Mission Shaped Church ebook -free

I hadn't realised that Mission-Shaped Church is available as a .pdf ebook. But now I do and so do you!


Sites Unseen - Earth's Mightiest Alternative Christian Link Portal

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The paradox of original goodness and original sin

Thought-provoking article today on youth crime. Touched a load of things for me that seemed to resonate with my experience of late of teens in the school I'm at currently in Tyneside. And I can't help thinking, again, of Jesus' words about it being better to be thrown into the sea with a millstone roundd your neck than to cause 'one of these little ones' to sin. Apart from anything else, it seems to me, this means we can't simply operate, morally, with a model that only recognises moral responsibility as the determinative factor in human behaviour and sinfulness. It plays, in fact, into my thesis that humanity is corporate as well as individual and that being formed by those around us is the vital transmissive route for the root of sin that we often call 'original'.

Those who would birch and flog the teenagers who go bad seem convinced that human action takes place in a vacuum. There is no excuse for murderous, bullying, thoughtless behaviour, but to ignore the circumstances that led to that behaviour is simply crass. Being poor will not in itself make you more likely to murder another person of your own age, but being poor, brutalised and unloved - or loved in a way that alternates neglect and indulgence - might.

It's the statistics of sin. Like the statistics of existence: we know that it is overwhelming probability that gives us the regularities that many have called the laws of physics. So we can catch a glimpse of the strange possibility that original sin is the overwhelming probability of social formedness inscribing into each of us the basic data that will mean that one way or another, we will find that something we are given by the morally imperfect beings who nurture us (or to whom we look for nurture) interacts with the necessities of our being human; our finitude, our necessarily unique perspective on the world, our concern to avoid pain or to pursue pleasure ... whatever ... to produce thinking and actions which are, to put not too fine a point on it, sinful. And in turn we pass on the memetic virus. (Not that I hold with meme theory, but as a metaphor it has its uses).

In this we see the paradox that we are born both originally and basically good but that we are also bound to sin. Mimesis is the bootstrap that pulls us to learn and become members of our family and then our society. But we are bound to imitate also the sinful content of the messages we incorporate into our individuality. We are well familiar with the way that it runs from them; so much experience in self-examination and reflection on the ways of sin. Thus, from the article:

gang members run with each other because the street is the one place where they can justify and pity themselves with impunity

Any theory of atonement beyond this point in our cultural history will have to take account of this. That's why I recommend

Labour has failed to tackle the roots of youth disorder | Guardian daily comment | Guardian Unlimited

Technorati Tags: sin, social, corporate, corpowerations,

Resurrection is making a come-back

jonnybaker: happy easter!

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from that profoundly secret, still, moment in the dawn of the day, when God raised up Jesus

The Rector of the Parish we live in has the soul of a poet; I enjoyed one of the phrases he wrotesaid this morning.

As certainly as the Universe itself is unfurling still from that
one vast explosion of creative energy we call the Big Bang,
so a new creation, a new way of living ripples still
from generation to generation – even to us –
from that profoundly secret, still, moment in the dawn of the day,
when God raised up Jesus; when God opened new life, for us, in him.

let the trees of the forest sing: My Easter Sermon


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Guilt, gospel, racket and substitution

For as long as I've been aware of Giles Fraser, (and I've escorted him round the venues at Greenbelt and heard him speak, I like the guy), he's had it in for the penal substitutionary theory of atonement. And he seems to be becoming more vehement. Now I agree with him that the popular versions of it do tend to lead into so dodgy ethical and metaphysical territory. And I think, certainly in terms of popular presentations and perceptions, this is a point worth hearing.

Nietzsche argued that Christianity gets going by first inventing a religious-type problem - like hell - and then offering itself as the solution; that it's a fictional/metaphysical deliverance from a fictional/metaphysical affliction. In other words: a racket. This may be true of some versions of Christianity - particularly the nasty evangelical salvation story known as penal substitution.

However, that last bit was a bit OTT. Mainly because it is not fair. It's not fair because whatever else we say about PS theory, when it is properly stated it avoids most of the pitfalls that would earn it the adjective "nasty". We should note that it is the popular versions that are problematic.

I think that the critique is on surer grounds with Nietzsche's quoted view. And this relates to my point a few days back about guilt-arousal preaching. We have lost it culturally when we are having to persuade people of the problem we are claiming to have a solution to. We should be connecting the already felt issues with the Good news in much more direct ways. That's why where people are coming to Christ it is often to do with finding their place within the cosmos, a sense of vocation or of connection that is foremost. Guilt and the need for SP theory is not really on most people's radar. I suspect that we need to make connections between the cross and resurrection on the one hand (and note both terms) and the search for meaning, placedness, 'vocation' and God's good purposes for the world. Forgiveness just isn't a central or primary concern for most people. And worse, by trying to insist it ought to be, we actually are heard to be moralistic and guilt-tripping thought-police: not at all good news.

Embrace freedom | Guardian daily comment | Guardian Unlimited


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Easter ponderdom

Thanks to our Bishop Tom Wright and to the Guardian we have an intriguing thought or two for Easter.

That's why the Easter stories tumble out in bits and pieces, with breathless chasings to and fro and garbled reports - and then, stories like nothing else before or since. As the great New Testament scholar EP Sanders put it, the writers were trying to describe an experience that does not fit a known category. They knew all about ghosts and visions, and they knew it wasn't anything like that.
Equally, they knew the risen Jesus wasn't just a resuscitated corpse, still less someone who had almost died but managed to stagger on after all. They had the puzzled air of people saying, "I know this sounds wacky, but this is truly how it was." They were stumblingly describing the birth of new creation, starting with Jesus but intended for the whole world.

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | Face to faith


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Cathedrals see a steady rise in congregations

While we're on the subject of churchgoing in Britain, here's the surprise.

In 2000, when weekly attendance figures were first collected, the number of regular worshippers at the 43 cathedrals was 14,300, compared with 24,800 last year. Seasonal attendance has also increased: 130,000 people attending services over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in 2006, compared with 94,300 in 2000. Attendance at Easter Eve and Easter Sunday services has risen to 52,400 last year from 47,900 in 2000.

So what's going on here? I confess I don't know but my guesses lead me to ask the following questions, which, if I get the chance I will try to answer. My questions are whether the increased attendances at cathedrals have connections with decreased attendances elsewhere; in other words are we seeing transfer growth here? Particularly with the decline in local churches meaning that the whole traditional robed choir thing is harder to maintain. I'm also wondering how far this may have a relation to a desire to attend without further involvement? The reason possibly shares a driver with the last question: the decline of local church-going may have entered a negative loop which exacerbates the features of decline, that is the disheartening aspects of decline actually further promote decline as people find it harder to be resilient in the face of decline and 'bail' to something that buoys them up and may give them rest from their small church labours.

So we could be witnessing a squeeze of the smaller local church as on one hand the traditionalists bail out to cathedrals and cathedral-like churches, and on the other the radicals bail out into informal 'emerging' set-ups and the 'revivalists' (for want of a better description) bail into large MOR front-led praise-band set-ups.

Of course the knock-on effects are pressure on clergy and active lay people in the declining set-ups which issues in depression and turns the screw of the negative feed-back loop one more twist. It's a 'those who do not have, even what little they have will be taken away' situation.


Church Times - Cathedrals see a steady rise in congregations