Three simple alt.worship ideas

It used to be called alt.worship. Now it’s called emerging church. Whatever. There are lots of definitions, but basically it means Not Your Grandma’s 10am Sunday Service (Praise the Lord!). It’s about seeking to remove the tired old wrapping from the gift of encountering God in community, and parceling it up in new and invigorating ways.

Some markers of alt.worship:

old worship	alt.worship
One big group	Several small groups
All face the front, listen to preacher	Face each other, talk to and listen to each other
Sing hymns	Respond to God through various art-forms: draw, make a collage, write a poem
Recite set prayers together	Pray by drawing, lighting candles, meditating, planting a seed or other interactive activities
Sunday morning, in church	Any time, in cafe, pub, park, church
Kids packed off to Sunday School	Adults and kids share in activities
Instant coffee and boring bikkies	Real, fair-trade coffee and home-made treats

Here are three alt.worship ideas we’ve tried lately, based on some readings from the Gospels. Try them out, vary them, improve on them, and let me know what happens.

The man born blind (John 9): the blind people and the elephant

Key discussion point: People who think they know most about God and how God works in the world are often blinkered or blinded by their preconceptions and unable to recognise God in new and unexpected ways and places, while those who have no preconceived ideas can often be the most open to discovering God.

Activity: A large toy elephant is placed in the centre of the space. Someone tells the story of the five blind people and the elephant: they could each only feel individual parts of elephant and so couldn’t recognise it for what it was. But if they shared their different perceptions, they would be much more likely to realise together they were enountering. Similarly, God is much too “big” for each of us to know on our own – even though we can see what God is like in Jesus. And our understanding is often skewed by our own prejudices. But if we share what we know of God with each other, toegther we can come to a fuller understanding and correct some of our “blind spots”.

Each person receives some sticky notes and a pen. They all think of one or two things they each “know” about God, write them on the sticky notes and stick them on the elephant. Then, everyone takes a few minutes to read each other’s comments.

Elephant with sticky notes

“Born from above” (John 3:1-21): what’s made us who we are?

Key discussion point: The idea that, to be a real follower of Jesus, “you must be born again/from above” – same word in the original Greek – has been much misused. Some people say they are “born again”, but do Very Bad Things (George W. Bush). Some followers of Jesus can be made to feel fake or inadequate because they can’t tell the story of their big conversion moment. But being “born from above” is just one metaphor for knowing Jesus. The Bible has others. Paul, for example, has an amazing conversion story to tell, but puts more emphasis on whether the Christians he knows are showing evidence in their lives now that they know Jesus, rather than being able to recite what happened to them in the past. (Such evidence includes exhibiting the “fruits of the Spirit” and loving one another.) So instead of thinking of one “Big Moment” in coming to know God, it might be more helpful to picture a bowl full of different ingreadients that contribute to our “mix”.

Activity: It’s likely that lots of  influences that have helped us know Jesus and grow in love and service of God. These could include friends, books, random enounters with strangers, church leaders, travels, etc etc. Try to name as many of these on slips of paper, then place into a bowl in which a tea-light candle is burning. The flames will turn the notes into prayers of thanksgiving.

The tempting of Jesus (Luke 4:1-13): what tempts us?

Key discussion point: The idea of temptation has been trivialised in our world: it’s not just about whether you can resist eating that extra slice of mud cake. The temptations we need to worry about are not those that may make us fat but those that distracts us from being the person God intended us to be and fulfilling our vocation in the world.

Activity: Worshippers are given a sheet of paper with a pair of eyes drawn on it, some colured pencils, scissors, glue, and a pile of assorted magazines and catalogues. They colour-in the eyes to match their own, then look through the magazines and catalogues to find pictures and words that symbolise what tempts them away from following Jesus. They can take home the finished sheet, stick it to the fridge and use it as a prayer reminder during the week.

Lent among the onions

Shrove Tuesday, it’s one of the great missed marketing opportunities of the Church: after all, who could say no to a pancake? But Mardi Gras only gains its full significance when it’s understood as the last day of feasting before Lent – which I doubt would be quite as easy a sell.

Lent – the 40-odd days leading up to Easter – has been marked in various Christian traditions in a number of different ways, but a common thread is that of giving up something (fasting, or going without luxuries such as alcohol or chocolate) while taking up something else (a spiritual discipline, like prayer, or a social justice commitment, like giving to the poor).

