Distinctly Welcoming

Greenbelt 2008

That time of year is approaching fast! Late in the day, there's a music line-up that is beginning to interest me so I'll definitely be making my way over to see Seth Lakeman, Howe Gelb/Giant Sand, Jose Gonzales and One Giant Leap. Looking forward to the usual bumping into old friends, chilling over a cinnamon tea in the Tiny Tea Tent and, should I feel inclined, getting into the odd seminar and talk. I'm on duty in the CMS Main Venue talking about a fresh approach to the theology of religions on Saturday at 4pm (Distinctly Welcome - "No Limits, Just Edges") and talking about faith in the public square (Distinctly Welcome - "Christian Britain or What?") on Sunday at 1pm. Some time on the Monday (!!!) I'm meant to be leading a workshop in the new "Kitchen" venue on Christian community action and collaboration with Muslims. So come and say hello!

I have a belated confession to make that I hit the big 40 a couple of weeks ago. One prezzie was "The Poet, The Warrior, The Prophet" by Rubem Alves. If you like philosophical, poetic works of theology that bring in works of literature, then this is a gorgeous book. It's unclassifiable, mysterious and beguiling, and will be a book I can see myself repeatedly coming back to,

Unity and Diversity: bishops, covenant et al

                                                                                                                                             

I spend a lot of my time encouraging an engagement with other faiths that aims to seek the best in the other and as a bottom line, disagree well. This last week then has been a sobering reminder of the need for us to follow similar principles as we relate to our own brothers and sisters. A week of washing our dirty linen in public or sweeping dirt under the carpet, depending on how you look at it. The very human tendency to draw our lines in the sand and push people away is all too evident in a church that should be characterised by risky, vulnerable love. Now I'm not suggesting that this means the church should "let everything go", have no boundaries or disciplines. Rather, in expressing our boundaries, and truths that we may hold dear (tick your choice from the following: women should be free to become bishops, women should not be bishops, practising homosexuals should not be ordained, faithful homosexual relationships need to be recognised by the church) we learn to hear the voice of the other and disagree well.

The thing is, there are bigger Truths that ought to bind us as a family (that's an alternative helpful designation for the church!) and I dare to propose that humility, forgiveness and reconciliation are integral to what binds us a believing fellowship. Yup, it's all there in the breaking of bread/eucharist/communion (tick your choice from the preceding): men, women, old, young, whatever culture, colour, or sexual orientation are restored through the death and resurrection of Christ. Oh, and the "small business" of the centrality of the cross is that we are not just restored to God, but to each other (and creation!).

How can we learn to bless those we struggle to agree with and hear God speak to us in those we might oppose? I remember that a few years ago, Tony Campolo and his wife famously sat on a platform and gave a vivid illustration of this when Mr Campolo talked of his own conservative line on homosexuality. He then passed the mic over to his wife who admitted that she disagreed with Tony and welcomed more progressive interpretations of sexuality in scripture. They still shared the same bed! Sacre bleu!

Whether we like it or not, we are bound to each other in often uncomfortable ways: that's part of the beauty of the church and not an issue that just relates to the current politics of the Church of England. It can be depressing to witness the exclusivism, the labelling and the defensiveness. Going back to the issue of  interfaith relations, I suspect that one of the key processes to get beyond the impasse of Christian disunity  is a more faithful engagement with the world in mission. As we step out and forward, embodying Christ's love in a broken world, we may well find alongside us brothers and sisters, also broken and sometimes of very a different persuasion. In the place of being poured out for the world, in the name of Jesus, our differences are likely to look exceedingly petty.

