Join us for a week exploring Celtic spirituality

On September 20-24 we will be leading a course on Celtic Spirituality as part of Fuller Seminary’s DMin program.  Based on the island of Lindisfarne, off the coast of Northumberland, we will have sessions on Lindisfarne history, spirituality, as well as hands-on workshop on Celtic art, worship, reflection on mission issues, and sharing stories.   In addition to sessions led by us, we have recruited some significant speakers who live and work on Lindisfarne itself. 

As well as those who are formally enrolled in Fuller’s DMin program, we can also accommodate others as ‘audits’ (which roughly speaking means you have the experience without doing the work – and pay a lot less for the privilege!).  For details, see
http://www.fuller.edu/uploadedFiles/Academics/School_of_Theology/DMin/SP764%20Drane.pdf
   And to enrol (or enquire more), email Julia at dmin@fuller.edu

Church Leavers

In February 2007 we were teaching at Fuller Seminary, Pasadena, and a couple of students asked if they could create a website as their assessed work for a course on ‘Theology and Culture’.  They did, and both got A’s for the course.  Their intention was to research reasons why people leave church, by inviting such people to share their stories.  What we (and quite likely they) did not begin to imagine was that the site would still be up and running more than two years later, and still going strong with responses and stories from people who were leaving church – but (and this is the interesting part) mostly were not giving up on faith.  To learn more (and maybe share your own stories), go here.

It’s an interesting reflection to think that if we’d been inflexible about what assessed work in a graduate school should look like, a significant resource for wounded people would never have existed.

How not to go to church

This news item tells its own story: 6 year old steals his dad’s car to avoid going to church.  Draw your own conclusions – about the kid, the parents, the church, or all three.

Angels

We’ve been thinking about angels recently.  Not too surprising given that it’s Christmas, and even breakfast television had a slot this morning retracing the journey of Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem, in which the presenter talked about angels in the same matter-of-fact way you might talk about traffic jams or the weather.

 

But it’s not really Christmas angels that got us going on this.  In fact, it all started just over a month ago when John was guest preacher at a church in the north-east of Scotland.  The title of his sermon was ‘Holy Ground’, based around the story in Exodus 3 of Moses’ encounter with the burning bush.  At the time, it seemed as conventional a sermon as you could imagine, but in the course of it John shared some of his own experiences of holy ground, including a story of angels.  Not just any angels, but a very personal story which was one of the pivotal points in his own spiritual journey, when during a trip to Manila in the Philippines he had an experience that could only be comprehended as an encounter with angels.

 

So far, so good.  The congregation went home, said the usual platitudes as they left (‘loved your sermon today’, ‘deeply moving’, ‘hope you’ll be back’ – you know the sort of thing).  Actually, some of them really did seem to have been deeply moved.  Until they started thinking about it later that week, and realised that they were supposed to be Dispensationalists and therefore by definition shouldn’t be believing in angels – or at least, not unless they were in the Bible, because the whole point of Dispensationalism is that we now live in some sort of interim stage of God’s relating to this world and what happened in the past can’t be experienced today.  So if John was telling the truth and he really had encountered angels, where had they come from?  There could be only one possible explanation: he must be in touch with the dark side, inspired not by the divine but by new age hocus-pocus, and therefore to be denounced and certainly not invited back again.

 

Since that happened, we’ve had lots of reflections on all this.  A missional one was first: how can people who so readily dismiss anything mystical or numinous possibly expect to connect with a culture that is desperately searching for help from beyond ourselves?  And a theological one: what sort of God do these people believe in, if God can only act according to some theological theory that was only dreamed up in the 19^th century?  Maybe the answer to that lies in the fact that the individual who stirred up all this strife in the first place is a scientist, and there is a certain sort of scientist who thinks that their PhD makes them higher than God (just think Richard Dawkins – though it has to be said that not all scientists are like him).  When you think about it, mixing a materialist science that sees everything in terms of unchangeable laws of nature with a Dispensationalism that says God is no longer active in the world is a pretty strong humanistic brew that puts you in control of most things.

 

Believing in angels seems remarkably straightforward compared with that sort of contortion.  Not to mention the fact that the very first pages of the Bible have quite a lot to say about people thinking they know better than God.  Whatever else you might think about the circumstances of the first Christmas, you could never accuse God of doing things our way!

This week so far

It’s been a pretty hectic week for us.  We went straight from Brian McLaren’s meetings in Perth to London, and just back a couple of hours ago.  One of the highlights of that trip was eating here.  A really cool experience for arts types, as it’s a restaurant inside an installation at the Royal Academy.  So not only was the food truly excellent, but the ambience was something else – with great service as well!

While in London, we had plenty of time to unpack the Brian McLaren conference (which, incidentally, was an overnight thing that included the public meeting in Perth but also a couple of sessions within the conference, not to mention staying up half the night for personal conversations).  Nobody reading this will be surprised to learn that Constantine got a really hard time (again).  That poor guy must be not just turning, but churning in his grave, what with all the attention he’s getting from Christians these days.  And alongside that, of course, was much critique of the Christendom narrative (so nothing new there either!).  But we did ask each other a couple of questions.  First up, supposing we’d been Constantine (or for that matter, any of his pals, either inside or outside the church), what would we have done?  Almost certainly the same as he did.  So when does the stone throwing stop?  Has he become a convenient historical fall guy to divert us from addressing some of our own issues?  It’s a genuine question – not like we have a definitive answer to it. 