My past Lenten attempts have been about as successful as my New Years’ Resolutions – and about as spiritual. But this year, I have a plan, and I think it will work. I’m spending Lent in the vegetable garden.

Veggie Garden of Eden

Gardens are very biblical places – scripture is full of them.The Anglican Church lectionary (list of appointed readings) for one of the first days of Lent pairs Matthew’s story of Jesus’ temptation with the temptation of Adam and Eve. The Genesis story, of course, takes place in a garden, the archetypal earthly paradise, where nature is hospitable, domesticated and willingly shares its bounty with humanity. But Adam and Eve’s disobedience turns that garden into a wilderness, a hostile and recalcitrant place where the living is far from easy. As God narrates:

Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you… By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food… (Gen 3:17-19)

And so it has been. But fast forward from ex-Eden to Palestine circa 30 AD. Matthew locates Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, a place of hunger. Yet as the gospel story plays out to the end, we see that Jesus’ continual obedience to God even through death opens the way for humanity to be reconciled to God, and the hostile wilderness that earth has become to us be once again our hospitable garden home (symbolised by the restored tree of life and the undoing of the edenic curse in Revelation 22).

My garden is neither Eden nor wilderness. It is a small, disused backyard vegetable patch that my dad is helping me rehabilitate.We first weeded the whole bed, then marked off about 1/6 of it to begin work in. The next step, to my surprise, was not to upend a few packets of seeds and give it a once-over with the hose (we have tank water, by the way). Instead, we spent several back-breaking hours digging up the soil to a spade or more’s depth, turning it and carefully ridding it of stones, roots and other rubbish that would get in the way of new growth. Then we added the manure. Then we dug in the manure. Then we watered. And then we planted – carrots and spring onions.

I was hot and very sweaty by the end. My shoes were full of dirt, I had cow manure under my finger nails, and a callous from the spade. But I had learnt a small Lenten lesson: before you put the new stuff in, you have to get the old stuff out. Too often, I’ll embark on some form of spiritual self-improvement, whether motivated by Lent or just a general sense that I need to pull up my holy socks. So I’ll add more Bible reading, or praying, or being nice to my spouse to my life. But of course it never lasts. I now have a suspicion that this failure is because I’ve neglected to prepare my garden properly in the first place – I haven’t dealt with the selfishness or doubt or anger or whatever else is at the root (sorry) of the issue. So just like in the parable of the sower, the seeds of my good intentions are likely to fall on stony ground or be choked by weeds before they have a chance to sprout.

This Lent, then, instead of resolving to be nice to everyone, read swathes of the Bible or give up everything that makes life fun, I’m going to put myself under the discipline of the garden and see what it has to say to me about life, about creation and about God. At the very least, I should end up with a nice bunch of onions.

The end of the world as we know it

Overheard in a Melbourne lift:

Man: Cyclones, floods, earthquakes, bushfires, revolutions… My children asked me last night if it was Armageddon.
Woman: How would they know about Armageddon?
Man: They saw the movie.
Woman: Maybe we need Bruce Willis to save us.

...but I feel fine.

Though it’s become shorthand for “the end of the world”, Armageddon – the biblical “Last Battle” – only gets one mention in Christian scripture, in Revelation chapter 16:

Then they gathered the kings together to the place that in Hebrew is called Armageddon.

That’s all we hear until chapter 19 when the kings, their armies and their demonic allies take on Christ and his heavenly host. No surprises as to who wins. This confrontation comes at the climax of a range of calamitous events signalling the end of rebellious humanity’s reign of terror on earth, and the beginning of God’s just and generous rule. Disease, environmental catastrophe, war, famine, economic chaos and earthquake are just some of the fun we have to look forward to, according to Revelation.

Sounds a lot like today’s paper.

So, is this Armageddon, mummy and daddy? In some ways, it would be nice if it was! As a theologian, one of my particular interests is eschatology – the study of the “Last Things” (both last chronologically, and last as in lasting – we theologians can be subtle when we try). So it would be rather neat to be an eye-witness to these momentous events – and it would save me finishing my thesis.