RUN and BLAH

It's been a busy time but I thought I'd share a couple of observations on two events that i was involved in last week. I dipped into the conference of RUN last week, leading a couple of seminars on Islam and was really impressed with the people that they had gathered there. Despite the rash that came over me as I walked into the atrium of what was ostensibly a mega-church, there was a real generosity and welcome in tone to all of the input, to the hosts and the delegates as a whole.RUN have clearly done a great job in connecting with a mainstream evangelical/charismatic constituency and provided a network that pushes the boat out on thinking and practice into that constituency. The keynote speakers Gerard Kelly and Brian McLaren were their usual impressive selves, basically orienting the church around a vision of integral mission: a church that makes a difference in every area of society. Gerard was especially strong in reminding us that this transformation begins at home and we dare not neglect our worship and community (in whatever package this is manifest!) in pursuit of this mission of God's.

The previous day I'd hosted Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat for a BLAH seminar on Romans. Following their glorious commentary on Colossians, they shared some thoughts on this seminal book for the Reformation, salvation by grace and the evangelical gospel. It was hugely challenging to hear their perspectives on the epistle as a radical tract for community against the empire and dismissing any simplistic view that Romans is all about individual salvation. I've linked to one of the targums that they read, on Romans 13, which gives you a flavour. Their material is the best of biblical exegesis: rooted in historical context, demanding a journey into the text from the listener and applied to some of the real issues of today.

I wasn't entirely convinced by everything that they had to say, but they do clearly have a significant contribution for us as a church in the West. There is a danger of a gospel reduced to the political and becoming severed from the life of worship and tradition in some of their emphases, and perhaps an overly counter-cultural model that fails to pastor and affirm what is "established". I wonder, juxtaposing the two days, whether there are two streams that need to feed off each other. A clear-thinking, politically relevant church married to spiritual passion. In a context of interfaith division, I have the sneaky feeling that sometimes the hardest, most unbridgeable barriers are between Christian evangelicals and liberals......Can we hear God speak to us across those borders, let alone across the borders between religions?

The Lost Art of Identification - incarnation by another name

Talking with a local colleague on Friday, he reminded me that Muslims constantly struggle with extremists, often coming from the outside speaking for their community. These extremists present a distorted, reactionary view of the Muslim faith, appear bolshy and forceful, lacking in compassion, understanding or any engagement with real relationships across different boundaries. For the majority of Muslims, they feel powerless in the face of sectarian groups that supposedly speak on their behalf, using the media's hunger for simplistic caricatures to make their splash. Your average Muslim would rather continue to follow their faith in a manner that fosters goodwill, neighbourliness and peace. It can all be very frustrating and demoralising. How would you feel in this situation?

Well, for many of us, we have an opportunity to sympathise, empathise and identify with the bulk of Muslims in Britain when certain Christian groups pronounce in the public arena to our consternation and bewilderment.

A Response to Christian Voice

I have received a couple of comments from my previous posts directly from Stephen Green of Christian Voice and feel the need to respond so I'll have a go at expressing what feels like complex and mixed emotions and thoughts on the topic:

1. Stephen Green sees this blog as a bit of a "knife-in-the-back" to other Christians. I want to take this comment in all seriousness because I am committed to us working together in unity as Christians, to hear the voice of God right across our differences within the church. Where my statements have come across as presumptive of certain attitudes (and re-reading one or two things, I can understand that reading), I apologise. I don't want to presume on anyone's motivations, and it is wrong of me to do so

2. I am struggling with how to respond to the use of Philippians 1:14-18. These are verses I genuinely wrestle with over a whole host of issues in the church. Basically, if we take these verses at face value, whatever anyone else's motivation, whatever the slant in the message, so long as Jesus is proclaimed, then that is good and to be applauded. I am really not sure that this is what we are asked to take on board literally for all time and in every situation. I do believe (and this is the wrestling in the passage for me) that we should have a generosity in our approaches to other church streams and, by a Christ-like humility, be able to see how God will use a whole variety of Christian approaches and spiritualities. But the context in Philippians is of a small, persecuted church within the heart of the Roman Empire. Paul is writing this from within prison: basically, get the word out. This word is dangerous so will not be bandied about lightly because it costs. Whatever we may think about the challenges of making the gospel known in Britain today, the church has huge amounts of freedom and there are numerous vestiges of Christian presence and knowledge that we need to be conscious of before equating Paul's context with our own. The  "courage" that is referred to by someone else's comment to my posts is not in those that may choose to visit Birmingham for an hour or two on Saturday: it is in those that are living there, day in and day out. Whatever means those Christians choose to use, whether I like their theology or not, let Jesus be honoured in that part of the city. The fact that people from the outside can come in and potentially stir a hornets' nest where none exists will impact on the gospel and freedom of those that remain when the visitors have long since gone. That for me is an issue that needs talking about and addressing. I'm not convinced that those verses in Philippians are a carte blanche for endorsing any activity of the church willy-nilly. I am compelled to critique the prosperity gospel of some churches because it does not lead to freedom but binds and oppresses and is not a proclamation of Christ. So I would ask that we have some sober reflection on scripture in this instance rather than proof-texting