And then on the narrative of Christendom.  There was a fair amount of discussion among the group about whether we should just ditch that story altogether as being too controlling, exploitational, manipulative, etc – and start all over again by telling a completely different Christian story for our generation.  We are in no doubt that we need a new Christian story if we are to communicate the core of Jesus’ person and teaching to 21st century post-Christian cultures, but there is still a question about what to do with the historically inherited narrative.  To put an explicitly theological spin on it: are we saying that the Christendom story cannot be redeemed?  And if we are, then what other things or people are beyond redemption?  And if there are things that can’t be redeemed, what does that say about our understandings of redemption, or indeed of the grace and love of God?  Well, we’re thinking about it …

One other thing we’ve been thinking about is the way Brian focused the atonement debate, with this question: what or who do we need to be saved from – from God (who is angry with us), or from evil, which is against both us and God?  We’ll tease that one out a bit more later on.  But it’s a good way of putting the question.

DR CONGO

Remarkable!   A great piece of news!   Now that is news!  A visiting doctor to Congo has performed an outstanding piece of surgery on a young boy who had his arm blown off.  He hadn’t done the operation before but by the miracle of texting, his senior colleague back in the UK led him through the complicated processes by text instructions!   We’re amazed!   Less by the skill of the surgeon and more by the part played by texting.  It reminded us of a very similar story from a friend maybe as long as 15 years ago.   As a language student, she also went to Congo to work for a year with CMS using her language skills and was placed in a remote area where another volunteer was working as a doctor.   He also found himself having to perform surgery he had never done before, but he had his medical textbooks with him, one of which contained the instructions.  So our friend sat in the corner with the book and read the instructions out to him.   At one point she recalls him asking, ‘Are you sure you haven’t turned over two pages at once?!’   We’ve laughed about that quite a few time .  But what was even more amazing was that the patient’s family (who evidently were watching the whole performance) thought the patient was getting a really special deal because unlike other operations they’d come across, this one came out of a book!  There’s something in there about spirituality and mission (not to mention our Enlightenment obsession with things written in books), and we’ve often used it as an example of how not to do theology, mission, and lots of other things.  Would you really trust a surgeon who needed to consult a book to learn how to do it?

Mind you, texting does seem to be more immediately personal.  There are members of our family who we would lose contact with if it wasn’t for texting.   And in recent months, we’ve done some significant pastoral care using text messages with a person who suffered one of those tragic bereavements that you hope will never come your way.  Sometime in the future we want to write more about how that has worked.   A few initial thoughts suggest that it works partly because it’s less invasive than some other forms of communciation: people only need to read a text when they are ready, and there’s no demand to respond.  Brevity is acceptable, though from the point of view of offering pastoral care that’s the challenging bit.  A conversation can so easily drift into platitudes, whereas in a text every word has to count otherwise it’s not worth sending.  If you’ve not found it already, Morning bell from Ian Adam at mayBe is a good example of a text to inspire your prayerlife.

Story, narrative, and mission

Well, the snow’s now turned to ice and Olive had a hard time getting to Dundee for a meeting with Geoffrey Stevenson to plan a course they’re teaching together for Cranmer Hall in January, on ‘Story and narrative in Christian mission and liturgy’.  Olive’s contribution to it is based on a course she teaches for Fuller Seminary, called ‘Storytelling, Gospel, and Culture’.  It so happens that this meeting coincides with us reading Metavista by Colin Greene and Martin Robinson, which has a lot to say about the importance of story in communicating faith within post-modern culture, but surprised us by containing no stories!  They’re not alone in that of course, there is no shortage of people keen to tell us what needs to be done but not offering much in the way of either stories or models showing in practical terms what they’re on about.  That’s not to say that these two aren’t experts: they obviously are, and display evidence of their wide reading in (western) philosophy and social sciences in just about every sentence.  From that perspective, it’s a great book.  But as practical theologians we struggle a bit with the idea that theory comes first and that spiritual practice always starts with some kind of ideological basis.  Most Christians probably operate the other way round, starting with practice and then maybe reflecting on it all more analytically.  Like Gustav Gutierrez said, something about discipleship being the first act, theology the second.  Not to mention the fact that in plenty of other areas of life, a theory-driven approach to knowledge seems to have shortcoming.  British news today is dominated by claims of horrendous child abuse and questions about why those who inspect social work departments don’t pick up the deficiencies in their systems.  Could that possibly have something to do with the fact that so-called ‘inspections’ are really only looking at the way paperwork is completed, and not asking what really happens on the ground?  Another example of theory triumphing over praxis?  When John was working in universities, he was part of a team carrying out government inspections of ‘teaching quality’, which was another similar exercise in box-ticking.  At least, that’s how it seemed, because the one question nobody was allowed to ask was whether students were actually learning anything!