Category: Religion

T-Bone Burnett And Christian Art

After fourteen years without releasing any of his own music T-Bone Burnett is back. He even now has his own website and a MySpace page. (Fans will previously have known how difficult it was to track down anything close to first hand online.) Last month he released both a wonderful 2-CD compilation entitled Twenty Twenty and a CD of new recordings, The True False Identity.

Burnett is well known in Christian art circles for his famous quote,

“You can sing about the Light, or you can sing about what you see because of the Light. I prefer the latter.” (Credit: JesusJournal.com)

In an interview to promote the new releases he comes up with another thought-provoking insight for Christians in the creative arts:

“Where I want to go with my work and with my life is that place
that’s between heaven and earth. It’s neither; it’s ether,” Burnett
says. “That’s the place I feel comfortable — that’s where I feel alive.”

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Methodism, Methodist Conference And The Future

Methodist Conference begins today and runs for a week. One of the potentially most contentious debates will happen next Tuesday afternoon, the 27th, when the Pilgrimage Of Faith report on the question of civil partnerships and related matters will be considered. To the relief of my conscience last week’s Methodist Recorder reported that the recommendation will be that although anyone in the church may enter a civil partnership we should not agree to bless such relationships. We welcome all, but maintain ‘Resolution 4’ of the 1993 Derby Conference which affirmed our commitment to fidelity within marriage and celibacy outside. I had certainly feared the recommendation might be that ministers would be able to conduct such blessing and that those who had a conscience against it would have to refer enquirers to a colleague who would be happy to oblige. Of course we now have to see whether Conference will ratify the recommendation. I pray that it will. (The report can be downloaded in Word format here – it’s number 40 in the list.)

But those who hear me preach know I am loath for we Christians just to be known for what we are against. I would also like to write about something that has not worried me but excited me. Today’s Methodist Recorder publishes the text of the Pastoral Address being given today by the outgoing President of the Conference, Tom Stuckey. His inaugural address at the beginning of his year’s term was exciting and these closing words of his Presidential year are in my opinion no less exciting. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear to be online yet but keep an eye on the daily reports page – hopefully at least a summary will be up in the next twenty-four hours.

However the entire address bears reading and pondering. At heart Tom says God is calling us to ‘repent and believe’, and we have a short window – perhaps only five years – if we are to respond meaningfully. Firstly he talks about ‘Reading The Signs’ and secondly about ‘Reshaping The Church’.He concludes with ‘Necessary Changes’ and then a Postscript. What follows is a quick attempt to précis a dazzling address.

READING THE SIGNS
The destruction of the planet calls for a missionary response, since the covenant with Noah is ‘the foundational covenant of mission’.
The violent clash of cultures means ‘The Church has to jettison surplus baggage and recover essential Gospel values.’ There was violence before the Flood (Genesis 6:6); Christian and Islamic expansion could precipiate further violence; and in Alasdair MacIntyre’s words (in 1981!), ‘The barbarians … have already been governing us for some time.’
The shifting centre of Christianity Declining Western liberal Christianity has to come to terms with the fact that the majority of world Christianity is now southern and conservative. John Drane: ‘We seem to have become a secular Church in a spiritual society.’
The edge of Pentecost There is a ‘kairos moment of opportunity. Martin Luther: ‘God’s grace is like a passing storm which does not return where once it has been … it came to the Jews but passed over … Paul brought it to the Greeks but it passed over … the Romans and Latins had it. And you must not think that you have it forever.’ There are signs of personal response to the Spirit. We need what Orlando Costas calls ‘total growth’: i.e., numerical growth (numbers of Christians), organic growth (flexible structures), conceptual growth (theological development) and incarnational growth (prophetic identification with the marginalised).

THE CHURCH RESHAPED
John Hull: ‘Start with the Church and the mission will probably get lost. Start with mission and it is likely that the Church will be found.’ Pete Ward: modernity provided one ‘solid’ structure after another and our churches have modelled this. But technological innovation is liquefying all that. We need a ‘mixed economy Church’, says Stuckey. Some ‘Fresh Expressions‘ of church are genetically the same as modernity, substituting piano for organ and PowerPoint for hymn books. We need more theologically adventurous ’emerged churches’ which are not planted but spring from a need outside the church and who have a ‘theological consultant’ rather than a pioneer minister or leader. So there could be three types of church: traditional, fresh expressions and emerged churches.

NECESSARY CHANGES
Problems facing us include bureaucracy, resistance to change, ministers being bogged down in maintenance ministry and gifted laypeople who are frustrated in the exercise of their gifts. Action:
1. Encourage growing diversity and focus the national (‘connexional’) leadership more clearly.
2. Appoint bishops, but make them missionary bishops in the Celtic tradition.
3. Recruit younger presbyters and deacons for pioneer ministry.
4. Ordain 100 Local Preachers to a non-stipendiary ministry of word and sacrament.
5. Head-hunt ordained persons who truly could work with ’emerged churches’.
6. A structure of mutual accountability for those presbyters with evangelistic gifts.
7. Annual appraisal for ministers needs to become personal development: from initial ministerial training to ongoing.
8. Release some presbyters and deacons with evangelistic gifts from pastoral charge of churches.
9. Shift power from local churches to circuits and Districts so that resistant churches can’t dig in their heels against change.

POSTSCRIPT
As in John 21:6, we are being called to ‘cast [our] nets on the other side’. He then concludes with this amazing prayer of Brendan the Navigator.

Dave’s thoughts …
I think I just want to reiterate that the cat is out of the bag about the problems with our doctrine of ordination. Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch made the point in their book The Shaping Of Things To Come that the problem with ordaining people to a ministry of word, sacrament and pastoral charge (as denominations like Methodism do) limits the kind of people who offer and are accepted for ordination. Where, they ask, is the rich pattern of Ephesians 4 with apostles, prophets and evangelists as well as the pastors and teachers?