Eschatology is an even bigger conversation-stopper that theology itself. If anyone knows what you’re talking about, they naturally assume you’re a nut. But eschatology is actually a pretty cool field. Traditionally, the “last things” it studied were death, judgement, heaven and hell – core areas of solid, if rather dry, doctrine. But since the 1960 and 70s, the topic has become a little more exciting – and excitable.

To over-simplify, we can pin the changes on two books. Firstly, The Theology of Hope (1967), by the incomparable Jurgen Moltmann. Prodded by Marx’s vision of an earthly, corporate utopia, and driven by his own experience of WWII to despair of the possibilities of human progress without divine intervention, Moltmann began to restore the centre of eschatology from the individual to the corporate, and from the human to the divine. The question became not – “What will happen when I die?” – but – “What is God’s ultimate, historical purpose for God’s people, God’s creation and Godself? And what is the role of the church in achieving this purpose?” Moltmann stood at the head of a loose school of theologians whose focus was eschatological, but whose concerns were firmly in the here-and-now: justice for the poor, women’s liberation, ecology, church reform and world peace to name a few. (Dare we say, left-wing issues?)

Secondly – from the sublime to the ridiculous – The Late, Great Planet Earth (1970) by American Hal Lindsay. Both literalistic and wildly imaginative, the book became a publishing sensation. Cashing in on the growing interest in spirituality and futurism of the Age of Aquarius, and picking up on America’s angst (prompted by the oil crisis, the Nuclear Age and 70s “moral decline”) that it may no longer be Top Nation, Lindsay blithely interpreted the arcane symbolism of the Bible with the aid of the daily headlines, finding Soviet Russia and the EU in the pages of Revelation like the answers to some cryptic crossword. While Lindsay’s message ultimately boiled down to “get saved now and avoid the last-minute rush”, his legacy lives on: a populist, right-wing, vengeful wish-fulfilment eschatology that owes more to the Republican Party than God.

Ok, so that’s a potted history of recent developments in eschatology. So, is this Armageddon, mummy and daddy?

Lindsay would give a resounding “Yes!” Ever alert to the signs of the (end) times, he’d see the world’s recent spate of natural and political upheavals as proof that the end was very nigh. Things will only get worse and worse, until God steps in to save the Christians, and send everyone else to hell. The only action we can take is spiritual and individual – to repent.

Moltmann would say “Probably not”. The end is coming, but its progress can only be seen from God’s perspective not ours – it will be brought in by God, not called in upon us. Messy situations on earth – even so-called natural disasters – are more to do to with the natural consequences of humans behaving in messed up ways, than a sign of supernatural intervention. More importantly, the end is not about destruction and death, but about recreation and rebirth – no matter how violent the imagery, God’s purpose is to bring to fulfillment God’s plan for the perfection of creation. This includes the earth, humanity and human culture. God, says Moltmann, will incorporate into the “New Creation” human efforts, no matter how feeble and corrupt, to “make the world a better place”. So our scope for action is by no means limited to the individual and spiritual: whether we believe the end is near or far, humanity should work together for the good of all.

Finally, what would Jesus say? Matthew reports him as advising listeners:

You will hear of wars and rumours of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains. (24:6-8)

Conflict and chaos signal the beginning of the end, but not The End. Instead, Jesus continues:

[T]his gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come. (24:14)

The end – or the purpose – of this life on earth is bound up with the spreading of the Good News about God – liberation for the oppressed, wholeness for the afflicted, love for the stranger, care for creation. We don’t need Bruce Willis to save us from the end, we need God’s Spirit to help us fulfil our part in making God’s kingdom a reality.

Theology in a nutshell

If you want a great conversation stopper, tell people you’re a theology student. It works in one of two ways. Many people aren’t sure what theology means, but don’t want to let on because they think they probably should. So they respond with “Oh, right” or similar, and change the subject. Other people know that theology has something to do with religion, and that religious people are determined to convert you, so they respond with “I’m a Catholic” or similar, and change the subject.

But occasionally, you get a response that shuts you up, rather than your interlocutor. This happened recently while chatting to a cycling partner. Having told her “I’m a theology student”, she responded with, “I don’t know much about Christianity: all I know is ‘love thy neighbour’.”

And in a way, that’s all there is to know.

