Prophetic Voices Day Conference With Roy Searle and Stuart Murray Williams

Advance notice of a tasty-looking day conference.  Northern Baptist Learning Community and Luther King House are jointly sponsoring the Northern leg of the Voices From The Margins national tour.  Roy Searle and Stuart Murray Williams will lead us as we look at what today's church can learn from the prophetic voices of three radical church groups: Celtic Missionary Monasticism, Anabaptism and the contemporary movement known as New Monasticism.  It promises to be a stimulating event.  Click here to book.

Blue Like Jazz

Just spent most of the weekend sitting by a river at the foot of Wales' highest waterfall reading Don Miller's Blue Like Jazz.  I'm writing this because I can't make my mind up about the book.

Miller can clearly write.  I found myself laughing out loud more than once.  I think this opener to his chapter, Magic gives you the flavour,

When I was a child my mother took me to see David Copperfield the Magician.  I think she had a crush on him.  It was the same year he made the Statue of Liberty disappear on national television.  Later he made a plane disappear and later still he got engaged to Claudia Schiffer.

On the other hand he's a bit too fond of certain stylistic cliches.  Like the one where you start a chapter with a seemingly insignificant anecdote as a way into your subject then complete the circle at the very end of the chapter by coming back to some aspect of the anecdote as neat closer.

Miller's insights on human nature and Christian spirituality are often spot on.  Trouble is most of these arise out of rather too much petty introspection for my liking.  Is he self-aware or self-obsessed?  Not sure.

The chapter on evangelism, where Miller and his mates turn the idea of confessing your sins on its head, is sheer genius.  The one on marriage though struck me as pretentious faux intellectualism.  A bit like using the worked faux.

I loved his liberal cultural attitudes.  Couldn't help wondering though why his basic theology is quite so unreconstructed-conservative-evangelical.  Way too sin-centered to my mind.  Also he keeps banging on about the Devil.  The whole book bounces back and forth between a refreshing world-affirming perspective and good old-fashioned fundamentalist dualism.  Also, too much time spent slagging off the Republican party.  Not that the Republicans under Bush didn't need slagging off, but it did get boring.  Too many of the people he describes are cute or beautiful.  And way too much about smoking pipes.

There are lots of  good stories, personal stories, of course.  Sometimes though I did find myself wondering if they were true.  I had the sneaking suspicion they must have been embellished.  Maybe though that says more about my failings than Miller's.  We always spot faults in others (real or imagined) that we know we are prone to ourselves.

The book is a collection of essays/reflections on a range of life issues from the perspective of Christian spirituality.  It clearly has evangelistic as well as didactic intent.  I can imagine it working for some people.

It's always a good sign when I irritate my wife by repeatedly asking her to put down her Reginald Hill while I reader her a paragraph.  Did this quite a bit.  Also kept wondering what certain friends would make of it.  Wondered this so much that I'm going to buy a copy for a couple of people in the hope that they might read at and give me their feedback.

When all's said and done I reckon the most important thing is that the book got through to me.  Helped me connect with God.  So I really ought not to complain.  Maybe it's because I liked it so much that it irritated me so much.  Tends to work that way with people as well as books, don't your find?

Anyhow there you have it.  That's what I made of Blue Like Jazz.  (Oh, yes that's another thing, there's virtually nothing about Jazz, which can't be good.)  If you've read it, I'd be really interested to know what you think.  Go on, help me out, make a comment.

Refreshing Church

Good time at Connect last night.  Connect is sort of an alternative church type thing that meets up every two or three weeks.  Not sure if it's sponsored by Levenshulme Baptist Church or Urban Expression Manchester, bit of both I guess - these things tend to be a bit messy round here.  The format last night was: gather and chat, watch a short video, natter, pray, meditate.  Despite all my best intentions over the past couple of years this was my first time.  Thought I'd stick some observations up here just in case anyone's interested.

