andygoodliff

A question from Stanley Hauerwas

Taken from an interview here

[Dean Jones asks:] Bill has asked you  a lot of questions, others have asked you several questions. What    question would you like those of us gathered here to be thinking about as we depart from here?             

What do I need, or what do we need, to be a community of friends that can not only tell one another the truth, but want to be told the truth?

Why Stanley Hauerwas Gets Me In Trouble

I like Stanley Hauerwas. I like the way he writes a paper called 'Why gays (as a group) are morally superior to Christians (as a group).' I like the way he writes, showing that theology is always ethical. He has been described in the following way:

Stanley is a loud, blustery, locomotive of passion for the Gospel; his eyes deep, intense, penetrating, full of sparkle and fire; his discourses passion-filled, spluttering with expletives, crashing into everyone else's opinion in the room, his thoughts thundering into your consciousness - sometimes against your will, often making you angry at his lack of ... well ... senstivity. And yet. And yet ... You realize this is man who is so in love with the Gospel - so in its grip - that he must say what he says or the rocks will say it for him. There is such clarity about Stanley Hauerwas. You have no doubts about what he thinks, about what he believes. And, there is no question in our minds that his clarity often leaves him alone, isolated from those whose ideas are of the mind and not of the heart. There are times when he spoke that a kind of holiness filled the room and you knew you were hearing the words of a prophet, and when the interview was over there were tears in the eyes of the interviewers'
('The Door Interview', 1993, quoted in 'Stanley Hauerwas: Where Would We Be Without Him?' by Mark Thiessen Nation in Faithfulness and Fortitude, 2000, pp.19-20)

I like that description. Part of me wants to be like that, although without the need for the expletives. Part of me already is. These Hauerwasian traits though can get me into trouble. They can serve to make me appear uncomprising (which hopefully when it comes to the gospel I am), aggressive, argumentative and passionate. There's a bluntness and a truthfulness about Hauerwas' words which I like and admire. In a time where often the church appears to resemble nothing like or even pretend to resemble the gospel to which it claims to follow, the theology of Hauerwas unmasks the shallow and fakeness of the church's life and demands (as Bonhoeffer and Barth before him) that the gospel is more demanding and more costly than we want it to be. Too many characters like Hauerwas would dishearten the church, but without him and others, the church will continue to live in a type of Disneyland, entertaining but not discipling. I encountered Hauerwas first through the writings of John Colwell, who writes like a British version of Hauerwas, slightly softer, but no less blunt. Shall I continue to see Hauerwas as someone to emulate as a witness to the gospel or should I look for more tactful and diplomatic witnesses?

World Cup Systematic Theologians

If you know you're modern theologians (or at least the likes of Gunton, Jenson, Torrance, Moltmann, Pannenberg, Zizioulas, etc), you might like to join in on the World Cup of Modern Systematic Theologians. We're already into round 2, but there's plently of time to take part. Click here and you'll find the latest matches. I'm hoping of course that Colin Gunton does well and also Robert Jenson, John Zizioulas and Jurgen Moltmann.

Ten ways to help save the planet

1. turn off the tap - especially when brushing teeth, try and flush less | how about using bath or shower water to water your plants?
2. recycle - paper, cardboard, class, plastic bottles, clothes
3. turn off the standby button (tv, video, dvd, stereo, cooker, mircowave) or simply cut down on how much you watch ...
4. get a compost
5. clean green - use ecological products like the Ecover range
6. walk, cycle or take public transport more | avoid using your car! - probably the hardest!
7. buy a 'bag for life' and avoid using free plastic bags  (although these can be recycled at supermarkets)
8. buy fairtrade | grow your own food
9. check out oxfam and other charity shops for clothes and other items
10. buy from local producers and not the giant supermarkets (or at least avoid Tesco and Asda - Waitrose are the best - it's worth spending that few extra pounds)

Tony on going to church

I’ve been to a few churches around town and they just annoy the **** out of me because they’re so fake, and the people look so lost, and the people on the stage just look so plastic and so charming and so seductive, and I just think ‘I don’t believe in these people’. These people are not an expression of faith. So, I’d much rather just slip into a church and sit there for 10 minutes and have a bit of quiet time, or pray at home. I don’t feel that you necessarily have to turn up at a certain place at a certain time dressed in a certain way to express your faith and live out your faith. I think there’s other ways of doing it.
                                                                                                        (Tony, The Monastery Revisited, BBC2, 7 June)

I thought Tony's words we both illuminating and disheartening. It certainly made me ask what kind of people Tony would encounter in the church I belong to. I find it brilliant that this guy Tony keeps returning to Worth Abbey because he's found a place for his christian faith to grow and be nourished. He's a man just turned 30, who through the experience of living at a monastery and being accountable to the monks and people he went with is now looking for his vocation, which is about giving of his self to others. It's just sad that so far the wider church has not been able to help him.