Why I’m not an atheist

It’s ironic (or perhaps it isn’t) that the biggest “story” in Christianity for 2010 was atheism. This year saw the Global Atheist Conference in Melbourne and an atheist bus poster campaign in London. Battle lines were drawn over the proposed introduction of an ethics course in NSW primary schools to provide an option for students who don’t attend religious education classes. The country’s newest political force, the Australian Sex Party, campaigned with the slogan of Keeping Religion out of Politics. And English atheist and writer Christopher Hitchens memorably stuck to his guns, turning down offers of prayer in the wake of his diagnosis with cancer.

But while there are proportionately more atheists around today than in Victorian times, I suspect there are fewer Capital-A-Atheists like my personal favourite, Mr Goe. The story has it that this 19th century English solicitor was such a staunch non-believer that he refused to give his sons “Christian” names. So one was called Field Flowers and the other Garden Flowers! (Sadly for Mr Goe, Field Flowers grew up to be a priest and eventually bishop of Melbourne.)

Field Flowers Goe wasn't an atheist either.

More and more of my friends put “Atheist” as their Facebook religious status. Does this mean that atheism is their religion (which would of course make them people of faith and thus negate their claim)? Do they see atheism as saying “No” to belief, or is it a belief in a fundamental “No”? I must admit I haven’t asked. Perhaps I should make that one of my goals of 2011, but the truth is I’m scared of it turning into a pointless argument for and against the existence of God, on one hand, or the validity of Christianity, on the other.

It’s not that I don’t think that either position is defensible (which is not the same as provable), but that arguing is not the way to do it. Frederick Buchener’s words resonate here:

C. S. Lewis once said something to the effect that no Christian doctrine ever looked so threadbare to him as when he had just finished successfully defending it. The reason is not hard to find. In order to defend the faith successfully… they need to reduce it to a defensible size… They try to make each doctrine as it comes along sound as logical and plausible as they can. The trouble, of course, is that by and large logic and plausibility are not the heart of the matter, and therefore [they] are apt to end up proclaiming a faith that may be quite persuasive on paper but it is difficult to imagine either them or anyone else getting very excited about. (Whistling in the Dark, p 12.)

“Excited” – yes. Perhaps another reason why I shy from arguing with atheists is that, despite years of theological study – which I love – it’s not the stuff of the brain which keeps me going with this Christian thing, but the stuff of the heart.

Once, if you’d asked me why I was a believer, I would have said that it was because Christianity made sense of the world. I still think it does, but it wouldn’t be my answer now. Now I would say that Christianity holds out the hope of the return of splendour to the world. Not just a hope of justice – that wrongs will be righted, or that nature will be healed, or that humans will be freed from their bias to do harm to themselves and others – but of beauty, glory, splendour! The diamond inside everyone and everything will be polished to perfection. And what’s more, there is a role for all in working towards the achievement of this astonishing state.

Would this answer convince Christopher Hitchens – or even your average FB atheist? It doesn’t sound very logical – yet I find it utterly plausibly, and very, very exciting.

Busking the Incarnation

My cousin and her best friend are visiting from the far north. They’ve gone to the symphony orchestra tonight, to take in some “Melbourne culture”. Which reminded me that I’ve never put the following story down in writing. So while in our last post we had the Resurrection, this post brings you the Incarnation…

One evening I was walking home through the city’s “arts precinct”. Under the covered walk-way, an old man was playing the violin. You might have seen him around – shabby, in a shiny black suit, he sits on a folding stool and saws away with an air of resignation. He doesn’t expect to draw a crowd; just a few dollars for dinner will do.

I was waiting to cross the street. It was a cold evening, towards the end of rush hour. No-one stopped to hear the elderly busker play, or even toss a coin in his instrument case. Until one woman, tall, 30-ish, dressed in black, came striding by – obviously in a hurry – then paused. She reached into her pocket, bent down and left some money. The busker, surprised, looked up and met her eye. I wasn’t close enough to hear what she said, but I saw her raise her arm in a kind of salute – and in her hand was her violin case.  Then she smiled, and continued on.

Here was a professional musician, probably a member of the Melbourne Symphony. Successful, talented, young. And a poor old man with a scratchy fiddle who, if he ever was that good, wasn’t any more. And she stops, when no-one else would, and gives this brilliant, joyful, gallant, gesture of  solidarity that said, as plain as words, “Look – we’re the same.”