Tom’s section ‘Necessary Changes’ above recognises the problem but doesn’t radically reshape our doctrine of ordination. Many of us in circuit ministry know how the problem rears its head: we may feel the connection between the call to ministry and leading the church, but when it comes each quarter to making the Circuit Plan (the document that shows which minister and which Local Preacher is taking which service at which church) we have to fill in who is conducting the specifically sacramental services of baptism and Holy Communion. We become, in my rather cynical phrase, ‘travelling sacrament machines’ rather than people deployed to lead the church.

Compound this with the problem that proportionately the number of churches has not declined as much as the number of ministers and the ordained staff are looking after more congregations. This means a further dispersal of our energies from focussed efforts.

Tom, I’m very excited by your courage and vision. Now let’s be much more radical than even you are daring to suggest!

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Another Belated Quote: Sufjan Stevens

From an interview with Sufjan Stevens in issue 41 (July 2006) of The Word magazine by Graeme Thomson:

Aside from the 50 States Project, the other aspect of Stevens and his music that has been much discussed is his devout Christian faith. He is understandably reluctant to talk about it in too much depth, having discovered it motivates a lot of questions that he finds odd and unanswerable. His music certain expresses a certain euphoria and wonder at the mysteries of the world, yet you would struggle to define it as specifially religious. Stevens’s own take on it is that “if you believe in an omnipotent God, you yield yourself to that God, and of course everything you do is about that relationship. My songs are always about that, but they’re also about aliens from outer space and serial killers and pre-marital sex and all these other things that make up the world we live in. To me, it’s all about life and life is all about God.”

Here is someone with a whole-life view of faith.

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Separation And Mystery

Here is a quote from the man I shall always speak of as Miami Steve Van Zandt in issue 41 (July 2006) of The Word magazine:

When it comes to entertainment and religion a certain amount of separation and mystery is necessary. If you look on stage and you see exactly the same as you are, what is there to aspire to? What is there to inspire you?

Something in there for evangelicals, charismatics and liberals to contemplate. When ‘exactly the same’ is about identifying rather than being remote, it’s OK. But evangelicals reduce it to God the celestial chum, charismatics to God the boyfriend and liberals to, “It’s all right, we (dis)believe the same things as you do.”

Naturally we are nervous about a form of separation which is ‘holier than thou’. Our more recent history as the Church, however, has been to combine the wrong version of separation with the wrong version of ‘exactly the same’. We have become pedestrian Pharisees. We have proclaimed holiness but superficially. It has either been the tick-list of dos and don’ts or it has been the shallow assumption that if everyone is converted the world will automatically become a better place – forgetting that justification needs to be followed by disciples who are sanctified. Witness Rwanda if we want one of the most horrifying examples of that going wrong: not too many evangelicals boast about the twentieth century East African Revival any more.

Mystery has been preserved by the more sacramental section of the Church, although not always helpfully. It has been reduced to theories of the Real Presence and the resulting arguments. Mystery has been resisted by evangelicals and liberals in captivity to the Enlightenment, both of whom in different ways believe that everything is open to explanation.

I am early in a journey of working out what a healthy ‘separation and mystery’ might be. We need a separation, a difference, that is winsome. It needs to be incarnated. Somewhere in the life of Jesus is surely the model. He was ‘exactly the same’ yet clearly different. We need a practical pneumatology (theology of the Holy Spirit) that grounds the Spirit’s work in our lives as being every bit as much in the world as in church activities. John Wimber went a certain way in this respect with the ‘gifts of the Spirit’ being used outside church boundaries; we need more regarding other aspects of the Spirit’s work.

Likewise when it comes to mystery. The parables are a mystery to most of Jesus’ audience. Only on two or three occasions does he explain the meaning, and then only to his inner circle. Mostly they are a mystery if not a tease. It is left to the listeners whether they respond to this narrative teasing. And no wonder we have endless arguments about the meanings of the parables (even before we get to reader-response theories!).

Part of my early response to the issue of mystery is this. My main church has recently bought a digital projection system. They now request a PowerPoint presentation for every sermon. But I have decided to resist the idea of producing PowerPoint slide shows that are lecture notes, with every heading and sub-heading plus the punchy quotes. Instead I am trying to find visuals for each point I make in a sermon: my hunting ground has been Flickr, because the images are of a higher quality than using Google Image Search.

This are just hybrid thoughts. But maybe they can provoke a discussion in the Comments. What are the other ways in which we might portray a healthy ‘separation and mystery’?

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Spirituality And Business Cards

I had an order arrive in the post this morning from Amazon. Usually the advertising leaflets that come with their orders proceed rapidly to the recycling. Today I saved one. It was an offer for 250 free business cards. I haven’t had any since moving here. In my last appointment the circuit office printed them for the ministers free of charge. But here you do your own thing and I haven’t got round to finding a local printer. So what better than the chance to do it all from your desk online?

There was a large selection of free designs. I chose this one, with its background image of the desert. There was a tranquil one of the sea, but that was altogether too much like a cheesy Christian poster from a 1970s Christian bookshop for me. I thought the desert would be a good metaphor for a minister. In the Scriptures the desert has a multiplicity of meanings: yes, it is a place of deprivation and lostness, but it is also an arena for discipline, preparation and even renewal. (If you’re not convinced, do a word search for ‘desert’ or ‘wilderness’ at Bible Gateway.) All these things are part of our lot and our ministry.

What image would you have chosen, and why? (Sorry if that sounds like an exam question!)

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