andygoodliff

Greenbelt 2005

Back from Greenbelt, back to school. I was writing RE schemes of work this morning. But this is a post about Greenbelt.

I had a fantastic time - great music, great talks, great worship and great company. I came away thinking why have I not been more over the years.

Friday

Maggi Dawn - 'My name is Maggi, and I'm relevaholic...' - Maggi asked why are we so eager to be relevant all the time? Is this about church being relevant to wider culture or relevant to our own lives? Left me thinking is our concern for relevance, which usuallys works out in bigger, louder, more technology, just a reflection that we theologically-impoverished - our understanding of God is too small, so we feel we need to jazz him up?

Iain Archer - was brilliant live, some great new stuff.

Saturday

David Ford and Michael O'Siadhail - 'The Poet and Theologian 1' - poetry and theology are concerned with wisdom. A wise faith has a richness which is aware of and resists the dangers of neat-packaged faith. So in the book of Job, we find Job cries out, and his friends try and bring him neat packages.

Roy Searle - 'Streams of Living Water' - we need a breadth to our spiritual life, to learn from and live with different traditions - evangelical, contemplative, incarnational, charismatic, social justice - to be without one or several, is to have an unbalanced life.

The Post Evangelical: 10 years on - panel (Dave Tomlinson, Robert Beckford, Maggi Dawn, Elaine Storkey) - a mixed discussion, where good stuff as said, but highlighted the problem of labels, especially the 'evangelical' one

Richard Giles - 'Tent People' - this was thinking about how we use the space in our church building to reflect the kind of community we are

Sunday

Communion - Revive: a great whole church attempt to do communion with 20,000 people. good liturgy, music and mix

Karen Armstrong - 'The Battle for God' - excellent hour on what fundamentalism is and how we deal with it. I must get hold of some of her books.

Corinne Bailey Rae - beautiful voice, fantastic songs

David Ford & Michael O'Siadhail - 'The Poet and the Theologian 2' - theology should contain affirmation, judgement and transformation - what can we affirm, what needs to be judged and what can we transform. Theology should be an intensive conversation. Re-reading the scriptures in different contexts. Theology for God's sake. Theology is a broker between every sphere of life.

Monday

Naim Ateek - 'Whose Jerusalem?' - a good exploration of the Middle East politics

Dave Tomlinson - 'Running into God' - God is active in the whole world, we run into God all the time

Andrew Jones - 'The Spirituality of Blogging' - only caught the first bit of this, but out of a number of seminars on blogging, this was the best because it gave a good answer to why as Christians we blog. See here for Andrew Jones' notes

Maggi Dawn - 'Reinventing the wheel?' - how can we subvert the tradition, what can we learn from the tradition and alt.worship can be simple

Betty Spackman - 'Fantasy and other real things' - looking at Christian kitsch and how we live in fantasy worlds and the recognition that Christian art does not need to make an obvious message

Greenbelt Beckons

Lots of people off to Greenbelt this weekend - Maggi Dawn, Jonny Baker, Andrew Jones, Kester Brown, Ashley Beck, Laurence, Brodie, and Youthblog are among some that I know will be there. Hannah and I are off to Bicester this afternoon and then Greenbelt tomorrow.

It should be a great weekend of music, talking and worship. I'm really looking forward to it, having not been in a few years. It will be last holiday moment, before next weekend where its back to school and writing schemes of work and lesson plans.

This weekend will also be a our first wedding anniversary - not sure how I convinced to come to Greenbelt to celebrate it!

Bedside Reading

Hopeful amphibian has suggested we all subscribe to Third Way magazine and I'm definitely thinking about it (I used to read it via a friend). I was wondering what (if any) journals or magazines other people subscribe to. I currently get a new journal called Cultural Encounters, which is described as a journal for the theology of culture. This is its first year, but looks good. I also get the the Journal for Youth and Theology, which is the journal for the International Association for the Study of Youth Ministry (IASYM for short). This can be some what of a mixed bag, but does occassionally have some good papers. I also get RE Today, which has a good selection of articles and lesson ideas, and also Empire, because I like movies.

From my university days I still keep track on the International Journal of Systematic Theology, New Testament Studies, Scottish Journal of Theology, Journal for the Study of the New Testament and more recently the British Journal of Religious Education.

I'm interested in subscribing to (and perhaps even contributing to) Ministry Today.

Who's in? / Who's out?

I've been thinking this week about what it means to be church and these are some of the questions I came up with:

Who’s in? / Who’s out?
Who’s welcomed? / Who’s ignored?
Who’s invited? / Who’s rejected?
Who’s important? / Who’s of little concern?
Who’s celebrated? / Who’s forgotten?
Who’s privileged? / Who’s tolerated?
Who’s in control? / Who’s controlled?
Who’s busy? / Who’s uninvolved?
Who’s included? Who’s excluded?
Who’s a worshipper? / Who’s worshipped?
Who’s speaking? / Who’s spoken to?
Who’s it for?

It's perhaps a reflection you can lead people with, to get them thinking around some of the issues and then follow it up with 1 Cor 12:12-27.

In a world

A prayer I wrote for parallel universe event at Baptist World Alliance Congress 2007.