When I saw this, I wanted to cry, because in this mundane encounter was a vision of the Incarnation. In the story of Jesus, we have God – brilliant, bright, powerful, ever-loving, endlessly creative – stopping with humanity – fearful, faltering, tawdry, half-hearted, shop-soiled humanity – and saying, “Look – we’re the same. We’re the same.”

I think I’ll leave it at that.

Why every theology faculty deserves an atheist

Every theology faculty deserves its own atheist. Ours is called Kevin.* As he tells it, Kevin grew up in a Christian family, and as a teenager considered becoming a priest. Now, in his 70s, he calls himself an atheist. Or an agnostic. It depends. Kevin drifted into theology after taking a few subjects in philosophy as a way to keep himself off the streets in semi-retirement. He stuck with it and is close to completing a degree.

The Empty Tomb, by Dr. He Qi, China.

Kevin’s no fool – he’s had a long and varied career in the law – but he is the only person I’ve ever met to get 5% for an essay. It was in Old Testament. Kevin gave us a precis. It began with “The Old Testament is a load of rubbish” and pretty much ended there too. The lecturer refused to let Kevin sit the exam, which I think was extremely unfair, and showed an astonishing lack of curiosity.

Kevin and I did a subject together last semester. Having an atheist in a theology class had its challenges. He was so determined that Jesus isn’t the answer that it was hard to get him to actually listen to the question. It also had its advantages: Kevin’s curveballs frequently stopped students assuming that everyone in the room thought the same way (like, Christians think the same way?) on topics like pacificism, for example. But what I found most helpful were his frequent requests to explain it “without the Christian jargon” and his insistence on bringing up questions we thought we were well past, the kind of questions you were supposed to have answered in Sunday School, not theology college. Ones like:

“The Resurrection: what’s it all about?”

We were having end-of-semester drinks in the University Club (Kevin’s shout – another good reason to have your own atheist) when Kevin asked this one. He looked around the small group of theology students, a couple of actual ministers, the rest graduates or post-graduates. Most people suddenly found something interesting floating in their wine glasses. One guy responded with: “I’m not sure yet: I used to be a Presbyterian.” After I scraped myself off the floor, I realised it was over to me.

My slightly improved-upon and expanded response to Kevin’s big question – without using jargon.

If you mean, “What happened at Jesus’ resurrection?” I have no idea. There were no witnesses. It’s not a scientifically repeatable experiment. All we’ve got are the Gospels (aka Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) and they’re not giving much away.

For me, what the Resurrection is about is not so much what happened then, but what it means now for Jesus to be resurrect-ed. I think there are four significant implications:

Firstly, a resurrected Jesus is still involved in human history. A living Jesus is one still passionately engaged in the story of humanity, still crying over Jerusalem, still devastated by the betrayal of friends, still weighing-in on the side of the outcast, the exploited and the powerless.  He just can’t keep out of it! A living Jesus calls people who would follow him to a similarly passionate involvement in life, inspired by his commitment to justice, compassion and love.

Secondly, a resurrected Jesus is someone humanity can relate to. There’s a lot of cant talked in Christian circles about “Having a personal relationship with Jesus”. Much of it’s about appropriating Jesus to our own ends. But unlike a dead Marx or Gandhi, a living Jesus cannot be domesticated quite so easily. A living Jesus is the only kind of Jesus that it makes sense to literally follow (not much sense in following a dead person, they’re not going anywhere), to argue with, to recognise in the street, to try to avoid. A resurrected Jesus is a force to be reckoned with.

Thirdly, as well as being active in the present, a resurrected Jesus has a future. Just like any living person, he is someone we can expect more from – and not in some pie-in-the-the-sky afterlife, but within human history. His story hasn’t finished. What the next chapter looks like we can only speculate, but we can be sure it’s consistent with his character of wisdom, justice and love.

Fourthly, a resurrected Jesus has implications for humanity. When his contemporaries “got” Jesus, when they grasped – if fleetingly – what he was about, they said things like,  “This is God’s son”. In other words, This is what being truly human looks like. The resurrection is never presented as a one-off special something for the good guy only – but as the future of all of God’s people. This has immense implications for what it means to be human. People are not disposable products with a limited shelf-life; God loves us so much God cannot imagine a future without us. Maybe we should love each other, too.

So, the Resurrection in four easy parts, and without jargon. Did I satisfy Kevin? I’m not sure. But thanks for asking, anyway.

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*Name changed for privacy purposes.