Distinctly Welcoming

Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth

I'm enjoying Christmas preparations reading through Maggi Dawn's "Beginnings and Endings" book. There are some gems of theological insight and gentle nudges to a lived Christian life. Reading yesterday, I was reminded of a wonderful Advent prayer by the theologian, Walter Brueggemann, that seems doubly apt as a prayer into a world of inter-religious conflict:

We give you thanks for the babe born in violence.
We give you thanks for the miracle of Bethlehem, born into the Jerusalem heritage.

We do not understand why the innocents must be slaughtered;
we know that your kingdom comes in violence and travail.
Our time would be a good time for your kingdom to come,
because we have had enough of violence and travail.

So we wait with eager longing,
and with enormous fear,
because your promises
do not coincide with our favourite injustices.

We pray for the coming of your kingdom on earth
as it is around your heavenly throne.

We are your people grown weary with waiting.

We dwell in the midst of cynical people,
and we have settled for what we can control.

We do not know that you hold initiative for our lives,
that your love planned our salvation
before we saw the light of day.

And so we wait for your coming,
in your vulnerable baby
in whom all things are made new.

Amen.

This can be found in Brueggemann's book, "Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth" here.....

New Age Spirituality - Too close for comfort?

Yesterday I had the privilege of hosting Ben Edson of the emerging church fellowship sanctus1 as he did some training for us and then spoke at our BLAH Birmingham event. Ben has just come back from a week of research in the New Age eco community of Findhorn and his reflections were incredibly stimulating. I won't repeat his story here but Ben's blog plays out the scenario of joining in the ritual of the birth of the new moon here and it has created quite a stir. Ben is an incredibly thoughtful church leader with, at heart, a truly missionary vocation so we would do well to hear him out and listen to the challenge of a constructive engagement with New Age and neo-Pagan spiritualities.

Coming from the more acceptable inter-faith perspective it's fascinating for me to reflect on Ben's approach. I'm not sure that there are definitive judgments to be made here. On one level, it's far easier to know when to say "no" and when to say "yes" to a shared prayer when working with traditional religions with their corpus of language and theology that can provide for a sifting of the good, the bad and the blandly benign. When we encounter the New Age, we are engaging with a meld and mix that, to some extent, accomodates whatever the participant wishes to read into the experience. I wonder too that in Ben's sharing in the birth of the new moon festival that what you have here is a ritual, divorced from worship. It seems to be more like a rite of passage, a marking of the seasons that can become an act of worship for us as we recognise the faithful sovereign God who governs the seasons.

Reflecting on Paul's engagement with the religions of his day, I recognise three understandings of "what is happening" that require discernment: something of God, something false and dangerous, and something empty and redundant. The risky challenge for everyone of us (whether we are mixing it with the secular, Islamic, Hindu, New Age etc) is to to stay faithful and true in relationship when we are not entirely sure what we are discerning.

Anyway, Ben, thankyou for the stimulus of your thoughts and your considered practice.

BLAH Brum - New Age Spiritualities, Ben Edson

Next Tuesday, 13th November, we have the latest BLAH seminar with Ben Edson from the holy city of Manchester. Ben is involved in sanctus1, an emerging church fellowship linked in to the Manchester Diocese and seeking to engage spiritual searchers. Ben is one of the leading thinkers in the emerging church movement and was recently at the Manchester Mind, Body, Spirit Fair embodying something of Paul at the Areopagus in Acts 17! He's well worth listening to and will be sharing about some of the lessons he has learned on the way. Doors open at 6.30pm, light refreshments available, we finish at 8.30pm. As usual, we're using the "Breathe" space on the 5th floor of 3 Temple Row, opposite Birmingham's Anglican Cathedral, St Philips. Let me know if you plan to show.