Employing Youthworkers Update

A week ago I asked the question: should churches employ youthworkers? and its good to see its generated some feedback. Jon Bishop, Lewis Pearson and Pete Leveson (two of whom I know are Baptists) have offered their thoughts either in the comments or on their blogs. And someone called Tim has commented and started a discussion thread on the Youthwork website. I'd be interested in any further thoughts, especially from the likes of Ian at Youthblog (who was on holiday when I originally posted). I've followed up my original post with Considering a New Role for Youthworkers. It's good to try and shake us out of inherited or accepted thinking, which says youthwork and youthworkers must look like this and this and do this and this.

The Convent and the Monastery Revisited

Coming soon (starts 14 June) is The Convent - a sequel of sorts to last year's The Monastery, this time with four women in a convent for forty days and nights. Incidently the Monastery is back this week on Wednesday, 9-10pm, BBC2 for The Monastery Revisited:

A group of ordinary men took part in a unique experiment when they spent 40 days and 40 nights living with monks. 

Almost a year and a half on the five men reunite to reveal exactly what impact this unique experience has had on their lives.

The Monastery was a must-see last year, so hopefully the Convent will be as equally interesting.

PENTECOST: God's Jigsaw the Church

I like jigsaws. I hardly ever do a jigsaw, but when I do I like the challenge of trying to complete.  But jigsaws are really annoying when a piece or pieces are missing. An incomplete jigsaw can make all the work of putting it together feel wasted. A jigsaw needs every piece to see the picture it is trying to show … and so it is with the church … the church needs every person to be the church.

God’s jigsaw the church needs every piece

Just as male needs female, rich needs poor, white needs black, so intellectuals need the simple ... The church is itself when it bridges all these gaps and tensions between people of different kinds (Frances Young, Face to Face)

Some of us think we not important – in a jigsaw every piece is important and no piece is more important than the other … every piece is required … the church is only itself when every piece is in the right place

These bridges are the interconnecting relationships and lives that join us and hold us together – like one jigsaw piece is linked to two or three other pieces. And it is the Holy Spirit who brings us together:

God’s jigsaw the church is a work of the Holy Spirit

the Spirit liberates us, that is to say, by bringing us into community: by enabling us to be with and for the brothers and sisters whom we ourselves do not choose (Colin Gunton, Theology Through the Theologians)

The Holy Spirit has placed you and me in this community – Bunyan Baptist Church – and this is sometimes hard because for all of us there are probably people here we would not choose and things about Bunyan we don’t like and the attraction of other jigsaws (meaning churches) becomes appealing. We want to be church shoppers, when God calls us to committed belonging (this is what church membership means in a Baptist church). The problem is that the church starts with God (at Pentecost), the church is held together by God (in Christ by the Holy Spirit) and the church continues in God to participate in his mission and witness to the world. God has called you to be part of his jigsaw here …

For some of us what we need to do is find where we fit in because not all jigsaw pieces join to each other and a jigsaw piece in the wrong place can distort the picture … some of us are trying to do or be too many things ... some of us are just doing the wrong thing ... and some of us are doing nothing ... when this happens the church struggles to be itself

God’s jigsaw the church is a jigsaw without edges

why might I want to say that? … because new members can always and are always being added and joined on … tiny Lucy Pellegrino this week has joined God’s jigsaw … and those of who have recently found a place to belong and believe are also part of our jigsaw. Pentecost reminds us that that in God’s jigsaw there are no finite number of pieces – 144,000 or the such like – but our task is bear witness to the wonder of God and his story that others may find a home and a family here.

God’s jigsaw the church is a picture of the face of Christ

we are the face of Christ to the world … in and through us people encounter and meet the risen Christ  … the power and work of the Holy Spirit shapes and transforms us in the image and likeness of Christ … and as God in Christ is for us and the world, so God in his church, in us, calls us to always to be looking beyond our edges …

Gunton On ....

Gunton on feminist theology: 'This will not satisfy radical feminist critiques - what will? - yet it remains the case that the interesting feature of New Testament Christology is not its stress on maleness - which is not there - but the way in which at times the centrality of the risen Jesus to the New Testament Church enabled stereotypes to be overcome' (Epilogue to Second Edition, Yesterday and Today, 1997, 215)

Gunton on charismatic Christianity: 'One does not have to look further than the repeated outbreaks of pentecostal enthusiasm in the history of Western Christianity to realise that there is something deeply amiss with the way in which the doctrine of the third person of the Trinity has been understood, taught and lived' (Theology Through the Theologians, 1996, 189)