3. "nothing so provocative as a Good Friday parade" - this walk of witness was not provocative. That is the point: it was the product of a consistent relational engagement with the community, with church leaders that are known by mosque leaders. Saturday's demo is provocative because it is divorced from relationship

4. My final point would be an echo of "Asha's" that the ultimate point of reference here should be the local church. If we are truly committed to honouring the body of Christ, to the proclamation across the breadth of the church, we must be able to hear the Catholics, liberal Anglicans, charismatic Anglicans, convent community, Baptist churches and others, that may not conform to the Christian Voice's vision of mission but are all rooted locally, honouring God and living and witnessing in a Muslim majority area. Have we "listened" to all of them?

So, in summary, I hear the critique of not being "Christ-like"; my tone was clumsy and presumptuous. But I hope the above reasons make very clear my intentions and why I choose to disagree with Christian Voice.

40 Years on: Moral, But No Compass?

For the past month or so on BBC Radio 4, there has been a three minute slot with snippets of recordings from "the Summer of 1968". It's tempting to believe that Radio 4 are keen to  celebrate my fortieth birthday. Instead, they're marking the anniversary of the Summer of Love, student riots, the full flowering of liberalism and a whole load of cool music from that year. What I've actually heard is incredibly dull: news pieces that were far from earth-shattering (rock star arrested in drugs seizure, music hall comedian dies, industrial action, midde-of-the-road film premieres, protests against the government etc etc). Apart from the shocking assassinations of Martin Luther-King and Robert Kennedy, the whole Summer of Love thing seems like a bit of indulgent nostalgia from a few middle-aged BBC executives. Accidentally tuning in to a Radio 2 programme listing the pop charts of June 1968 over the weekend, it seems even the idea that  the music was any good is misplaced  (have you tried listening to Englebert Humperdink?).

So what has changed? The new Church of England commissioned report, "Moral, But No Compass" suggests that society has lost its moral bearings due to a privatised vision of the person and increasing distance from the church. Increasingly, I am having a great deal of sympathy for this view, and wonder, as a friend said to me recently, that we have "Not got we wanted, but got what we asked for". The 60's revolution, and I date our current malaise of individualism back to then and not to New Labour, nor even Margaret Thatcher (though each hammered nails into the coffin of communal values), tipped us into the self-seeking that we see now. To paraphrase this same friend:

- we wanted sexual freedom, we got Nuts magazine, lapdancing clubs and untold family break-ups
- we wanted to break away from deference to authority, we got happy-slapping, knife crime and anarchic classrooms
- we wanted self-determination and the sanctity of the individual, we got a myriad of new neuroses and the objectification of the human body
- we wanted choice, and we got SUV's and a planet in meltdown

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't want to sound like some Daily Mail columnist, and I don't hark back to the days of patrician England, unquestioning deference and a different type of class system (we have a new one now based on celebrity and income!). But we do need to do some serious cultural critique, stand back and work out where we may have gone astray from the ideals that God calls us to.

It's not trendy, and I'm conscious that this sort of sentiment is not terribly "emerging church" either. But as a church, we need to work at questioning the cultural values we may have imbibed. I wonder, just to prod some discussion, whether the emerging church, in an effort to build "responsibility to other" has failed in "responsibility to action" because it has been overly dictated by society? .....Moral, but no compass?

