The two streams will do the same foundational courses in Bible, theology and history. But students in the pioneer stream will also have specialized courses and placements to prepare them for their future ministries.

If you are interested in exploring what the pioneer stream within the M.Div might look like, click here for more information, or email the Director of the stream, Dr. John Bowen.

photo courtesy City of Ottawa

fresh expressions canada update

january 12 2010

A very Happy New Year to all of you, and especially to those in the Diocese of Ottawa who have recently joined this list following various Fresh Expressions-related events in your diocese.

It is already shaping up to be a busy year for Fresh Expressions Canada (FXCA), what with two Vital Church Planting Conferences (East & West), as well as the launch of the one year, part time,  Mission Shaped Ministry (MSM) course -a year to be equipped in planting and sustaining fresh expressions of church

MSM is expected to run from Sept. 2010 -April 2011, comprising 6 weekday evenings, 3 Saturdays, and a residential weekend away. Based in Toronto, we hope to have clusters in other cities which will meet at the same time and be conferenced together! For more information email msm@freshexpressions.ca

The newest addition to the FXCA team John Bowen will be our MSM Coordinator, contact him with any questions!

Mission Shaped Intro (MSI)-six weeks to rediscover mission and re-imagine church
This excellent six-session course can be freely downloaded and presented in your neighbourhood. To find out more email info@freshexpressions.ca

MSI Edmonton starts soon! email thomas.brauer @freshexpressions.ca for more details

Peter McCracken, Rev. Christine Piper and Thor Stewart have joined together to start up a Tuesday-night youth ministry based on skateboarding. Melissa Di Costanzo

skateboarding spirituality?

Where signs warding off skateboarders once hung, a new movement to blend skating culture with Christianity is taking root.

Tonight, Christian rock music will blare from the speakers as kids take advantage of the only place in town they can skateboard indoors. When their boards hit the ramps, they will be taking part in a new iteration of a global Christian movement called Fresh Expressions that is making the teachings of the Anglican church accessible to people who haven’t felt a connection to the traditional church… more

The first Vision Dayof 2010 takes place on Saturday, April 17, 2010 from 9:30am –               3:00pm. Hosted by: St. Mark’s Anglican Church, 5 First Avenue,
 Orangeville, ON, L9W 2Z5. Cost: $15.00
If you are interested in holding one in your area contact our Vision Day Coordinator, Sue Kalbfleisch. Contact her at vision@freshexpressions.ca

some more things to watch out for in 2010!

a Fresh Expressions Canada consultation will he held in Toronto, Feb.1-2,  prior to the Vital Church Planting-East conference. Members of the FXCA team will be meeting with Dr. Rachel Jordan and Pernell Goodyer, as well as other ecumenical partners, who are working together to see a more mission-shaped church take shape throughout Canada. Please pray for all those at this important consultation.

Two Vital Church Planting Conferences
“The annual Vital Church Planting conferences are becoming venues where some of the most creative and entrepreneurial leaders of our church—bishops, clergy and lay leaders from across the country—are gathering to network, learn, pray, and strategise together.” more

Toronto Feb. 2-4, places are limited register now!
Edmonton May 18-20, new!

Two Messy Fiestas! – days of fun and learning about Messy Church
Saturday, April 24, 2010 from 10am – 3:00pm.
Hosted by: St. George’s Anglican Church, 60 Guelph St.,
 Georgetown, ON, 
L7G 3Z5. Cost: $15.00

Saturday, May 15 , 2010 from 10am – 3:00pm
Hosted by: St. John the Evangelist Anglican Church, 12 Carleton St. S., Thorold, ON, 
L2V 5C2. .Cost: $15.00
Please contact Sue Kalbfleisch at vision@freshexpressions.ca to join the advance mailing list or with questions about Messy Fiestas! If you haven’t heard about Messy Church, go to www.messychurch.org.uk to see a great promo video!

Watch out for “Mission (im)Possible“.   A 5 week course being prepared by Jenny Andison and Stephen Drakeford to help people re-discover and re-discover mission in your context.  It’s purpose is to provide an interactive tool to assist people in beginning a conversation about what it would mean for their parishes to be shaped by the mission of God and for the mission of God. The course will be fun and easy to use and is being designed to be run over a one hour period for 5 evenings. The course would be perfect to use in Lent in your parish. It can be downloaded from the Diocese of Toronto website beginning  mid-January 2010.  If you want more information then please contact Jenny Andison, Archbishop’s Officer for Mission, at  jandison@toronto.anglican.ca

We need your stories of what’s going on in your area, to put on the FXCA website. Stories of attempts to start something new, something which may stand a chance of developing into a fresh expression of church. Here’s an example of what we are looking for, something that started partly as a result of someone attending a Fresh Expressions related event. Could it turn into a fresh expression of church? I guess we’ll have to just wait and see! Please send your story with photos to web@freshexpressions.ca

Please pray for all of us involved in encouraging “the development of fresh expressions of church alongside more traditional expressions, with the aim of seeing a more mission-shaped church take shape throughout the country.” Yes, it’s a huge job, but with God nothing is impossible, even though it is seldom easy!

Thanks so much for your interest in Fresh Expressions Canada. If you would like to support the work financially you can do so by clicking here and filling out the form, selecting “Other,” from the “I would like to direct my gift to:” options, and writing Fresh Expressions in the “Please Specify” box.

^“… let’s not allow ourselves to get fatigued doing good. At the right time we will harvest a good crop if we don’t give up, or quit. Right now, therefore, every time we get the chance, let us work for the benefit of all, starting with the people closest to us in the community of faith.” Paul writing in Galatians 6:9 (The Message)

With best wishes for a mission shaped 2010, from the Fresh Expressions Canada team, Ryan, Sue, Thomas, Jenny, John, &…

Nick Brotherwood

Team Leader-Fresh Expressions Canada

nick.brotherwood@freshexpressions.ca

fresh expressions canada december update

december 2 2009

After being blessed with some beautiful weather throughout November, (did you realise not a single flake of snow fell in Toronto for the first time in 160 years?) the arrival of December has been accompanied by more seasonable weather at least here in Montreal. My major travels have been completed for the year, my winter tires are on, and I almost feel ready for another winter!

The fourth and last Vision Day of the year took place on November 21st in Ottawa where over ninety people spent an energising and interactive five hours lead by Michelle Hauser and Matt Kydd. Read more here.

I had a great time in Calgary, (not for the Grey Cup you understand) but to represent FXCA at the Renov8 Church Planting Congress, Nov. 19-20, where I presented a workshop on Fresh Expressions to over seventy-five people, most of whom did not fall asleep! It was good to be among so many people (700!) from a host of denominations, who are passionate about seeing a more missional church take shape here in Canada.

Stuck for a Christmas gift? Why not give an MSI course in your area?

Mission Shaped Intro (MSI)-six weeks to rediscover mission and re-imagine church
This excellent six-session course can be freely downloaded and presented in your neighbourhood. To find out more email info@freshexpressions.ca

The next Vision Day will take place on Saturday, April 17, 2010 from 9:30am – 3:00pm
Hosted by: St. Mark’s Anglican Church, 5 First Avenue,
 Orangeville, ON, L9W 2Z5. Cost: $15.00
If you are interested in holding one in your area contact our Vision Day Coordinator, Sue Kalbfleisch. Contact her at vision@freshexpressions.ca

some things to watch out for in 2010!

Two Vital Church Planting Conferences
“The annual Vital Church Planting conferences are becoming venues where some of the most creative and entrepreneurial leaders of our church—bishops, clergy and lay leaders from across the country—are gathering to network, learn, pray, and strategise together.” more

Toronto Feb. 2-4, places are limited register now!
Edmonton May 18-20, new!

Two Messy Fiestas! – days of fun and learning about Messy Church
Saturday, April 24, 2010 from 10am – 3:00pm.
Hosted by: St. George’s Anglican Church, 60 Guelph St.,
 Georgetown, ON, 
L7G 3Z5. Cost: $15.00

Saturday, May 15 , 2010 from 10am – 3:00pm
Hosted by: St. John the Evangelist Anglican Church, 12 Carleton St. S., Thorold, ON, 
L2V 5C2. .Cost: $15.00
Please contact Sue Kalbfleisch at vision@freshexpressions.ca to join the advance mailing list or with questions about Messy Fiestas! If you haven’t heard about Messy Church, go to www.messychurch.org.uk to see a great promo video!

Watch out for “Mission Possible“.   A 5 week course being prepared by Jenny Andison and Stephen Drakeford to help people re-discover and re-discover mission in your context.  It’s purpose is to provide an interactive tool to assist people in beginning a conversation about what it would mean for their parishes to be shaped by the mission of God and for the mission of God. The course will be fun and easy to use and is being designed to be run over a one hour period for 5 evenings. The course would be perfect to use in Lent in your parish. It can be downloaded from the Diocese of Toronto website beginning  mid-January 2010.  If you want more information then please contact Jenny Andison, Archbishop’s Officer for Mission, at  jandison@toronto.anglican.ca

We need your stories of what’s going on in your area, to put on the FXCA website. Stories of attempts to start something new, something which may stand a chance of developing into a fresh expression of church. Here’s an example of what we are looking for, something that happened in Ontario earlier this year. Could it turn into a fresh expression of church? I guess we’ll have to just wait and see! Please send your story with photos to web@freshexpressions.ca

Please pray for all of us involved in encouraging “the development of fresh expressions of church alongside more traditional expressions, with the aim of seeing a more mission-shaped church take shape throughout the country.” Yes, it’s a huge job, but with God nothing is impossible, even though it is seldom easy!

Thanks so much for your interest in Fresh Expressions Canada. If you would like to support the work financially you can do so by clicking here and filling out the form, selecting “Other,” from the “I would like to direct my gift to:” options, and writing Fresh Expressions in the “Please Specify” box.

“The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighbourhood. We saw the glory with our own eyes, the one-of-a-kind glory, like Father, like Son, generous inside and out, true from start to finish.” John 1.14 The Message

With best wishes for a blessed Advent and a joyful Christmas, from the Fresh Expressions Canada team, Ryan, Sue, Thomas, Jenny, &…

Nick Brotherwood

Team Leader-Fresh Expressions Canada

nick.brotherwood@freshexpressions.ca

Read more

fresh expressions canada october update

October 5 2009

Hello there!

In the time of shortening days, of lengthening darkness, we are called to live as children of light. Jesus doesn’t force us to walk in his light. He invites us. How do I respond to him when he claims, “I am the world’s Light. No one who follows me stumbles around in the darkness. I provide plenty of light to live in.”? May God help us to always walk in his light and to allow his light to shine into and through us, that others may be drawn to Jesus the source of true light.

Mission Shaped Intro-Six weeks to rediscover mission and re-imagine church is being presented at Wycliffe College, Toronto on six Wednesday evenings this fall—starting September 16, from 7 pm till 9 pm. The presenters are Jenny Andison and  John Bowen.  Already halfway through, the twenty something participants are appreciating this engaging course.  Following the third session John observed, “Again, things went well. I felt we are getting into our stride (teachers and students), and there is a good dynamic and a good rhythm.”

This excellent six-session course can be freely downloaded and presented in your neighbourhood. To find out more email info@freshexpressions.ca

The next Vision Day will take place on Saturday November 21st, 9.00 am-3.00pm, at St. Thomas the Apostle, 2345 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa. For more details and to download the registration form click here. If you are interested in holding one in your area contact our Vision Day Coordinator, Sue Kalbfleisch. Contact her at vision@freshexpressions.ca

Last month Sue & her husband Andy  visited the UK to research various fresh expressions of church and wrote engaging reports on their travels here. Later in September Tim Haughton, minister of discipleship at St. Paul’s, Bloor St., Toronto,  spent time in England read visiting various fresh expressions of church. Read his insightful posts here.

In May of this year, Canadian filmakers Bill Kinnon & Imbi Medri shot a two-part interview between Bishop Graham Cray and the Revd Annette Brownlee, discussing the Fresh Expressions Initiative. In a wide ranging conversation filmed at Wycliffe College, Toronto, Bishop Cray gives a fascinating overview of the initiative, as well as describing Anglo Catholic and Evangelical examples in England. Part one. Part two.

I will be heading out (God willing) to Sault Ste. Marie, ON, later in the month for the Diocese of Algoma’s Synod to present Fresh Expressions Canada, so if you are going to be in the area please get in touch with me at nick.brotherwood@freshexpressions.ca!

Please pray for all of us involved in encouraging “the development of fresh expressions of church alongside more traditional expressions, with the aim of seeing a more mission-shaped church take shape throughout the country.” Yes, it’s a huge job, but with God nothing is impossible, even though it is seldom easy!

Thanks so much for your interest in Fresh Expressions Canada. If you would like to support the work financially you can do so by clicking here and filling out the form, selecting “Other,” from the “I would like to direct my gift to:” options, and writing Fresh Expressions in the “Please Specify” box.

Yours sincerely in Christ Jesus,

Nick Brotherwood

Team Leader-Fresh Expressions Canada

nick.brotherwood@freshexpressions.ca

Let’s start with the first single “Get On Your Boots” (GOYB), released a month before the album No Line On The Horizon (NLOTH). While panned by some critics, GOYB served the role that U2 seems to look for in a first single—revealing the band’s new musical and thematic direction (and getting folks excited that “U2 is back!”). GOYB offers a different sound from previous albums, but the lyrics also deserve some attention. Bono singing of “love and community” how “the future needs a big kiss”, and not wanting “to talk about wars between nations” makes one thing clear—on this album U2 won’t be dealing with the familiar issue of social injustice (in concert is another story though). GOYB’s repeating phrase “let me in the sound” is also intriguing. Is it frivolous or does it have some meaning? We’ll return to that point shortly. What is clear is that something new is afoot for U2 on this album.

No Line on the Horizon, the album, begins in an unusual spot for U2. While the band’s past few albums start in a broken world but lead the listener to spiritual safety (see album-closing songs like “Grace” and “Yahweh”), NLOTH turns this approach upside down. The title track bursts open the album with a mix of heavy guitar, drums and Dr. Who-like sonic effects that conjure a sense of racing over a body of water—fitting, given the album’s cover art of merging sea and sky. Bono’s wavering vocals express how “infinity is a great place to start” and “time is irrelevant, not linear.” Bono has described “No Line on the Horizon” as that place where the earth meets the sky, and possibilities seem infinite. U2 drew near to this space in songs like “Gloria” (from the album October) and “Where the Streets Have No Name” (from The Joshua Tree), but here they’ve gone deeper, crossed a line (no pun intended) and reached an altogether different place.

