view of church where church is a product; but also that our churches have essentially been Babylonian and so doing real harm to people without a path to restore relationships or reform the church; pastors and leaders of the institution of the church are to blame for this, because who else is shaping the culture, understanding and practices of the church and thus how we experience and understand church? My call is not for people to be more committed to bad models of church, to express that commitment by putting up with more — it’s for all of us to change how we conceive of church. If people have been traumatised by churches they should not stay in ways that perpetuate the trauma; but the church (as an institution) has a responsibility to consider why we’ve caused trauma and how we play a part in healing. But it’s also true, I think, that our conception of the church (or a church) as a thing we can just ‘leave’ is the result of a false picture of church that we have perpetuated (and one that is probably more inclined to traumatise people than a more Biblical, less Babylonian, church).

And, mea culpa, there are people who have left our church because of my failures as a leader. Some have perhaps been traumatised by my bad decisions, or my words, or my actions; or by our culture, our practices, and our environment. We have fed a culture of consumerism, and so consumed and burned out people by suggesting that godliness looks like doing more. I am imperfect and inexperienced. I have been Babylonian in my approach, at times. Lots of this is self critique and a desire to approach church differently. I am the leader of a church that is still working out how leadership and authority are worked out, and where elements of our practice have been more Babylonian than shaped by the Gospel. The thing that haunts me about these leavings, more than my guilt about my own failures (though that is real), is the lack of reconciliation — both because when someone leaves it removes some of the opportunity for repentance and forgiveness, but also because the break of fellowship removes the capacity for the healing that comes from forgiveness, forbearance, peacemaking, and ongoing love and unity.

The more Babylonian a church is in its structures and practice — including the authority given to the pastor and how much they are perceived as being the primary ‘image of God’ (remember the Babylonian creation story where the king was the image bearer) — the more likely it is to be abusive and traumatic. Don’t stay in Babylon; just don’t leave without challenging Babylon and giving those in leadership the chance to repent and be reconciled. Recent history is full of Babylonian, abusive, church leaders who fail to genuinely repent in those circumstances (there’s some well documented examples in the U.S, and probably some not so well documented examples in Australia with the current conversations about bullying within church ministry teams happening online), so the path towards this sort of leaving well is also fraught with danger. A hint will be if in such a conversation a leader appeals to his or her authority and refuses to let you go. But I suspect lots of the literature around domestic violence, narcissm, and abusive relationships will also help spot traumatising church systems and leaders. To say we shouldn’t work through that difficulty is a bit like saying that domestic violence is a reason to stop encouraging people to get married and pursue covenant faithfulness when times are tough.

Churches abuse. Churches traumatise. Pastors abuse. Pastors traumatise. Church members abuse and traumatise each other; where those churches, pastors, and members, are genuinely living the Gospel story those moments of sin that cause trauma are opportunities for forgiveness, reconciliation, and forbearance; and in those processes it will become more or less clear if the abusers are Babylonian wolves who should either be run out of town, or run from… but if that’s the case then your brothers and sisters in those churches should leave too, not be left behind. And the processes of church discipline that our western churches have departed from (because when you try to discipline someone — whether a pastor or an individual — they tend to just leave one church and go to, or start, another) were perhaps an essential part of a less individualistic church and its ability to be what the church is called to be in the world.  A lack of accountability to anybody but yourself; and your sense of where the Spirit might be guiding you is a recipe for Babylon. God gives us a community, who we’re united to by the Spirit, to discern where the Spirit might be leading us together. It’s hard for me to believe that the Spirit who unites us will also lead you away from the people he has united you to without any opportunity for you to talk through that leading with those people. But 99% of the people I see leaving churches have done that without speaking to anybody (except perhaps, the leaders of the church recruiting them to their ‘better’ show), and most of the conversations I’ve had have been with people who have already decided to leave (and so lost some of the capacity to be sent well to another church). Where people have left us because of trauma — or my failures to love and leave well — they have left without the conflict being truly resolved or any opportunity for reconciliation and ongoing fellowship and unity to be experienced by either party; this is the loss of an opportunity to experience the Gospel; the love of Jesus; in the midst of our sinfulness, but also in our new, non-Babylonian, relationships. It might very well be that in those circumstances the trust in a relationship is broken to the extent that forgiveness and reconciliation is possible, but full restoration is not. I’m not arguing people should never leave a church; or that the pastor alone should dictate when — Paul’s picture of the church has the pastor playing some sort of shepherding role, absolutely, but has the members belonging to each other; not the pastor as the image bearing king.  The trick is also that in church communities (as opposed to marriages) the absolute best thing for an abuser; a Babylonian; is to belong to a church — they may need to be sent to a different church to protect their victim, but connection to the body of Christ is the best context for repentance, forgiveness, and genuine reconciliation; for dealing with sin in a way that breaks a vicious cycle.

The point isn’t that churches or marriages should be built on rules, or even on vows. It’s that our vows reflect the story we are participating in (both in marriages and the church), and more than that, that we come together united in love; and love that expresses itself through deep, lifelong, commitment that does come at a cost, but also comes with benefits. It’s no coincidence that Paul lands his teaching on the oneness of the church, as one body, with a passage that gets read ad nauseum in weddings.

And yet I will show you the most excellent way. “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.”

‭‭1 Corinthians 12:31-‬13:1-8‬ ‭

A church built on this version of love won’t feel like Babylon; it won’t abuse or traumatise; it will deal well with sin and hurt. It might feel like a cult, but it will also be a place where the love and example of Jesus, and the story of the Gospel — of sins being forgiven, relationships reconciled, new lives being given — is lived and experienced by all those members of his body, and those who might come amongst us.

December 7, 2019

Medevac and the Good Samaritan: My letter to Scott Morrison (and maybe those who think the Medevac repeal is a good political move)

To the Prime Minister, the Hon Scott Morrison MP,
CC: The Minister for Home Affairs, Peter Dutton MP

Re: The Medevac Bill and our ongoing politicisation of asylum seekers

Mr Prime Minister, I recently had the pleasure of meeting you in Dalby, and introducing you to my kids; a photo opp not all of them appreciated at the time, but that provided significant opportunities for us as a family to talk about civic service and politics and the strange calling and vocation you find yourself in. I was thrilled for the opportunity to explain to them that you can be in politics, and be a Christian (I’m a Presbyterian minister as well as a father… which isn’t to say we’re political as Presbyterians, but rather that I want my kids to see how faith and political action are intertwined).

I did explain that this is a particular hard calling especially the more senior your role in a party, but that we should pray for you and celebrate when Christians are able to bring a faithful presence into the “corridors of power” because the western world we live in has been profoundly shaped by Christians using the levers of government from soft hearts and convictions shaped by the Lord Jesus.

These leaders have often operated from convictions, whether on the right or left, that are both especially Christian in that they reflect a Christian belief that all human life is valuable because all people are made in the image of God, and they have been made by leaders whose character, convictions and relationships with people (and so politics) are shaped by having the mind of Christ. These are Christian politicians who have, because of their Christianity, been given to humble service sacrificing personal ambition for the sake of their neighbour (Philippians 2), and to practicing the commands of Jesus. Especially the commands to love God, and love our neighbour as we love ourselves (Matthew 22), to treat others as we would have them treat us, and even to love our enemies (Matthew 5). I urge you, as our Christian political leader, to rediscover and conserve these values that have helped shape the western world, as we in the west have been profoundly influenced by the teaching, example, and life-giving work of the Lord Jesus particularly as it applies to how our nation treats Asylum Seekers.

Seeing our enemies as human has had a profound impact on the western world (particularly as we practice war, and seek justice) as I’m sure you’re aware; but so too has seeing foreigners as neighbours. Jesus makes it particularly, explicitly, clear that to be a neighbour to someone is not to leave them in a ditch after criminals have taken advantage of them; it’s certainly not to leave someone with wounds unbound as a deterrent to future criminals. I am, of course, referring to the parable of the Good Samaritan, which Jesus tells when someone, looking for a loophole, asks “who is my neighbour” (Luke 10). The Good Samaritan, of course, is the model neighbour in the story. Jesus describes his actions as costly, humanising, love — seeing the humanity of the man in the ditch who was his ideological enemy. Here’s a picture of neighbourly love:

“But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’”

The good neighbour binds up the wounds of the broken; those broken by criminals. The good neighbour does not perpetuate the results of the criminals, or compound their behaviour, in order to deter the criminals or to teach them that their victims are indeed less than human.

And here, Mr Prime Minister, is where I as a pastor, and father, and neighbour, am struggling to reconcile the picture of you meeting my kids and what I’ve told them about leadership and faithful presence, with what must surely be a demand placed on you by your Lord that is complicated to navigate in the context of the Australian policy landscape; a policy landscape on refugees and asylum seekers that you have helped create.

I’d urge you to read the theologian and political theorist James Davison Hunter, who coined the phrase “the culture war” and wrote about how a faithful Christian presence in the corridors of power might change the world, precisely because it has done so historically. One of the points he makes is that our western world tends to politicise everything; to view humans through the lens of political problems, which ends up dehumanising people for the sake of political outcomes. I believe our approach, as a nation, to the complex question of asylum seekers and refugees, including those who arrive by boat, has become so politicised that is has not just dehumanised those who should be our neighbours, but has also dehumanised us as we fail to act as neighbours. This is no longer conservative, but rather destructive to our humanity, and the values that have profoundly shaped the western world.

A dear friend of mine was involved in detention centre operations around the time our nation resolved to use off shore detention as a deterrent to prevent people smuggling. A policy that has existed for some time, and that has, according to reports and the trophy in your office, been instrumental in stopping the boats. Stopping the boats seems a noble and reasonable political goal, especially when paired with the way the story of the good samaritan has infected our national ethos through the faithful presence of many Christians such that we have a generous refugee settlement program (though I think many Christians, myself included, would love to help do more if we depoliticised the refugee problem and its solutions and allowed institutions like the church to be involved in the process more directly). People smugglers are no doubt like the thieves in the story of the Good Samaritan; those who are prepared to see their victims as less than human; who are prepared to take money from those reduced to something, in their imagination, like cattle in a live export ship rather than fully human neighbours. They leave these fellow humans in a ditch; our choice as a nation then is both how we respond to the existence of these thieves and how we bind up the wounds of those they abuse. It does not punish the thieves to leave their victims in a ditch; it certainly does not punish the thieves to leave their victims with wounds unbound, especially if we have the means and capacity to treat those wounds. The deterrent policy looks nothing like the neighbourly actions described in the parable of the good samaritan. It is a departure from the theological vision that shaped the western world; the one conservative governments like yours should seek to conserve in order to both live up to your name and conserve things of great value.

Jesus showed us what neighbourliness and kingship look like in the world that God made; in a world where people are valuable to God, by stepping in to a complex mess — the ditch, where criminals throw their victims — when he died on the cross. He did this as the archetypal version of neighbourly love; one where he became despised like a Samaritan, to not just rescue us from the ditch, but to be beaten, and flogged on our behalf so that we might walk free. He took not only the penalty for our sin — whether we were like the criminals or the victims — but he turned us from his enemies into his beloved neighbours. He saw humankind as human, and valuable. He did this to bind up the wounds of the broken and the oppressed. He did this in a way that profoundly changed and challenged the kingdoms of worldly power that produce violent robbers (and people smugglers). Christianity hollowed out the market for people smuggling in the Roman empire, and the slave trade both then and later in Europe, by reminding the smugglers that their cargo were human; perhaps we might try that approach by treating their victims as human rather than continuing to treat them like cattle? At the very least what virtue and the teaching and example of Christ require of us is to see those afflicted by criminals as our neighbours and so bind up their wounds as we can.