Christian Evangelists Arrested Part 2

Church - Mosque: Friends, Neighbours, Competitors, Enemies...?

The above church is where I'm based; the above mosque is the view across the road from the church. So, how we see Muslims is not just an abstract thought, or a political discussion, but a matter of co-existence, neighbourliness and daily lives. Following the controversy over the American evangelists arrested not far from us, it seems that the lobby group Christian Voice are wading in on the act. They are descending on that same area of Birmingham for a very public declaration  that there should be no "no-go areas" and handing out evangelistic tracts. We might like to consider What Would Jesus Do? Invited to just such an exercise, I'm tempted to remember a chapter in one of Brian McLaren's books, "Would Jesus Have Been a Christian?"

Let me fill you on on some extra information:
1. the local Anglican church had a Good Friday walk of witness this Easter, singing choruses and handing out leaflets explaining the Christian faith. The local majority Muslim community welcomed this event and the police were informed and had a minimal presence as part of the gathering
2. every year, the local Roman Catholic convent and church parade a statue of the Virgin Mary, handing out flowers and rosaries as prayers. This is an annual part of local diversity expressed and hundreds of Muslims stand out on the streets to welcome the parade

...is this a no-go area for Christians?

The "arrests" back in February seem to be the fruits of one ill-informed, errant community police officer. The subsequent bandwagon seems to be the fruit of scare-mongering and will-to-power that betrays the Christian gospel institutions such as Christian Voice would so otherwise seek to espouse. Bigging up this issue disconnects the pronouncements in the public square from the vital task of local church presence, for no one I know has been able to ascertain to which local churches these evangelists are accountable. The local church responsibility includes the task of seeking truth and seeking the good of all people.  Saturday's proposed demo, to my mind, is more likely to drive a wedge between communities than build bridges because it is not from a spirit of love and service, but of defensiveness and posturing.

BLAH - Subverting the Empire

 
Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat are with us for a BLAH in Birmingham on Tuesday June 17th. They are here as part of the "Subverting the Empire" tour, and for the Birmingham leg, their focus is the book of Romans, "Romans Disarmed". Catch them while you can: book here for the day in Birmingham Anglican Cathedral, the cost a  mere £15.  Bible commentaries are often dull, obscure and lacking in application. Their  groundbreaking commentary on Colossians is none of these: a breathtaking  application of this letter to the challenges of postmodernity and pluralism today. It is infused with passion, wit and evidence that this couple are part of a working scholarly reflection from within a lived, missional community.

N.T.Wright: "One of the most creative and exciting books to emerge from the current interface of biblical, cultural and political studies"
Walter Brueggemann: "Colossians will never be the same again; neither will the reader"
Brian Mclaren: "A tasty sample of postmodern engagement with a biblical text...It will expose readers to evocative and challenging new ways of reading and interpreting both Scripture and our culture"

...can't wait to hear what fresh insights they will bring to bear from the monumental book that is Romans!

Christian Evangelists Arrested in Muslim Area

The issue of evangelism amongst Muslims rumbles on. The latest instalment is the case of two US evangelists being "arrested" in an area not far from mine for distributing Christian tracts to Muslims. Now this particular story dates back to February so there is obviously an element of the Telegraph getting the bit between its teeth and seeing a controversy played out to a largely conservative readership. So let's be aware of context and be conscious of who is often being addressed by the stories we are reading or seeing on the news. This is where the church needs to be very careful; we need to be speaking to and for Christians but also to the nation as a whole, which includes Muslims, atheists etc.

Let me start by making a very clear point that the freedom to proclaim one's religion in public is something we should be stoutly defending as a bottom-line in society. But let me add some riders that make things just a tad bit more complicated:

1. would Daily Telegraph readers be so anxious to defend the freedoms of Muslims, dressed in religious garb and very visibly representing a "foreign" culture, to give out Muslim tracts, warning of the prospect of hell for Christians and the corruption of the Bible in the village of Bray, Berkshire? "Love your neighbour as yourself" requires that we apply standards to others that we would like from them. If we're troubled by the prospect of Bray, Stow-on-the-Wold, Godalming and March (for foreign readers, these are idyllic English villages and towns, white and prosperous) receiving an influx of Muslim evangelists then we should keep quiet.