Hints of that somewhere different can be found in Bono’s recent comparison of NLOTH to The Beatles’ White Album. With closer inspection, the comparison is fitting. While The Beatles went to India on pilgrimage to meet the Maharishi and write music for the White Album, U2 went to Fez, Morocco, to attend the World Festival of Sacred Music and work on NLOTH.  While there, members of U2 seem to have taken inspiration from the faith expression of Sufism, a sect of Islam found in North Africa, whose members seek ecstatic communion with God through physical, emotional, and vocal expression—a form of faith that three members of U2 are familiar with from their early days as members of a charismatic Christian group named “Shalom.” While The Beatles’ White Album was a double album, and “No Line on the Horizon” a single CD, U2 have recently mentioned a “companion disc.” Scheduled for release in late 2009 or early 2010, the new disc is to be named “Songs of Ascent” and is described by Bono as a “ghost album of hymns and Sufi singing . . . a kind of heartbreaker, a meditative, reflexive piece of work”.

One need not wait for the next album to ascend though. The heavenly direction of NLOTH continues with “Magnificent,” a song carried by a powerful drum rhythm that will no doubt shake stadium audiences and rally them to singing. Lyrics about making “a joyful noise,” being “justified until we die,” and “you and I will magnify, oh, the magnificent,” take the album deeper into the unusual territory of unbridled expression of faith and hope, unhindered by the earthly challenges previously encountered in U2′s music. What U2 has been reaching for throughout their career seems finally within reach here. Bono told Rolling Stone magazine that “The Magnificent” was inspired by “The Magnificat,” the gospel passage where Mary expresses joy at being chosen to be the mother of Jesus. By choosing the term “The Magnificent,” one of Islam’s 99 names of God, and shooting a creatively spiritual music video for the song in Fez, Morocco, U2 also extend an olive branch and find common ground with Muslims.

“Moment of Surrender” is a slow gospel tune that stands out with its moving vocals and evocative imagery. The line about “love believing in me” may ring a bit over the top for some, particularly Christians familiar with such language, but the lines, “I did not notice the passers-by, and they did not notice me,” and “a vision over visibility,” describe a scene of spiritual conversion or renewal at its most tender and intimate.

Opening with an exquisite “sunshine” harmony, “Unknown Caller” picks up the pace while carrying on the theme of renewal found in “Moment of Surrender.”  U2 guitarist The Edge described the song’s narrator as being “in an altered state, and his phone starts talking to him.” The lyrics “cease to speak, that I may speak” echo Psalm 46:10—“Be still and know that I am God.” While the language of entering passwords and rebooting yourself initially sound awkward, the power of `this song grows and will no doubt stir stadiums to sing along. Observant fans will note how “Unknown Caller” uses a reference to 3:33 on a clock, which U2 also used as an airport gate (J33-3) on the cover art of All That You Can’t Leave Behind. During press for that album, Bono told Rolling Stone that it refers to Jeremiah 33:3 (“Call to me and I will answer you”) and described it as “God’s phone number.

Bono speeds up his phrasing and applies his falsetto skills in “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight.” While the lyrics in “Crazy” seem random at times, lines such as, “Is it true that perfect love drives out all fear” and “a change of heart comes slowly,” are intriguing, if not familiar. When added to others such as “it’s not a hill it’s a mountain” and “we’re going to make it, all the way to the light,” one can hear echoes of Martin Luther King’s famous “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech. It is tempting to wonder if Obama’s historic election inspired Bono to write this song, one of the album’s stronger tracks.

While the US reference may be subtle, there are Canadian connections to NLOTH worth mentioning. First, there is Daniel Lanois, the musician and producer who, along with English artist and producer Brian Eno, worked on this and many other U2 albums. Then there is Lori Anna Reid, a talented Canadian singer who receives a mention in the CD liner notes. Daniel Lanois explained to the National Post (March 11^th 2009) how U2 were looking for hymns to draw inspiration from while they attempted to create “future spirituals.” One of the ones Lori Anna suggested was “O Come, O Come Emanuel,” which U2 ended up working with when writing “White As Snow”. Finally, there is a connection to Canadian folk singer Bruce Cockburn. The line “shouting to the darkness, squeeze out sparks of light” from “I’ll Go Crazy” is a paraphrase of Cockburn’s lyrics on “Lovers in A Dangerous Time.” U2 referenced those lyrics more directly twenty years ago in the song “God Part II” from the album Rattle & Hum (“I heard a singer on the radio…say he’s gonna kick the darkness till it bleeds daylight”). “Cedars of Lebanon” also has a very Cockburn-style travel monologue that his fans will recognize and appreciate.

Let’s return now to that phrase “let me in the sound”. Bono sings it repeatedly in “Get On Your Boots”, and it echoes quietly at the start of “Fez Being Born”. It appears a third time on “Breathe” near the end of the album. Anything repeated on a U2 album is a concept with real currency. So what is this about? The answer may again lie in U2′s “pilgrimage” to Morocco. This repeating concept of entering the sound echoes the Sufi approach to finding union with God through music and dance. To this end we hear Bono calling out “meet me in the sound” in “Get On Your Boots”. Later in the song “Breathe,” Bono sings of being “people born of sound” and finding “grace inside a sound”. Who is being met here? U2 often leave much open to interpretation in their music, but the source of grace in this context rings most true when understood as God.

If the trajectory of recent U2 albums was an arc of challenge and adversity ending in hope, that journey is reversed on “No Line”. In fact Bono has said that you could call this album, “The Pilgrim and His Lack of Progress.” It bears true, for while U2 start out elevated, magnifying “The Magnificent,” they descend into the earth’s atmosphere from that place in the heavens. Along the way they teach over-sensitive Christians a thing or two on “Stand Up Comedy” (“Stop helping God across the road like a little old lady”) while rallying them to live their faith in a “dizzy world.” Midway through the album songs deal with rebirth, and by the end, it lands in the middle of life’s challenges with “Cedars of Lebanon”, where a war journalist struggles with a “shitty world” that “sometimes produces a rose.”

It is fair to say that U2 have been seeking “grace inside a sound” their entire career. Bruce Springsteen may have described U2 best when inducting them into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, calling them “a band that wanted to lay claim to not only this world, but had their eyes on the next one as well.” U2 prove Springsteen true on No Line on the Horizon. Grabbing hold of the sky right from the start, U2 refuse to let go, pulling the power of heaven down into the heart of earth’s challenges. Bridging divisions and erasing boundaries, whether between the stage and audience, between east and west, or between heaven and earth, is what U2 has been all about for some 30 years now. With this new tour, concertgoers have the chance to join them in that journey, and find grace inside a sound. Many will lose themselves for the evening in U2’s fantastic light and sound show. Some will be found in the sound as well.

Henry is also author of Faith, hope and U2: the language of love in the music of U2 a booklet in the Institute of Evangelism’s Dare series.

We all know what Jesus did to the herd of swine in the gospel story when he allowed the demons who were harassing the demoniac to enter into the herd grazing nearby. Not a PETA poster moment, for sure.

Three weeks ago in Egypt, the government there began a pig slaughter on a slightly bigger scale: some 350,000 pigs were led to the slaughter for fear of the dreaded “swine” flu. Countries all over the world began to ban pork imports from North America and we saw news clips of well-intentioned people (usually in the grocery store, mid-shopping) telling the reporters that they were eliminating pork from their diet, “just in case.”

What these stories intimately share is the fact of possession, of being possessed. In the gospel story, the demonic possession of the pigs leads to their plunging death off the cliff. In our more recent dealings with swine (which extends far beyond Egypt’s rash reaction), it is us, as a culture that is possessed. We are a society that is possessed by fear and being possessed by fear always ends in death.

The days following the swine flu outbreak from Mexico were a newsmaker’s dream and an opportunity for our culture of fear to kick it into high gear. A new, hybrid flu that was unheard of with a catchy name, and an increasing death count—what more could the networks ask for? We were then all witnesses and participants in a quickly escalating panic.

Why did alarm spread so fast even though this flu turned out to be nowhere near as fatal as a regular seasonal flu? Why were we so quick to panic? I think Frank Furedi, in his book Culture of Fear, hints at why when he reminds us that “the risks that kill you are not necessarily the ones that provoke and frighten you.” What does he mean by that? He simply means that while we are afraid of what statistically usually kills us (cancer, heart disease, and stroke) we are, as a culture, more pointedly afraid of terrorism, school shootings, pedophiles, serial killers and these new killer viruses (which, statistically, come nowhere near to the risk of the big three above).

So, again, why did panic spread so quickly over a flu that we now know was overblown? I think the answer is that, as a culture, we’ve transformed fear, like everything else, into a commodity that is bought and sold and we’ve become proficient peddlers and consumers of fear. In other words, just like sex, fear sells. And just like selling sex, marketers, advertisers and producers hold a vested interest in shaping our collective imagination and influencing our desires to line up with what they’re selling—and we’re buying.

In his book, Following Jesus in a Culture of Fear, Scott-Bader Saye makes the observation that in Scripture when we meet an angel from God, they begin their message with “fear not”. Why is that? He says he always thought that it was because angels must be such imposing and frightening figures. But there’s more to it than that. He thinks the reason they tell us to not be afraid is that the quieting of fear is required in order to hear and do what God asks of us. And I think he’s right.

Thomas Aquinas taught, eons ago, that disordered fear is a result of disordered desire. Simply put, we fear in deformed and distorted ways because our imaginations, and consequently, our desires are screwed up—which is another way of saying that we are a sinful people who can’t imagine a world of quieted fear and so we act, think, and speak accordingly.

You see, this culture of fear is all about shaping our imaginations through the various rituals that make up this culture from the ways and forms our news is disseminated to the methods with which producers market their products as the ‘safe’ alternative to their competitor’s. This is an embodied cultural reality that is practiced over and over again in order to intentionally form us to be a certain kind of people—in this case, scared.

As followers of Jesus in this culture, we are called to be a living alternative to it. Jesus, like God’s angels, told his disciples over and over again, “fear not”. As the church, our liturgy is all about shaping our imaginations through the rituals that make up this alternative culture of the church. Nowhere is this more clearly, visibly and physically true than in our practice of the Eucharist.

The Eucharist is an embodied reality that is practiced over and over again in order to intentionally form us to be a certain kind of people. It is the act of the church whereby it remembers who she is as follower of a crucified and risen Lord. So, it is in the ritual practice of the Eucharist that we learn that death is not the worst thing that can happen to us—which puts us deeply at odds with this predominant culture of fear which feeds off this fear of death.

As Bader-Saye notes, this isn’t about telling ourselves not to fear. Our fears are primal, overwhelming and overpowering. We can’t just tell ourselves to feel less fear—that would be disingenuous. What we need is for our desires and our fears to be re-ordered, or rather, rightly ordered. In other words, our overwhelming fears need themselves to be overwhelmed by something bigger and better. That is what we recognize and practice in the Eucharist. In consuming Jesus we are consumed into the body of Christ; we are consumed into a wonderful adventure where our fears are rightly ordered because we know this story to be ultimately hopeful and not tragic.

So what, in the end, of the pigs? It is our task, as those people whose imaginations are shaped and formed in the Eucharist to embody that imagination in our world through practices that upend the culture of fear. Being a people that don’t buy into the consumerism of fear is a good first step and is part and parcel of our commission as followers of Jesus in our world. We ought to be God’s disciplined people in a scared world—a people who practice hospitality to strangers, who love enemies, who bring gentleness to violence, a people who, in our day to day lives, are dispossessed of the demons of fear and filled with God’s Spirit of peace.

Most of the time, the only real obstacle to moving into new life is our fear — nothing else! Fear of the unknown, fear of the known, fear of giving up control, fear of the hidden motivations of the institution, fear of __________ (please fill in the blank!). In the story of 2 Kings 7, there were four lepers hanging out at the city gates, in fear because their city was under siege. They couldn’t find a home in the city and they were terrified of the enemy outside the walls, as well. Mind you, they’d never actually encountered the enemy – just heard about it. Finally, the storyteller quotes them as saying, “Why stay here until we die? So let’s go out . . .” Well, the story goes on to confirm that the threat we are familiar with may actually be worse than the one we’re imagining!

As I respond to some of the fear-filled correspondence, I’m learning that asking, “What is it that you fear?” only makes things worse. People can expand on fear, forever. Lately, I’ve started asking, “What would you need in order to feel safe enough to try . . . ?” Now, instead of expanding on their fears, they are working toward a plan, an approach, a venture — even new partnerships!

Much of what we fear exists where there is a lack of love. In our Christian Scriptures we have the assertion that perfect love casts out all fear. I often wonder, when feeling fear (even institutional anxiety), “What (or who) is it that I need to love, right now?” I can tell you that, when the answer comes to me, and I follow the Spirit’s leading to Love, it’s actually OK to feel insecure, rather than fearful. I can live with not knowing; I cannot, however, find life through fear. Rudolf Bahro (German activist and iconoclast) explains that “When the forms of an old culture are dying, the new culture is created by a few people who are not afraid to be insecure.” Imagine us leading – loving but insecure with asserting Truth – “insecure” enough to stay curious and loving enough to stay clear of the sticky web of fear.

Postmoderns are sometimes critiqued for too glibly denouncing that which smacks of modernity. Reading religious ‘blogs lately convinces me that most of us could spend the rest of our days apophatically asserting our various realities. If we’re to prepare ourselves for the “not yet” Kin-dom of God, though, we have to gird up our loins to walk in that in-between place where the old language is inadequate and the new language is still coming to us. We’ll daily be humbled by recollections of the certainties we used to herald. We’ll more freely admit that, well, we just don’t know (yet!). All we’ll have is the Holy Visions that wake us in the night and a longing to be a part of what the Spirit has been birthing for millenia – right in our collective midst. Some of us will paint our memories of those visions; others will put music to them; fewer still will design buildings and sacred spaces and most of us will try language – old wineskins for new wine!

I imagine that when the original drafters of the 20/20 vision first came together with their love and hopes for the Episcopal Church and all that it has to offer, they shared a passion not too dissimilar from what we share on this virtual community. They were afire with visions of what might happen if we were to open our hearts and hands and churches in new ways to new possibilities. They too were concerned that the “same old – same old” might subsume their Spirit-led ventures and they were cautious not to limit the Spirit’s work with small expectations. They prayed and they hoped and they shared, tirelessly. I know, because I’ve been blessed to hear their stories. Many of them are now watching and praying and listening to this conversation regarding Angli-mergence – hoping from the sidelines that the baton they passed will be cherished, regardless.

Here are the questions that shape my conversations, these days: “How might we choose love over fear? How might we get comfortable with insecurity in this strange place we presently traverse? How might we honor the Episcopal Church we’ve inherited while preparing ourselves to offer ancient gifts to new cultures? And most of all, how might we do that, TOGETHER?” I think that courageously answering that question may be more important than many of us realize.

With crazy hopes and growing cheer,

Tom
646-203-6266

IKEA North York presents…SENSTATIONAL SUNDAY MORNINGS!!