Gunton on modern liberal democracy: 'The danger of modern liberal democracy is that it will deceive us into believing that we are freer than we are. Here we must not forget the positive side of modern institutions. One cannot, without indulging in reactionary nostalgia, deny that we are freer in certain respects than in many alternative forms of organising society. But we live in a fool's paradise if we evade the pressures to homogenisation or the abolition of the personal differences that make us unique and loveable for ourselves' (The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 2nd ed., 1997, 164)

Gunton on tolerance: 'Much modern tolerance is, to be sure, little more than a means of the repression of uncomfortable opinion, encapsulated in forms of political correctess and illustrated by the experience of a colleague who was once told: 'You can't say that; we are tolerant here.' What needs to be reiterated is that all positions, including relativism, are positions, and thus far exclusive and intolerant of those positions which are logically incompatible with them; and all ideologies and theologies take some institutional or communal form' (Intellect and Action, 2000, 64)

Gunton on capitalism: 'For all its apparent pluralism, the world of the market that so dominates our lives is actually working to make us all identical: all to drink coca-cola and to eat at McDonald's, those symbols of the homogenizing forces of modernity, all to wear the same only superficially different designer clothes ...' (Father, Son & Spirit, 2003, 15)

Gunton on the modern world: '... on spectre at the banquet of the modern world was homogeneity, symbolized by the idea of a Coca-Cola advertisement in every village of the world. The pressures for homogeneity are various: philosophical, political, social but above all perhaps commercial. Homogenizing pressures take away our individuality and particularity, and make us all alike' (The One, the Three and the Many, 1993, 180)

Gunton on Christian responses the modern world: '... it is scarely suprising that Christian responses to the modern world vary from puzzled perplexity, through frenetic and overpowering religiosity to an activism which tends to equate the gospel with the most worthy political causes' (The Actuality of Atonement, 1988, 176-7)

Gunton on Enlightenment thinking: 'It is not only individualistic, but aims to see the individual after the image of God: or rather the powerful, lonely, solitary God of so much Western theological thinking' (Enlightenment and Alienation, 1985, 84)

Gunton on Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology:  'The ecclesiological note is a recurring one in this book, the weaknesses of the treatments being the almost complete lack of those twin motors of a truly radical orthodoxy, eschatology and the doctrine of the Spirit' (Editorial, International Journal of Systematic Theology, Vol 1:2, 1999, 1-4)

Gunton on foundationalism: 'What, then, is wrong with foundationalism? It is not that it seeks a common basis for rationality, but that it seeks to the wrong one and in the wrong way. It seeks the wrong basis, because it seeks one that is merely secular: something inherent within human reason and experience. It thus expects human reason to ground itself. It seeks it in the wrong way, because it believes that it can find what it wants apart from revelation (A Brief Theology of Revelation, 1995, 50)

Gunton on non-foundationalism: '... the anti-foundationalist song is the voice of a siren. The allusion to fideism indicates the perennial weakness of non-foundationalist epistemologies ... Theologically speaking, they evade the intellectual challenge involved in the use of the word God. If that words refers in part to the universal source of being, meaning and truth, then those who would use it must be prepared to take some responsibility for intellectual enterprises which impinge upon theirs from 'outside' (The One, the Three and the Many, 1993, 134)

Considering a New Role for Youthworkers

I guess this is a kind of response to the comments and emails I've had so far to my post should churches employ youthworkers?

The predominant role of the church youthworker is to work with young people - those who belong and do belong to the church - and either keep them in or draw them in the church community. The youthworker will create youth orientated acitvities and programmes running at the same time and at separate times to the wider church services and programmes. When the youthworker is doing a really 'good' job adults and young people rarely come into contact in the church.

What about if the predominant role of the church youthworker was not to work with young people, but to encourage, equip and empower parents and other adults to be those who engage young people? Here the youthworker facilitates the whole church to be youth and children orientated. Their role is to help integration and communication, to give the church the means to be responsible for reaching out to young people, to give the church the means to fulfil their dedication or baptismal promises. This, I would argue, require a reimagining of church, for the implications of changing the role of youthworker would affect and impact who and how we are church. Children and young people would be present and visible in our churches. They would become active worshippers and disciples. This would cause us to (re-)examine what it means to be a community of God's people - who we are would now includes children and young people all the time and not some of the time. This is sorely needed not only children and young people, but for all of us who have become church consumers, where attendance at a worship service/small group has become the badge of Christianity. Ending a specific and separate youth ministry would demand that we face the questions of what it means to be God's church. From a Baptist perspective it would face us with the questions of are we a prophetic, inclusive, sacrificial, missionary and worshipping community? Youth ministry avoids us having to ask those questions, at least not in the same way, with respect to our children and young people. I would argue that provision for children and young people - in the form of youth and children's ministry - is not what being an inclusive and worshipping community means.

This post follows on from a number of previous posts and represents the next stage in my thinking as I continue to wrestle with questions of church, youth ministry, children and young people. To see some of my previous thinking go to 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.