UK Trip
Reflections on UK Trip - August/September 2004.
(As this is written for the multiple Cityside, Urban Seed, Collins Street Baptist audiences I apologise for names and references that may be meaningless to any – or all of you.)
Being in the UK is always great fun. Getting there is never! This trip had been arranged for almost a year, and so well before my transition from Cityside to Urban Seed began or was even contemplated.
London was experiencing its wettest August in 50 years so I didn’t mind having to spend the first two days inside writing my seminars and generally preparing what I hadn’t been able to do before leaving Melbourne in a flurry of work.
I was staying with good friends Dave and Pat Tomlinson in the St. Lukes Church Vicarage – always a most hospitable place with old friends and new coming through and living nearby. I managed to catch up with Citysiders Grace Chan and Mel Taylor.
Greenbelt Festival – the 31st – began early for me with Andrew Jones http://tallskinnykiwi.typepad.com) organising a gathering of alternative worship/emerging church people from USA, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Over the next four days I would do two seminars and one panel discussion, and take in as many seminars and experiences as possible. Greenbelt is undoubtedly the best Christian based music and arts festival in the world. The range and depth of what is on offer is overwhelming. Around 18 000 punters turned up (www.greenbelt.org.uk) including Citysider Karl Berzins, and friends from all over the world. There are more than 30 venues operating concurrently; 100’s of seminars from people like Anita Roddick, Archbishop Williams, Jeffrey John, John Bell, Shane Claiborne; more music arts and drama than you can cope with; and around 30 different worship events from Gothic Eucharist to Catholic Mass via Taize, Iona and alt. worship.
Unfortunately an over-ripe Sweet and Sour Chicken with rice took it’s toll and I didn’t see much of the last day of the festival but did manage to stay upright long enough to complete my seminar on ‘Freedom From the Tyranny of Worship Leaders’ ie treating worship as an art form and the curator model of worship leading. It was good to spend time on several occasions with friends of Urban Seed, Ched and Elaine Meyers over from USA.
From Greenbelt (Cheltenham) to Oxford is a short trip. I stayed in an apartment at Regent’s Park College. One of the few Baptist establishments around the world with serious history. Oxford is full of history. Sipping soup (my first meal since the chicken) in the Eagle and Child Public House in St Giles; established in 1650, J R Tolkien and CS Lewis were regular patrons and often held forth there….taking time out for reflection in the Oratory – Catholic Church of St Aloysius Gonzaga. Built in 1875 Cardinal Newman preached there and Gerard Manley Hopkins was curate. The Captain of the Wallingford 2nd Eleven Cricket team also lives in Oxford. It was great to catch up with Richard Body and Sarah and Mike Puttick. All Citysiders. Sarah has recently had twin girls. I also visited the alternative worship community (‘Home’) that Richard is part of.
Then it was time to work again. ‘A Church for the Arts’ conference was held at the Ark-T Centre housed at John Bunyan Baptist Church in Oxford. Thursday was titled ‘ Worship as Art’, Friday ‘What Lies Beneath, and Saturday ‘Art as Worship’. This was the first time I have spoken at depth and length about Cityside and what has shaped it and me over the last 12 years. Not wanting to present Cityside as a model for anyone else I have previously declined to do more than make passing references and illustrations in seminars.
Around 40 –50 people attended each day with most staying through. It was great to have some Americans over for the event. Old friends and new. Pete and Tess Ward put it all together (‘Liquid Church’, etc, etc) and it was sponsored by the Church Mission Society, Regent’s Park College and the Centre for the Study of Christianity and Culture, Kings College, and the Ark-T Centre. The punters were a refreshing collection of mostly older people from a variety of denominations and mostly women. The response was very encouraging and I had some good conversations with people. Jonny Baker reviews the event at http://jonnybaker.blogs.com as does Karen Ward at http://submerge.typepad.com/
Then it was back to London. Sitting in the back of the car Mac Laptops on our knees exchanging files, making movies all the way with Karen Ward from Church of the Apostles (Anglican/Lutheran/Emerging) in Seattle (http://www.apostleschurch.org/home.php). I love what Karen is doing there.
A chance to catch up with some more people (Stephanie Hoe, Cityside) and to meet properly with a young guy I have had email contact with for more than a year. Meeting Simon and attending Headspace was a delight. Sitting on the floor in Christ Church & Upton Chapel (History stretching back to 1783, but a building rebuilt in 1941 after being bombed out) where the massive pulpit used by Wilberforce, Shaftesbury, FB Meyer and others had stood until recently. It had been deconstructed and turned into the bar and counter for a café used by a new worshipping community. (http://www.church.co.uk/). I’m not sure what the ghosts of the past would have thought.