I note that in the same week our government repealed the Medevac laws, under your leadership, to continue our policy of deterrence, and keep the boats stopped, new details emerged about the violence of the Iranian government. I have many friends who fled to Australia, through people smugglers, from Iran. Many who have met neighbours here in our community who care for them; but many who fled and were wounded not just by their government, or by the smugglers, but by us — we aren’t, as a nation, just like the religious people who walk past the man in the ditch in Jesus’ story; we have become like the robbers in order to deter the robbers; our deterent model seems to be built on the idea that we are to be less appealing than both smugglers and the Iranian government.

How do I explain this to my children?

I’ll continue to teach my kids how wonderful it might be for them to love Jesus and serve people in our civic institutions; even if our oldest is only eight and most of this goes over their heads still (now about that education funding I mentioned in Dalby…). And I will continue to pray for you and the government you lead. You have a difficult task made more difficult, not less, by your faith in the crucified Lord Jesus; but Mr Prime Minister — Mr Chief Servant (for that is what minister means) — please lead us towards conserving the things that have made the western world great; an absolute commitment to the value and dignity of each human life. Lives so valuable to God that he entered the ditch to die for us, to bind up our wounds, heal, and restore us to life at great cost; because the cost of not being a neighbour, on our humanity and society, will always be greater than the price of neighbourliness, even if neighbourliness is very expensive indeed.

In Christ,
Rev. Nathan Campbell

December 4, 2019

Why Christians must never acknowledge an altar to an unknown god

Mark Powell has responded to the responses to his piece about why Christians shouldn’t conduct acknowledgments of country. He’s responded, especially to Fr Daryl McCullough’s piece with the classic ‘double down.’

Mark confuses description from some quarters with prescription for all quarters on a couple of occasions; citing examples that back up his claims about pantheism and smoking ceremonies, and then drawing a long bow and shooting arrows into all versions of acknowledgments of country and symbolic uses of smoke. One hopes that he will consistently extend his logic to suggesting we shut down fellowship with the Anglican Church over its use of incense, and stop Presbyterian churches participating in ANZAC Day ceremonies, which are overtly religious and nationalist and just a tiny bit pagan in their remembering the sacrifices of our ancestors. Mark must, of course, be worried about the sort of syncretism that saw the discussion he mentions that happened at our General Assembly happening in a building decked out with the trappings of the ANZAC cult. Pretty much every charge Mark levels at acknowledgments of country can also be levelled at dawn services — so he might, for consistency’s sake, have to reject those syncretistic symbols.

Mark also thinks I called him white in my last post. Having known Mark since I was a kid, and having heard him describe his heritage and his family’s connection to the South Sea Islands during the Assembly, it would be very odd for me to assert that he was white. I didn’t. I said the courts of our church are typically white. I said his impulse to read indigenous practices through a western individualistic political lens was part of the colonial impulse. I hope that clears things up.

Needless to say, I don’t find Mark’s response to the responses very convincing (he has another drive by shot at me over suggesting that there’s a ‘sacramental’ element to nature; to be clear, I don’t think going to the beach is a ‘sacrament’ in the way that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are; but I do believe nature is oriented towards grace; and that the purpose of the natural world is to throw us towards the presence of God in all times and places as the creator who sustains all things by his powerful word. I don’t believe in a secular/sacred divide when it comes to time or place (1 Corinthians 8:6, Ephesians 4:5-6, Romans 11:36). If all time and space is sacred, then recognising this, that the transcendent and immanent realities are always overlapping; not bifurcated; is very similar to what we do in the sacraments though those are particularly oriented to the saving work of Jesus (in the same way I’d say marriage is ‘sacramental’ but not a sacrament).

Anyway. My real beef is this.

Mark insists that acknowledgments of country are a protocol that is always inherently religious; particularly because of the claims made by one source on indigenous spirituality. He says this idolatry disqualifies Christians from using the forms of the protocols because to do so is to invite judgment on our heads.

Someone shoulda told Paul.

Eating food sacrificed to idols or acknowledging that unknown God in Athens are the worst forms of idolatrous syncretism Mark can imagine.

There’s two places one might go to engage with Mark’s argument here; one is in Paul’s treatment of food that had been sacrificed to idols in 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy 4; in 1 Corinthians he says ‘the idols are nothing,’ and ‘the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it’ (he does warn about sharing in the cup of demons in 1 Corinthians 10:14-19). Now. If Mark is right and an acknowledgment of country is always idolatrous such that to participate in a prescribed form is to participate in idolatry, then the cup of demons paradigm might apply. If an acknowledgment of country is always to partake at the table of pantheistic indigenous theology (and if all indigenous theology is pantheistic), then we cannot participate. For Mark this idolatry seems to take the form both of indigenous spirituality and the woke, progressive, lefty politics he hates so much… and the same rule probably applies, if participating in a civic protocol is necessarily to be a woke, progressive, lefty, and so cause division in the church with those who don’t share that ideology, then Christians shouldn’t do it for the sake of Christian unity.

But Mark is self-evidently wrong because he admits that the protocol for an acknowledgment of country is not really established; that the first one was a quasi-spiritual welcome put together by Ernie Dingo; and this is exactly what aboriginal Christian leaders are saying — there is no recipe for a welcome to country; no particular spirituality to be ticked; no formula in the words used for the speech-act to have taken place; the fundamental element of an acknowledgment of country is truth telling about our nation’s past (Mark seems to keep wanting to offer an alternative narrative here with his doubling down on wave theory, but we’ll leave that for now). That some acknowledgments of country are idolatrous does not make all acknowledgments of country idolatrous; and that some are idolatrous does not prevent Christians adopting and adapting the forms to align them with Biblical truths.

Mark seems to believe that all the meaning of a protocol is caught up in one particular form, and one particular sort of content, and that you can’t adapt those forms. Which would be news to the Israelites who melted down gold from Egypt to furnish the temple; and Solomon as he copied and pasted a bunch of Egyptian proverbs bracketing them with the phrase ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’… both the gold, and the proverbs, had particular idolatrous meanings before Israel co-opted them; just as meat did in Corinth.

An acknowledgment of country, because it can mean something different at each different table where it is offered, by each different host, seems to be much more like idol meat — sure, there might be idolatry involved in some of the application of the protocols (and this is also true of smoke ceremonies), the question is whether the symbolism might be re-appropriated and used to preach something true (like ‘the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it’) that invites us to love and serve our neighbour. When Paul writes to Timothy about people wanting to forbid different foods, or practices, on the basis of idolatry, he gives this principle for dealing with created things (particularly things created by God), and their redemption.

“For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer.” — 1 Timothy 4:4-5

But wait… you might say… this is about food and marriage; things that God created. Sure, it’s obvious that we can redeem those by consecrating them (a sacramental approach to created things if ever there was one) and receiving them with thanksgiving… and acknowledgments of country were created as a civic protocol, not by God. There is a spirituality attached to some versions of both acknowledgments and welcomes to country, and smoking ceremonies (just as there is idolatry attached to Anzac ceremonies, and a political mythology too). The question is whether that spirituality is definitive, and inherent to the practice, or whether they might be re-framed by Christians to bridge the gap to God and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Now. If only we had some example of man made, civic, religiosity, being redeemed, and reframed, to connect people to their creator.

Mark seems to believe that any adaptation and reframing of an idolatrous activity or ‘cultural text,’ such as a smoking ceremony necessarily leads to syncretism. So. I’d like to introduce you to the Bible’s chief syncretist. The Apostle Paul.

Mark says “Aboriginal smoking ceremonies are clearly spiritual in nature. Their goal is to explicitly ward off evil spirits.” I’d suggest this is equally true of the altar Paul found on the streets of Athens to “an Unknown God” — an altar the Athenians used to cover all their spiritual bases and explicitly avoid offending any god they’d accidentally missed. A piece of religious superstition; clearly spiritual in nature. Paul, of course, as a Pharisee, knew what idols were — abominable departures from the truth about God; that when Israel occupied the promised land they were meant to destroy. And yet Paul, in Athens, does not pull out the sledgehammer and condemn the Athenians for their misplaced spirituality; he uses that spirituality, and that altar, to build a connection to the God he knows. The God who created all people; even the Greeks, and who appointed them (and those before them) to live in and occupy their lands. Mark doesn’t believe simply conducting a smoking ceremony — using the burning of a created thing as a picture of God’s goodness — in worship ‘sanctifies’ the act of burning; he says “Just because they are done in the context of Christian worship doesn’t sanctify them.” I’d suggest the reframing offered in the context of Christian worship might explicitly be the sort of ‘consecration’ that Paul talks about in 1 Timothy. Mark also rejects the idea that we might use our indigenous neighbours’ previous beliefs about an ‘All father’ Creator Spirit’ to proclaim the God of the Bible, because that would be ‘precisely what syncretism is’… the problem is Paul’s explicit example in Athens. Now. Mark will appeal to the regulative principle and the nature of Christian worship here, perhaps, but I’m in a slightly more maximalist camp on the question of worship than Mark within our denomination (Romans 12:1). And the issue here is that nobody in our denomination is currently suggesting Acknowledgments of Country happen in worship (ie between a call to worship and a benediction in a Sunday service); the question has been whether we can conduct them at all as Presbyterians. Mark objects to any reframing of the civic protocol because he believes all versions of the protocol are idolatrous syncretism, what he defines as the “fusion of diverse religious beliefs and practices!”

Someone should tell Paul that he got it wrong. I mentioned in my last piece that this section at the Areopagus also involves Paul deliberately following the conventions of that court for introducing a new God into the life of Athens. Syncretism. He also favourably quotes their religious philosophers, he, for example, alludes to Zeno the Stoic, who said that the true God doesn’t dwell in a temple, and directly quotes Epimenedes Cretica, a hymn to Zeus, when he says “For in you we live and move and have our being.” Syncretism baby. Pure syncretism. Paul takes the content from a hymn to an idolatrous God, and uses it to proclaim truths about the God of the Bible who reveals himself in Jesus. Syncretism! Or… Pure Gospel proclamation using created things and the humanity of the people he is seeking to reach with the good news.

 “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.

“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’

“Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.” — Acts 17:22-31

How could Paul get it so wrong. Doesn’t he know he is inviting God’s judgment on himself by affirming truths that he found with pagan roots?

The test for whether or not acknowledgments of, or welcomes to, country are ‘pagan’ or idolatrous or not is not ‘what are their origins’ but ‘are we speaking God’s truth,’ and the benefits are ‘are we speaking such truth in a way that invites people to know the God who is just, and a father of all nations, who invites us to come home to him through Jesus; the resurrected king.

