Contemporary Churches: a review

What attracted me to getting hold of this book and reading it was the prospectus that it would help '"to apply the insights of contemplative spirituality and spiritual direction to entire faith communities"

For me this is a really of the moment prospectus. Partly because for some time now I've been thinking that we should be discerning the way forward for churches by really listening to the vocations in formation of our members -a sort of corporate guidance exercise. And of course this means that we should be actually living our church lives, for want of a better way of describing it, contemplatively. Part of this is that I have been challenged in the past by the Quaker discernment process as a way of trying to take spiritual accompaniment to the next level which is corporate, congregational discernment. But I have also wanted to take seriously my Charismatic movement roots and the evangelical referencing to Scripture, not to mention taking seriously what we learn (positively and otherwise) from church history about how we do or don't discern good ways forward, or God's ways forward, in relation to our context and cultural milieu. So ... a few implicit expectations on this book; would it be as helpful, insightful and even exciting as I would hope? Was I going to find a book on my wavelength that pushed my thinking forward a bit or even a lot?

Well, yes to varying degrees. One of the unexpected things for me from this book was catching a glimpse of just how rapid and alarming is the decline of USAmerican institutional Christianity. However, this is good for reading in a British context as the stories of dealing with decline and institutional death are helpful. "At a time in Amerecan culture when more peolpe than ever are interested in spiritual practices and young people have a renewed interest in ussues of social justice, institutional religion is proving itself to be ill-equipped to respond." -quite so, it looks similar in Britain too.

In respect of decline and death, I found it particularly helpful to have a case-study of a church's good death and of the institutionally problematic but kingdom-serving resurrection. In relation to that case it was also helpful to have the author's (psychologically well -informed) psycho-spiritual reflection on the tasks ("stages") of grief and how these are important to be honoured in processes of reflection, church direction-setting and pastoral and missional work. It was good to see, too, the complexities of this named and recognised along with a basic strategy for approaching them. For example, "Some people are in denial, some are moving to acceptance; some are angry; others try to bargain for solutions. That is the state of the institutional church today." I particularly liked the way the tasks of grieving were seen also in Jesus' passion; "Even though he saw it coming, even though he spoke about it to his disciples, Jesus continued to wrestle with his fate and bargain for a different future in the garden of Gethsemane." I think that this is a very important permission-given thing to notice and draw into consideration. And a little further on, "Jesus himself worked through the denial, expressing anger at the religious authorities, bargaining in prayer for another way before accepting his fate." There is some useful reflection following that in how we do this corporately.

It was encouraging too to read of approaches to church life where a spiritual-accompaniment approach has been taken. Encouraging because this is what I think I'm finding myself increasingly drawn to. "Council meetings were transformed with the presence of a spiritual director whose function was to call the council together in prayer and reflect back on the process of the meeting from a spiritual perspective. Meetings became times of active discernment marked by the exploration of what it meant to live out the congregation's sense of mission."

And also to my liking, because it named where I've got to in my own reflections is this: "As Christians, it is the teachings of Jesus and the way of life he modeled for us that should be the center (sic) of our lives and not an institution. Churches are places where we gather, learn, share faith, and celebrate our way of life and beliefs. But the institution is not a substitute for the experience of leading a spiritual life which is primarily informed by the teachings of Jesus and the experience of God in our midst." And A few pages later we are helped o see the implications of this kind of approach for leadership: "In this model, the role of leadership is to equip people to respond in authentic ways to the stirrings of God's Spirit, to be always open to new possibilities and to use the resources of the church to translate the understanding of one's call into something tangible. To that end, leadership must be committed to ongoing prayer and discernment."

I also found helpful the insight about how communities of faith might approach things in our new spiritual context. "...communities of faith which are primarily spiritual centers don't limit spirituality to a program. Instead, spirituality, the experience of the Divine, the animation of the human spirit by the Divine Spirit, becomes the foundation upon with the church gathers ... the lesson of the sermon is put into practice more directly..." The kind of approach recommended is much like the principle that 'Sanctuary' in Bradford was constructed in the years of the early 2000s. Here there was a clear drive to build collective worship around responses in real time to the issues raised and discussed: acts of forgiveness, signing petitions, planning for actions. The founding insight in that case was seeing liturgy as repentance: a turning of ourselves to follow Christ -which meant embodying as best we could at that moment what it was we were sensing a call to. In both cases this involved "not viewing themselves as the hub or center of life in the community, members of post-modern congregations live out their faith and spiritual practice with others as equal partners to bring positive change in the world." In reading that I caught a resonance of the thinking in Raymond Fung's 'The Isaiah Vision' and Ann Morissey's 'Beyond the Good Samaritan'.