In a world of many stories
Jesus teach us to hear your story

In a world of many images
Jesus help us to recognise your face

In a world of many 'gospels'
Jesus show us the good news found in you

In a world of fame and fortune
Jesus we acknowledge that you are Lord

In a world which is being damaged and destroyed
Jesus may God's kingdom come

In a world of lonely individuals
Jesus join us together in your love

In a world of passing fashions
Jesus you are the same yesterday, today and tomorrow

The Liberating Image

While Hannah and I spent the weekend in North Wales I found some time to read this new book by J. Richard Middleton (co-author with Brian Walsh of Truth is Stranger than it Use to Be). On first glance I thought this book would be useful for my minister Dave Morris, who is about to go on sabbatical, including some teaching time in a Christian college in Tanzania, where one thing he'll be teaching is Genesis 1-11.  As I read more closely I found this is a brilliant and very important book on the meaning of Genesis 1 and the imago Dei in particular. I previously posted on Colin Gunton's trinitarian interpretation of the imago Dei here, Middleton brings a different and I think on reflection a better reading of the text.

The book is a detailed examination of the imago Dei in the symbolic world of Genesis 1 and against the social context of the Ancient Near East. He argues, not to uncontroversially (in my view anyway) for Genesis 1-11 as ideology critique; that is, it is a brilliant theological articulation of what it is to be human in the face of the known world. The book is completed with two chapters on the ethics of what is to be human that arise from Genesis 1. Chapters 5, 6 & 7 are very good read.  Chapter 6 argues that the God's whose image we are made is not a violent god and that a proper reading of Genesis 1 'constitutes a normative framework by which we may judge all the violence that pervades the rest of the Bible' and 'for judging human violence in the contemporary world' (269).

It's good to see some great books on the Old Testament being published to join those of Brueggemann and Goldingay. Old Testament study can often seem like a debate over whether a text is from J or P, and so books like The Liberating Image and the many by Brueggemann continue to be a breath of fresh air, from which we have much to learn.

Gospel Amnesia

Why is it so hard to get a church to change? Why is it that we get so concerned about who can and can't participate in communion? Why is so important that we have a church service every week of the year where something for children is provided? Why is it that church plant equates with church service in our thinking? How do you read something like Colossians Remixed (excellent, excellent book) and not find ordinary church life at odds with what you believe about being a disciple of Christ?

Some answers?
We have gospel amnesia ('the lost message of Jesus') - we think we know the scriptures, but in reality we only know the little bits we like, and even these have been twisted to suit our theology; we are unable to think theologically
We have found ourselves, although we are often unware, living more faithfully to "good news" of our time, which leaves little room for God
We view children as persons to be accomodated so that the adults can get on with the proper act of being church - we run lots of programmes and events, but avoid the messy, difficult act of interacting and worshipping with our children
We believe church is about services, which we put all our energy and time into and leave little for being of community
We believe church is about the few serving the many - most of us are consumers, who receive, but have no interest or no understanding how to give

In short, we have a low view of God, the scriptures, the church, children and the Christian life.  At the BWA, when Steve Chalke, spoke at the first young adult seminar on what is gospel, he said it was three things - public, wholistic and costly. For most of us I think its probably the opposite - private, undemanding and an added extra.

After Preaching

There's lots of good stuff and discussion on the place of preaching in the church.  Chris Erdman at odyssey is consistently blogging excellent teaching on how to be good at preaching. Jonny Baker has just made available a rejected chapter on preaching, which contains much food for thought. As the church we need to look beyond and outside the traditional role and shape of the sermon and look at more creative and participatory means of preaching - I encourage you to read Jonny's chapter for some good ideas. Earlier this year I did a session for some of our youthworkers called theology bitesize, with the aim of making our theology accessible, memorable and applied. Too often the preaching is boring, forgetable and unconnected to everyday life.  One thing we need to consistently do is preach forests and trees or the big story and the small story - we need to see the wide canvas of the larger story of God and then see where the smaller story fits in and lastly where we fit.

I've just come back from Lemmings which some members of my church are involved in running. Its a weeks holiday for 8-12 yr olds. Reflecting on the teaching in the evening it was often visual, require active participation and told the big and small story - the story of Joseph and the bigger story of how this links with Jesus' story and especially the Sermon on the Mount.  In the leaders evening meetings which I was leading I tried to make our times memorable - did bittersweet ritual and a meditation on faces with a powerpoint running of every leader's face. Theology was repeated and hopefully made memorable and applicable.  I give this example from Lemmings, one because I've just returned, but two, because the wider church need to learn from the good examples of how youth and children workers preach. 

I reflect on those good preachers and one comes to mind in Louie Giglio from Soul in the City 2004. The preaching was accesible, memorable and applicable. One method he used was reducing theology to easy-to-remember phrases - 'I AM not, but I know I AM' and 'I can't, but he can'.

There is still a place for good preaching, but the how and what we preach I believe needs changing. Some suggestions:
1. reduce the length of our preaching and the amount of points we try and make
2. find ways of saying the same thing in different ways
3. don't try and make our preaching neat and tidy, leaving the listeners some work to do
4. tell God's whole story and make links between old and new testaments - ideally use a lectionary
5. make preaching active and not passive - congregation need to engage if they are to learn
6. include different voices in preaching
7. before you preach do the reading work, don't rely on your interpretation or one commentary
8. give space for public response, dialogue and conversation
9. a sit down and listen to sermon is not required every week to be church
10. give the listeners a question to answer or preach in a way that generates further questions
11. reduce theology to memorable preaching
12. read scripture - open the scriptures and read them out loud