Ok I am no longer a Blah virgin. Last Tuesday I ended a great day by accompanying Matt and Yaz (two stars of the present and future church) to Blah at CMS. Great to see Jonny Baker again and to meet up with Martin Thomas and Jonathan Kerry and a few others. Had to rush off for a train and so missed actually speaking to many people at the end.
I am coming to Blah again...so hopefully next time I will get to see more people...
So Kester's complex christ...well, sorry but not convinced. I like some of the stuff that kester was saying about re-imagining the church, about decentralization of power, about the pressure to conform. The whole post-marxist agenda of Mancuse was dealt with well...but Kester, mate, read the whole book, please!!!
In fact, I also like the image of alt.worship as 'punk' - although is it really an answer to say that alt.worship simply burns out the old and then will be replaced? Surely there is something in alt.worship that is actually true and so worth keeping and cherishing. If it is such hard work, then perhaps worship should be hard work...
A lot of what Kester was saying depended on an interesting dichotomy between revolution and evolution. Kester suggested revolution is from the top - the imposition of change by an oligarchy. He compared it with Microsoft and closed source software. On the other side, he talked of evolution - a gradual bottom up process of change which can be compared with open source software like Mozilla etc. Revolution, he suggests, doesn't work anymore - where by revolution he means the top down enforcing of change to titivate the status quo - to give the status quo a new image.
In fact, he suggests, revolution provides a simple answer whereas evolution provides a complex answer and that is where we need to be looking for answers - complexity theory. OK...but hang on a minute - who defined revolution as a top down enterprise? How about Czechoslovakia and the Velvet Revolution? How about alt.worship? How about popular uprisings throughout history? Can we really say that these are simple oligarchic makeovers? I think that that is just too simplistic an answer in itself. Revolution is not that bad an idea, Kester. And as for cities not needing a bread tsar - I was glad someone raised in the question time the whole point about market focres and demand - in lots and lots and lots of urban and rural places in this world, a bread tsar is exactly what is needed - it is called the United Nations, or Christian Aid, or Tearfund. It is simply not good enough to say that in our situation of overabundance bread doesn't run out because of complexity theory - it doesn't run out because we have got too much!!! And as for ants not living in hierarchies and your myth about the introduction of the internet...are you sure you're right, Kester?
So, Jesus. For Kester, Jesus becomes a bottom up kind of evolutionist. He rejects the OT simple idea of a revolutionary messiah (does he???) and instead initiates an unstoppable open source movement of the spirit. Jesus disappears from the scene (like the scary scenes from the watchman visual novel) and is replaced by this new community - we are Jesus scattered complexive body.
And the attempt to redeem Judas? Well, this is commonplace stuff in Biblical Studies - a whole number books have come out recently on this subject and of course it is the subplot of Jesus Christ Superstar and so on. For more reading, see William Klassen and Kim Paffenroth's works. Here's an article Kim Paffenroth wrote in 2001 on depictions of Judas in film. But even if we want to be sympathetic to Judas, we cannot really suggest that at this point Jesus rejected the simplistic revolution in favour of the complexive evolution of himself into a community of the spirit. Where is the space for a bodily resurrection or ascension? Where is the whole role of the parousia or second coming where Jesus seems to be suggesting that a whole scale oligarchic revolution is coming. And if we are to reject these images because they are a later simplistic redaction of the orginal complexive Gospel tradition then are we really being that fair to the gospel message?
A stimulating evening...and pages of notes to read through and loads of ideas and a book to read...but...
Quotes of the night?
- the future is open source, local, and adaptable.
- Where is the place for the church to dream?
- bricks are just reconfigured mountains
Overall?
I'll buy the book and give it a second go...but there is too much based on too little here. Is it really that simple? Isn't it both and rather than either or - don't we need some direction as well as some grass roots stuff. Isn't Jesus both a bottom up popularist messiah (spending time with the people of the land and the marginalised) as well as a top down revolutionary (God incarnate)?