A couple of hours at the Oasis headquarters (www.oasistrust.org) was invaluable for meeting the staff, evaluating the team they sent to work with Urban Seed in May-August this year, and in planning for next years team.
I should have realised that the trip home was going to be interesting when I got onto the Underground for Heathrow airport and the electronic signs continually indicated that the train was ‘For Cockfosters’, which is in the opposite direction. But a quick check of successive stations indicated that the train was going the right way! Forty five minutes later, three stops and a few minutes from the airport we ground to a halt with the announcement that a suspicious package had been left unattended at the next station and the train could not proceed until given clearance. Twenty minutes later a further announcement indicated that no one knew how long we would be stopped. Two hundred people, mostly with large suitcases and packs piled off the train in search of a taxi or bus in the village we were stopped at. One hundred and twenty of us eventually squeezed on a double-decker bus, licensed for 60, on it’s regular run to Heathrow. Communitas resulted from the many liminal moments! Forty five minutes later and within sight of Heathrow the bus stopped and the driver announced that his driving hours were up and he could take us no further! This is the stuff that reality TV is made of. Eventually another bus on it’s regular run arrived and we were deposited at Heathrow. I made my flight, but others would not have made theirs.
The long trip home was made pleasantly memorable by the surprise meeting of David Craig from Cityside as I wandered around Changi Airport in Singapore. We were on the same flight to New Zealand.
Thanks for your interest and support as I travelled. I appreciate everyone who made the trip possible for me. I don’t take the experience or the freedom for granted.
Read no further unless you want ramblings and reflections of a more philosophical bent….
REFLECTING ON…
Travel always makes me reflective. Much of that reflection is personal ‘meaning-of-life’ stuff. Below are some undeveloped thoughts of a broader nature.
As has been the case on some previous occasions, my experiences of the alternative worship/emerging church stream of church life continued to worry me as well as inspire me. While most alt.worship services at Greenbelt were full to their venue limits I came away from the UK feeling that it’s still all quite incestuous and self gratifying, with little happening that is making any significant impact on the shape of the Church or the culture. The 50 older people at Oxford gave me more hope for the future of the Church than most alternative worship gatherings I have attended.
While I think that D.A. Carson’s recent body-slamming critique of the Emerging Church movement is unchristian, and yet typically Christian in attacking form rather than substance, I also believe that he misses the point entirely. What he sounds are useful warnings to the movement but hardly a significant analysis. (See www.kevers.net/mills_staley_response.pdf for an excellent summary and response)
I am more convinced than ever that the future of the Church in the West doesn’t lie in the pure alternative worship or emerging church models. Or at least not solely or predominantly in these models. In 50 years time these movements, if remembered at all, will be seen as eddies in the flow of church life rather than a new stream. As a generalisation, there is often too much emphasis on aesthetics and too little on spirituality and an encounter with God. We offer froth and bubble rather than depth. The ancient traditions of the Church are too often neglected altogether or reframed with too little understanding of the essence of what is being adapted. The Future didn’t come down in the last shower. Most groups seem unable to do worship in natural light or without heavy reliance on technology. And in particular, I think we’ve got our leadership model wrong.
My lack of enthusiasm for the corporate, pastor-driven model actively promoted in New Zealand Baptist Churches is well known. It assumes a mechanistic leadership model that will work in every situation. It ignores the intuitive, messy, subtle, and often mysterious ways in which people come together, interact and grow as followers of Christ, and the way those people might be given leadership. We’ve been misled by the ‘vision’ promoters. Worse still, while many churches, particularly Baptist Churches in New Zealand, have relentlessly been pursuing a corporate model of leadership and management, globally corporations have been looking to religion for insights into spirituality, relationships, trust, intuition, mystery, community, commitment, cooperation and even love! They’re applying these to emerging corporate leadership styles while we in the Church apply the models they are leaving behind! To be ahead of the play all the Church needs to do is to apply the values it knows best to its leadership models.