Sunday Mornings are a great time for family, big breakfasts and coming to IKEA! Starting on February 22nd and running on

March 1st, 8th and 15th. IKEA North York will have another great reason to come to IKEA. We will have 2 crazy offers on great products.

From 10am-12pm the Sales team will reduce 2 good products at 50% off!

There will also be a great reason to bring the kids…

From 10:30am to 11:30am kids can enjoy a fun activity in the restaurant!

This advertisement was flanked by a picture of a happy nuclear family full of joy, optimism and looking so über-cool with their new IKEA gear. So there it was: “Sunday mornings at IKEA”-what every family is looking for! Drop the kids off at the activity center, eat good, inexpensive food and funkify (please excuse my creative vocabulary) your life at unbeatable prices all in one Sunday morning!

Now the reason that IKEA (bless its soul for where else could I find a lint roller for that price?) represents a challenge to the church is because it’s out-narrating the church; it’s beating the church at its own game of narrating and embodying a story about what life is all about. It’s not IKEA alone that’s successful here but it’s a good representative of the whole culture of commerce and consumption and its ideals. In fact, the whole industry of advertising is based on successfully narrating a way of life-a way of life that you can’t help but want to be a part of.

Do you know why IKEA is so successful? I mean, we’re in the middle of a recession and the place was packed with people with their carts full of stuff (ours included). The reason IKEA is thriving is because it knows its story, it knows how to tell and embody its story of consumption at fair prices. It knows its end goal, its reason for being. In other words, IKEA knows how to do its IKEA thing, and it performs it well. In fact, walking the halls, you can read the narrative about how IKEA came into being. They sure know how to tell a story.

“Church” names a story, it names a people, it names a certain performance; simply put, it names a way of life. Being a part of the church means being a part of this performance, embodying this way of life. The church tells and lives out a story about what life is all about. In doing so, it narrates an alternative story to the one our culture, so effectively told by IKEA, does. What does this mean? It means, simply, that the church tells a different story than our world does. This ought not to come as a surprise, since the Jesus we follow embodied an immeasurably different story than did the world of his day.

But it’s when the church forgets who she is-when she forgets what her story is-that the church misses the whole point of this following Jesus thing. It’s then that the church starts to listen and buy into the stories that are told around it; stories like the myth of redemptive violence, or the story of unlimited consumption of resources, or the story of homeland safety and security at all costs, or the story of self-concern over the concern of those on the edge of society. Maybe it’s as simple as the story of “the best bang for your buck”-a story told without narrating anything about the condition of the production or the producers of our goods. The stories told around us are legion and often very attractive. When the church forgets to do its church thing, it loses its way.

Remember what happened to Israel when Israel forgot to do its Israel thing? Babylonian captivity, period. So, when we bemoan the state of the church, or when we contemplate the nature of cultural shifts and what role the church should play in them, we need, above all things, to remember that the malaise the church finds itself in (call it whatever you like, “ecclesial recession” is one of my favourites!) is first of all a loss of identity, which is a long way of saying that we find ourselves in our own Babylonian captivity.

Answers? Well, I get asked a lot, probably because I’m a young priest, about how the church is going to move forward into the future. And right now many Dioceses in our church are working with strategic plans as they look to that future. Let me add something that’s seemingly obvious but that gets lost ‘on the ground’ as it were: no amount of strategic planning, no number of core values, no measure of problem solving will secure the future of the Anglican Church in Canada if we are not willing to radically re-think what it means to be a church in a culture that has by-and-large forgotten about the church! Before we crunch the numbers, before we throw solutions at our problems, what this Babylonian captivity ought to engender and create is a penitential community-a community that can acknowledge our collective failure to embody the gospel call to live out the Kingdom of God in our world.

Answers?  I only have one.  Only God rescues. Only God takes unfaithful Israel back. Only God can rescue his people. I’m writing this on the tail end of Lent as we approach the celebration of resurrection. At Easter we tell and embody the story in our services, in our pageants, and in our choir choruses, of a God who rescues, and in the resurrection rescue of love that raised our Lord from the grave, rescues us as well. That’s good news; and, it’s incomparably better news-and a much better story!-than Sensational Sunday Mornings at IKEA.

The first of these revelations was Florida’s debunking of globalization’s promised “flat world.”  This myth says that with the advent of high-speed communications and transportation, “place” has little or no relevance for the creative and mobile classes.  For example, stockbrokers armed with high-speed Internet and a cell phone could work from the dock of a Muskoka cottage, a hotel in India, or their home in Eastern Ontario, just as if they were on Wall Street, and Wall Street itself would lose its status as a financial hub.  If this were true, Florida says, we would have seen a mass exodus from city centres into rural areas.  After all, why would a stockbroker pay Manhattan rent when he/she can do the same work in a country hideaway that can be bought for the same amount as a few years’ rent in the city?  Yet the reality is that since the advent of these technologies, we have seen continued growth in urban areas, and continued population decline in rural areas, despite skyrocketing urban rent and housing prices.  Florida illustrates this increasing concentration on a continental scale with creative analysis of night-time satellite images, where artificial light indicates population.  The truth, Florida says, is that place does matter, and it matters so much that people will pay thousands more to live, work, and locate their businesses in the right place, surrounded by similar people and businesses.  Florida calls this the “clustering effect.” 

The ecclesiastical version of the “flat world” hypothesis says that in today’s world, geography is obsolete, and people prefer to arrange themselves in “networks”.  The Anglican tradition of dividing ministry into geographic parishes should thus be replaced with churches that serve “networks” of people, whether connected by their work, pastimes or simply friendship, recognizing these networks may gather people from across several parish or even diocesan boundaries, a sin next to heresy in some circles.  In many ways this is true, but the model falls apart when it’s pushed too far.  Taken too far, one could conclude that a church planted for young professionals could thrive regardless of its location.  Whether in a sprawling metropolis or a small city, it could theoretically gather its target population by affinity rather than by geography.  The problem that Florida’s research shows, however, is that affinity networks are increasingly clustering in geographic areas, and no wise church planter can discount geography.  “Who” and “Where” are deeply connected.  A church called to a certain geographical location will be wise to understand and engage with those clustered there, and a new plant called to a certain people group will be wise to locate where they cluster.  

The most obvious example of clustering is that instead of globalization, enabled by high-speed communications and transportation bringing us a flatter world without geographical constraints or advantage, we have an increasingly segregated world where, thanks to the same developments, up and coming musicians cluster in Nashville, ‘A’ list film stars cluster in Los Angeles, and top fashion designers cluster in NYC and so on.  Trying to break into those industries outside of those clusters is exceedingly difficult. . . . Place matters.

Less obvious, but more relevant clusters can be identified by age.  Florida divides the life of a person in the creative/mobile classes into five segments, separated by three “big moves”.  Remember, these are generalizations, and are focused on the “creative class” and not the entire population, where many are immobile due to economic and other circumstances.  The first segment of the creative/mobile class is made of recent college graduates, 20-29 and generally single, establishing careers and relationships on their own for the first time.  The second segment is young professionals, 30-44, established in careers and relationships, but still childless.  The third segment is families with children, aged 64 and under.  The next segment is empty-nesters between 45 and 64, followed by retirees 65+.  In each stage, distinct needs cluster people together.  First an active nightlife attracts young singles to a vibrant city center, then as young professionals, the cheaper real estate of the suburbs, still within a reasonable commute, becomes more appealing.  For a young family, good schools and safe streets are of primary concern.  Finally, for empty-nesters, arts, culture and recreation become more attractive, and for retirees, access to high-quality healthcare, safety and warmer weather are draws.  Florida uses these survey results and other criteria to rank cities and neighbourhoods across the United States by their appeal to each segment, as well as by “personality”.   A Canadian edition is said to be coming soon.  Until then, the US edition is still helpful, and gives honourable mention to several Canadian neighbourhoods.  For his target audience, members of the creative class contemplating their next move up the ladder of success, this is meant to help one choose a city of residence.  For church planters and evangelists called to serve a specific segment of this class, Florida identifies and ranks the kinds of cities and neighbourhoods where that segment has “clustered”.  In other words, it helps us locate and understand our mission fields.

Christians will also find much of concern in Florida’s book.  Not least among them is the “stratification” of the world, where Florida observes a massive segregation of people by wealth and class.  His use of gay and lesbian populations as indicators of up and coming neighbourhoods is both intriguing and contentious.  Finally, the book reveals how the pursuit of wealth and success drives many human decisions, often at the expense of others, even though Florida’s research reveals that happiness has more to do with one’s place than one’s wealth (although the two are not unrelated).  

However, when it comes to church planting and evangelism, we of all people should hardly be surprised that the world has different values from the Kingdom of God.  Florida is making valuable, realistic observations about the world that is, and not the world that God wants.  For someone like me, finding that my call to plant and evangelize is based on the question of “who” more than “where”, Who’s Your City describes and locates a mission field ripe for introduction to kingdom values.  Evangelists and church planters will surely benefit from understanding the demography of this mission field as they, with the dedication and enthusiasm of a pearl merchant seeking a pearl of great price, seek clusters of those among whom they are called to share His kingdom.

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McLaren tells the story of his friend April, as she moved gradually towards Christian faith through an email conversation with him.  Essential insights for evangelizing postmodern people.

I can only answer the question, “What am I to do?” if I can answer the prior question, “Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?” (After Virtue 216)

Human beings need to know their story: it gives us identity and it gives us purpose. If I may adapt an old joke, you may know of the son who wouldn’t get up on a Sunday morning for church. His mother tried to get him up, but he said, “Why should I go to church? Nobody likes me, it’s boring, and I’m not sure I believe that stuff anyway. Give me two reasons I should get up.” And his mother replied, “Well, you’re thirty years old and you’re the priest.”  What is the mother doing? She’s trying to get him to do the right thing by reminding him of the story he belongs to! 

For the most part, Anglican Christians don’t know the story they belong to. We are biblically illiterate, maybe because we still live with a Christendom model of the church, where we assume everybody who walks through the door is already a mature Christian, or maybe we prefer to be biblically illiterate so that no-one will mistake us for Baptists.

What then is our story? We are part of what is basically a very simple story. Our story says God created the world good and beautiful and full of life; the story says we spoiled God’s creation by refusing to follow the manufacturer’s instructions; but the story says too that this is not the end, that the Creator has not given up, indeed that the Creator is seeking to restore this world to a beauty even greater than it had at the beginning. And, as we understand it in the Christian community, the centrepiece of God’s restoration project is the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Does this make the Christian story a metanarrative, bete noir of postmodernism? Frankly, I don’t see any way around saying yes, it is a metanarrative. But I would say with Richard Middleton and Brian Walsh in their book, Truth is Stranger Than it Used to Be, that the Christian story is a uniquely benign metanarrative, whose intention is to bring freedom not oppression. Now the Christian story is not the same story a Muslim or a Buddhist might tell (though that’s no reason we can’t be friends). Neither is it the same story an atheist would tell. And, frankly, it’s not the story most Canadians would tell. So Christians need to be familiar with their distinctive story in order to answer the question, “What am I to do? How should I behave? What are wise choices?” Tom Wright, the Bishop of Durham, has a great analogy for this, which I will adapt slightly. He says, suppose a previously unknown play of Shakespeare’s was discovered, but with one act, Act 5, missing. What could you do? Perhaps the best solution would be to get together the world’s most experienced Shakespearian actors, get them to read Acts 1 through 4, and Act 6, till it is second nature to them—and then set them loose to act out the play. When they came to Act 5 they would improvise, they would make it up. Now, if they are going to do that well, they would have to be true to Acts 1 through 4, the characters and the plot would have to be credible—and their improvisation would have to connect with the start of Act 6.  Now, says Wright, that is where we are in relation to the Christian story. God has given us a framework for our lives in Acts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6. Act 1 is creation, Act 2 the fall, Act 3 the formation of the people of

2.      We need to retrieve the story of the Gospel . . . because at the heart of our story is Good News. When you ask what brought the Christian church into being, it was, in a word, the Gospel. Those first followers of Jesus had stumbled on good news–the good news that Jesus had risen, that sins could be forgiven, that God is for us, and that the whole world looks different because of this. And the reason the Christian church spread so rapidly throughout the ancient world, and the reason it continues to spread in many countries today, is exactly that—that Christians have amazing good news to share. I think of one young man who became a Christian not long ago, who said to me, “I feel more alive than I’ve ever felt before!” That’s what the Gospel does to people. Now Anglicans are not exactly known for their (what shall I say?) unbridled spiritual exuberance. But unless we rediscover the Gospel, we will die—it’s as simple as that. Do Anglicans know the Gospel? I remember asking this question at a diocesan gathering once, and an elderly man in the front row said, “Well, I’ve been an Anglican for 60 years, and I can’t honestly say that I’ve ever heard something called the Gospel.” His priest, who was sitting beside him, turned to him in horror and said, “But you hear it every Sunday!” Who was right? Well, probably both were right. He had heard the words all right, but not in such a way that it came home to him as good news, not in such a way that it gave him joy or hope.   We say, “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again”—and the greatest facts in the history of the human race just make us yawn, whereas, if they are true, surely they should make us want to shout and dance and sing and weep for joy all at the same time. Although as Anglicans, we would do it in a reserved and liturgical way, naturally. That doesn’t matter. Part of the problem, I think, is that we have not helped people discover the Christian good news in their own experience. Think of it this way. Suppose a war has been won and a country has been set free from oppression. That’s great news. (My father used to tell us children how he had liberated

Conclusion

For some years, I served on the Primate’s Evangelism Commission. I remember Michael Peers once reflecting how in his lifetime he had seen the church’s involvement in social action move from the margins of church life, where it was just the pet peeve of a small ginger group, to the centre, where these days we take it for granted that social action is the church’s responsibility.   So my question, I suppose, is this: Can the reality and drama of our story move back to the centre of the church’s life? Can we grow again into loving the story, being passionate about the story, centering our lives and our congregations’ lives, around the story? Because in a world where many lack a story, this is a story that gives life, this is a story that is full of hope.  Does the Anglican Church of Canada have a future? My answer is a definite . . . maybe. But in the big picture, you know, that’s not really the most important question to be asking. In the long run, if survival is our number one priority, one thing is clear: we will not survive. (You will recall that Jesus said some pretty strong things about those who tried to save their own lives.) No, our job is to be faithful to the story, not least because we believe it is God’s story, and our job is to retell the story and to live out the story—as Tom Wright puts it, with faithfulness on the one hand and creativity on the other. And to leave the consequences to God. 

Queen’s College,

Newfoundland

May 2004 

In current writing about evangelism, largely through the influence of Lesslie Newbigin, there has been much discussion of the relation of evangelism to culture, and an assumption–I think a valid and biblical one–that the style of evangelism needs to change according to its cultural context. Peter’s sermon to Jewish pilgrims on the Day of Pentecost is quite different from Paul’s sermon to the philosophers of Athens.  The corresponding problem, of course, is that any given culturally shaped form of evangelism cannot be readily transferred to another cultural context, since its message will not be understood or received.