December 3, 2019

I can’t do “this” any more (and I’d invite you not to either)

For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to tell people about Jesus as a job. I mean, I also wanted to be a sports journalist, I am quite idealistic about what the press might be and what journalism is, and I enjoyed my time working in public relations. But there has been a deep and abiding desire in my bones (and my genes) to see lives transformed by Jesus as people have their hearts and imaginations fired up by the way of life he offers, that is described in the story of the Bible. This new way of life that involves us being pulled from death and destruction — an old way of life that destroys others — as an act of forgiveness, grace and love from God, where we are given new life with God forever. I love that the pattern of the cross and the hope of resurrection could transform the world for better now, and that I believe it will, ultimately, for eternity. Christianity makes intellectual and emotional sense for me in a way that nothing else does; it lines up with how I think people and societies work (or should work), and offers a profound critique of the alternatives. It answers big questions, and gives bigger ones to explore. It is full of tensions, or mysteries, or paradoxes, that reward curiosity. The Bible is great literature that tells an amazingly integrated story (spanning genres, and millenia), centred on the heroic victory of Jesus through sacrifice, resurrection, ascension, and now rule. A story that we can tell, but that we can also live. I can’t comprehend a more valuable use of my time and energy than contributing to God’s mission in the world. I love the church. I love the way that God calls a bunch of weird people to follow Jesus and pours his Spirit into us to unite us in something bigger than ourselves.

I’ve been blessed to be supported by many people in the last six years (and four years before that as a student) who’ve given money to free me to do this as a full time job; who’ve loved and supported Robyn and I as we’ve supported others, and started our little family. I’ve worked alongside many others, paid and not, who are committed to this cause. We’ve seen lives transformed by the Gospel. This is my life.

But I can’t do “this” anymore.

At least not in the way “this” is happening.

This morning I had to console my four year old daughter because several of her favourite people are leaving our church community. I had to console her because she asked why we were so sad. Why I struggled to get out of bed this morning. Why I don’t want to do “this” anymore. Robyn and I have spent the last few weeks reeling from conversation after conversation with our brothers and sisters in Christ who, for various reasons, won’t be continuing in fellowship with us. And each one of these conversations feels like an amputation.

None of us should experience the sort of phantom limb feeling of looking around one week for the members of our body who were there last week with no idea where those members have gone. None of us should be cutting ourselves off from the body we belong to and are connected to. No parent should have to explain why their big sister in Christ, or their little brother in Christ, is not going to be part of their life any more. I recognise that we don’t live in an ideal world, and that the visible church is a complex and variegated reality; but we could, perhaps, attempt to be a little more idealistic in our execution of what church is meant to be, rather than simply accepting the status quo. Especially if that status quo is deadly and at odds with what the church is meant to be. As a church we’ve chopped off far too many pieces of ourself (or had too many pieces chopped off) over the last few years for that loss not to be dramatically and significantly felt. The job of the pastor seems to me to be a giving of one’s self over an over again, in all sorts of relationships, only for those relationships to suddenly disappear by the autonomous decision of an other; and this isn’t just true for those in ministry; it’s true for any member who stays connected to a body. Staying in church, belonging, often hurts. It can feel like people are wielding their scalpels with one another as we bump into each other, sometimes pruning one another, sometimes chopping into bits that feel more essential, and sometimes causing deep wounds that hurt; but healing and growth actually come through that pain, through wounds being bound up, hurts being forgiven, and blood or an organ or two being donated. Amputation is a terrible and drastic step that alters both the body as a whole, and the body part; even if that part is grafted elsewhere. Sometimes healthy transplants can be vital and life giving to other bodies though, but never without cost.

Our church is in a period of transition; you may have read my manifesto. Part of that transition involves a changing of place, time, and philosophy of ministry, and we’ve invited people to use this moment as an opportunity to commit with us, or look elsewhere. Every time we have made major changes in the structure of our church, people have left us. Some have told us, some have ghosted. I feel like each person who has left our church in the last six years has taken a piece of me with them. Sometimes we have sent people to other churches with our blessing, as an act of Gospel partnership. Some people have left fellowship with us because they’ve left Brisbane. Some have broken fellowship with us over theological disagreements. Some have tried really hard to stay and ultimately felt called to leave for a variety of reasons. There are good ways and bad ways to leave a church; but whether good or bad, each leaving is a cutting away at a unity that is meant to be greater than the unity we experience in the fibres of our embodied being. Paul uses the metaphor of the body to describe the church; it’s one of his favourites. The thing about metaphors is that the reality they point to is always ‘greater’ than the analogy we use to describe them. Metaphors are visual reductions of a concept to make it easier to grasp. The connection we enjoy to one another by the Spirit that dwells in us and units us to Christ is greater than any other connection between people — if Jesus is to be believed as he calls people to leave their family networks to follow him this connection is greater than our biological connection to family.

“Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptised by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.” — 1 Corinthians 12:12-13

I can’t do this anymore because what we do in the west is not church. We’ve commodified the body of Christ so it’s something you can leave without being sent. We’ve individualised our spirituality so that our decisions around church are based on ‘choice’ and ‘personal growth.’ We’ve fragmented community life so that most of us are driving past a variety of churches to attend the community of our preference, and when our preferences change, or our stage of life changes, we change our community. C.S Lewis and Marshall McLuhan both wrote about the damage the automobile (literally ‘self’ mobile) did to village life, but beyond the combustion engine technology continues to wreak havoc on our shared life, fragmenting space and time and the rhythms of our life and freeing us to be autonomous authors of our own destiny and communities in ways that mean we don’t do the hard work of face to face life with people we don’t like, but who we are called to love. I’m not a Luddite, so not suggesting that we should stop driving to churches to be with those we are called to be in fellowship with; those whom we are united with by the Spirit, but I am suggesting that we should recognise the costs of our patterns of life, and the way that “Babylon” and its values keep infecting the church.

Babylon is a metaphor in the Bible. One the New Testament, especially the book of Revelation, picks up to describe the human empire opposed to God in favour of self. Its roots go back to the tower of Babel, where people rather than going into the world to generously and abundantly spread God’s flourishing vision for humanity, decide to ‘make a name’ for themselves. In Revelation, Babylon is depicted as a city built on power and commerce; on grasping hold of the things of this world to build one’s own security. Babylon comes crumbling down. Ultimately. And yet we still, as Christians whose future in the “New Jerusalem” is secure, keep turning back to Babylon for our patterns of life, in ways that shape our patterns of church. Babylon, as the empire that took Israel into captivity in the exile, offered a very different narrative about the good human life to Israel’s narrative, a story that came with very different patterns of behaviour, forging a very different character in its people.

Lots of Old Testament scholars argue that the Biblical creation narrative, where God brings life and order and makes us in his image, is in such stark contrast to the Babylonian narrative (The Enuma Elish) that it must have had a particular significance in counter-forming Israel during the exile. Some believe the parallels between the Genesis story and the Enuma Elish (and other ancient creation stories) are so strong that you should read them as polemics or correctives of the sort of Babylonian story that Israel might have been tempted to be ‘re-created’ by during the exile. The Enuma Elish depicts only the king as the ‘image of God,’ and the gods of Babylon as chaotic, destructive, self-interested figures who are obsessed with conquest and its spoils. This story was used to justify Babylonian military expansion around the ancient near east, but also shaped a certain approach to human life, where people are objects, with no inherent dignity, to be used to secure pleasure and prosperity; for the gods, and those who were most ‘godlike’ in their position in society. To be Babylonian was to approach life as a consumer; a consumer of the world, and a consumer of others. To flourish in Babylon one had to climb the hierarchy to become as close to the gods as possible; we see an interesting hint of this in the book of Daniel in those within the Babylonian court who do all in their power, in a dog-eat-dog world, to entrap Daniel and remove him from influence.

In his book Subversive Christianity: Imaging God in Dangerous Times, scholar Brian Walsh says our situation is very like Israel’s in exile in Babylon:

“We live in Babylon. Babylonian definitions of reality; Babylonian patterns of life, Babylonian views of labour, and Babylonian economic structures dominate our waking and our sleeping. And, like the exiled Jews, we find it very tempting to think that all of this is normal…

If our presence in this culture is to be Christian we must recognise with Christian insight the profound abnormality of it all. This means that we cannot allow our experience of exile to define reality for us. We must not allow the Babylonian economistic worldview so to captivate our imaginations that its patterns, its views, and its priorities become normal for us. This was also the central problem for the exiled Jews in Babylon. One of the ways in which they dealt with this problem was by constantly reminding each other of who they really were. In the face of Babylonian stories and myths, Jews told and retold their own stories. In fact, it was most likely at this time that they first wrote down one of their most foundational stories—the creation story.”

The difference is, unlike Israel, we are no longer exiled from God. It is clear what our story is; because in baptism and the pouring out of the Spirit we share in the death and resurrection of Jesus; our hearts have been made new as we are united to Jesus, caught up in the life of God, and marked out as children of God in the world. We are home. Not exiled. Babylon is a foreign land to us because we belong to a new kingdom with a new creation story. We have a new Adam. Jesus. We are new creations. Babylon’s days are numbered (see Revelation 18).

The Enuma Elish had its own tower of Babel story. Scholars have long suggested Babel was what’s called a ‘ziggurat’ — a stairway to the heavens; a stairway that would allow people to ascend to the heavens as those in the Babel story wanted, but that would also bring the gods down to earth. In the Enuma Elish the city of Babylon is founded as a ziggurat. In the Babylonian version of the story the tower isn’t built by people who want to be godlike, but by the god, Marduk. He announces his plan:

“Beneath the celestial parts, whose floor I made firm,
I will build a house to be my luxurious abode.
Within it I will establish its shrine,
I will found my chamber and establish my kingship.
When you come up from the Apsû to make a decision
This will be your resting place before the assembly.
When you descend from heaven to make a decision
This will be your resting place before the assembly.
I shall call its name ‘Babylon’, “The Homes of the Great Gods”,
Within it we will hold a festival: that will be the evening festival.

The Babel story, in its ancient near eastern context, is the Bible’s story of the creation of Babylon; a temple-city opposed to God. A story of people wanting to be godlike; of wanting to be like Marduk; of wanting to rule on earth and in the heavens. It is a story of a certain sort of autonomy; of self-rule. A story of people being like Marduk, the Babylonian god of war and destruction and consumption. So much of our approach to church in the west is Babel like; it’s Babylonian. Our New Eden story offers a stunning alternative picture to Marduk; Marduk who descends from the heavens so that his people-slaves will serve and entertain him…

“Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” Then he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”

He said to me: “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life. — Revelation 21:3-6

This new Jerusalem is our future; not the new Babylon.

We are new creations in Christ living with this new creation as our end; our ‘telos’ — our vision of the good, flourishing, life. We are not to be caught up in Babylon because Babylon will be destroyed. Violently.

Babylon is consumerism.

Babylon is a pattern of self-rule.

Babylon is seeing others, and communities, as things that serve you, rather than a body that is held together by love.