It seems to me that the rock bottom core value of any church community that will make an impact in postmodern culture is community. While the emerging church movement has always been very strong on valuing community it has rarely found a way to offer that to more than 20 people at a time. Significant community building in larger groups only comes from pastoral leadership that is truly pastoral; in touch with the real life of people, has life experience, and is self aware and self confident enough to be open ended and accepting of the breadth of life situations people now experience. It is leadership that empowers the creativity of others and isn’t threatened by that. This sort of leadership is unlikely to come from a 20, or even 30 year old creative who is anti-mainstream church. Most alt. church settings have been loathe to acknowledge any visible form of leadership and have bent over backwards to be ‘all things to all people.’ I don’t think that works in the long term.
Other values are also important in the life of a community of Faith – creativity, acceptance, real participation, servant leadership, collaboration, minimalist structure – but without strong pastoral giftings in clear leadership I think that any new church is likely to fail. Institutions have tended to fund young, creative people to start new churches on the assumption that these are the people most in touch with emerging culture. This may or may not be correct but it is the wrong characteristic to look for. The characteristics that make up a successful pastoral leader in postmodern culture are much more complex, even mysterious, than that. Len Sweet talks about the need for ProhetPriests ie leaders who look forward from a place of being firmly grounded in the daily reality of God’s interactions with people.
I also think we need to recognise that there is a difference between a ‘postmodern church’ and a ‘church that attracts postmodern people’. I know of some successful examples of the latter but none of the former. (I know that doesn’t mean there aren’t any.) If building ‘a postmodern church’ is the goal, I think success will always be elusive. If looking for ways to sustain and resource Christian spirituality among people who may be postmodern is the goal, success is more likely. (Maybe then we will be able to produce worship events that enable people to encounter God in the light of day as well as in the darkened, controlled-light environments we have become so good at creating!)
What is my measure of success? Numbers. I have previously steered away from making numbers a significant criteria, but if after 13 or 14 years of experimentation the movement hasn’t produced some examples of larger (say 80 plus adults in UK, Australia and New Zealand), self sustaining and growing communities, then serious questions need to be asked of the investments made. My Australian friends think I’m being overly critical and that the scene is different in Australia with it’s stronger emphasis on missional-church principles. I’m not convinced. I have no time for ‘growth for growths sake’ but equally am convinced the Church can’t stay where it is. So authentic growth should be expected.
The way forward? At least one possibility is that we should be funding ‘emerged leaders’ rather than just ‘emerging leaders’. Emerged leaders who have a track record of being able to engage with their local communities and provide rituals from a Christian worldview that engage with the needs of those communities. Pastoral giftings, creativity, integrity, openness, hospitality and life experience should be some of the primary criteria for church leaders and planters. These people may need retraining to understand the new world they are part of, and to be exposed to some new ways of doing the old tasks of pastoral care, servant leadership, worship that engages the whole person, stages of spiritual formation etc. But we shouldn’t make age a primary criteria for pastoral selection. (Perhaps I need to revive my idea for an ‘Emerged Leaders Conference’.)
I also think that when we set up an emerging leader in some entirely new emerging church project we need to invest in more accountability and much stronger mentoring/working-alongside/apprenticeship models of training. We have what we call ‘emerging leaders’ and we group them together to support each other – away from ‘traditional ‘ leadership styles so they won’t be tainted — but we assume they already know how to lead in an emerging-way. Why would they? What is an ‘emerging leader’ anyway? Generally someone under 30, with at least a measure of creativity, a dislike or disdain for mainstream church, who has a relationship with a funding provider and who can write funding proposals. Since any proposal for ‘doing church’ seems better than the status quo we fund them. But most of our new ventures don’t see themselves as church. They see themselves as small experimental communities. So they stay small. They don’t take risks. They have no models for structure or leadership except what they may have seen and rejected in other places. They are doomed to fail and we who fund them and give them hope are responsible.
Church-as-small-group doesn’t need funding. They should be led by people who do them in their spare time. The variety and intimacy they offer will always be important for a minority of people. We need to fund projects with potentially larger impact.
Maybe every new project should be under the umbrella of an established church (now there’s a thought) – perhaps where an emerged leader is being retrained? Or at least under the regular mentorship of an established yet flexible leader. This means that change and influence can go both ways and resourcing is available at all levels. Liquid church (Book of same title by Pete Ward) is a vital concept, but I don’t think it works when starting from nothing. It needs an established community of Faith to flow from and around. I think we’ve often placed too much emphasis on needing a neutral venue and looking for non-offensive strategies.
Well, that’s some random, not well-developed or integrated thoughts had while travelling. There is no personal criticism of any individual or church community intended by any of the above comments. As always I reserve the right to change my mind on further reflection or because I was wrong or for no obvious reason at all..
Mark Pierson, 20 September, 2004