C.S.Lewis was a remarkably effective evangelist to the culture of his day, and Mere Christianity in particular still helps many come to Christian faith. Yet western culture has changed greatly since Britain in the first half of the twentieth century, not least in the ongoing shift from modernism to post-modernism.  As a result, some today see Lewis as hopelessly wedded to a modernist culture and therefore unable to communicate to a postmodern world. One author who does so is Rodney Clapp: in his 1996 book A Peculiar People, he points to one aspect of what he considers to be Lewis’ modernism:

The foundationalist C.S.Lewis argued that there is for all persons in all times and places a singular and innate sense of fairness. . . . But today our society is sufficiently pluralistic . . . that different standards are indeed seen to be at work. Thus the prochoicer’s “decent behaviour” is the prolifer’s “murder.”

In other words, Lewis’ kind of argument will not impress a true postmodern. Lewis assumes absolutes and appeals to universals in a way that many in our culture do not. Clapp seems to me correct in some respects. Certainly, Mere Christianity can be interpreted as modernist, in the popular sense that it seeks to argue people into belief in a linear, rationalistic way. For Lewis, Christian faith can only be based on sufficient evidence:

I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against. (MC 120-121)

–and his goal is to set out the appropriate evidence in such a way that the conclusion is virtually irresistible. An objective, non-perspectival, faith-free consideration of “the facts” is possible, and faith is a secondary step based on that rational consideration. In a postmodern world, where reason is relativized and distrusted, and where objectivity is considered impossible, this approach is hardly guaranteed to gain one a sympathetic audience. Even worse, of course, underlying all of Lewis’ apologetics is a metanarrative, bete noir of postmodernism. This is perhaps clearest in The Narnia Chronicles, with their retelling of the Christian metanarrative from the creation (The Magician’s Nephew) to the eschaton (The Last Battle), but it is always assumed

So is Lewis’ voice ineffective as an evangelist to a postmodern world? My argument is this. There may indeed be ways in which Lewis addresses his culture more appropriately than he does our own. This is the nature of good evangelism: it is precisely its timeliness that limits its timelessness. Nevertheless, I want to argue that Lewis in fact recognizes and anticipates the dangers of modernity and, in response, demonstrates approaches to evangelism which we might now label as postmodern.

Lesslie Newbigin, in his many books, has encouraged Christians to learn from those who have been involved in cross-cultural mission overseas in order to learn how to address what is increasingly a cross-cultural situation “at home.” Following this lead, I am going to make use of a 1991 missiology classic, Transforming Mission, by South African David Bosch. What Bosch does is to look at the history of Christian mission from New Testament times to the present day, with an eye to the many ways in which mission has adapted to culture. He considers how mission has been influenced by modernity, and how it needs to adapt to a postmodern context, and although his focus is on overseas missions, his analysis this seems particularly apt for our purpose.

Bosch’s first observation about modernity is that:

The human mind was viewed as the point of departure for all knowing. Human reason was . . . independent of the norms of tradition or presupposition. (264)

In these terms, Lewis’ appeal to reason in books like Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, or Miracles might appear to classify him as a modernist. Yet Lewis is actually quite aware of the limitations of human reason and clearly relativizes reason in several ways.

Probably Lewis’ own experience laid the foundation for this. After all, the experience of Joy in his life preceded any rational reflection on the experience. Further, when he describes the foundations of his own personality, he does not see rationality as primary. In a 1954 letter, he explains that:

The imaginative man in me is older, more continuously operative, and in that sense more basic, than either the religious writer or the critic.” (Letters 444, 1954)

It may be significant in this respect that he saw himself first and foremost as a poet, and that his first published work was poetry.

From this vantage point, Lewis is able to acknowledge that reason is never autonomous but that culture has a role in shaping how we approach truth and reason. As Lewis says of Uncle Andrew’s view of the creation of Narnia, “What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing; it also depends on what sort of person you are.” (Nephew 116) Our knowledge of the world is never unbiased, complete or absolute.

This is clear in such places as The Discarded Image, where he acknowledges that no Model of the world can be regarded as ultimate truth:

Part of what we know now is that we cannot, in the old sense, ‘know what the universe is like’ and that no model we build will be, in that sense, ‘like’ it. (218)

He encourages us, therefore, to “regard all Models in the right way, respecting each and idolizing none.” (222) David Downing actually notes this as anticipating “contemporary post-structuralist historiography.” (Planets 61)

As so often happens, Lewis’ philosophical convictions are played out in his fiction. Thus it is not surprising that in the space trilogy, while reason plays an important part, it is strictly relativized. Reason occupies one seat at the table, but not the seat of honour. Thus in That Hideous Strength, McPhee, the strict rationalist (who, like Kirkpatrick “came near to being a purely logical entity.” Surprised), has an honoured place in the fellowship of St. Anne’s. The Director explains to Jane Studdock, “He is our sceptic; a very important office.” (Trilogy 539). Thus he can ask the difficult questions and challenge sloppy thinking. Yet his strength is also his weakness, and when it comes to confronting Merlin, McPhee is useless: “You can’t go, McPhee,” says the Director; “The others are heavily protected as you are not.” (587)

What then of the reliance on reason in books like Mere Christianity? One possibility is that it is chiefly strategic, based not on autonomous modernist foundationalism, as Clapp seems to believe, but on Christian presuppositions. Lewis’ 1941 letter to the BBC’s Dr. Welch suggests this:

It seems to me that the New Testament . . . always assumes an audience who already believe in the Law of Nature and know they have disobeyed it.” (Green and Hooper 202)

Although he will “mention Christianity only at the end,” that very strategy is a biblical one, reminiscent of Paul’s sermon at Athens. Perhaps this is an example of what James Como has in mind when he says that although Lewis “never deviated from his belief in reason as the organ of truth,” nevertheless he “could adapt with the adroitness of a field commander.” (xxvii)

Bosch deals at some length with the modernist view of science. He observes a new emphasis on objectivity in the modern period, which “separated human beings from their environment” and opened the door for exploitation of the environment and of others. Teleology has disappeared: “science cannot answer the question by whom and for what purpose the universe came into being.” Scientific knowledge is perceived as objective and value-free and all problems are in principle solvable. (264-266)

Lewis’ scorn for what he calls “scientism” is well-known. He distinguishes it from “real science” and “good scientists” since “the sciences are ‘good and innocent in themselves’” (quoting THS).
He is clear what this good science would be:

When it explained it would not explain away. When it spoke of the parts it would remember the whole. While studying the It it would not lose what Martin Buber calls the Thou-situation. (Abolition 79)

Scientism on the other hand is by nature reductionist, finally undermining its own credibility by destroying the possibility of rational thought and human nature itself:

Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man. (Abolition 68)

The fictional form of scientism is seen in several places. At the creation of Narnia, for example, while most spectators are rapt in awe, Uncle Andrew, the scientist, is already thinking of how to plunder the scientific and economic bounty of this new world. His objectification of Narnia, of course, has the logical result that he cannot hear the music of the Lion or the speech of the animals; nor can he enter into their play.  In other words, he becomes less than human.

In Out of the Silent Planet, Weston and Devine, similarly, think of Mars and its inhabitants as objects of scientific and economic interest only. Their bias is revealed early in the book, when Weston complains of the boy they had hoped to take with them, that “in a civilized society [he] would be automatically handed over to a state laboratory for experimental purposes.” (Trilogy 15) When they arrive on Mars, it is not the physical scientists but Ransom, the linguist, who enters into relationship with the inhabitants, shares their sports, hears their poetry, and shares their grief.

In both instances, while scientific “objectivity” towards the environment may bring limited (and usually selfish) benefits, the person who is prepared to set aside such distance and enter in to the environment, reaps far richer rewards. That Hideous Strength illustrates the logical end of this kind of “objectivity.” When Frost is preparing Mark Studdock for the (significantly named) Objective Room, he warns Mark that:

Resentment and fear are both chemical phenomena. Our reactions to one another are chemical reactions. Social relations are chemical reactions. (Trilogy 614)

The reductionism which is implied in objectivity leads to the mind of dehumanization which is at the heart of the NICE.

Bosch observes that in modernity the doctrine of progress meant that people “were convinced that they had both the ability and the will to remake the world in their own image.” (265) Lewis is not a fan of “progress.” He calls it:

the fatal serialism of the modern imagination—the image of infinite unilinear progression which so haunts our minds. Abolition 80

In Surprised by Joy, however, he admits that he was not always a sceptic about progress. He describes his reaction on hearing that Owen Barfield had become an Anthroposophist: “‘Why, damn it—it’s medieval,’ I exclaimed; for I still had all the chronological snobbery of my period and used the names of earlier periods as terms of abuse.” (Surprised 166) Later, he wrote of Barfield in 1936, “The friend to whom I have dedicated the book [The Allegory of Love] has taught me not to patronize the past, and has trained me to see the present as itself a ‘period’.” As a result, Lewis was not a fan of the doctrine “lodged in popular thought that improvement is, somehow, a cosmic law’ (De Futilitate 58) nor of its offspring, chronological snobbery, “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age.” (Surprised 167)

In The Discarded Image, he further disarmed the myth by suggesting that scientific “evidence” for progress merely followed on a philosophical hankering for progress. This is why, in The World’s Last Night, he says that “Progressive evolution as popularly imagined, is simply a myth, supported by no evidence whatever. . . . No-one looking at world history without some preconception in favour of progress could find in it a steady up gradient.”

Perhaps the most merciless pillorying of the myth of progress, however, comes in Out of the Silent Planet, when Weston tries to defend human colonization of the universe on the grounds that human beings are more “advanced” than other civilizations. Ransom’s childlike translation of Weston’s rant effectively reduces its triumphalism to meaningless folly. Thus Weston’s boasting of “our transportation system which is rapidly annihilating space and time” is reduced to we “can carry heavy weights very quickly a long way.” (Trilogy 120-121)  It is significant that both Weston and Uncle Andrew in The Magician’s Nephew are punished with cold water on their heads (Trilogy 116, 118, Nephew 123), as if their scientism has been a form of intoxication.

Finally, Bosch characterizes the modernist period as one when people were seen as “emancipated, autonomous individuals”, as compared with “the Middle Ages, [when] community took priority over the individual.” (267)

Lewis has a somewhat ambivalent attitude towards individualism. On the one hand, he fears the crowd, “the growing exaltation of the collective and the growing indifference to persons. . . . the general character of modern life with its huge impersonal organizations.” (“Haldane,” OTOW 108) Yet he acknowledges that this emphasis on the collective ironically stems from an over-emphasis on the individual, “that quite un-christian worship of the individual . . . which is so rampant in modern thought.” (“Membership,” Fernseeds 24)

On the other hand, Lewis is clear about the importance of the Christian community. He is quite explicit: “The Christian is called, not to individualism but to membership in the mystical body.’ (“Membership,” Fernseeds 15) In That Hideous Strength, if the NICE represents the parody of “family” that scientism brings, true community is to be found at St. Anne’s, with its strange mixture of the Cockney cleaning lady, the Scottish sceptic, the academic Dr. Dimble and his wife, the bear Mr. Bultitude, the enigmatic and austere Grace Ironwood, Jane Studdock, the would-be academic with second sight, and the director, the saintly Ransom. The group is bound together by philia, that is, the love which exists between people who “care about the same truth.” (Four Loves 62) St. Anne’s is in fact almost a microcosm of the Body of Christ.

It is true that Lewis’ ecclesiology is notoriously weak. Though he attended his parish church in Headington, he could hardly be called an active participant in the parish’s life. Yet he understands the importance of church as a place of community. Screwtape complains about church because “being a place of unity and not of liking, it brings together people of different classes and psychology . . . in the kind of unity the Enemy desires.” (Screwtape 81) His advice to Wormwood is to distract his patient from these realities by reminding him of the outward eccentricities of church members and the unintelligible liturgies, not to mention the singing of “fifth rate poems set to sixth-rate music.” Screwtape, like Lewis, knows the importance of church, and that, as Lewis says elsewhere, “personal and private life is lower than participation in the Body of Christ.” (“Membership,” Fernseeds 13)
Conclusion: The premodern as key

In light of this, I would suggest that Lewis can be read with profit by both modernist audiences (of whom there are still many) and postmodern audiences (of whom there are a growing number).

How is it possible to do both? On the one hand, he addresses the modern world because he deeply understands that world. He was influenced by it, as all of us are shaped by the culture into which we are born. He uses the tools of that culture, not least the linear rationalism, and the assumption of shared values, to advocate on behalf of Christian faith, to great effect.

But, at the same time, because he is a Christian, that culture does not have the final word, and he can anticipate its demise without concern:

It is not impossible that our own Model will die . . . when, and because, far-reaching changes in the mental temper of our descendants demand that it should. (222)

In fact, because Lewis’ faith and his academic discipline have their origins before the modern era, his mind is also shaped by influences far broader than that of a single culture: his faith, indeed, his whole mindset, is a pre-modern faith. Some have suggested that the pre-modern has more in common with the postmodern than either does with the modern. This would explain why other sides of Lewis than the purely rational can still communicate powerfully in a postmodern world.

One of the features Bosch observes in a postmodern world is a realization that:

Rationality has to be expanded. . . . This recognition has led to a re-evaluation of the role of metaphor, myth, analogy and the like, and to the rediscovery of the sense of mystery and enchantment. (353)

This would suggest that the future of Lewis as evangelist may lie more in his fiction than in his directly apologetic works, in Narnia and the science fiction trilogy, in The Great Divorce and Till We Have Faces, those places where (to paraphrase Emily Dickinson) he tells all the truth, but he tells it slant.

Mere Christians: Then and Now
7th Annual C.S.Lewis and the Inklings Conference
LeTourneau University, Texas, April 2004

Robert Webber argues that the church is best equipped to meet the challenges of the postmodern era by recovering the resources of the ancient Christian tradition. 

Webber sketches the shift from modernity to postmodernity in science, philosophy and culture and describes how this affects the contemporary search for faith. He shows how Christians have always struggled to articulate the faith in their own historical and cultural contexts, and traces these attempts from the early church through the medieval era and the Reformation, to the rise of modernity after the Enlightenment.  In doing so, Webber argues that the modernist assumptions which characterize so much of Christian thought and practice today are not only discredited by postmodern thinking, but that they actually do a disservice to the faithful presentation of the good news of Jesus Christ.  When we reclaim the perspectives and practices of classical Christianity, we not only attract the postmodern seeker but we recover a robust and authentic Christian faith.