One of the other things I found myself reflecting on in reading this book is how useful the role if interim ministers can be. I think that this book could also be usefully added to interim ministers' reading lists.

Link-Love: 
Rev. Louis F. Kavar Ph.D. Website
Contemporary Churches on Amazon
Rev. Louis F. Kavar Ph.D. on Facebook

Please tag #ContemporaryChurchesSpeakeasy

Disclaimer: yes I got my e-copy of this book as a freebie in return for a promise to write a review of it. But that's as far as the deal went: I am not obliged to post a favourable review or to pull any punches. But I tend to be a generous sort and my way of appreciating a book is usually to find things that I have enjoyed thinking about or at least that have provoked my thinking further. Only after some thinking do I tend to get negatively critical. 

The five stages of organisational grief

I read this a few weeks back and saved it in Catch to read again later and perhaps blog about. Well, decided to go a head on the blogging front, mainly because I think that my interest in the way it may transfer to the churches in the West is still intriguing and perhaps insightful. In making the connection, I was minded of Mike Riddell's book a few years back
Threshold of the Future which pretty much started with the idea that the church in the West is undergoing the bereavement of Christendom. That's the idea that has stuck with me and so revisiting it through the prism of how political parties react who suffer major electoral setbacks such that they have to question their received wisdom, strategy and messages. In this article the reflection frame is the five stages of grief.

Caveat: the five stages of grief needs nuancing and careful handling; not applying like a rule to human lives so that it becomes a straight-jacket of emotional tyranny. So this is for musing and consideration only; it's not a fate or a procrustean bed.

The article was published shortly after Obama's re-election Now Republicans face the five stages of political grief | Jonathan Freedland | Comment is free | The Guardian, and the author characterises the reactions of Republicans:

Think of it as the political equivalent of the five stages of grief. The ones that trigger the deepest anguish are the serial defeats and the beatings you didn't expect.

So he goes through the stages reading the evidence through the interpretive grid of the stages.

the first stage is denial. ... embodied by the electrifying sight of former Bush guru turned Fox pundit Karl Rove scolding Fox's own number-crunchers for calling the election for Barack Obama, desperately pretending two plus two did not, in fact, equal four.

Yes and we the churches of the West do similar things: we cling to the census returns showing high -but still declining- figures of at least nominal Christians (see here for a bit more info),  and we carry on trying to do church as if they were still holding hundreds rather than dozens.

Next comes anger, often manifested in lashing out and blaming others. ... When Candy Crowley – the CNN anchor who had moderated the second TV debate, arbitrating at one crucial point in Obama's favour – appeared on the giant TV screens, the Republicans in their suits and evening dresses began booing loudly. "It's your fault!" they howled,

I think that this is what a lot of all that stuff with Christian groups protesting at perceived sleights and imagining that they are being treated less favourably than others: it's anger borne of a sense of loss of a previous influence and standing and power.

The third stage of grief is said to be bargaining, accepting that something has to change but seeking to delay or dilute what needs to be done ...  In the current Republican case, you can hear it in the time-honoured admission that "we didn't get our message across" or "there is a perception problem". The party agrees to tweak appearances, but remains unwilling to undertake deep reform.

I think this is probably where a lot of the churches in GB are at the moment: if only we update our worship, say things in a relevant way, use modern media ... you get the picture. Please note that 'deep reform' in this case doesn't mean changing the basic values or core identity, but it does mean recognising that there may be things that have become quite dear to us which are barriers to us reaching out and connecting beyond our own communities.

Friedland rushes the last two stages:

After depression – common after a string of losses, such as the five defeats in the popular vote the Republicans have suffered in the last six presidential elections – comes acceptance. In politics, that usually means a recognition that the country you seek to lead has changed and that, therefore, you have to change with it, no matter how painful that process will be.

Depression? Yes, that's around. I know I have and do experience this stage (nb, one of the crits of the 5 stages is the observation that, in reality, people seem to re-visit 'previous' stages and go at different speeds in different bits of their lives through the process). To be fair, depression is a kind of acceptance where the loss is still keenly felt.