Babylon is the pattern of this world that produces digital disembodiment in platforms driven by a sinister ‘surveillance capitalism’ that harvests us digitally like we’re some sort of organ farm, and sells our desires and whims to the highest bidder; platforms that exert soft power influence on us reshaping how we see the world in ways we don’t even notice as we uncritically embrace technology (like the car, or the smartphone, or new social media patterns of behaviour) that subtly deforms our practices, our imaginations, and our desires, and so re-casts the image we live in the world. We end up bearing the images of the gods of Babylon. Babylon comes with rulers who become more and more ‘godlike’ at your expense; whether digital platforms that know more about you than you know about yourself, or their owners who become obscenely rich selling what they know to people who are going to sell you stuff, or a vision of life that will subtly change the way you interact with the world and others. Babylon comes with the story that says ‘the most important person in this world is you’ and ‘freedom is autonomous individual choice in the pursuit of your authentic inner self.’ Babylon comes with the story that says people and relationships are disposable. That community exists to serve your needs. That relationships with brothers and sisters in Christ can be severed by your autonomous wielding of the surgeon’s knife without concern for the impact that cut causes on anyone but you. The pattern of Babylon has us thinking about our immediate pleasure and needs; recalibrating our hearts via the ticking of the second hand of the clock, not the hour hand or the eon hand. It has us making decisions without the ability to hold a preferred picture of the future in view; relationships become interchangeable and disposable because we want quick fixes not the transformation that comes via a patient plodding along with the same people, in the same direction, for twenty years — and the requisite making of sacrifices here and now to secure a future end. Babylon has us obsessed with short term results against metrics that are ephemeral — like wealth and power — rather than long term results. Babylon is what causes a climate catastrophe and leaves us ill equipped to do the sort of planning or sacrificing now to avert a diabolical future. But Babylon’s own future is secure precisely because Babylon is diabolical. It is the Devil’s way of life.

Church is the opposite. The Gospel — our new creation story — says that your neighbours — your brothers and sisters in Christ — are united to you by something stronger than the biological tie of blood; it says that you exist to serve one another as you are transformed by the Spirit to love and serve and build up each other. It says that we should not give up the habit of meeting together with people, that we are to forgive and forbear and maintain connection to one another and that growth as the body comes through the bond of love, and peace, and fellowship, as we let the message of Christ dwell among us richly. It says church is not a product that we buy, or discard, but a community of people we belong to, marked out by a shared story, that comes with shared experiences, and a shared vision of the future. Our story is not that we build a stairway to the heavens to dwell with the Gods, but that God in Jesus descended from the heavens, to a cross, in order that God might dwell in us by his Spirit — uniting us to each other — and that ultimately he will dwell with us for eternity. Our story is that our gatherings now, face to face, are gatherings where we reject autonomy and automobility and ‘freedom via authentic selfishness’ — where we resist Babylon — in order to be shaped in the image of Christ through belonging to one another as the body of Christ; God’s living temple in the world.

The church is life giving. It unites people. It holds us together. It should be impossible to leave a church without being sent out (the pattern in the New Testament, I reckon), so long as those you gather with are your brothers and sisters. Churches grow — not numerically, but that too — when people stay connected to each other for the long haul, even when it appears your particular needs aren’t being met as well as they might be elsewhere. Churches grow when people work hard at loving each other imperfectly, through the ups and downs, over an extended period of time. The best results for church aren’t immediate but are long term. Church is like marriage; or family.It is not meant to be disposable.

Babylonian church — an attempt to live the story of Babylon at the same time as living the story of the Gospel — attempting to synthesise its patterns with the patterns of Jesus and his body — is costly and destructive; and the bodies pile up.

And I can’t do “this” any more. I won’t.

I can’t be part of a church that people leave easily; a church that is as disposable of a pair of worn out running shoes; where obsolescence is built in to keep you buying more (and where those shoes are increasingly made of cheap materials put together by cheaper labour).

The church can’t afford to do this any more. Firstly, because this, more than anything else I suspect, is going to burn out leaders of churches more than any other factor; either as they play the Babylonian game and try to grow churches through transfer growth from disenfranchised consumer Christians, or as they chop of piece after piece of themselves; seeing those they’ve poured love and time and energy into walk out the door and into some other community. That old sexual purity scare tactic where we were once told that sex is like sticky tape is a terrible way to promote the true, created, purpose and goodness of sex, but the oneness we experience in the body of Christ, brought into oneness by the Spirit, is, at least for Paul in 1 Corinthians, part of the same extended metaphor he uses to talk about sex and the oneness two bodies experience in sex. We are one body. We are meant to be a community built on communion with God, via the Spirit (expressed at a shared table), not a consumity.

Secondly, the church can’t afford to do this any more because Babylon’s destiny will be our destiny if we operate as Babylonian church. The patterns of this world are Babylonian and are geared towards making church fail because they are shaped by a profoundly different creation story to the church; they are shaped by the anti-Gospel; new forms of the Enuma Elish that turn us into gods and technology and consumption into the key for us having power and dominion and a godlike ability to fight against the limits put upon us by space and time.

I can’t do Babylonian church anymore.

Part of the New Eden Project was a recognition that we have, for years, perpetuated consumer Christianity in our practices as a church; and there’s been a live by the sword, die by the sword reality at play as some people have left us for greener pastures, rather than engaging in the difficult business of sticking it out in the body of Christ and working for the good of all. Some of this being complicit has been caught up in limiting the ability for different parts of the body to operate for the benefit of all.

I met with a friend recently, another pastor, who has launched a new church plant in the last few years relentlessly committed to being anti-consumer. For this other church this looks like changing how gatherings happen so that every member is involved, changing the expectations around time and community so that church isn’t just an event you turn up to and consume in as short a time period as possible, so that you can get right back to Babylon, but an event where everybody participates, and one that lingers.

We so desperately need to change how we approach church; and by ‘we’ I might first mean our family, and our church community, but the project is so much bigger than that. Babylon will be destroyed. Don’t conform to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Don’t get caught up in Babel projects; instead find a community that longs and lives for the new Eden; God’s presence with us, one for us and given to us in Jesus, and through the pouring out of the Spirit that brings life, and unites us to each other.

Please, if you catch this vision, if you share this frustration with the status quo; don’t leave your church. You might get sent by your church one day to be part of some new thing. But don’t leave your church. Stay. Commit. For the long haul. Plod away. Resist Babylon.

December 3, 2019

Why Aussie churches should acknowledge country

We Presbyterians are, next time our General Assembly meets in three years, deciding whether or not Presbyterians should conduct acknowledgments of country, or facilitate welcomes to country, in Presbyterian Church events.

I think it’s a no brainer. Others, including the Reverend Mark Powell, disagree. Mark has rehashed his arguments against acknowledgments of country in a public forum over on Eternity News.

I vehemently disagree with Mark on this issue; which won’t surprise him because we disagree on most things. I think his piece in Eternity is the worst form of religious culture war propaganda (up there with his columns in the Spectator, which are typically just culture war fodder, rather than being explicitly religious). While there’s an ‘opposite’ position already published on Eternity, and while I’d love to hear from Aboriginal Christian Leaders like Brooke Prentis (who Mark names in his piece) and Aunty Jean Phillips (who has been exceptionally helpful to me in ways you can read about here), there is, I think, a place for a fellow Presbyterian Minister to respond (so someone who is definitely a university educated male, and highly likely to be white). I don’t think being male, middle class, educated, and white prohibits someone from having an opinion, or from being right, or from speaking — but I do think when a room of decision makers, like our assembly, is made up almost exclusively of one type of people (men), with a fairly homogenous (though not exclusively western) cultural background, the onus is on us to listen well to those not in the room, not just to each other. I remain optimistic that our denomination will land somewhere good on this issue. I find myself feeling like there’s a similar dynamic going on here that was at play in the same sex marriage debate, where the ‘political ends’ shape our engagement with others rather than pastoral and evangelistic ends; like Mark I believe politics is also a form of love, and an outworking of the Gospel, but I believe our politics are meant to be pastoral and evangelistic as we are ambassadors of Jesus, through whom God makes his appeal for all people to be reconciled to him. There’s a consistency between this Eternity article and what you’ll find in Mark’s pieces on the Spectator; there’s a fusion of a certain form of western individual liberalism, a syncretism even, with Christian theology. I often feel that Mark’s positions are more concerned about politics and winning a culture war (or converting people to a syncretised western individualism and an individualised Gospel), than they are about bringing people into the kingdom; there’s a degree to which to accept Mark’s vision of the truth you must accept his late modern political assumptions (that late modern politics has to some extent been shaped by a protestant form of Christianity is not lost on me).

Here are my arguments against Mark Powell’s arguments.

  1. For Aboriginal Christian Leaders, acknowledgments of country and welcomes to country mean nothing like what Powell insists they mean. Powell reads the culture, and these ‘cultural texts’ through a prism of Western individualism (that comes through in his argument), and an idiosyncratic theological grid. To impose either that social or theological grid on others without listening to them is the very worst of the colonial impulse. Mark would do well to listen to people like Brooke, or even those indigenous men and women serving in our denomination before telling indigenous people what these aspects of their culture actually means or represents. I’ll include an Acknowledgment of Country I wrote, in consultation with Brooke, for a wedding for someone from our church at the end.
  2. The Bible consistently connects identity to land; and has God appointing the boundaries in which different people live and are connected to land. Think Adam and Eve in the garden as ‘gardening’ stewards, Israel in the ‘promised land’ — whose fortunes were intertwined so that blessing would flow from the land to Israel if they were obedient and worshipped God, while the land would become harsh and unlivable if they worshipped idols. But also, this is a point Paul explicitly makes in Acts 17: “From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.” Mark makes a very strange argument from the work of Manning Clark to refute this, but regardless of who the original custodians of this country were, Mark’s version of the history of European settlement is a troubling one that seems in part to be based on recognising that to make reparations would be expensive for individuals (who benefit from the historic dispossession of the occupants of this land), and institutions (though Mark’s western individualism is consistently applied here). The Bible consistently recognises the intergenerational cost of sin; from the ground being cursed because of Adam, to Israel in exile, to Pilate’s words about the blood of Jesus being on the heads of those who killed him and on futute generations. The Old Testament jubilee laws recognise an historic ‘birthright’ connection to country, and a corporate identity, closer to indigenous beliefs about connection to country than a western individual liberalism that turns land into something that individuals and corporations can own for perpetuity (not to mention foreign investment).
  3. The Bible has a sacramental, though not idolatrous, view of creation. To make all sacramental approaches to nature idolatrous is to throw out a whole bunch of baby with the bathwater; or to avoid the “abusus non tollit usum” principle (wrong use does not negate right use). If the divine nature and character of God are revealed from what has been made, and if the heavens and earth declare the glory of God, and if the Lord of heaven and earth does not dwell in temples made by human hands but put people all over the world so that we might seek him; then those places that are recognised as beautiful, that thrust us towards the transcendent as they take our breath away are truly sacred, but also we should not be surprised that such places become ‘sacred’ in idolatrous systems. Regarding Mark’s treatment of Brooke in his piece, Brooke (who was recently appointed as the CEO of Common Grace) says she was drawing on Stan Grant’s observation that ‘the sporting field’ is the most sacred place in Australian culture; she wasn’t even making the theological point that I am.
  4. Acknowledgments of Country, or Welcomes to Country, especially those conducted by Christians, do not deny that ‘the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it’ — in fact they acknowledge that, and the role God gave humanity as stewards or custodians.
  5. Even if there are idolatrous forms of an Acknowledgment of Country or a Welcome to Country, and that is quite possible, there are lots of other idolatrous forms of things we westerners embrace; the Presbyterian Assembly, for example, took place in a church building with a metal archway entrance bearing the words ‘Lest We Forget’ with flagpoles carrying the Union Jack and the Australian flag (but no Indigenous flag).
  6. Even if there are idolatrous beliefs associated with traditional indigenous religion, as there are with every non Christian belief, it is possible for us, as Christians, to hear the existential cry of those practices and show how it is answered in the Gospel by participating in adapted forms of the cultural text or artefact. This, for example, is what Paul does in Athens as he introduces a new foreign God to a place searching for meaning through connection to the transcendent; Paul does this by following the cultural conventions for introducing a new God to the Areopagus in Athens (there’s a paper by Rev. Dr Bruce Winter that makes this case about the structure and content of Paul’s speech in Athens).
  7. There is, perhaps, very good reason historically, but also presently, that Presbyterian Churches are not known for having Indigenous membership that reflects the breakdown of the population in any given area. Many of these are structural — both around building design (our buildings feel ‘institutional’ (the ANZAC arch being a great example), and because of our forms of worship being quite western and structured. But our failure to listen, and indeed, our baptising of ‘not listening’ as something sacred where we came bringing the light of the Gospel such that we should not listen to our indigenous brothers and sisters in Christ who bridge that cultural gap, insist that people leave their aboriginality behind to become Christians (while not leaving our western individualism and conservative culture war politics behind), seems to me to be a significant blocker to our ongoing witness in partnership with our indigenous brethren, and it stops us acknowledging the historic injustice that so many of out Aussie neighbours are now prepared to acknowledge. Plus, in a week where we’re seeing more ongoing horrific institutional abuse, including deaths in custody, it’s just massively tone deaf to be making such an argument now. It’s possible for us to walk and chew gum; so I’d love to see Mark make some acknowledgment that embodied practices of sin, by individuals and communities and institutions end up affecting systems so that we can speak of systemic sin and its implications on different groups of people within our community. I’d love to hear him explain how deaths in custody emerged as a problem ex nihilo.
  8. Conducting theologically thoughtful acknowledgments of country that articulate Biblical truths is not ‘syncretism’ but an invitation for our community to connect its desire for justice, a connection to country, and a desire for reconciliation to the one in whom God is reconciling all things. The Lord Jesus. We don’t lose anything by taking a form of communication that is not inherently idolatrous, and like Israel with Egyptian gold, and Augustine with oratory, using that gold to preach truth about Christ. An acknowledgment of country is not a golden calf, but a sometimes idolatrous expression of our humanity, that can also be used to connect people with the truth about our creator; as some of our own indigenous poets have said… (Which is, of course, how Paul engages with Stoic philosophy while in Athens).