Good stuff:

• friendly atmosphere - got the sense that it really is as inclusive as it claims to be, can't imagine anyone not getting a welcome
• amateur in the best sense of that word - low on glitz high on  sincerity 
• permission to say what you think and what you wonder - there really was an absence of any sense of oppressive orthodoxy
• seemed to be light on structure - people arrived when they could and left when they had to; the conversation was allowed to run on as long as it needed to and to end when it seemed right
• a natural, relaxed and unembarrassed bit of praying for needs that had been shared during the discussion
• the setting - a no nonsense Caribbean cafe called The Retreat on the A6 - really liked the view from the big glass sliding doors straight out onto the busy pavement, enjoyed people having a bit of a pike as they walked past, also liked the noise leakage from laughing teenagers to wailing sirens and the background rumble of traffic all of which made it feel like a real-life happening 
• the food - well if you can call it that, midget gems, hula hoops, smokey bacon crisps and either mango juice or ginger beer, wierd is good, right?
• the Nooma vid - seemed to work as a discussion starter.  

Could have been a bit better stuff:

• would have been good to have had a Bible reading as part of the concluding meditation 
• a few more blokes perhaps (three of us out of twelve) - although maybe not, I wonder if tipping the hormone balance away from estrogen in favour testosterone might have made it a bit more difficult for some of the women to share as freely as they did.  

All in all a very encouraging couple of hours.  Proof definite of the need for the church actively to generate the kind of space that's within touching distance of regular congregational life but which is also free enough for people to stay at arm's length if they so choose.  I can't imagine the group of people who met last night sharing in the way they did at a regular church gathering

So a big thank you to Ian and Jean for making it happen.  I look forward to the next one.

Free e-book on preaching in the emerging church

The resurgence have made available a free e-book on preaching in the emerging church. 

HT Dan Kimball

Here's the blurb:

The emerging church movement has significantly influenced contemporary Christianity. Evidence abounds—the creation of blogs, conferences, seminary classes, doctorate programs, and the birth of an entire class of literature. In recent years much has been written to help the church better understand this latest Christian phenomenon. However, a deficiency still exists when it comes to understanding the role of preaching within the movement. Since preaching is God’s appointed means to convert sinners and preserve the church, then an understanding of this movement’s preaching is of vital importance to the church and the culture it serves.

NB is for info, not a commendation - only just got it.

A British Future For American Christianity?

Christian commentators in the States are reflecting on the implications of the American Religious Identification Survey which indicates that secularisation is biting deep. This is an excerpt from David Gushee writing for the Associated Baptist Press.

Christians who bring faith-based moral convictions into the public square will win less and less. Some will respond by just shouting more loudly, thus turning more people away from Christ. Others will shift to a paradigm of faithful witness rather than cultural victory. Broad-based coalitions across religious and ideological lines will be a necessity.

The era in which cultural Christianity delivered bodies and dollars to churches and sustained thousands of often marginally effective Christian organizations is ending. The era in which Christians could afford to spend their time and money fighting with each other in the pews or the annual conventions or the newspapers is ending.

We will either deliver to people vital, meaningful, life-changing, Christ-following Christianity, or we will die of our own irrelevance.

Seems to me that if American church leaders want to discover what the future might hold all they have to do is visit Britain.

Emerging Baptists

If you are Baptist and interested in emerging/emergent church it might be worth checking out this mainly American site, Baptimergent.

Blah ... Manchester Pete Ward

For those who might be interested but haven't picked them up elsewhere here's the details of the next Blah ... Manchester event. Pete Ward will be at the Nazarene College to speak on Participation and Meditation: A Practical Theology for the Liquid Church. How do we encounter God through Culture? Is liquid Church just an abstract academic ideal?

Two Books on Preaching

Read two books on preaching last week. One was a big disappointment the other a pleasant surprise.

