“There is a mistaken understanding that fresh expressions of Church are mostly linked to Evangelical churches and traditions. However, this is simply not true, as can be seen at the website, Fresh Expressions of the Sacramental Tradition.” writes Thomas Brauer
Postmodernity
Grace Inside A Sound: Exploring U2’s New Horizon
Having already conquered Europe, U2 is about to take on North America with their “360 Tour.” With a new set of songs to deliver, and a massive space-inspired stage (known affectionately as “The Claw”) to perform them on, it seems a good time to check in on the Irish supergroup’s latest musical direction, No Line on the Horizon, and see how it might resonate with those listening with ears of faith.
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 11th 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.
“On Pigs and Jesus”, or why the Eucharist is the end of the culture of fear
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.
What would it take for you to feel safe enough to . . . ?
Over the last few days, the e-mails coming into my Inbox regarding the role of the institution in supporting emergence in faith communities and networks have been so confirming. They have confirmed for me that this is an important moment in the long history of our Christian dialogue. I have come to believe that, in our relationships, there is always more potential than we realize. What is it that we say in Eucharistic Prayer C — something about “Open our eyes to see Your hand at work in the world around us . . . “?
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, Sunday Mornings, and the Telling of Tales
After visiting the IKEA in North York a few weeks ago, I had to ask, “What does IKEA have that we-the church-don’t have?” This question is at once tongue-in-cheek and a sober one. On the tongue-in-cheek end of things, they’ve obviously got more comfortable seats, a great deal of marketing geniuses (have you seen their commercials?!) and a multi-million dollar advertising budget! On the sober end of things, IKEA, as a culture, presents and represents a challenge to the church. This was made sharply apparent to me on this particular visit. On our way out, after buying a new door mat, some Swedish meatballs (if you’ve ever had their Swedish meatballs you know what I’m talking about!), a table lamp, and a lint roller (wow, I’m just realizing how random that purchase was) we were confronted with the following advertisement:
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.
Place Matters…What evangelists and church planters can learn from “Who’s Your City?”
Shortly after the 2008 Vital Church Planting Conference, I shared some church planting principles with my sister on a winter camping trip. Among other things, I explained the importance of understanding cultural context, and how evangelism and church planting efforts can be helped or hindered by geography. Months later, for my birthday, she added to the conversation by presenting me with Who’s Your City by University of Toronto business professor Richard Florida. Its cover claimed the book would answer “how the creative economy is making where to live the most important decision of your life,” and its pages contained a treasure trove of demographic data, survey results and surprise revelations for church planters and evangelists called to specific segments of the population.
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.
Evangelism as Dance
This is available for sale in Audio CD format.
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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.
Does the Anglican Church have a Future?
One of the things that we expect in a postmodern world, and rightly so, is that people will be upfront about where they are coming from, about what their story is and about their biases, so that they don’t pretend to an objectivity they don’t have, and so that we can have honest conversation. This being so, I need to tell you as I begin that at my core I am an Anglican of the evangelical variety, but at the edges I am quite fuzzy. (Well, maybe to say “fuzzy Anglican” is redundant anyway.) When I say fuzzy, let me be clear: what I mean is that I know God can’t be contained in my little box, or indeed in any human box, so I want to be open to God wherever God is to be found. Like the late Bishop John Robinson, who in many things is not a hero of mine, I want to be clear at the centre and open at the edges. I also want to acknowledge that this event tonight [Convocation] doesn’t take place in a cultural vacuum. I don’t need to tell you that the Anglican Church of Canada is facing what will in all likelihood be the most contentious of General Synods since the ordination of women was debated, and perhaps moreso. Friends of mine on both sides of the issue of blessing same sex unions are threatening to leave the Anglican Church if the vote goes against their preference. If that makes you nervous because you think that I am about to pontificate on The Issue, you can relax. It’s not my job, and I’m not sure I’m that courageous anyway. (I had lunch with Michael Peers a few months ago, and I said as we began, “Don’t worry. I don’t want to talk about the homosexual issue.” And he said with a wry smile: “That’s OK. Most people don’t. They just send me emails.”) I only mention this because it is the situation in the background for this evening’s convocation, and I think it would be naïve for us not to acknowledge it. Where then to begin, and which direction to go? In trying to be open to different ways of thinking, one of the schools of thought I have found helpful in recent years is postliberalism—people like George Lindbeck and Stanley Hauerwas—and I want to borrow their term “retrieval.” They would say in order to understand the present and to be ready for the future, we need to have a strong sense of who we are, and in order to do that, we have to reach back into our history, and “retrieve” a sense of what it means to be a Christian. I want to suggest there are perhaps three areas of Christian faith that we need to “retrieve” in order to understand the present and to be ready for the future, whatever it may bring: 1. We need to recover a sense of what story we are living in You may know that wonderful line from philosopher Alasdair McIntyre on this subject. He says:
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.