It’s not that hard to do this. Here’s the wording of an acknowledgment of country I put together listening to Brooke Prentis, reproduced with her permission. I’d love to hear more about how this is awful pagan syncretism… or actually, I wouldn’t.

“We would like to acknowledge the ____ people who are those appointed by God as the traditional custodians of this land — both within the area called ______, which we know as _____, and of this nation.

We would like to pay our respect to Elders past and present of the _____ nation for the way they have stewarded the creator’s good creation, and we extend that respect to other indigenous people past and present, and those future generations who we pray will continue this task, hoping that our creator will continue reconciling all things to himself in Jesus Christ.“

November 28, 2019

How Jesus met a pagan fascist through Facebook

“I’m done with Christianity, thank the gods.”

This was my first interaction with Steven Pidgeon, then going by Sigurd, or Vidar, Pidgeon depending on the social media account he was logged into at the time. He posted this response to an Easter advertisement from our church that we had pushed out via Facebook advertising in 2017.

My own personal Facebook policy, for our church’s online presence, is that you should always feed the trolls. So I clicked through to his profile, where I found a man who had apparently recently converted to paganism, sharing memes from the TV show Vikings, and discussing participating in online ‘blots’ — a Norse ritual — with other Norse pagans from around the world. I also found a series of troubling posts about Hitler, and race. Steven, or Sigurd (named for the legendary hero of Norse mythology), turned out to be an interesting man obsessed with Tolkien, white purity, fascist politics, and religion. I noticed that he was based near me, in Brisbane.

“I’ve never met a legit pagan before, I find this fascinating, I see you’re in Brisbane, I’d love to grab a beer and hear your story.”

I posted in this in response.

Steven sent me a friend request. I’ve since learned that Steven loves social media and building connections with all sorts of people from around the world. In our virtual conversations I learned that his back story was even more complicated than I imagined. He’d spent the last 17 years living in a religious community in the Blue Mountains, the infamous Twelve Tribes, a community with a particular view of the end times seeking to recreate twelve tribes, faithful and pure communities, of Christians who will bring about the end times. Before this, Steven had been, as a teenager, a Pentecostal, and then a Mormon. Steven rose through the ranks in the Twelve Tribes. His IQ is off the charts. He learned Biblical Greek and Hebrew, and made trips to the United States to ‘prophet school;’ often acting as a teacher in the community. At some point in the years leading up to his departure Steven became suspicious of Israel as a political entity, and began reading anti-Semitic literature, including Hitler’s Mein Kampf. He found the politics of national socialism intriguing. He also smuggled a phone into the community — which exists cut off from the outside world except through their businesses (like the Yellow Deli café in the Blue Mountains), and their missionary activities. At some point, his interest in politics, and his reading, led him to start his own political party, the Australian Freedom Party. He started to connect with people on social media, and questioning the teachings of the community. The more he knew, the more they unravelled, eventually he decided to exit this group who were like a family to him for most of his adult life. His exit wasn’t straightforward, nor was it straight into paganism, or fascism.

Steven is a convinced theist; his approach to testing truth claims of different religions is ‘full immersion’ — not baptism, though his Pentecostal, Mormon, and Twelve Tribes history mean he’s chalked up double digits for baptisms — he invests himself deeply into the plausibility structures for beliefs; the communities of believers. Steven spent some time in a Buddhist community in the Blue Mountains, and then moved into a Mosque in Sydney. He spent a period of time as a Muslim “revert,” grappling with the text of the Koran, while living in community with Muslim friends, who eventually organised for him to move to Brisbane where he found employment in a kebab shop, and enrolled in a Business degree at Griffith University. His experiences in Christianity, the Twelve Tribes, and Islam, and his interests in politics, and particular, the political vision of national socialist movement Order15, led him to explore and embrace white nationalism, and Odinism as a ‘white’ religion, disconnected from any religion with Jewish heritage. He began to embrace this identity; wearing a Mjolnir hammer around his neck, immersing himself in Norse Mythology, and participating in message boards, and social media groups with other pagans who were embracing the old religion as part of a commitment to ethnic purity. In embracing this identity Steven, who doesn’t do things by halves, adopted a racist persona, and expressed racist sentiments consistent with Naziism and white supremacy, while disconnecting from the Islamic community who had moved him to Brisbane. This extraction process was not without complications — his employment and housing were both connected to Brisbane’s Muslim community. Steven packed all his belongings into a backpack and bought a tent; prepared to embrace life as a wanderer, like those in the epic tales he loved — whether Norse, or from Tolkien. He eventually found a share house, but found himself in a city a long way from family, and friends, only connecting to his new ‘community’ online.

Then Easter happened.

We’d, by chance, themed our Easter series around Tolkien’s view of the Gospels as an epic true fairy story; a theme explored in his On Fairy Stories, where the Gospel and its joyful resolution in the resurrection is the ultimate ‘eucatastrophe’ — the sudden, joyous, turn that gives fairy tales their mythic constitution and quality. Steven and I were able to share a mutual appreciation for Tolkien. He shared my invitation with his pagan friends on Facebook, asking for their advice. Given that we’d become Facebook friends I was able to see, and participate, in this conversation where pagans from around the world suggested he ‘bring an axe’ and ‘be prepared to go full Lindisfarne’ on this Christian priest (Lindisfarne is the site of a famous massacre where Viking pagans put Christian monks to the sword and plundered their relics). Steven was lonely, he loves speaking to people about politics and faith, so he accepted my invitation to share a beer at the pub.

Here he is waiting for our first meeting; not knowing the twist his adventure would take.

I was genuinely fascinated to hear his story; I’d seen John Safran’s segment on modern pagans in John Safran Vs God years before, and despite Steven’s apparent racism and the risk of being smote by an axe, it was obvious that he was an intelligent man with an interesting journey. I committed to sharing a beer with Steven in a safe, and public, space; and I listened to his story. I asked questions. I didn’t, in our first meeting, push back on anything in particular except the idea that the Christianity he rejected looked nothing like orthodox Christian belief. We parted agreeing to keep in touch. I found the experience fascinating, because Steven’s story is truly remarkable. About a month later my wife and I were returning by bus from a football game, and we happened to bump into Steven at the bus stop; he’s not one to believe in coincidence. We chatted briefly at the bus stop, and then a few weeks later he sent me a message. His New Guard movement — a local fascist group — was meeting in the city in a couple of weeks, some of the members of the fascist movement were churchgoers who were planning to go to church after their meeting, but he had decided to come along to our gathering instead. He thought he might try it out this coming weekend to get his head around transport logistics in Brisbane.

His first Sunday was a perfect week for a racist fascist with a history in a community trying to live out the vision of the church in Acts 2 to visit our community. We were in the middle of a Bible overview series, and his visit coincided with our look at Pentecost, and the way the pouring out of the Spirit was the beginning of God’s kingdom expanding to include people of every tribe and tongue and nation. As if to highlight the contrast, the Bible was read that Sunday by a member of our community who is of Indian heritage, and we incorporated the baptism of two Iranian converts into the sermon. Steven hasn’t missed many weeks of church since that day.

Our church shares lunch together after our service, and introducing your multi-ethnic community to a pagan, racist, facist, is an interesting challenge. As a community we have long cherished the idea that people belong before they believe, and can come into our community as they are. We believe that conversation and connection, and the experience of Christian hospitality and love make the Gospel plausible, and that the Gospel has the power to change lives. So Steven was welcomed; he shared lunch with us, and I directed him to one of our members who happens to be a professor in Old Testament (whose Hebrew is much better than mine — but then, so is Steven’s). This member of our church was a safe pair of hands, who again listened to Steven and answered some of his questions about orthodox Christian belief. That day, when Steven went home, he went home questioning whether the Christianity he was ‘done with’ was really Christianity at all; I sent him works by Augustine, Athanasius, and C.S Lewis. He spent the next two weeks watching the entire back catalogue of our church’s sermons that were available online. Over time, as he explored the Reformed theological outlook, Christianity became the lens through which he saw the world. His racist Facebook posts didn’t stop straight away, there was a period of transition. He threw himself into a community of Christians on campus at Griffith (where he was blowing his studies out of the park, recording the highest mark ever given in one subject, and achieving exceptional academic results across the board). Steven was a 37 year old who had never handled money for himself; who had been withdrawn from society for 18 years, missing most pop culture, and plenty of news. He was readjusting to life in the real world, outside the intense communal life of the Twelve Tribes. A couple of months later, in a conversation we were having, Steven and I both realised he had become a Christian; that not only did he believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus, but that Jesus was his Lord and we were seeing the fruit of that in his life, his changed view of others, and his evolving political convictions. Steven had repented; we recognised that to do this and to be able to truly say “Jesus is Lord” was an act of the Holy Spirit. Steven, despite his journey taking him to all corners of the religious globe, had come home. Steven is now my friend. He has been a much-loved member of our church family ever since, and, if not for his desire to own his past and acknowledge his mistakes and the way his journey has developed, almost nobody in our community would know about the darkest chapter in his story. Steven Pidgeon, the online Nazi pagan, has become Steven Pidgeon, our servant hearted, genius, brother in Christ, a man who desires that people from every tribe and tongue and nation meet Jesus, and that he might use his gifts, and the degrees he earns through his study, to serve his neighbours around the globe, in some ways making amends for the horrid views he held for a short period of time.