Classical Christianity appeals to the postmodern seeker because it is holistic, directed toward every aspect of life, not just an interior “spiritual” plane.  It is relational rather than individualistic, and communicates through images and symbols, not only through words. It incorporates mystery.  Yet classical Christianity diverges from postmodernity at a key point.  Where postmoderns distrust any claim to a universal truth, the Christian faith is based on the universal significance of Christ.  To his credit, Webber acknowledges that classical Christianity is at odds with postmodern relativism. 

Evangelism, according to Webber, is not directed to a mere assent to the articles of faith but to entry into a life lived under the Lordship of Christ in the context of the church community. His model of evangelism is based on the catechumenate of the early church, a process whereby seekers are gradually brought into a deeper understanding of and commitment to Jesus Christ as well as into the life of the Christian community.  Such a model sees evangelism less as a push for an immediate commitment and more as a natural process of drawing others to the life of faith.

As its subtitle suggests, Ancient-Future Faith is written with an evangelical readership in mind.  However, those in the Catholic Anglican tradition will find here a deep appreciation of the richness and theological integrity of liturgical expression, as well as confidence in what that tradition has to offer to the wider church and to the postmodern world. 

Editor’s note: A sequel to this book, Ancient-Future Evangelism: Making Your Church a Faith-Forming Community, by Robert E. Webber, is to be published by Baker Book House in November 2003.

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One day you will look back, and you will see how, you were held out by this love, while you can stand it, you can move on this moment, follow this feeling… - “Mysterious Ways” Achtung Baby

Introduction

It’s been said that music is the language of the soul. All of us probably have songs that we carry in our hearts, that ring through our heads, and find their way onto our lips – as a whistle on the street or as a bellow in the shower. Around the world, singing often passes the day for labourers harvesting fields. Music touches something deep in us as little else can.

I have intended this booklet to be an exploration of a music group which has touched millions of people for about twenty years now. Their songs have sought to connect with the heart of people, politics and everything in life that is worth being passionate about.

I want to look at the source from which the group and their inspiration has sprung. What motivates U2? What drives them to a creativity that crosses borders of the world and of the heart?

I first saw U2 as a young teenager in 1983 in Massey Hall, Toronto, and I have seen them at every successive visit to the city since. That first night I was struck by how U2 reached out to audience members, welcoming them on stage: a young man to play the guitar, a woman to slow dance with Bono.

Reaching out and bridging gaps has consistently been a hallmark of the band.

This book is not an attempt to conform U2′s message to some narrow dogma. Their musical and lyrical influences have been many. I am choosing here to look at a single element that has run through all of their music, and which continues to be an inspiration for members of the band. It is an attempt to see what can be learned from taking a look at their career to date.

I want to approach this as a dialogue. While it might be easier to ignore or label what is difficult to understand, true dialogue means asking good questions and listening objectively to the answers given. I think the answers we’ll find will be intriguing. For those of faith it may mean expanding the ability to engage the world with a Christian mind. For those for whom faith is a non-issue, it may raise interest in what keeps U2 “wide awake.”

Whatever the case may be, I suggest you use this booklet in an interactive way. Play the songs and read the lyrics (especially if you doubt what I am saying!), and even buy or rent the videos mentioned. Universal Music is not paying me to say this! I believe that by looking more closely at the message of U2 you will gain a deeper appreciation for the band and for the faith, hope and love found in their music.

I welcome your comments below.

Let Go, Let’s Go…Discotheque

It’s October 26, 1997 and U2 are in concert at the Toronto Skydome. 50,000 fans are in attendance, and on stage is a monster yellow arch, a’ la McDonald’s, and a giant video screen, 50 feet high by 150 feet wide, pumping out creative video segments that comment on our culture. It’s midway through the concert and U2 is playing “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me,” the theme song for a recent Batman film. Bono, the lead singer, reaches over to one of the many cameras on the elaborate stage and pulls it close – his face appearing on the massive video screen for the entire stadium to see – and makes a gesture into the camera. With one hand he draws a halo over his head, and then with both hands grows a set of horns. Horns or halo? Angel or Devil? With a shrug and sly grin he carries on singing. The crowd goes wild.

U2. Who are they and what they are about? Something sacred? Profane? either? Or both? Is there still anything deep and meaningful in their lyrics today, or did it all go downhill after “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”?

Are they religious? Spiritual? Christian even? In the past, U2 concerts closed with “40″ – a song based on Psalm 40 of the Bible and which made their faith clear. Since Achtung Baby, however, U2′s faith seems to be increasingly confused and gray.

Nevertheless, the intrigue surrounding U2 continues. As Bobby Maddex of Gadfly Magazine says in the edition entitled “U2: Still Looking?”:

Mention the Band to a U2 fan and chances are, you’ll find yourself talking not about chord progressions, danceability, or favorite songs, but existentialism, hermeneutics, or the problem of evil. (1)

Perhaps there is something we can learn from their music, intellectually and spiritually.

A Fire in The Village

The band members grew up in Ireland in Dublin and attended Mt. Temple High School. It was the seventies and the punk scene was in. Sid Vicious and the Sex Pistols, Johnny Rotten and Thin Lizzy represented rebellion against everything established and accepted. It was in this context that drummer Larry Mullen posted a notice for anyone interested in starting a band. Soon a community of musicians developed that called themselves “Lypton Village.” They saw themselves as a movement resisting the status quo. Out of this came U2, named after an American military spy plane – most notably the one that was downed in the Soviet Union during Kruschev’s rule [in May of 1960] and that was involved with the Cuban Missile Crisis. The band was made up of Larry Mullen Jr. as drummer, Adam Clayton as bassist, “The Edge,” or David Evans, as lead guitarist, and “Bono,” or Paul Hewson, as lead singer.

The 1970′s religious scene in both the Protestant and Catholic churches of Ireland has been characterized as dry and empty. Many Christian groups emerged to fill the emptiness and spiritual longing of the times. Even then Bono realized that “It wasn’t enough to rage against the lie, you had offer truth in its place.”

Three members of U2 – Bono, The Edge, and Larry Mullen – became part of a group known as Shalom, a charismatic, non- hierarchical and informal Christian group, led by a man named Dennis Sheady. They became deeply involved with Shalom and grew in knowledge and commitment to their faith.

Here’s a comment from Bono looking back at that time:

The Pentecostalists have this idea that a spirit falls and they can trace its movements. There was one that fell in 1917, 1918, and a number of things came out of that.  These are movements of the Spirit. They fall and they stay somewhere. And there was one around that time…something happened. I just know that…I knew there was something to this. (3)

It was this fire of the Spirit that propelled the passion of U2, and which would break through in their music for years to come.

Under an October Sky

Traces of belief in God are evident in U2′s first album, Boy (1980). They come through more clearly in their second album, O c t o b e r (1981), when a crisis arose for the thre e Christian band members. They wondered whether Rock and Roll was compatible with their faith in Christ. The struggle is heard in the songs of this album, such as “Gloria,” where Bono sings about offering everything he has to God.

From early on U2 knew they did not want to be “the band that talks about God.” (4) In an interview with Hot Pre s s magazine Bono said that if they had anything to say it would have to come through “in our lives, in our music, in our performance.” (5) Nevertheless, they still had questions and were even ready to give up their music careers if necessary. The t h ree Christian band members went away to spend time near the cold autumn beach of Portrane to reflect and consider what to do. They eventually reached the conclusion that their faith and rock and roll were not mutually exclusive and carried on. U2′s musical journey soon entered new territory with the albums War (1983), The Unforgettable Fire (1984), The Joshua Tre e (1987) and Rattle and Hum (1989).

I Want to Run, I Want to Hide…

An Album, a Movie…and a Backlash

The hits from The Joshua Tree, such as “With or Without You” and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” pushed U2 into superstardom. As Elyssa Gardener of Rolling Stone said, “U2 was Rock and Roll in 1987.” (6) In the magazine’s readers’ poll, U2 was tops in many categories: Artist of the Year, Best Band, Best Album, Best Single, Best Male Singer, Best Songwriter, Best Guitarist, Best Bass Player, Best Drummer, Best Live Performance, Best Video, Best Album Cover, and even Sexiest Male Artist.

The Joshua Tree was followed by Rattle and Hum – the album and the movie. By now U2 had reached full media saturation.  Every pop culture magazine featured them on its cover.  People had seen enough. Even David Evans (“The Edge”) said of all the media coverage, “I’m sick to death of reading about U2.” It wasn’t long before a backlash began.

Some rejected U2′s delving into the roots of American music, and others rejected their strong stance on moral issues (U2 had been strongly linked with causes such as Live Aid, Feed the World, Amnesty International’s Conspiracy of Hope tour, Greenpeace, and Artists Against Apartheid). The band members were caricatured in the media as flag-waving, overzealous bleeding hearts. One comedian even said that “Bono thinks he’s Jesus.” (7)

It is likely there was some truth in what the critics were saying about U2. Some of Bono’s political and social commentaries, both in and out of the concert arena, were quite strong considering the cultural context of the “greedy 80′s” in which they were made. Such clarity of vision is rare and often misunderstood.  The critics of the time may have missed the ideas at the heart of U2, misunderstanding the meaning behind U2′s words and actions.

The fine line between artistic expression and righteous posturing had become blurred. If they were to continue musically, U2 would have to find a way to free their voice and their artistic ability for future albums.

After Rattle and Hum in 1989, U2 announced, “We’re going to go away for a while so we can dream it all up again.” (8)

Chopping Down The Joshua Tree

When Achtung Baby was born two years later in 1991, it brought radical changes for U2:

from monolithic images to a multitude of images from clear-cutting lyrics to songs that were more mystical and metaphorical from earnestness, sincerity and truthfulness to irony, image and persona – revealed in the on-stage characters of The Fly and The Mirrorball Man, and later MacPhisto from U2 on the stage against the wrongs “out there in the world” (i.e. black and white) to the world on the stage there with them (on the TV screens and in the characters played, i.e. the colour of gray) Actual concert footage gives a greater sense of what U2 was doing around this time. The video segment of The Fly on U2′s Live From Sydney is an excellent example. Bono is in full Fly persona: wrap-around bug-eye glasses, slick black pants and jacket, an extreme swagger, and an attitude. He was the perfect rock star. The opening riffs of this song are described by the band as “the sound of us chopping down The Joshua Tree.”

Before the release of Achtung Baby, U2 had developed a re putation for being self-righteous and political. Now the band was determined to set the whole “myth of U2″ on its head.

“Everything You Know Is Wrong” – Achtung Baby

“Achtung baby” means “Danger [or Attention], baby.” The theme of this album is love and relationships, on both a human and a spiritual level.

The context and influencing factors for this album were both the Edge’s marital breakup and the exploding information age with all of its ironies and dangers. While recording Achtung Baby in Hansa Studios in Germany, the band was watching the Gulf War unfold on CNN. When an American fighter pilot was being interviewed about what it was like bombing Iraq, his response was, “It’s so realistic.”10 This blew the band members away (no pun intended). Did people actually see the war as just a game on a screen, rather than a brutal conflict affecting real people? This led U2 to further reflection on how the media influences the world on a mass level. They c o n s i d e red the numerous conflicting messages the media b roadcasts, messages often swallowed unthinkingly by viewers. Ideas for the stage set-up for their next tour began to form. Zoo TV was about to be born.

Previous stage set-ups were sparse, often with a monolithic image on a banner, and the four members pitted against the world “out there.” Now U2 took the forces and messages that are “out there,” and brought them on the stage with the band.  Then they pushed these forces to their logical conclusion.  Before, things were rather decided – black and white, but now there was uncertainty and greyness, which U2 pushed into the audience’s face. In a way they were saying, “you decide.”

It was during this time that John F. Kennedy’s sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, observed to Bono that there always were angels on U2′s stage, only now they were letting in the devils too, and that was good because it made for a fairer fight!

Sincerity and earnestness were gone. Bono had discovered “that irony is not the enemy of soul, but can be its’ friend.”12 U2 also discovered that if you want to have an impact on a culture, you need only describe it.

To describe it is to challenge it. Isn’t that what artists are supposed to do? It’s not their job to solve the problem. It’s their job to describe the problem. (13)

Bono and the band were further influenced by fellow Irishman and poet Brendan Keneally, who said, “If you want to serve the age – betray it.” (14)

The on-stage set-up now consisted of walls lined with video monitors pumping out images and messages transmitted by mass media. Here are just a few that show up during the concert version of “The Fly”:

• Everything you know is wrong
• The future is a fantasy
• Art is manipulation
• Enjoy the surface
• It could never happen here
• Guilt is not of God
• Rebellion is packaged
• Death is a career move
• It’s your world you can change it
• I’d like to teach the world to sing
• Watch more TV

The audience is presented with a post-modern wasteland with no rational basis for truth, just the pitting of one person’s feelings and experiences against another’s.

At this point one might well ask if U2 had gone over the edge. But listen to what Bono says about this album and tour:

It’s all a con – a way of putting people off from the fact that it is a heavy mother. It’s probably our most serious record yet it’s the least serious title. It just fooled everyone. They thought we’d lightened up – which is totally untrue. We’re miserable bastards. (15)

In fact, if we look, we can see that U2 is expanding upon the very things they used to sing about. The seeds of intense thought in their earlier lyrics have blossomed into fuller, more artistic realities on stage.

Let’s look at a few examples.

• One line from “Sunday Bloody Sunday” forms the entire basis for the monster TV set-up in the Zoo TV tour of 1992/93: “When fact is fiction, and TV reality.”
• Instead of singing about a “preacher stealing hearts in a travelling show” as they did in “Desire,” Bono is now trying to become that character in his stage personae.
• The line “Taking a landslide to my ego,” from “A Day Without Me” (B o y), is now the basis for the Fly and Mirrorball Man personae in the Zoo TV tour. Bono was pushing his constructed identity to its limits and becoming like a rock star – mocking the whole star concept, deconstructing it, tearing it down.

“I used to think that my image was something to live up to,” he says. “Now I feel it’s almost a duty to let people down.” The only way Bono could dodge his own shadow was by assuming its cartoonish opposite – becoming MacPhisto or The Fly, modern devils as degraded as his previous public self was holy. “One thing I might regret from early times was just showing that one side of me,” he says. “The egomaniac was always there, too. And some people have always seen me with horns.” (16)

Bono wanted to show that he identified more with “sinners” than with “saints.” To show he didn’t think of himself as Jesus, he sang a song from the perspective of Judas – the person who betrayed Jesus before his death. Bono sings “Until the End of The World” as if Judas had just risen from “down in the hold” – the grave. He seems to be saying, I am human, I can betray, I am not the perfect saint you may think I am.

“She Moves In Mysterious Ways…”

There is some depth in all the artistry of the Zoo TV tour, but what about the songs themselves? Do they have any depth, or are they as shallow as the characters played out on the stage? Of these song lyrics Bono says, “I lie all the time. I only always tell the truth in my songs.” (17) He stresses that it is the music that is important.