Doug Pagitt's Preaching Re-imagined is well worth a read. Should only take four or five hours. Doug is one of the leading lights on the American emerging church scene. Here he joins those voices raising serious questions about monologue preaching or speeching as he calls it. He proposes instead an approach that he dubs progressional dialogue. I liked this. It resonated with a notion that I have been working on that conceives of preaching as the initiation of a discussion. What I could have done with though was a bit more of an idea of how this actually works out in practice. An appendix with a transcript in an appendix perhaps. Or alternatively a free return plane ticket to Minneapolis to see for my self.

Anabaptist Preaching was deeply disapointng. I had been hoping that it would live up to the subtitle, a conversation between pulpit, pew and bible. No such luck. Only one chapter in this symposium was on the money in this regard and that itself is non too substantial. As for the other chapters far too many were rather light weight and very few had anything remotely distinctive to offer. I had imagined that such a book would introduce me to a tradition less wedded to the traditional monologue but I reckon I'm going to have to look elsewhere.

Olive and John Drane

The Dranes are blogging. They are calling it 2churchmice's Blog Yeah, sounds a bit twee to me too. Still, should be worth checking out from time to time.

Kaleidoscopes, Denominations, Urinals and Emerging Church

Isn’t it difficult not to compare sizes?

Last week I was in Oxford meeting with members of staff from Baptist colleges across the country. This week we’ve been inducting the new batch of ministerial students here at Luther-King House as well as starting the foundation module for all new students – Baptist, Methodist, URC, Unitarian, Pentecostal and few others - on our BA and MA programmes. In both settings it became apparent that size does matter. At least we found ourselves talking about it quite a bit.

It looks like all the Baptist colleges have reasonably healthy intakes of new students (ours is particularly big – for us anyway) but while peering over the urinal wall here in Manchester it became apparent that one of our partners is not especially well endowed. We only have one URC ministerial student starting training this year.

In fact it turns out that Nationally the URC have only six new ministerial students (four in England and two in Scotland). Now – and I know this is a big jump – this set me thinking about the viability of some of our historic denominations and indeed the desirability of a denominational future for the Church in this country.

How do emergent types feel about denominations? There would appear to be a bit of a tension here. On the one hand it almost goes without saying that there is a (sometimes naïve) anti-institutional stripe to most emergent attitudes to church. This would seem to put denominations beyond the pale. On the other hand a big part of the emergent psyche is an antipathy towards all things Modern. This comes with an attendant desire to reach back to the pre-modern and mine (or skim the surface more likely) the wisdom, resources and practices to be found in pre-enlightenment Christianity. However, it is precisely the denominations that have been the custodians of these treasures. How is this tension to likely be resolved?

It seems to me probable that emergent Anglicans will become more and more Anglican (as did many Evangelical Anglicans did in the last quarter of the 20C). But will they be able to negotiate their relationship with the denomination in a way that keeps the institutional feel to minimum so as not to alienate pm’s? Also will people continue to confuse the Fresh Expressions movement with the genuinely emergent so that many an Anglican feels they are being much more radical than in fact they are, resulting in a veneer of reform on a fundamentally modernist substructure?

Then what about Baptists? How significant is the (relatively) recently reawakened interest in things Anabaptist likely to be for the future shape of churches in the BUGB? Are there resources/wisdom/practices here that genuinely have the potential to help renew (or whatever re word you prefer) the denomination as a whole or is this likely to remain a rather weird interest for an unrepresentative and rather geeky section of the denomination? Are Baptists so thoroughly subdivided into either baby-boomer-modern or 1950’s-Isle-of-White-nostalgic-modern as to be beyond hope of anything other than a late modern surge and an ultimate post-modern demise?

Or are denominations as we have known them destined for such a fierce twist of the kaleidoscope that what emerges will be utterly unrecognisable? If so, what realignments and new births might we anticipate? Which pieces of the picture are likely to disappear altogether? And how will the mix of newly-minted and freshly-alloyed wisdom/values/practices be carried from generation to generation? (There surely has to be some institutional framework for values to survive beyond the generation of the charismatic pioneers. Or this just a hopelessly modernist way of seeing things?)

One final question: am I starting to ramble or is there something here that anyone fancies having their own two penn’worth on?