He now devotes himself to his studies, and his social media posts are much more likely to be about very obscure questions around Ancient Near Eastern inscriptions (where our Old Testament lecturer’s PhD work on Akkadian language came in handy), reflections on what he is hearing at church, or his experiences as a Law Student at university. This reflects how he spends his time and energy in real life.

This week a group of Antifa (anti-fascist) activists unearthed the archives of IronMarch, a web portal for Nazis and fascists that Steven contributed to up until 2017. He was named and shamed as an Australian neo-Nazi. Those doing the shaming were not prepared to accept that transformation is possible, and reached out to different groups and institutions Steven has connected to since repudiating paganism, and the Nazi, or ‘Alt-Right’ movement. I’m sharing this story now because Steven has genuinely changed, and is genuinely a member of a church community committed to a cause that is fundamentally opposed to fascism. I share Antifa’s issues with fascism, and Naziism, in all its forms; but it might be that there are better methods for changing hearts and minds; it might be that the Gospel of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit can bring about an amazing transformation in someone’s politics, and this doesn’t happen by exposing, “doxxing,” or attacking a person you’ve never met on the internet, but by meeting them face to face, connecting, understanding, and loving your ideological enemy, and inviting them to experience a community living out a thoroughly different politics. Maybe our world needs more people sitting down for a beer with those we oppose, rather than entering a vicious cycle of trolling and insults.

Maybe Easter changes everything.

November 23, 2019

Fame does not qualify you to be a preacher

There’s a worrying trend developing amidst the church around a desperate bid for us to be ‘relevant’ and ‘change the culture’ of the world. A trend that is having the opposite effect of changing the culture of the church.

This trend is a through line that runs in the U.S evangelical church’s obsession with Trump, the Aussie church’s obsession with Israel Folau (until this week), and everybody’s new obsession with Kanye West. We want to be noticed and normal. We want to restrain the excesses of our society and we’re so used to the levers of power and cultural influence ‘from above’ — from ‘influencers’ being pulled, that when an influencer becomes a Christian we thrust them off their pedestal and behind a pulpit as soon as we can. We also keep building pedestals and pulpits for fame adjacent Christians — like CEOs of lobby groups who build political platforms for their video “preaching” — but neither being famous, nor fame adjacent, qualifies a person as a preacher or teacher.

Both Israel Folau and Kanye West have pivoted from very public expressions of their Christian faith to the pulpit. Both are now operating as teachers in communities; neither is qualified in any way to do so. The apostle Paul says teaching, or being an overseer, is a noble task but is not for recent converts (1 Timothy 3:6)… or lovers of money (1 Timothy 3:3).  Both Folau and Kanye run the risk of damaging the witness of the Gospel if they keep functioning as preachers without being trained or qualified, and we run the risk of damaging the witness of the church to the crucified king if we keep treating celebrity itself as a virtue and so trading on celebrity for our own relevance, or the proclamation of the Gospel.

Character, gifting, and calling qualify a person as a preacher. The ability to ‘rightly divide the word of truth’ qualifies a person to be a preacher. Unfortunately it seems that neither Izzy, nor Kanye, nor Martyn Iles (or the Australian Christian Lobby) are equipped to lead the church theologically, as teachers or preachers. And this matters — because both our politics and our witness to the Gospel are actually profoundly theological exercises. We evangelicals, in our desire to win people to Jesus (and to follow Paul in ‘becoming all things to all people’) have somehow baptised pragmatism — the getting of ‘results’ — measured in converts, over the substance of the Gospel message and the way it produces a certain ethos, or virtues, that are to be part and parcel with Gospel preaching.

There’s a deep irony that some of the justification for cultural engagement comes from 1 Corinthians, where Paul starts by outlining how the content of his message is the foolishness of the cross of Jesus, which is the power of God — not worldly power or status. The city of Corinth was obsessed with fame; especially with famous orators; sophists. People who valued style over substance and ability and results over character and conviction. Paul smashes this. He comes to the Corinthians embodying the Gospel of the crucified Jesus; when he writes to them again about their obsession with the ‘super apostles’ in 2 Corinthians, he gives a long list of his foolishness and suffering and being unimpressive as the resume for a Gospel preacher. When he describes himself in 1 Corinthians and his social position as a preacher he says:

For it seems to me that God has put us apostles on display at the end of the procession, like those condemned to die in the arena. We have been made a spectacle to the whole universe, to angels as well as to human beings. We are fools for Christ, but you are so wise in Christ! We are weak, but you are strong! You are honoured, we are dishonoured! To this very hour we go hungry and thirsty, we are in rags, we are brutally treated, we are homeless. We work hard with our own hands. When we are cursed, we bless; when we are persecuted, we endure it; when we are slandered, we answer kindly. We have become the scum of the earth, the garbage of the world—right up to this moment. — 1 Corinthians 4:9-13

This is him imitating his crucified king. The one who died a humiliating death reserved for slaves; the scum of the earth, to show God’s upside down world altering kingdom. The power of God is not found in fame. Being famous is not a qualification for being a preacher; our bizarre desire for famous Christians to represent Christianity publicly as though they are preachers, and to not call out the problems that come from that public representation turning into occupying a pulpit and so, potentially, speaking the word of God to his people and the world is a reprehensible departure from the Gospel that mirrors the situation Paul addresses in Corinth.

Stop it.

I understand Kanye’s desire to preach about the grace that it appears has been given to him. But there is no way he is ready for the task of preaching yet.

I understand Izzy’s passion to save people from God’s wrath; but he is not just unqualified as a preacher of the Gospel, he is disqualified because he explicitly rejects the Trinity.

And yet preacher after preacher, for who knows what reason beyond — rejoicing that Christ is preached by a celebrity — have joined the Australian Christian Lobby’s Martyn Iles in lionising these two figures. Martyn Iles even doubled down on Folau’s faithfulness this week when everybody else in the world was realising that Folau’s brand of religion is a long way removed from the Gospel of Jesus. He did this just weeks after celebrating Kanye’s conversion. The same Kanye who in an interview last week said he’s considering changing his name to “Christian Genius Billionaire West,” and running for president — hardly the response modelled by Zaccheus and promoted in Luke’s Gospel where Jesus explicitly says “you cannot love both God and money.” This week he appeared at Joel Osteen’s church proclaiming himself the “greatest artist God has created” and saying that God now has him on his side. His sermonettes that you can watch online are mostly expressions about him, and the influence he will now bring because he is on God’s side. None of this means Kanye is not a Christian; what it does mean is that Kanye is not qualified to be a preacher of the Gospel, especially not simply on the basis of fame… The rapid endorsement of these famous people as preachers might mean that there are lots of preachers out there whose qualifications need some renewing.

Perhaps the only thing worse than famous people who become Christians who have the task of preaching thrust upon them by a celebrity-infatuated church, is those who cynically resort to the tools of fame and power to build some sort of preaching or teaching ministry. The only thing worse than preachers or leaders getting photo opps with celebrities (think Osteen and Kanye, or Iles and Folau), are preachers who seem to just perpetually post glamour shots of themselves or photos accompanied by pull quotes from Sunday’s sermon. These are the antithesis of the Gospel and the ministry it should produce as we follow the example of Jesus.

We could do worse than looking to the example of Paul as he followed the example of the crucified king. Who was careful to ensure that the ‘noble task’ of leading and teaching be passed on to those recognised by the church communities they taught as ‘reliable people’ who were ‘qualified to teach others’ (2 Timothy 3:1-3), who charged Timothy to “preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction,” and to do this because “the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.”

Those teachers might just be celebrities who say that the Gospel is just about personal salvation from hell, or about political victory over the immoral leaders of the ‘gay agenda,’ or about all manner of things that we give a pass simply because it seems good to us that “Christ is preached.” This Washington Post piece on how Kanye, like Trump, has embedded a certain form of ‘evangelicalism’ that focuses on individual salvation and self-improvement, in the black Gospel music tradition, is worth considering. Kanye’s conversion, so far, certainly hasn’t looked like doing anything but switching the market he sells his clothing line and music to — and talking an awful lot about having met Jesus. Our hope for Kanye is not that he might make the Gospel relevant by converting lots more celebrities to bring a revival (as he’s expressed his mission), but that he might be surrounded by faithful witnesses who model humility and the power of the crucifixion to him such that his future suggestions about name changes don’t run completely at odds with the virtues that come from a life led imitating Jesus.

We’ve got to stop expecting celebrities to jump on the celebrity preaching circuit; how much greater a witness to the crucified king would it be for Kanye, or Izzy, to submit to years of training in interpreting the text of the Bible, and years of character formation reflecting on the character of Jesus and keeping in step with the Spirit (as Paul puts it in Galatians 5), before opening the mouth. Silence from Kanye right now would speak volumes; it would perhaps speak louder than his brash, enthusiastic, embrace of the Gospel.

In all this I’m reminded of the strength of the testimony of another celebrity convert. Aussie actress Anna McGahan. McGahan has just, after years reflecting on the experience of meeting Jesus as Lord, released a book called Metanoia — which is the Greek word for repentance. The absolute change in one’s life that happens when we turn from the dead ends of relevance, fame, power, and personal glory, to worship the crucified and living God. McGahan writes beautifully. She has been a faithful member of a church community for years, she has turned down the sorts of roles and trajectories her acting career had her on before her conversion and devoted herself to imitating Jesus in ways she describes in her book. She is qualified, in these ways, to be a trusted witness to the Gospel. A preacher. And her book (and her online writing) are a powerful testimony of one who has rejected fame for the sake of the name of Jesus. McGahan does, by conviction, have a ministry with creative people — some of who are famous — she describes the ethos in her book as: “Fall at the feet of Jesus, fall at the feet of Jesus, fall at the feet of Jesus.” She describes how this emerged out of realising that she wasn’t whole as a celebrity, out of being broken and remade by Jesus, not just having her fame baptised and turned towards the ends of making Jesus known, but having her life turned upside down because she is now known by Jesus.

We could do lots to learn from at least one Christian who has experienced fame, and experienced the call of the Gospel, so that we stop acting as though fame qualifies someone to preach the Gospel. The results of our pursuit of relevance through Kanye and Izzy will keep coming home to roost if we don’t.

November 19, 2019

The New Eden Project: What shape might this take for a church community

I’ve posted a preamble, and manifesto, about this New Eden Project thing yesterday. And it’s all nice in theory, right? But what might it look like in practice?

The TL:DR; version is: the New Eden Project is about revitalising and renewing the spaces churches already occupy, and reclaiming other spaces, for communities of up to 150 people, that duplicate and spread into other spaces, while not relying on any ‘one’ particular church leader. Its practices are built around re-narrating life around God’s Jesus-oriented story, as we are re-created by his Spirit, to resist the patterns of the world, while living lives in communities that anticipate and testify to the renewal of all things, re-imagining the status quo in our church communities, but also for our neighbours.