I hadn't realised that I had become so invested in some of the 'advantages' of Christendom until I found myself depressed about their ebb. I was a bit bemused because I recalled praying (way back when I was a newish Christian full of the realisation that many people had the label 'Christian' but didn't understand the importance of the cross and hadn't had an experience of inviting Christ into their lives) that the 'nominals' would stop thinking of themselves as Christian so it would be clearer what being a Christian is and they wouldn't have a false assurance. Well, I kind of feel that that prayer was prescient and now it seems to be in process of being 'answered' (I don't actually think it is being, btw, because I don't think that my asking it was necessarily either right or actually a 'causal' factor), I wasn't sure that it was so good a thing.

Not necessarily good because I think that maybe there are a number of those 'nominals' who actually do  'have a faith' but whom the way we have done church has left cold. I'm also more aware now of how the Christian cultural legacy has helped evangelism. Of course, there is still a dimension of the legacy of Christendom that it would be good not to have and which corresponds to the intent of my erstwhile prayer. That legacy is the sense that people think they know what is 'Christian' and reject it. The problem being that when one investigates, it becomes plain that they don't understand a real Christian faith at all and have rejected a cartoon. The problem is that a post-Christendom society has a lot of this around. It'd be better if we could re-pristinate society with regard to Christianity, but we can't. Not to mention that we continue to score own goals in relation to this: we keep apparently fulfilling those negative stereotypes.

And what would acceptance look like? I think it would have a lot less nostalgia about it. It would be more focused on disciple-making and intentional Christian-formation, it would be strategically counter-cultural rather than narrowly moralistic.

We're not collectively there yet, and those who are (often in contexts like emergent churches) suffer the denial-anger reactions or depressive cynical responses. It's the work of generations, probably.

Of course the other thing to notice about this is that way that I've tended to describe individuals still, rather than institutions. I guess the question is how the way that groups of people sharing grief reactions  scales up within a collection of smaller institutions and organisations interacting when all are at various stages: how does the overall 'feel' change out of those component dynamics?

Should we implement the Easter Act 1928?

I'd thought that the Easter Act 1928 was contingent on the agreement of the the Christian Churches in this country -like that would ever happen! But maybe not -see this article from a couple of weeks or so ago. Unthinkable? Implement the Easter Act 1928 | Editorial | Comment is free | The Guardian:
The occasion of writing, is, of course, the very late Easter this year. And I have to admit that I had mused in odd moments about whether it'd be a good thing to implement it, but I thought that there was very little chance of the churches agreeing to it.
So what would it do? Why might it commend itself?

"the Easter Act 1928, a prescient piece of legislation which is already on the statute book, ready and waiting for a government brave enough to issue the implementation order. The act sets down that Easter Sunday must fall on a fixed day – the Sunday following the second Saturday in April. The effect would be that Easter Sunday, instead of falling on any date between 22 March and 25 April as now, would fall in the narrower window of 9 to 15 April."

Well, perhaps not quite 'fixed' as Christmas (which, incidently, I think perhaps should be tethered, probably, to a Sunday) but certainly de-coupled from the lunar-Gregorian calendar mash-up currently employed and held into a much tighter window.

And it doesn't need for the churches to agree: "the act merely requires that "regard shall be had" to their opinion"
Which is not quite the same as giving us/them the veto. There's no way that the RC would go with it, and I can just imagine the "Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells" reactions from the likes of the professionally-outraged at the Daily Mail and its ilk. But consider, a de-coupling of a Christian high day from public holiday has already taken place (and there are still rumblings) in the case of Pentecost -rather 'Whitsun'.
"Churches would rightly still be free to celebrate Easter on the day of their choice rather than over the public holiday – as the Orthodox church already does. The secular majority, however, would at last have an annual spring break that makes a bit more sense."
I'd want to say that we should consider this seriously. Let there be an early April bank Holiday weekend, but let the churches celebrate Easter our own way and at times that our traditions and collective bargaining determine. The advantages would be that we may be less likely to 'lose' attenders to extended weekends away and more likely to find others to invite to the feast alongside us -you know: who might like to consider responding positively to what we're celebrating... not to mention perhaps it might erode the post Easter 'flop' when instead of continuing to celebrate we all retreat and don't celebrate together further for a fortnight (I exaggerate, but not by much). Shame to lose the Easter Octave of celebration linked to Church life.

Though of course, it'll happen that quite often Pascha will fall at the same time as the public holiday too so the advantages I see would be some years but not others. But I'm not sure that linking Christian festivals with public holidays actually serves us well in post-Christendom.