The lyrics cry that in this dark, apocalyptic wasteland created on stage (which could be our world under the influence of the mindless media) there is one thing that stands tall, that defines our experience, and against which we rise and fall.  That thing is love. U2 is still U2, despite all the on-stage chaos.

Another song from Achtung Baby, “Mysterious Ways,” reveals more about this love. Bono sings about someone who has been “running away” from what he does not understand.  Even as he runs, there is a certain “she” who “moves in mysterious ways” and who is going to “be there when you hit the ground.”

These lyrics could be about love between a man and a woman, but this song is also about God in the person of the Holy Spirit. Bill Flanagan, author of U2 At The End of The World, makes a comment about this:

I do know that when they write about fidelity and loyalty, very often they may be writing about a relationship with God in the metaphor of a relationship with a woman (18)

In Niall Stokes’ book, Into The Heart, Bono talks to the author about El Shaddai (an infrequently used name for God in the Bible), which some scholars believe may be translated “the breasted one.” Bono adds, “I’ve always believed that the Spirit is a feminine thing.” (19)

Bono’s meaning is even more apparent when you watch him perform in concert. At the end of “Mysterious Ways,” he can be heard calling out to the Spirit:

I feel your comfort love.  Move now Spirit lead me… move now Spirit teach me – to move with it, to move with it. – “Mysterious Ways” Zoo TV Live From Sydney (1994)

Bono sings passionately and ecstatically – perhaps much as he once sang in those spirited church gatherings of his youth.

“I Have No Compass/And I Have No Map” – Zooropa

Don’t worry baby It’s gonna be alright Uncertainty Can be ya guiding light – “Zooropa” Zooropa (1993)

I went out there, to taste and to touch, and to feel as much as a man can before he repents - Johnny Cash on “The Wanderer” Zooropa

U2 took the spirit of Achtung Baby even higher with another album recorded while still on tour. Many of the band’s albums had been an exploration of certain emotional, geographic and spiritual states. Zooropa is an exploration of another place: the state of “Europe.” “Uncertainty can be your guiding light” is the theme representing European life. U2 seemed to be positioning themselves inside this place called Europe and commenting on the European experience. This reflects their earlier conclusion that to impact a culture one need only describe it.

The opening song, “Zooropa,” reveals the state of Europe as viewed by U2. It appears united but that unity is mainly under such commercial banners as “eat to get slimmer” and “fly the friendly skies.” At the culture’s core there is a fundamental lack of direction: “I have no compass/And I have no map…/I have no religion.” The songs on this album characterize the soul of Europe as uncertain and drifting. It is not until the last song that any antidote is offered. Here, in Johnny Cash’s rendering of “The Wanderer,” the subject is a comical character who goes against the grain of society, critiquing the world with his certainties – the ambiguous combination of “a Bible and a gun.”

With the release of Zooropa, the Zoo TV Tour included a new character, MacPhisto, a sad and aging lounge singer.  Bono uses the MacPhisto character to comment on all the media madness taking place on stage and in the world. This new persona has horns – Bono describes him as the Fly character taken to his logical conclusion, “…when he’s fat and playing Las Vegas…a bookend to the…swagger of the Fly.” (20)

Bono speaking from the perspective or persona of this new devil-like character may have shocked some, but it is related to what U2 set out to do. Remember Brendan Keneally: “If you want to serve the age – betray it.” Bono was also influenced by Oscar Wilde at this time, in particular Wilde’s comment:

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person; give him a mask and he will tell you the truth. (21)

Perhaps this betrayal of European culture – this exposure of its empty heart from behind the mask of MacPhisto – is intended to lead one to deeper discoveries. Is there a spiritual answer to this sense of emptiness? U2′s betrayal of the age seems to point in that direction.

“Lookin’ For Baby Jesus Under the Trash” – PopMart

On U2′s next album, POP, the various stage personae were replaced by a lighter, more playful version of U2 in concert.  The theme was an exploration of pop culture. Each song elaborated on a different aspect of that culture:

• “Discotheque” on pop music
• “Gone” and “Mofo” on the dynamics of being a pop star
• “Miami” on the brittleness of pop culture
• “Please” on pop religion – religion that is cheap or used to hurt and oppress
• “The Playboy Mansion” on pop values and the idea of heaven
• “Wake up Dead Man” on the desperate emptiness of pop culture There is a strong spiritual thread running through the album.

Lines from the song “Mofo” are typical:

Looking for to fill that God-shaped hole,…

Looking for baby Jesus under the trash.

The song “If God would send his angels” takes this search a step further. It is a lament for the state of the world, a world where corruption is dominant and heads are buried in digital sand. It makes clear that televangelists and religious e x t remists who “put Jesus in show business” are not the answer. In fact, they can make it “hard to get in the door” of genuine spirituality. Instead, Bono calls his hearers to be spiritually wide awake. He invites them to find a spiritual source of hope so that they can be fully aware of the struggles of the world, and both grieve over them and do something about them.

“Into the Heart”

I believe that the basis of U2′s passionate worldview is love.  Love is the growing, living power that drives their passion to its mark. Some songs have titles about love, such as “Love rescue me,” “When love comes to town” and “Love is blindness.” Far more songs simply contain vivid images of love.  Some random samples:

• on The Unforgettable Fire: “In the name of love” (“Pride”)
• on The Joshua Tree: “The healing hands of love” (“Exit”)
• on Rattle and Hum: “I believe in Love” (“God Part II”)
• on Achtung Baby: “One love, we get to share it” (“One”)
• on Zooropa: “For the first time, I feel love” (“The First Time”)
• on POP: “Love is not what you’re thinking of” (“Please”)

The love that U2 talks about, however, is very different from “that lovey dovey stuff” (“Discotheque”) – the sugary, co-dependent love of so many pop songs. U2′s songs give shape and dimension to a love that is powerful, personal, and alive. It is love with a capital L.

Sometimes this drive for love takes the form of a yearning for justice. U2 albums contain information on how to get involved in Amnesty International and Greenpeace. At a concert in Vancouver to mark the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, U2 put Amnesty’s logo on the huge video screen and encouraged people to join the campaign to have the world sign the Declaration. They have also promoted awareness of such tragedies as Chernobyl and Sarajevo and the work of WarChild. Bono has also done extensive work with the Jubilee 2000 campaign to see crushing T h i rd World debts forgiven. Under this plan the world’s poorest nations may begin to channel their massive debt repayments into much needed social and infrastructure programs. This too is love. In fact, one writer has suggested that a concern for justice is simply love for the neighbour we have never met.

There is a beautiful and much-quoted passage in the Bible which talks about this kind of love as the supreme standard for all human endeavours. (22) It was read, for instance, by British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the funeral of Princess Diana. The writer suggests that one could sacrifice all one has for a cause, even “giving up one’s body to be burned,” but if it is not done in love, it is empty.

This is the spirit of a song like “Pride (In the Name of Love)” which celebrates the work of black rights pioneer Mart i n Luther King Jr. King vigorously sought to embody this kind of love. The song focuses on “one man betrayed with a kiss,” the man who inspired both King and U2 to love – Jesus. In fact, Jesus once said, “This is the very best way to love: put your life on the line for your friends.” (23) Jesus went out to do just this, laying down his life in crucifixion.

The love U2 sings about is powerful, personal and spiritual.  In fact, in many U2 songs, the word “love” could be replaced with the word “God” or “Jesus” with little change in meaning. The Bible goes so far as to say that “God is love.” (24) Not surprisingly then, the key dynamic of the band’s music is often the “rise and fall” of the singer’s relationship with this transcendent Love. Sometimes the relationship seems connected and intimate; at other times the singer honestly expresses himself as unfaithful and doubting.

Taking the Cup

The questions raised by U2′s music are good ones. In the PopMart tour a giant screen portrays a simple view of human progression from a small monkey, to an ape, to an upright human being, and finally to a person pushing a shopping cart. Are we here just to consume, “born to shop”? Is human development advanced by the creation of a global consumer culture in which “more material goods are better”? What are we missing that makes us want more and more? The irony, of course, is that as U2 raise those questions, they play their own part in the spread of consumerism as their PopMart touring and record sales reach more countries than ever.

Yet U2 has found some answers. It’s October 26th, 1997, at the Toronto Skydome Concert. In an encore set, U2 has just finished playing “One.” Cartoon figures – artwork from the late Keith Haring – move around and through each other, eventually forming a giant heart on the huge video wall. The crowd is ecstatic. The lights dim to a single spotlight on Bono.

The strums of his acoustic guitar run through the entire stadium as he sings a simple chorus: “Wake up, Wake up, dead man.” What’s the connection?

The song “Wake Up Dead Man” is said to be set during Holy Saturday – the day between Good Friday, when Jesus died, and Easter Sunday, when Jesus came back from death.  On the Saturday, Christ is in the grave and his disciples are desperate, despairing and confused. On one level, the song is a song to Jesus, the model of human love and compassion, urging him to come back to life, a song of hope in the midst of desperation.

Often, this kind of concern for spirituality is associated with a kind of spiritual escapism. Yet for U2 this is never the case.  In the song “Bad,” they sing about being “wide awake.” There are two realities U2 have shown themselves wide awake to: the reality of our broken and hurting world, and the reality of a God of love, mercy and compassion. Bono describes trying to hold these two together:

I enjoy the test of trying to keep hold of what’s sacred, and still being awake, walking around, breaking through the plate glass window. It’s one thing being in that holy huddle; it’s another thing taking yourself out there into the world. (25)

Perhaps it is such realism and honesty that draws people to U2. We are not always “wide awake” either to the harsh realities of our world or to spiritual realities. On the one hand, I need to recognize the needs of a damaged world all around me, and of which I am a part. On the other hand, I need to recognize the one living Source who can heal body and spirit and change hearts. I need to be wide awake to the two together. I want to live passionately in a world where mass media and materialism can make life dull. And I want to “take the cup” from the one who “carried the cross” and who gives true freedom and joy.

I am learning that, somehow, becoming fully human is becoming more like this Love-in-human-form called Jesus, about whom U2 has been singing for so many years.

Notes:

1. Gadfly Magazine, August 1997, p. 7.

2. Eamon Dunphy, The Unforgettable Fire (Markham: Penguin Books Canada, 1987), p. 101.

3. John Waters, Race of Angels (London: Fourth Estate, 1994), p. 153-4.

4. Dunphy, p. 212.

5. Dunphy, p. 213.

6. Rolling Stone Editors, U2 The Rolling Stone Files (New York: Hyperion, 1994).

7. Carter Alan, Outside is America (Boston: Faber & Faber Inc., 1992), p. 194.

8. Bill Flanagan, U2 at the End of the World (New York City: Dell Publishing, 1995), p. 4.

9. Niall Stokes, Into the Heart (Dubai: Carlton Books, 1995), p. 102.

10. Flanagan, p. 13.

11. Flanagan, p. 64.

12. Sean O’Hagan, “U2 Anew,” Details, September 1992, p. 138. Also Sean O’Hagan, “The Devil in U2,” Arena (Winter 1993-94), p. 73.

13. Flanagan, p. 66.

14. Flanagan, p. 52.

15. U2, Achtung Baby, The Videos, the Cameos, and a whole Lot of Interference (Markham: Polygram Group Canada, 1991).

16. Ann Powers, SPIN (March 1997).

17. Bill Flanagan, quoting Bono in an interview by Johan Conrad and Amy Nickell, “Almost Better than the Real Thing,”  Gadfly (August 1997), p. 14-15.

18. Conrad and Nickell, p. 16.

19. Stokes, p. 104.

20. Rolling Stone Magazine (October 14, 1993), p. 130

21. Flanagan, p.6.

22. First Letter to the Corinthians, chapter 13.

23. The Gospel according to John, chapter 15, verse 13, from the translation called The Message, by Eugene Peterson (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1993).

24. The First Letter of John, chapter 4, verse 16.

25. Ann Powers, SPIN (March 1997).  Bibliography & Suggested Reading

There are many books on U2, of varying worth. Those listed below are all excellent for exploring different aspects of the band and are the primary resources used in this booklet.

D u n p h y, Eamon. U n f o rgettable Fire. Markham, Ontario: Penguin Books, 1998. An excellent history of the band’s development until The Joshua Tree.

Flanagan, Bill. U2 at the End of the World. New York: Dell Publishing, 1995. This gives a great inside look at the band, especially during the wild times of the Zoo TV tour.

Rolling Stone Editors, U2 The Rolling Stone Files. Rolling Stone Press, 1994. This contains virtually every article or bit of news The Rolling Stone has published about U2 to 1994.

Stokes, Niall. Into The Heart. Dubai: Carlton Books, 1996. This book explores the inspiration and story behind every song up to the Passengers album.

Waters, John. Race of Angels. London: Fourth Estate, 1994.  This book is highly recommended for anyone who appreciates the brilliance of what U2 did in the Zoo TV tour. The chapter “It is October all over our lives” shows clearly how the Christian faith has influenced the band and its music.

Web sites that are related to U2:

• http://www.u2universe.com/
• http://www.interference.com/
• http://www.netaid.org/
• http://www.amnesty.org/
• http://www.greenpeace.org/
• http://www.warchild.org/

Copyright © Henry VanderSpek 2000 All rights reserved

IVCF is a learning community seeking to understand and follow Jesus today. The views expressed here are part of an ongoing dialogue in pursuit of this purpose and do not necessarily reflect the official position of IVCF.

The views expressed in this booklet are those of the author and U2 have not endorsed these views or collaborated with the author in any way.