I mentioned that this project is prompted by our experience as a church meeting in rented venues for the last six years, and in the context of a denomination where lots of buildings seem to be being ‘consolidated’ or whatever corporate euphemism you want to use for selling up properties. We’ve been part of that; our first few years hire costs were covered from the sale of an old church building. The church buildings around our city that aren’t built for massive communities (and we have a few of those), typically have physical limits for how many people they can accommodate (and carpark limits) of around 150-200. There’s a sociological number (the Dunbar number) that suggests 150 is about the size of a group (or tribe) where the members feel safe and so there’s a natural limit there. So, as we ponder the future we’re exploring the possibility of meeting in a suburban church building — and such buildings are typically a bit older and built prioritising function over form. So if this whole ‘project’ is going to go anywhere there are some fundamental convictions about what buildings should look and feel like, and what they should be used for, driving things; but also, cards on the table, I think there’s stacks out there about growing churches through the 150 or 200 barrier and the systemic changes you need to make to make that happen, and I’ve been increasingly thinking we’re actually better off creating healthy churches of 150ish that are trying to duplicate.

Our church growth models that are often built on an exceptional leader/preacher are problematic because we don’t have heaps of those around (sorry other leaders), and because when we do, those churches tend to grow at the expense of other churches around them; and that’s fine, big churches are in a position to do great things for the kingdom, but this is part of why we’ve got empty buildings and pastors burning out all over the shop (this is also fed by a consumer mentality where people last in a small church until there’s an ‘essential program’ missing and so drive to the next suburb over to a different church). If I’m going to lead a church, I don’t want to lead a church of 500, I want to train and equip people in my church community to occupy another building and grow a church of 150-200 that duplicates.

We’re also in a weird position as a community where because we have been a city church we have people driving to us from all over the greater Brisbane area; and our challenge is that we want people to be building relationships with the people they work, live, and play near (we’re pretty keen on Sam Chan’s Everyday Evangelism gear from his book (see review)). Being a city church has been fun, and I love the people who live a long way away from me, but we need some structural changes in how we meet on Sundays, and in small groups, so that our community can get involved in ‘team style’ evangelism (see that review), where people are naturally building good relationships and connections; not expecting non-Christians to travel across the city to come to a Sunday church service (though some might).

Here’s a shape for church life that I’m pitching; it’s a mix of semi-traditional church structures (with a few tweaks), small groups, and ‘fresh expressions’ of service/participation in the kingdom/New Eden Project, and of informal church structures (that can be a bit more of a movable feast/less tied to a physical ‘hub’). This is the bit where I’m really picking up and playing with the model Rory and Stephen from Providence in Perth have been developing (I think). So credit where it’s due, but they can, of course, distance themselves from the bits that they see ending somewhere bad…

Once again, after you have a read over this, I’d love your reflections.

Hub and Spoke Network

The New Eden Project values space and seeks to reclaim and renew it; ordering the physical space’s form (aesthetics) and function (architecture) towards the Bible’s story. Physical spaces aren’t just rain shelters. Habitats shape habits. The trend to prioritise function over form in church spaces, especially around AV requirements or turning churches into ‘multi-use’ space with an eye to commercial imperatives has led to church buildings being ‘non-places.’ Since spaces tell stories (and the medium is the message) this has served to tell a competing story to the Christian story; there’s no ‘neutral’ story or space, really. There are ways to create desirable common spaces that are organised towards a ‘telos’ or a story, that might still benefit the community outside of church activities. But a neutral aesthetic or layout is not neutral at all; for too long the church growth movement has sought to grow the church by ‘adapting’ worldly forms for the proclamation of the Gospel; but those forms actually adapt or colonise the content of the Gospel message. When we’re trying to dig into the problems of a consumer mentality in church communities and we’re not asking questions about how our ‘commercialisation’ of space is contributing then we’re missing the link between architecture and practices and belief.

Buildings are hubs for this New Eden Project; whether church spaces, homes, or, potentially, commercial spaces reclaimed for social enterprise type activities. Revitalising churches must necessarily include revitalising our physical spaces — even though the church is absolutely the people, not the building, habitats shape habits.

Houses where Gospel Communities or Growth Groups meet are part of the ‘spokes’ in this network; but they’re also an engine room for church planting or duplication, and a key part of how leaders are trained. Where these groups meet is likely to overlap with any future ‘hubs’ emerging. The goal of a healthy small group is to be part of some sort of local church renewal.

In terms of how this project might kick off in a church building, homes, and public space, a week might look something like this (taking up the practices from the manifesto).

Sunday Mornings (Hub)

Re-narrate // Re-sist // Re-imagine // Re-enchant

  • The church community gathers to be formed by God’s story in spaces cultivated and kept as ‘tastes of Eden’… gathered around God’s word as it is read, preached, sung, and practiced (prayer, spiritual disciplines, sacraments, liturgy, etc). Minimal technology. Relaxed vibe.
  • The preaching would be shaped by our theological anthropology (how we think people work and are transformed), our theology of the church (that we are the body of Christ and each one of us has a part to play for the sake of the other), our Biblical theology (that we think the Bible is one “Eden-to-New-Eden” story fulfilled in Jesus), and our understanding of different types of speech going on in the New Testament church (preaching, teaching, prophecy, etc). Biblical exposition is some, but not all of the diet in these terms (and, for example, penal substitution is some not all of the substance of the Gospel). Faithful preaching could involve story telling, performance, a time of sharing, encouragement, etc, with the agenda set by not just the content of a passage of the Bible, but ‘media’ questions like its form (you don’t find many expository talks given in the talks recorded in the Bible, sometimes the epistles we preach on are shorter than the sermons we preach on them, the original recipients of the New Testament writings weren’t actually literate so sometimes simply reading scripture out and discussing it together might be enough, etc).
  • The application of talks to the real world is not carried out solely by a male preacher operating as an authoritative priest (though I do still think there are roles in church that are determined, in part, by gender), but by the community via Q&A, a panel of members of the church (or guests), or in discussion groups. So our diet includes men and women offering Godly wisdom and proclaiming the resurrection of Jesus to one another, and listening to each other. Whatever ‘male leadership’ looks like in a world marked by the patriarchal power structures of the Genesis 3 curse, it has to look like men using our privilege and strength to cultivate ‘Eden like’ space for partnership with women who feel safe; some part of male leadership/eldership (which I think the Bible establishes), I believe, is providing such space, hearing, and elevating the voices of women. I get that some people will dismiss this as a sort of ‘benevolent patriarchy’ — but I think the first Eden and the picture of the New Eden are places where males and females come together in genuine cooperation, rather than one holding a particular position of dominance over the other.
  • Kids program. Play based. Mix of outdoor and indoor time. I’d love to have a kids church curriculum integrate with the adult program but featuring lots of Duplo (ages 2-4) and Lego (ages 4-99+) where the imagination is being engaged around God’s story and how whatever part of the Bible we’re digging into fits into that story.
  • Eating together. Both taking part in communion (or as we Presbyterians call it the Lord’s Supper), and a shared meal.

Sunday afternoons — Gospel Communities ‘in action’ (Spoke)

Re-create // Re-sist // Re-plant // Re-enchant

If Sunday is a day people are setting aside, at least partly, for church, it’d be good to see church not just as time spent in a building with other Christians, but as a time to participate in Jesus’ mission of renewal. This wouldn’t be an every week activity for everyone; but would be planned activities with buy-in and encouragement from the leaders of the community. These groups would be prayed for and ‘sent’ by the morning gathering; with an invitation for anyone to join (the church community is a plausibility structure for the Gospel so we want people to belong before they believe, and belonging involves some sort of participation in church life). These activities would be more geographically scattered (ie not just near the church building, but closer to where people live/Gospel Communities meet).

These activities could include renewal projects like tree planting or acts of service in the community; resistance projects like political action; rest or play together as a community (re-creation), but involve opportunities for groups to discuss the day’s passage or service side by side. They ideally are activities that include children as participants not bystanders.

Sunday Nights — Dinner Church (Hub)

Re-narrate // Re-sist // Re-create

Over time we’ll be looking for opportunities to invite non-believers to experience a taste of the Gospel, and of the rhythms of life in church community. This may or may not work best in ‘church’ space (it probably needs to have had a pattern of moving from ‘public space’ to ‘private space’ as relationships have developed — see Sam Chan’s stuff on “Coffee, Dinner, Gospel” and moving from the “front yard” to the “back yard.” and Mary Douglas’ Deciphering a Meal).

These would look like a stripped back gathering around a meal. Dinner church is a thing. It might meet in a home, or a community hall rented for a shorter period of time. These would involve a short talk, a Q&A or panel, and discussions (and maybe some singing). Coming to a ‘dinner church’ gathering would be a legitimate expression of participating in church life; it’s not a ‘come to everything’ operation.

Midweek : Growth Groups/Gospel Communities (Spoke)

Re-claim // Re-sist // Re-narrate
Midweek our small groups commit to spending time in community with each other, and embedding in a more ‘local’ context. These groups involve a commitment amongst members to meet one-to-one to read the Bible and pray together. The groups themselves are outwards focused — looking for opportunities to ‘merge universes’ (as Sam Chan describes it). But the regular rhythms of the group are eating together, reading the Bible (using a stripped back, resource-light approach — either the Swedish Method or the Uncover method AFES has developed, or other approaches that are big on digging in to the text). These groups meet in places we see as outposts for mission; homes or third spaces. They can be a movable feast, but hospitality involves being hospitable guests who partner in this work, not just capacity to host. A group might commit itself to the physical renewal of the places they meet in (spending time side by side working on projects in each others homes).

These ‘Gospel communities’ are open to outsiders as a first step towards Sundays. The church calendar is deliberately uncluttered outside Sundays to allow these communities to shape the rhythm of life together.

Midweek — Community Dinner

Resist // Re-claim // Re-create
Where a ‘hub’ type building exists we use it to host community meals and/or food pantries to provide a taste of Eden. These are for the marginalised, but also for those in our neighbourhood seeking community. These would be a great gateway to something like a Dinner Church series on the “Gospel in Four Meals” (a great evangelism course from Providence). Community meals could also happen before local Gospel communities meet (ie dinner at 6, the group meeting at 7:30) to provide a natural avenue for invitations into those groups (my friends at Village Church here in Brisbane have been doing something like this). Our Creek Road campus of Living Church does a great Friday night community meal for families after the afternoon kids club, and before the night time youth program.

November 14, 2019

The New Eden Project: Manifesto

Manifestos are cool. Here’s a bit of a primer on what this is for in the form of a preamble. I did not follow the convention on Manifestos that I said I would back in 2011. Sorry.

The New Eden Project

 “Certainly there was an Eden on this very unhappy earth. We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of ‘exile.” — Tolkien

Why the “New Eden Project”

The story of the Bible anticipates a re-creation; what was lost in the beginning is ultimately restored and renovated; what was a garden created for God’s image bearing people to “cultivate and keep” is, in the end, spread across the face of the earth. The last page of the Bible describes the scene this way:

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. — Revelation 22:1-3

The prophet Ezekiel describes the end of exile from God as a return to Eden — a re-creation and restoration of humanity from the inside out, and a return to God’s presence. Ezekiel chapters 36 and 37 are full of vivid language, prophecies, describing this renewal. Ezekiel promises God’s scattered people, Israel, will be returned and restored, and through this, God’s promise to bless all nations will also be fulfilled. Israel’s return from exile makes return to Eden possible for all of us…

“‘For I will take you out of the nations; I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. — Ezekiel 36:24-27

Jesus, the son of God and the new Adam, comes to lead Israel home, and all nations back to Eden. It is Jesus who, in Revelation, “makes all things new.” It is Jesus in whom “all things are reconciled.” Jesus, the image of the invisible God, is the new image that we God’s people are transformed into by the Holy Spirit. It is Jesus who pours out the Holy Spirit as the fulfilment of the Old Testament promises to restore and recreate God’s people. When Jesus enters the world as ‘God with us’ and then, with the father, pours out the Holy Spirit, our exile from God ends; the new Eden project begins.