2. the Daily Telegraph article quotes the Police Community Support Officer giving the American evangelists a hard time about Iraq and Afghanistan and their reply being "this had nothing to do with the gospel". Now we must not fall into the trap of the casual racism that infects the British in their attitude to Americans, (especially in the church?), but these global events do have everything to do with the gospel. This may well be where I part ways with the said evangelists in terms of my understanding of "the gospel". For many it is a pristine truth to be dispensed  on a folded,  printed bit of paper or announced like some town crier. For me though, the gospel is ultimately about the lordship of Christ and thus is a fundamental truth that has consequences in real-time: what Jesus being Lord means for any one person at any one moment may be quite different. The travesty that is the West's actions in Iraq were a consequence of many Christians NOT allowing Jesus to be Lord, and so many Muslims struggle to hear a Christian's commitment to a holy God without hearing instead a shrill, self-seeking materialism.

The missionary question for the evangelists in a Muslim area, then, is not, "how much courage do I have to present timeless truths to Muslims on their turf?" Rather, "what would Jesus' lordship look like in my life and in this place such that it made sense to Muslims, immunised against the gospel by so much of our history and politics?" Such a question demands that we become bearers of the message in our behaviour as much as our words, in our communities, as much as individuals. We are not town criers merely announcing something that costs us little aside from the cultural embarrassment of an odd costume; a relic of another age that misunderstands the whole point of communication. The gospel does and will offend; but we are called to suffer for being faithful, not aloof. Can we hope for not "more mission" amongst Muslims but "better mission" whilst affirming all that seeks to honour the name of Jesus, in all its variety and weakness?

Dialogue or Evangelism with Muslims: a simple trade?

There is a mini fuss kicking off about the place of evangelism amongst Muslims. Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali has spoken out about the need to have a strategy for evangelism to Muslims and suggested that the church has been far too diffident in that direction. His comments have provoked a fellow bishop to warn that evangelism "contributes nothing to our communities". What do you think?

Stay with me with this thread while I make my point; whatever you do, don't duck out too early for fear of misunderstanding me! Now I'm someone who normally gets a little jittery when Michael Nazir-Ali starts talking about Muslims...but he has got a point. Is the church a little like liberal newspapers that will gladly have a pop at other religions, but never satirise Muslims for fear of a backlash? There's not much integrity and courage there. And what kind of one-dimensional dialogue and community relations are established when a major dimension of our identity (and this is a mutual identity!) is the injunction to proclaim our faith to the other?

For me it is a no-brainer that we need to embrace evangelism and continue to think through our proclamation to all faiths and none. It's also a no-brainer that we should be thinking through strategies for dialogue and good community relations, though. The more pressing questions relate to the issue of what kind of dialogue and what kind of evangelism?

So, I'll applaud Michael Nazir-Ali, but add a vital qualification. If the Bishop of Rochester wants to resource an influx of folk bearing tracts and standing on podiums doing anti-qur'anic polemics into areas like mine (Muslim-majority) then I will agree to disagree. If he's talking about resourcing church communities that can confidently love and serve their Muslim neighbours unconditionally while unashamedly explaining the hope they have in Jesus, then I'm with him 100%. If the Bishop of Hulme's concern to see good community relations is about smoothing church-mosque relations so issues like apostasy in Islam are never broached and doctrinal differences overlooked in favour of focussing on shared beliefs alone, then I'm not interested. But if his vision of dialogue helps churches and Muslims to disagree and still be friends then I'm up for that.

The thing is, we don't need traditional evangelism or traditional dialogue: we need dialogue that includes the sharing of faith and evangelism that is prepared to listen.