What I was worried about most was what the image was of a postmodern world and what the interaction was with philosophy and epistemology and sociology and Biblical Studies in what Kester is doing.
What is postmodernity? What would be a postmodern expression of futurechurch? What is it that is actually going to fire the magination of the masses of people out there to actually get involved in this rather staid middle-class enterprise we call church?
Of course, the biggest issue I haven't mentioned. Kester started by suggesting a reversal of Descartes' dictum, "je pense donc je suis" - suggesting that people who do not think do not actually exist. Now I can see why Kester used this analogy because he wanted to go on to say that people who are forced not to think actually exist on a lower plain that those who think. It is the old dictum, reexpressed in works like the Matrix or 1984, that totalitarian regimes repress thought and so limit human epxression and create subhuman existence. If the church stops people from changing church or moving away from Christendom, then it will be acting like a totalitarian regime and stopping people being who they might be - the church would be working against the liberative power of God who wants people to have life in all its fulness.
However, the danger in the analogy is twofold - firstly it incorrectly suggests a dependance upon rationality as the defining essence of humanity - this is modernist thinking. Life is more than thinking...life is living, being, loving, playing, enjoying, sensing, smelling, singing, feeling, crying, laughing, breathing...(a few other things I can't list here but are going through my mind and need to be in this list...)...It is not that totalitarianism limits thinking - it limits being - it is anti-Christian because Jesus came to offer life in all its fulness. In fact, who thinks? You could get into the eugenic horror of saying that the plebs on the streets of London, the masses, the unwashed thickos should be shot because they don't really exist. Now Kester was a million miles from saying this...but the whole point is that this is Cartesian modernism rather than Gadamerian postmodernism! I think emerging church needs to move out of the limitations of modernist thinking and use the new concepts of postmodern thought...
The second danger was quaintly expressed by a young gentleman who shared that we should stop talking and just get on with it (using different words quoted elsewhere!). Emerging Church needs to be intellectually solid - believe me the intellectual power of the staid chruch is pretty formidable. We need people to engage with scholarship and become spiritual and intellectual leaders of emerging church. But we also need to move beyond the concept that thinknig matters. We need to actually see how this stuff works out in the real world. As I have said before, I am not convinced that many expressions of emerging church are hitting the road evangelistically speaking - they seem to be drawing in dechurched people rather than unchurched people - they seem to be small and middle class and white. If anything this is actually worse than staid church - it is certainly no improvement. If emerging church is going to go somewhere it needs to move to somewhere else...
Of course, I am just me and I don't know the scene well enough. But I just wonder, in my post-virginal ponderings, where exactly the Spirit is leading...
Too long...and prob too brutal...but hey this is a blog! Blown my chances of ever getting a hearing at an emerging church event ever!!! Pete = Greek for foot in mouth!
Pete
great thoughts pete. i'm so naffed off that this site that was being launched has taken so many more days. but i'd love it if you can add this into the ether/conversation when it does.....
good seeing you
cheers
Posted by: jonny | July 08, 2004 at 05:29 PM
I wasn't there, Pete, but I enjoyed your thoughts in any case. There's lots of things in the 'emerging' world that need a thorough analysis - you've raised lots of good points here. More please!
Posted by: maggi | July 08, 2004 at 05:59 PM
Don't worry Pete, no brutality taken, and I think you've probably bettered your chances! Emerging Church = Greek for 'Up for a scrap about ideas'? I hope so!
Apologies for not being able to come over more balanced on Tues, I'm sure you appreciate the difficulties of making complete sense from a standing start talk, and (I hope) the book provides some equilibrium. Hope you enjoy it, and look forward to batting the ideas around further.
There's going to be a discussion board on the companion website thecomplexchrist.com As I said on Tues, I don't feel I'm the expert with all the answers - I wanted to just put them into the public domain - so it would be great to move them forward with through debate there, and I'd love you to be involved.
It should be out in the next week or two, even though the official date is August 20th.
Cheers
Posted by: Kester | July 11, 2004 at 09:15 AM