A DAY WITHOUT ME. Music by U2 Lyrics by Bono & The Edge. © Copyright 1980 Universal -Polygram Int. Publishing, Inc. a division of Universal Studios Inc. (ASCAP) International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. MYSTERIOUS WAYS. Music by U2 Lyrics by Bono & The Edge. © Copyright 1991 Universal – Polygram Int. Publishing, Inc. a division of Universal Studios Inc. (ASCAP) International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.  ZOOROPA. Music by U2 Lyrics by Bono & The Edge. © Copyright 1993 Universal Polygram Int. Publishing, Inc. a division of Universal Studios Inc. (ASCAP) International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. THE WANDERER. Music by U2 Lyrics by Bono & The Edge. © Copyright 1993 Universal – Polygram Int. Publishing, Inc. a division of Universal Studios Inc. (ASCAP) International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. MOFO. Music by U2 Lyrics by Bono & The Edge. © Copyright 1997 Universal – Polygram Int. Publishing, Inc. a division of Universal Studios Inc. (ASCAP) International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. PRIDE (IN THE NAME OF LOVE). Music by U2 Lyrics by Bono & The Edge. © Copyright 1984 Universal – Polygram Int. Publishing, Inc. a division of Universal Studios Inc. (ASCAP) International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. EXIT. Music by U2 Lyrics by Bono & The Edge. © Copyright 1986 Universal – Polygram Int. Publishing, Inc. a division of Universal Studios Inc. (ASCAP) International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. GOD PART II. Music by U2 Lyrics by Bono & The Edge. © Copyright 1988 Universal – Polygram Int. Publishing, Inc. a division of Universal Studios Inc. (ASCAP) International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. ONE. Music by U2 Lyrics by Bono & The Edge. © Copyright 1991 Universal – Polygram Int. Publishing, Inc. a division of Universal Studios Inc. (ASCAP) International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. THE FIRST TIME. Music by U2 Lyrics by Bono & The Edge. © Copyright 1993 Universal Polygram Int. Publishing, Inc. a division of Universal Studios Inc. (ASCAP) International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. PLEASE. Music by U2 Lyrics by Bono & The Edge. © Copyright 1997 Universal – Polygram Int. Publishing, Inc. a division of Universal Studios Inc. (ASCAP) International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. DISCOTHEQUE. Music by U2 Lyrics by Bono & The Edge. © Copyright 1997 Universal – Polygram Int.  Publishing, Inc. a division of Universal Studios Inc. (ASCAP) International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. BAD. Music by U2 Lyrics by Bono & The Edge. © Copyright 1984 Universal – Polygram Int. Publishing, Inc. a division of Universal Studios Inc. (ASCAP) International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.

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Spirituality, yes; religion, no.

Many people today appear to be searching enthusiastically for an authentic spirituality-but with equal enthusiasm they are rejecting organized religion. Magazines as diverse as Self, Mother Jones, Psychology Today and Time have all given front-page coverage to spirituality in recent years. Psychology Today called this trend a ‘massive flight from traditional religious institutions into spirituality,’ and announced that ‘we are witnessing a spiritual awakening unprecedented in modern times.’ (1) Self magazine discovered that when asked, ‘Would you describe yourself as spiritual?’ 70% of its readers replied ‘Yes’, 27% answered ‘Somewhat’ and only 3% said an outright ‘No’. (2)

The first time I noticed the term spirituality in casual conversation was not long ago: a student was involved in arranging the sound equipment for one of my lectures, and I happened to ask him whether he had any religious beliefs. ‘Not really,’ he replied, ‘but I am trying to figure out my spirituality.’ Then I recall checking in at the airport in Ottawa once, and the agent behind the counter noticed that I was reading a copy of The Celestine Prophecy. (3) ‘I love that book,’ she commented. ‘A lot of us feel caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. We’re not especially religious, but we think there’s something in it.’ People are increasingly aware that they have a spiritual side to their nature, an aspect which neither science nor materialism has satisfied, but at the same time they are not looking to a church or religion to satisfy that need. The fact that The Celestine Prophecy, with its strong pro-spirituality, anti-organized religion message, has been on the best-seller lists since mid-1994 indicates the strength of this hunger for spirituality.

One of the first and strongest voices against religion but for spirituality in recent years was that of Sinead O’Connor. In October 1992, for instance, O’Connor was interviewed by Rolling Stone magazine. In answer to a question about religion, O’Connor replied, ‘Organized religion is a lie. It’s designed to take you away from God, particularly the Christian church.’ For the interview, O’Connor wore a T-shirt proclaiming herself a ‘Recovering Catholic’.  Yet at the same time she was not embarrassed to say,

I’m still angry, but I’m alive, and that’s because of God. If I hadn’t believed in God, I would be dead now, I would be drunk, I would be on drugs. (4)

Clearly, her sense of spirituality is alive and well. She would agree with comedian Lenny Bruce when he said, ‘More and more people are leaving the church and going back to God!’

Yet the anti-religion, pro-spirituality movement is nothing new. It was dramatically expressed in 19th century Russia by novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky in the story of the Grand Inquisitor, part of his novel The Brothers Karamazov. (5) Like O’Connor, Dostoyevsky was by no means rejecting God or spirituality, or even (in his case) the Christian religion-in fact, he was a committed Christian-but he was attacking what religion has done to spirituality, and specifically to Christian faith.

The story is set in Seville, Spain, in the 16th century, at the height of the Spanish Inquisition, when thousands are being burned at the stake by the church for their unorthodox beliefs. Into this setting comes Jesus, unheralded but immediately recognized. Crowds gather. He heals a man who has been blind all his life. He sees a child’s coffin being carried into the cathedral, and raises the little girl to life.

The Grand Inquisitor, head of the Inquisition, sees what is happening and orders his guards to arrest Jesus and throw him into prison. The people prostrate themselves in fear before the Grand Inquisitor. That night, he visits Jesus in his cell, and warns him that on the following day he will be sentenced to death and burned at the stake as the worst of heretics.

Why would the official representative of the Christian church treat Jesus, the founder of his church, that way? The Inquisitor knows that Jesus has come, as Dostoyevsky puts it, to ‘interfere’ with the way the church does things. Jesus, says the Inquisitor, preached love and freedom, but the church has imposed what people really need: mystery, miracle and authority. He calmly tells Jesus, ‘We have corrected your work,’ and removed from people ‘the terrible gift of freedom.’

To this long speech, Jesus says nothing. At the end, however, without warning, he goes over to the Inquisitor and ‘kisses him gently on his old, bloodless lips.’ In response, the Inquisitor shudders, then releases Jesus into the night, warning him never to return.

Dostoyevsky-or rather, Ivan, the atheist brother, who tells this story-focuses the conflict: he argues that there is actually a difference between the spirituality Jesus taught and what the church teaches. Moreover, he says that the church has tried to tame the teaching of Jesus and make it easier for people to be ‘religious’ instead of truly spiritual or truly Christian.

Jesus and religion

When we go back to Jesus, we see that he had a clear definition of spirituality, and understood the tension between spirituality and religion. In fact, in his teaching, Jesus pinpoints some of the areas of conflict in a way that is intriguingly contemporary. Many of these surface in Jesus’ confrontations with the religious leaders of his day-the Pharisees, Sadducees and scribes. For instance, in one of the earliest biographies of Jesus, by a medical doctor named Luke, Jesus raises the following issues with them.

Appearance vs reality

‘I know you Pharisees burnish the surface of your cups and plates so they sparkle in the sun, but I also know your insides are maggoty with greed and secret evil. Turn both your pockets and your hearts inside out and give generously to the poor; then your lives will be clean, not just your dishes and your hands.’(6)

The religious leaders were concerned about looking good-spiritual and together. Jesus says, in effect, ‘Don’t you realize that God is more interested in what is inside your heart than with how you look?’ Scandals of televangelists and religious boarding schools would seem to fit this diagnosis: they may have looked good on the outside, but sometimes the reality was very different. Jesus is not impressed with such hypocrisy. For Jesus, true spirituality is primarily a matter of the heart, something that works on the inside and not only on the surface.

In the Genesis song, ‘Jesus he knows me’, Phil Collins puts words which summarize this problem into the mouth of an evangelist: ‘Won’t find me practicing what I’m preaching… Just do as I say, don’t do as I do-get on your knees and start paying.’ (7) Collins is right: Jesus does know such people, and he is not fooled.

Things vs people

‘I’ve had it with you! You’re hopeless, you Pharisees! Frauds! You keep meticulous account books, tithing (8) on every nickel and dime you get, but manage to find loopholes for getting around basic matters of justice and God’s love. Careful bookkeeping is commendable, but the basics are required.’ (9)

Jesus finds religious people arguing over trivial things, significant only in their esoteric system of religion, while the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Today, I imagine him criticizing churches which seem mainly interested in the colour of the new carpet for the sanctuary, or the price of a new roof, or arguing over which Prayer Book to use. This is the ghetto mentality in religious form. Jesus asks, ‘Excuse me, people: what about love? what about justice? Aren’t those more important than these details?’ For Jesus, true spirituality is about the big stuff: knowing God, love of neighbour, compassion, justice, forgiveness, generosity, self-sacrifice.

Archbishop William Temple caught the thrust of Jesus’ teaching when he said that the Christian church is the only club in the world that exists for the benefit of its non-members. Jesus, I suspect, would have liked that. His followers, however, have not always remembered it.

Self-centred vs God-centred

Jesus told his next story to some who were complacently pleased with themselves over their moral performance and looked down their noses at the common people.

Two men went up to the Temple to pray, one a Pharisee, the other a tax man. (10) The Pharisee posed and prayed like this: ‘Oh, God, I thank you that I am not like other people-robbers, crooks, adulterers, or, heaven forbid, like this tax man. I fast twice a week and tithe on all my income.’ Meanwhile, the tax man, slumped in the shadows, his face in his hands, not daring to look up, said, ‘God, give mercy. Forgive me, a sinner.’ Jesus commented, ‘This tax man, not the other, went home made right with God. If you walk round with your nose in the air, you’re going to end up flat on your face, but if you’re content to be simply yourself, you will become more than yourself.’ (11)

In some ways, religious people’s arrogance is more distasteful than anyone else’s. After all, you might expect that the claim to have encountered the Almighty would produce in them some sense of their fallibility and sinfulness. You might expect a certain humility to result from having glimpsed God’s greatness and mystery. The greater the expectations, the deeper the disappointment.

For Jesus, true spirituality means having a right sense of who we are and of who God is-and a right sense of what it means to relate authentically to God. In fact, Jesus’ story must have been deeply shocking to the religious people who heard it. He implies that the non-religious person may be more acceptable to God than they are: sometimes non-religious people, like the tax man in the story, have a better grasp of who they are and who God is, and so their response is more appropriate.

To this extent, Sinead O’Connor is right: there is something in organized religion (the Christian religion, anyway) which easily squirms away from the teaching and spirituality of Jesus. For someone to claim to be a follower of Jesus yet do nothing about it is a lie; to put things before people is a lie; and to be self-centred is a lie. And lying is not a part of anyone’s definition of spirituality.

How did things go wrong?

Jesus said that he came to announce the inauguration of the kingdom of God-the realm in which the Creator’s norms for human life are honoured. His gift was to put people in touch with God and show what it meant to live as God’s community, in God’s world, in God’s way. So he healed the sick, he fed the hungry, he raised the dead. And he drew people into a new community. For Jesus, parties were significant because they symbolized the acceptance, love and community that characterized God’s rule. (12) Jesus’ intention was clearly to set up a community which would signal a new stage for humanity.

This was a profoundly counter-cultural thing to do. If culture is, as someone has said, ‘the way we do things around here,’ a counter-culture says, ‘there is a better way of doing things around here.’ For Jesus, that was the way of God’s kingdom.

Those who study the life cycle of organizations (13) describe phase one in that cycle as characterized by energy, charisma, community, fluidity, no tradition and few rules. What we see in the earliest accounts of the work of Jesus is a classic example of that stage. Phase two, say the experts, comes as the pioneers are dying out or moving on. The second generation says: Help us preserve the past. Write things down. Train us to do what you have done. Let’s build in some structures to make sure nothing changes. That’s an inevitable stage, not wrong in itself. This too is clear from the earliest accounts of the Christian movement. (14) The question is what will happen next.

The third phase of an organization’s life can be good or bad, can mean renewal or fossilization. Either the spirit of the original movement wins or the rules and the structure win. Either the life is renewed and flows through the structures, or the structures stifle the life.

Many would say that for the Christian church, the forces of fossilization won a decisive battle in 313 AD, (15)  when the Roman Emperor Constantine pronounced Christianity an official religion of his empire. He granted tax immunities to clergy and gave gifts to the church. The papacy became a position of political power, and the emperor took an active part in church affairs. One of the first effects was a great influx of people wishing to become priests simply in order to avoid taxation! (16) Thus the community which had started out as counter-cultural officially entered the mainstream culture.

A movement of the oppressed and outcast became respectable. A movement of the poor became an institution of the rich.  You can see why there might be a problem! The contrast was highlighted by a 20^th century Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, who compared his experience of Christian leadership with that of Paul, one of the first Christian missionaries, and complained: ‘Wherever Paul went, there were riots and revival; wherever I go, they offer me tea.’

Consider this parable:

The servant who forgot his place

There was once a queen who was gracious, wise and generous. She lived in a castle, and she loved to welcome her subjects there at any time, to get to know them and to help them. The entrance to the castle was guarded by a small, gentle servant. His job was to greet the visitors and show them into the queen’s presence.

One day, however, this servant misbehaved. He began to feel that he was more important than he really was. He imagined that his job was not only to show people into the queen’s presence, but also to decide or not whether they were worthy to meet her. And as his ideas of his own importance grew, so he grew, taller and taller, broader and broader, until nobody could even see the queen’s castle.

When people came to visit the queen, he would tell them that they were not dressed properly to meet the queen, or that they were too evil to see the queen, or that their nose was too long, or their feet were too big. Some of them tried to change in order to please the servant, so that they could get in to see the queen, though few of them ever did. Others went away sad because they knew they could never be good enough to see the queen. Some decided that maybe there never was a queen at all, and they were the saddest of all.

But there were a few who weren’t satisfied with the servant’s rules, and when he wasn’t looking, they slipped round the back of the castle, over the wall, and into the queen’s family room, where she always met her subjects. The queen, of course, hadn’t had many visitors for some time, and when she heard what had happened, immediately she went to the front door and demanded of the servant What on earth are you doing? As soon as he heard her voice, he shrank back to his original size, like a balloon which you blow up and then let go. Then everything went back to normal.

But from time to time, quite regularly, the servant would again forget his job, and become swollen and big-headed and indeed behave like a king. So after many arguments, the queen decided that the servant could not be trusted, and she moved her throne out to the front door of the palace where she could keep an eye on the servant, and where her subjects could always see her and approach her whenever they wished.

Ideally, organizations of any kind-political, business or religious-are structures to facilitate people’s working together for common goals. Yet human nature is such that organizations can easily become reactionary, bureaucratic, and self-preserving. They are, as the story suggests, good servants but bad masters. Cardinal Newman used a different image to make the same point: he said, ‘Every great movement begins with a prophet and ends with a policeman.’

Yet alongside the tendency towards fossilization in the church has also been a periodic impulse in the opposite direction-towards renewal of the spiritual values that Jesus taught and lived. To see this you have only to examine the lives of those who claim to be followers of Jesus.

Sometimes Christians plead, ‘Don’t judge Christianity by the church: just consider Jesus.’ The humility is commendable, but the strategy is misplaced. I think those who point away from the Christian religion to Christ do so not just because the church is often a cause of embarrassment, but also, more importantly, because Christ is the centre and heartbeat of Christianity at its most authentic. Therefore, if you are considering Christian faith, it is ultimately about Jesus you have to decide. To this extent, the instinct is right.