The liberation of creation begins with Jesus, and his kingdom of resurrected people living lives filled with the Holy Spirit. In his letter to the church in Rome the Apostle, Paul talks about the whole creation being under bondage to the curse of sin; subject to decay; he says the creation waits for the ‘revelation’ or literally the apocalypse of the children of God for its liberation. He says the Spirit marks us out as God’s children (Romans 8:16-17), and in the Spirit, we have the ‘firstfruits’ of this renewal.

This revelation and renewal ultimately happens in the new creation; the world is still broken; suffering because of sin, death, and curse, still marks our reality. We’re still waiting for the total renewal of all things. We wait eagerly for this future; but we do not wait idly. We are invited to testify to the future re-ordering of all things by re-ordering some things.

We are new creations in Christ. For us the “old is gone” and the “new has come.” We are already united to the resurrected Jesus whose new Eden project is already underway. We live in the ‘now and not yet’ of his kingdom. Our lives, our bodies (as temples of the Spirit), and the places we occupy, are part of the New Eden Project. The longing for the end of exile, for Eden, that Tolkien identified is fulfilled by Jesus but we are invited to provide a taste of Eden here and now.

What is the New Eden Project

The New Eden Project is Jesus’ mission — the mission to “seek and save the lost” and the re-creation and reconciliation of all things. The “Great Commission” to go into the world and make disciples (Matthew 28) is a renewing and renovating of the commission to the first people, in Genesis 1, to “be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it” — to spread the conditions of Eden.

The New Eden Project is our project as a community of people gathered by Jesus and called to make disciples; to invite people to be transformed into the image of Jesus as they receive the Holy Spirit and become citizens of the New Eden. We go knowing that “Jesus is with us always, even to the end of the age” — our exile from God’s presence is over. God is with us, he dwells in us by his Spirit.

A project is action — it is action pursuing some sort of future. Our project is to act in a way that pursues and participates in the New Eden described when Jesus returns to make everything new.

The New Eden has some continuity with the Old Eden; what humanity was created for before sin and death entered the world is what we are re-created for in Christ. We were created, male and female, to be God’s image bearing people in the world, to be like God, to imagine and create, to be “fruitful and multiply” — to expand God’s life-giving, hospitable, loving kingdom — his presence — over the face of the earth as we ruled for him. In Eden, Adam was given the job of “cultivating and keeping” the garden, a task he couldn’t complete alone. Eve was created as Adam’s ally — his partner — in this task. Taken together, Genesis 1 and 2 give us the picture that humans — male and female — are created to co-operate in the task of spreading Eden, God’s temple-like dwelling place where he is present with his people across the face of the earth, a result we finally see in Jesus’ work in the New Eden.

Genesis teaches us that God made the world and made us to partner with him in stewarding it. The Bible also consistently describes the world as part of how we know God (Psalm 19, Romans 1). Eden, like the Temple that later is an echo of Eden, is the high point of the world fulfilling its function. Sin means we’re kicked out of Eden, and also that we don’t see the world according to God’s purposes for it, but rather our own. We have our own little kingdom building projects that lead to death and destruction because really they’re Satan’s building projects.

Our tasks, as children of God, in this New Eden Project, in a world exiled from God but haunted by a longing for Eden, are to:

  • Re-narrate the world and our lives in it. The New Eden Project is shaped by the Eden to New Eden story of the Bible. The Bible is God’s word — it is also God’s story. This is the story of the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, for the forgiveness of our sins and his pouring out of the Spirit to re-create and restore us, ending our exile from God replacing our sinful nature with something new. Our lives, our words, our songs, and our actions retell God’s story of salvation in Jesus; they tell not just of the forgiveness of our sins and a pie in the sky future, but our union in the life and love of God so that we become the ‘body of Christ’ in the world. We are a people who live with Jesus as our king and the mission of renewal as our mission. Though we know this mission is ultimately fulfilled in his return and we know that the world and our lives are still marked by sin, suffering, death and curse, we live as those raised with Christ and seated in the heavenly realm. We reject idolatry and grasping self-gratification and seek to bring all things, including our own lives, towards their ultimate ends (or purposes). We live bringing a taste of the resurrected new creation, living now in our persons and our community even in our suffering. We invite people to taste and see that God is good in our lives and spaces as we tell this story.
  • Be Re-created by God’s Spirit, as we move from the patterns of this world, the pattern of Adam and Eve in the fall, to the pattern — or image — of Jesus, and so re-create our lives and the world in alignment with Jesus’ New Eden Project. Eden was a place of work and rest and play; it was a place of ‘re-creation’ as we people, made in God’s image, were to take up the task of ‘cultivating and keeping’ the garden using our God given imaginations and his good gifts to make life and culture (the conditions and creations that flow from pursuing life in God’s presence with him as our God). We work and ‘re-create’ (both rest and re-creation) with the goal of bringing the life and beauty and order of the God of the Bible into the world. We adopt habits consistent with this story and pursue transformation through a renewed mind as we let it dwell among us richly. We do this as people being re-created, in Jesus, by the Spirit, to be people of his eternal kingdom, anticipating the new creation, the new Eden. By the Spirit we are new creations now.
  • Re-enchant our understanding of space, time, and our lives — because God has “broken in” to this world in Jesus (a cool place to notice this is in the tearing of the sky at the start of Mark, and the Temple curtain at its end), and through the pouring out of the Spirit, we reject the secular/sacred or natural/supernatural divide and see every moment as holy and the world as enchanted. We see creation as a gift from God and the proper use of creation as “revealing his divine nature and character of God” as we enjoy it and cultivate it with him present in our lives. We see work and rest and play as Spiritual practices that proclaim the kingdom we belong to and shape us in the image of the God we worship. We worship the God revealed in Jesus and serve him as our good and loving king. We seek to love God and love our neighbour as ourselves, living lives in his kingdom, participating in his renewing and reconciling mission, a mission that culminates in the New Eden.
  • Re-sist the patterns of this world — by deliberately rejecting the pull of idolatry and by deliberately counter-forming ourselves through different practices. The nations of people exiled from God are often depicted after the Old Testament as ‘Babylon’ — this is particularly the case in Revelation, the last book of the Bible. Babylon has the power to capture the hearts of the people brought into its power, and its stories. We resist Babylon through deliberate acts of counter-formation and resistance (including cultural critique and protest or political action). We have our own distinct aesthetic and practices rather than imitating the world and its forms. This could be in something as radical as hospitality and sabbath, or as mundane as protest or tree planting. The catch is, there is no mundane because every part of our life is marked by the sacred.
  • Re-imagine our relationships as we re-image our humanity in the image of Jesus, the image of the invisible God. We, as males and females, are invited to co-operate in Jesus’ project. The first witnesses to the resurrection — in the garden, where Jesus appears like a gardener, are women. We still, though anticipating a new Eden, live in a world whose patterns are shaped by the curse of Genesis 3, where men have used their strength to grasp for power and control.
  • Re-claim space, time, and our bodies as ‘spaces’ where the New Eden is being anticipated and presented in the world as a taste of what is to come. We recognise our bodies as fundamental to our nature as image-bearing creatures. We are not just souls or minds waiting for some ‘disembodied’ future. How we use our bodies shapes our hearts and souls. We seek to love and serve Jesus as embodied people who belong to Jesus’ New Eden Project. We use our spaces — those we share, occupy, and own — to provide a taste of the sanctuary of Eden, both old and new. They are places of beauty and hospitality. Places where God is glorified and where we recognise his presence and provision. They are places of life and light and water.
  • Re-plant ‘Eden’ in our homes, shared public spaces, and community spaces. There are lots of old buildings dedicated to worshipping God that have, at times, become too close to Babylon or that need new life. We commit to re-claiming and re-creating whatever space possible, ‘church building’ or otherwise, to be used towards the ends of God’s kingdom, bringing a taste of the New Eden and God’s presence in the world by whatever means possible. We are committed to ‘renewing’ (and so also renewables, recycling, and up-cycling). We also commit, in our resistance of Babylon, to re-plant natural spaces — to be ‘gardeners’ and stewards who ‘cultivate and keep’ the world God made — so that they reveal his divine nature and character, rather than our ravenous idolatry. We recognise that as humans sinfully degrade the planet this is evident in the natural world; and so we commit to an alternative pattern of life that stewards and re-creates the life-giving conditions of Eden wherever possible, from community gardens to tree-planting to our own backyards.

I have some ideas what a church community shaped by this sort of manifesto might look like. Do you? I’d love to hear them. I’ll share mine in a future post. If this sort of vision for church excites you, I’d love to hear that too. Also, if it leaves you cold and you think this is a diabolically bad idea, please tell me.

November 13, 2019

New Eden Project Manifesto: Preamble

We’re in a position as a church, and as a family, where a bunch of unsettled and up-in-the-air realities are about to come crashing down into some new sort of normal. This year we’ve been out of our house while replacing deadly asbestos with normal plasterboard (we’re hoping to be in our renewed home by Christmas). My boss (and friend) resigned from his position unexpectedly, which has thrown church life into chaos for us. The building we’re currently meeting in is up for sale and our lease expires in two months. And our church community has the opportunity to recalibrate as we find a new place to meet; each time we’ve moved from non-stable venue to non-stable venue our numbers have been decimated and the sense of being rootless has not been great for us. So I’ve been thinking about the next chapter of church life for me, as a pastor, for us, as a family, and for those in our church as a community. I signed up for ministry with the Presbyterian Church because my theology and understanding of polity line up with Presbyterianism, but also because our denomination is one that puts the Gospel at the centre of what we do and is in a situation where new ideas or fresh expressions of church might bring renewal to a bunch of communities and buildings around Queensland; we’ve been a nomadic church plant for almost six years, which, while ‘new’ and sometimes ‘fresh’ hasn’t really been easy, or what got me on the Presbyterian bus to begin with. I’ve got great respect for those church planters who spend years meeting in schools or other public spaces for hire; but I’m not convinced that’s the most effective use of resources or the best model for the church in Australia long term (imagine, for a moment, that state schools decided overnight to no longer lease buildings to churches).

I’ve written quite a bit over the years sketching out some areas where I think church could and should change — from a set of ‘theses’ to mark the 500 year anniversary of the Reformation, to some ideas about how church might function in a post-Christian, secular, culture, then how we might re-capture our story, to a thing about zombies and the “Benedict Option,” to sketching out an aesthetic that might support the telling and living of the Christian story as a sort of architecture of belief, pieces on rest, and play, and finally a sort of theological vision for how we should live as Christians in a world facing climate catastrophe. In that last post I used the phrase “the New Eden Project” so many times that it became a brain worm for me. And thus, bringing all those threads together, an idea for a model of church was born. This model owes quite a bit to a subject I took at QTC with Rory Shiner and Stephen McAlpine on “Ministry and Mission in A Secular Age,” and in some ways is an adaptation of their model (as I understood it).

This is a long pre-amble for my next post — which will sketch out a picture of church community and life in Jesus’ kingdom that I’m calling “The New Eden Project.”

November 13, 2019