Yet, inescapably, part of looking at Jesus is considering what impact his life and teaching have had on ordinary people. After all, if no-one who claims the name of Christ ever makes any headway in putting his teaching into practice, if there is never any evidence of the reality of God among Christians, then it would seem to reflect very badly on Jesus. Jesus himself did not seem to hesitate about saying that his credibility, in part at least, depends on that of his followers. (17)

So does Christian spirituality ‘work’? You might start by considering the example of high profile Christian leaders such as Archbishop Tutu, spiritual leader of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa; Mother Theresa, who cared for the dying and destitute in India; Jean Vanier, creating residential communities for adults with special needs around the world; or Sister Helen Prejean, whose story is told in the movie Dead Man Walking. Such people are very clear that whatever they may have accomplished in their lives is because of Jesus. They are, if you like, a very public testimony to what Christian spirituality is really like when it is supported, not stifled, by religion.

While there may be few Christians in the public eye, however, there are millions faithfully living out Jesus’ style of spirituality around the world who will never hit the headlines. I think of sincere Christians I know who are conscientiously studying the teaching of Jesus and trying to follow it: some are organizing food banks, others are making Christmas dinners for the poor, some work in AIDS hostels or help refugees, many bring medical and relief aid to needy parts of the world.

I remember an edition of Ideas on CBC radio, because it is precisely such a story-ordinary Christians, out of the public eye, struggling to be faithful followers of Jesus. Sharon Gretz, the story-teller, was involved in keeping people with special needs out of institutions and in their homes. She got to know Merilee, who had cerebral palsy and cancer. Then, she said:

I called the pastor [of Merilee's church]…and explained to him what was happening to Merilee again, and I said: you know what?… She’s one of yours; she’s a member of your congregation and I want to know what you people are going to do… After listening to me, he said: So what you’re saying is that Merilee needs us to come to her, and maybe we can help support her to keep her at home…

He sent…[a] letter of invitation to the members of the church, and also announced it in the pulpit, that Merilee’s friends would be meeting in the parlour. So we met, and he presented the situation to them again, and he said to them: we need to go to her. And he pulled out this list of days and times, and he said: I expect everybody in this room to put their names down about when they’re going over to Merilee’s place. Everybody can do something. Some people might want to go and talk; other people-you know Merilee enjoys movies, so bring some videos with you. She likes people to write letters for her; some of you can go and write letters. And some of you might want to cook… Everybody can give what it is that they give, what is good, what they know how to do. And that’s kind of how it worked.

People started coming and they came at scheduled times, and then some people would come at unscheduled times. And they kept coming. I remember one time being over there and she was surrounded. They were doing a jigsaw puzzle… And there’s Merilee sitting in front of this table, like a queen. Do you know what I mean? She’s just presiding over a court; there was all this life in her apartment.

Part of this story is that Merilee died. But she died at home, and I believe she died knowing she was loved. And the proof of that was, I think, at her funeral, which almostyliterally filled the church…What Pastor Ed said was: Merilee’s life presented a gift to them. As painful and tragic as the cancer was, it was a gift to them to find out what they were about as a congregation. (18)

To find out what they were as a congregation. The church becoming what Jesus meant for his followers to be be-a wildly diverse community united by a commitment to loving God and loving people. Church structures doing what structures are meant to do: empowering people to live out the spirituality of Jesus. It is ironical, of course, that this took place through the prodding of an outsider, who saw more clearly than the church itself what it ought to be!

Distinctives of Christian spirituality

How does all this help the person wanting to explore their spirituality? Which way do we turn to discover if there is any real spiritual help in Christianity or just more ‘church’ stuff? What if we are curious about Jesus, yet alienated by much of what passes for Christian faith?

First of all, Christian spirituality is fairly distinct. I have referred several times to ‘Christian spirituality’ or ‘the spirituality of Jesus’ but so far I have not defined it. It is important to know that it is significantly different from the spirituality of, say, The Celestine Prophecy. This should not surprise us. Spirituality is not just a generic thing, the same the world over. Different religions and traditions have very varied understandings of what it means to be spiritual. I would not presume to comment on all of them, but I can tell you what is distinctive about Christianity’s approach to spirituality. And I can tell you why I work on my spirituality in a Christian context.

•  Christian spirituality centres around a relationship with God

In some traditions, spirituality is something you work on inside yourself. It may be with the help of a teacher, but basically the search involves just you and your relationship to yourself, to the universe, and (perhaps) to ‘the god within’. God, in the Judeo-Christian sense of the Creator, does not necessarily come into it.

In Christian understanding, everything begins with God, the dynamic, compassionate Artist who designed us. This God is the source of all life and all personhood. Indeed, in some sense, it is appropriate to think of God as person, separate from us. Although we are speaking in metaphors (what choice do we have?), we can say that this God has mind, feelings, and creativity. This God can be hurt, can be angry, can be nurturing. This God wants to know us and to be known by us. In Christian understanding, our longings for spiritual fulfillment are simply one of God’s signals to get our attention. For that reason, our yearning can only really be satisfied by learning to relate to this God.

•  Christian spirituality is  not a do-it-yourself faith

Some people adopt a mix-and-match approach to spirituality, taking a little bit from different religions to create their own unique faith. Religion scholar, Huston Smith, however, points out the weakness in this approach:

[T]he cafeteria approach to spirituality…is not the way organisms are put together, nor great works of art. And a vital faith is more like an organism or work of art than it is like a cafeteria tray. (19)

Generally, we do not chop bits off either an organism or an artwork and stick them together in a shape more to our own liking! Rather, we appreciate that there is integrity and life and artistry in the whole as it is. The analogy certainly holds true for Christian spirituality: it is an organic whole, a work of art.

The way the first followers of Jesus described themselves was as ‘disciples’-that is, as students, students of Jesus and all he had to teach them. To be a follower of Jesus was to belong to his school and to learn his curriculum. (20) With a school, whether a driving school, a golf school or a business school, you join because you want to learn what the school has to offer, you open your mind to learning someone else’s agenda. In the case of Jesus’ school, what he offered was to teach us how to live as God’s people, in God’s world, in God’s way. Following Jesus meant to share in the life of a new spiritual organism which he was bringing into being, to be involved in the creation of a new, interactive, living work of art.

•  Christian spirituality is practical more than mystical

The mystical tradition certainly has been a continuous thread throughout the tapestry of the Christian movement, yet the mainstream has had more of a practical and ethical thrust. This too is distinctive: historically speaking, not all religions have necessarily connected the spiritual and the ethical. Archbishop Tutu, Mother Theresa, Jean Vanier and Helen Prejean are good examples of how Christian spirituality at its best has an ethical vigour and beauty about it. Not that ethics is the starting point of Christian spirituality-the heart is always the student’s relationship with the Teacher-but one way the relationship, the schooling, is lived out is through ethics of compassion and justice.

•  Christian spirituality is tough to achieve

Jesus himself said that in some ways being his student is like a self-imposed death sentence! (21) Why? Because it means putting the priorities of God’s kingdom ahead of my own little kingdom, the needs of others ahead of my own needs. Every time I say ‘no’ to myself, a bit of me dies. There is no getting around that. But Jesus also says that through those deaths comes a new and better kind of life. (22)

•  Christian spirituality has a strong community aspect

It is very clear from the earliest accounts that Jesus meant his followers to be a community. This is in part because, in Christian understanding, we need one another in order to develop our spirituality. We are not self-sufficient in spiritual resources. We need to help, encourage and teach one another. But it is also because in Christian tradition the goal of spirituality is not to become an odd collection of spiritually mature individuals who happen to share the same ideals. The goal of spirituality is to be a mature community. Paul, one of the earliest Christian teachers, likened the Christian community to a human body-in fact, he called it ‘the Body of Christ’-people functioning in harmony together to do the work of Jesus in the world.

Why I (still) go to church

I was brought up to go to church. There I learned the stories of Jesus. I loved the music, the ceremony, the people, and being head choir boy. I don’t know how much I really understood, however. I do remember sermons about the ‘sin’ of wearing jeans and the ‘sin’ of chewing gum. (This was the 1950s in Britain, remember, and these things were not only new, but thought to be ‘American’ and therefore automatically degenerate!)

When I was sixteen, through a teacher in high school, I learned that what was missing in my grasp of Christianity was personal allegiance to Jesus, and I began to try to make that relationship central in my life. I learned to pray by simply talking to Jesus as though I could see him present in the room. I began to learn what it meant to take him seriously as my Teacher and Guide through life-on issues as diverse as my peers’ adolescent interest in pornography and the question of what to study at university. I began to read the Bible and to meet with other students who were also trying to grow their spirituality in relationship with Jesus.

For some years around then, I became very dissatisfied with church. I developed a strong distaste for anything in religion that distracted from a simple commitment to being a student of Jesus, whether ceremony, tradition, ministers, or old church buildings. I fed my spirituality mainly in private with God and in community with like-minded peers.

These days, however, I am more positive in my attitude to church. I have reconciled the search for authentic Christian spirituality with membership in the institution called church. Why? Is it just creeping middle age that makes me tolerant of nonsense that should not be tolerated?

One thing is this, and I must be honest: I have come to recognize that deep down I am very like the religious people Jesus criticized-and I suspect that most of us are. If I had been there for the arguments he had with them, I would quite likely have taken their side, because I too have exactly the same instincts they had-though I am no longer proud of them: to value appearance over reality, the trivial over the substantial, my interests over God’s interests. The story is told of the Sunday school teacher who told her students the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector (see above), then said to her class, ‘Now let us pray and thank God that we are not like this Pharisee.’ I still find the story funny-but I ruefully recognize that I have often fallen into the same trap. Sure there are hypocrites in the church, but I am capable of hypocrisy with the best of them. The problem is, as Jesus warned, that it is so much easier to spot hypocrisy in someone else than in myself. (23)

I also keep going to church because, although there are hypocrites there (as in any walk of life), there are also people who are serious about developing their spirituality along Jesus’ lines. I should warn you: they may not be obvious at the main Sunday service. Sometimes I discover these people in a small group Bible study on a weeknight, or organizing the food bank that operates out of the church basement. Sometimes I discover like-minded people in an interdenominational reading group that meets in my city. Sometimes I spot a person from my church on the other side of the room at a lecture by a visiting speaker on spirituality, and we smile at one another, recognizing a kindred spirit.

Not that I dismiss people who do not strike me as serious about their faith. What right have I to judge them anyway? What do I know about what is in their hearts? What do I know of how they have lived their lives with God? They may be giants of Christian spirituality for all I know, and maybe if I saw them as God sees them, I would be tempted to fall at their feet and worship them. So I will honour them and encourage them all I can. But for my own survival I need to find people whose yearning for spirituality resonates with mine.

I have to tell you also that among church people, in and out of church buildings, amazing things have happened to me. In church, I have heard things. God has spoken direct and powerful words to me through the words of others. Sometimes music in church has brought tears to my eyes, and I have known God in the music. I remember hearing someone pray, realising that they know God in a deeper way than I do yet, and being thankful for them. I think of songs whose words I cannot sing because my heart is full of memories of friends now dead who loved those songs. I remember children’s chattering mingling with the priest’s centuries-old liturgy. And I recall an articulate young woman, returning to church after many years, saying, ‘I’m learning about my faith along with my children.’

I have also seen things. An autistic young man and a Member of Parliament kneeling within a few meters of each other. An elderly couple, their arms around each other, going forward for communion. A woman dying of cancer, surrounded by friends holding hands, loving her and praying for her. A child stroking her mother’s hair as she is bent in prayer. Christmas pageants where generation after generation of children play the same parts and speak the old words, and we always laugh gently at the makeshift donkey.

At such times, I know I am glimpsing the Spirit of Jesus, the reality of Jesus, among the followers of Jesus, and it makes me say, ‘That’s what it’s meant to be about.’ When that happens, I find I don’t want to be anywhere else but in the company of those who are honestly struggling to follow Jesus, and to embody his spirituality, because it is there that I find truth and warmth and reality . . . and God.

Notes

1. Psychology Today, November/December 1994, pp 66, 57.

2. Self, December 1997, p 134.

3. James Redfield, The Celestine Prophecy, (New York: Warner Books, 1993).

4. Rolling Stone, October 29, 1992.

5. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1981), pp 297-316.

6. The Gospel According to Luke, chapter 11, verse 39. The wording of all quotations from Luke is from the translation called The Message, by Eugene Peterson, (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1993). If you would like to the read The Gospel According to Luke for yourself, please email the Institute for a free copy.

7. Genesis, We Can’t Dance, (Anthony Banks Ltd/Philip Collins Ltd/Michael Rutherford Ltd, 1991).

8. ‘Tithing’ is the ancient practice of giving a tenth of one’s income to God. The Pharisees were even tithing their nickels and dimes.

9. The Gospel According to Luke chapter 11, verse 42.

10. Tax men are not popular in any culture. In Jesus’ culture, however, matters were made worse by the fact that the (Jewish) tax men were collecting taxes from their fellow Jews on behalf of the occupying power of Rome. They would be about as popular as Palestinians today being employed by Israel to collect taxes for Israel from other Palestinians.

11. The Gospel According to Luke, chapter 18, verses 9 to 14.

12. For an account of one such party, and the disapproval of the religious folk, see The Gospel According to Luke, 20 chapter 5, verses 27 to 32.

13. For example, David Moberg, The Church as Social Institution, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, Third Edition, 1984), pp 118-124.

14. It can be seen in the The Acts of the Apostles, also (probably) by Luke, and in early letters like those to Timothy and Titus. All these are found in The New Testament.

15. ‘Of course, Constantinianism had begun earlier than 313…but dates, like birth and death, remind us that the way things were and are is not set in stone.’ Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, Resident Aliens, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989), p 17.

16. Kenneth Latourette, A History of Christianity, (New York: Harper, 1953), pp 92-93: ‘[Constantine] granted to members of the Christian clergy…freedom from all contributions to the state… Wills in favour of the Church were permitted. The

Christian Sunday was ordered placed in the same legal position as the pagan feasts… Litigants might bring suit in a bishop’s court and the decision rendered was to be respected by the civil authorities… He built and enlarged churches.’ Cf ‘Constantine, having recognized Christianity…in effect decided to make it a buttress of his State.’ Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976), p 76.

17. The Gospel According to John, chapter 17, verse 21.

18. ‘Beyond Institutions’, Ideas, CBC Radio, David Cayley, writer, March 16-18 and 23-25, 1994. Reprinted with permission.

19. Huston Smith, Mother Jones: the Investigative Magazine, December 1997, p 42.

20. This image is explored more fully in another Dare booklet in this series, The School of Jesus: a Beginner’s Guide to Living as a Christian, by John Bowen.

21. For example, The Gospel According to Luke, chapter 14, verses 25 to 33.

22. For example, The Gospel According to Luke, chapter 9, verse 24.

23. The Gospel According to Luke, chapter 6, verses 41 and 42.

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