Ben’s Musings

This is my next chapter summary, typed out by cold fingers. The
chapter is called Advent. It made me want to cry. Again, all quotes
from Kesters book.

…But before the Church can change, before I can change, before
anything changes, comes waiting. Before we can experience a
transformation, we will be required to wait. To be acted on gently,
gracefully and peacefully. Shaped, not crushed; guided not dragged.

We\’d like to be there now, no fuss or hassle or journey or
responsibility or pain. Down from the local maximum and straight up
Everest. By helicopter, preferably .

We must distinguish carefully between \”waiting\” and \”playing for
time\”; the former is a proper beginning to a long-sighted response,
the latter a panicked delaying tactic.

Human history has been transfixed by the idea of revolution, of
radical change precipitated quickly, requiring an uprising, an
insurgence, a head of pressure and a focusing of force. Yet it is
abundantly clear that materially, politically, psychologically and
spiritually, violent change tends to shear, to break the whole. For
our own health, we need change to occur not at revolutionary speeds,
but evolutionary speeds.

The slowness of evolution certainly has a divine beauty about it with
its gentle, unseen transformation so hard to plot yet so undeniable in
its force. We have projected our revolutionary tendencies on God, but
we have seen that ours is not a God of violent uprising, but of slow,
slow evolution.

The perception of the new step will come only to those brave enough to
stop dancing the old. The realization that we must descend this low
peak will come only to those prepared to stop and take stock of their
position. We fear that if we stopped for a week, a month, a service, a
moment, we might be forgotten, or lose our momentum, weaken our
profile, appear ill-thought-out and failing. So we feed our burnt out
wrecks: tired leaders, disillusioned ministers, fatigued congregations
- marshaling them to dance longer, march faster, pray harder, cry
louder in earnest for God to come, come, COME and batter out hearts
into change. (While Elijah waits.)

\”Our structures must serve us, not us serve them.\” The only way to
consider whether our structures are serving us is to stop and reflect
on them. To stop people in their tracks, to stop yourself, and
suggest that the way to higher peaks is actually to return to the
valleys, is a brave act of true leadership. It is an admission that
the way we have been has reached a dead end; it is thus a daring
statement renouncing power, and declaring that leadership will no
longer exercise it but serve by empowering.

It is difficult to write about waiting; we turn from Malachi to
Matthew without a thought. We read from Matthew 1v24 to Matthew 1v25
with no pause for breath - Mary\’s nine months of pregnancy, skipped
over. How did she feel? Excluded? Rejected? Shunned? Frightened?
Excited? We are being called to wait for new birth again. In this
advent between the \”modern\” church that was and is dying, and the
Emerging Church that is not yet, we must exercise patience. We must
descend into the cloud of unknowing. We must stop and wait.

Waiting can be experienced as a total loss of power: having to be in
another\’s control, reliant on them to arrive, to act, to turn up. Yet
more often than not, we fool ourselves that we can take control, that
some small chink of power still remains.

As we wait for the kingdom to break through again, we are not called
to inaction, to do nothing but lie back and wait for glory. But
neither are we called to frenzied activity, which will leave no space
for newness to be sown and grow.

US theologian Walter Brueggmann talks about how the prophets Jeremiah,
Ezekiel and Isiah helped Israel to \” enter into exile, be in exile and
depart out of exile\”. A time of exile - of having to stop and wait -
is upon us. The movement into exile is a movement into Fowlers Stage
4. It is a movement into the valleys, into the dark night of the soul,
into an absence. It is painful, but it is a pain necessary for our
development.

The arguments about whether we have drifted from God or God has
drifted ahead of us are irrelevant - what is patently clear is that
the Church is experiencing separation, delamination, marginalization,
trivialization, and exile from the world it seeks to serve. And it is
therefore experiencing these things from God too, for if the church is
not connected to its host culture and society it is not where God
wants it to be, and therefore not where God is.

We could of course, listen to these prophets; contemporaries who
\”dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious\” saying
\”peace, peace\”… where there is no peace (Jeremiah 6v14) But to do so
would be foolish, for if God is doing a new thing, we MUST apply
ourselves to perceiving it.

The first stage of the waiting process is grief. Only through grief
can newness become a possibility.

In his poetry, Jeremiah is encouraged by God to help the people to
truly feel and accept His absence. This honest grieving is the
required first step of the exile. Without it there can be no newness,
for we are left clinging on to that which is past and dead, unable to
grasp the new.

There is a spectacular lack of grief in our churches today. The texts
of so many Christian magazines, sermons, and songs are all woven into
an enormous blanket of denial that we wrap warmly around us,
smothering the honest doubts with an ever-optimistic hue of
\”everything is good and God is with us\”. Hands are raised, but never
to ask questions, only in surrender to programs or services,
outreaches, prayer meetings and worship. Eyes are shut, less blinded
by glory as blind to the facts that numbers are falling, Churches are
closing, the \”revival\” didn\’t come, society is losing interest and our
circle of influence is decreasing.

Where are the tears? Where are the honest appraisals? Where is the
daring speech that admits we have reached a low peak and must now head
DOWN? Grief and repentance are the only antidote for the culture of
denial and cover-up which has so permeated our Church and wider
society.

Where are the truly independent media that will speak the truth and
give permission and uncritical space for grief? Where are the
Jeremiahs today who will help the church to face its loss and grieve?
They are at Stage 4. We must stop all the programs, stop the meetings,
stop the denials, stop the machinations, dismantle the structures,
face our fears and disappointments and weep for the absence, weep for
the emptiness, weep for the pretence, weep for the fiction. Weep until
we can see our barrenness clearly, for only then will we have made
room for newness.

Once we have grieved, our tear-washed eyes can the properly open to
the shocking fact that God allowed this to happen. If we are seeking
this new, then what we were practising was the old, and therefore God
was not in what we were doing anymore. God has moved on back down the
mountain while we stayed up our comfortable hillock.

Such a divine departure is rightly shocking to us. We see an example
of it described in Ezekiel 10: God ups and leaves the temple. Bored by
our rambling, naval-gazing conversation about internal tinkering, God
hung up. God walked off, displaying a true holy freedom that shouts
clearly over its shoulder that no temple, no place, no people, no box,
no church, no agenda, no theological position will ever require me to
stay where i don\’t want, be co-opted into something I only half agree
with, be pressed into the service of some cause you made up because I
AM who I AM. And SLAM, the door shuts and we are left alone to wonder
about God;s holiness, transcendence, otherness, separateness,
difference.

To admit that God can and will leave is to admit that the life of the
disciple is not sedentary, but nomadic - moving on to where sustenance
lies, not staying where sustenance once was.

If we are to see change that is transformative rather than tactical,
we must open our fists, relinquish the old and learn to live with
emptiness. Grieve. Admit God\’s freedom and draw hope. Only through the
practice of memory will new possibility emerge.

Without memory we become imprisoned in an absolute present, unaware of
the direction we have come from, and therefore what direction we are
heading in.

Isiah stepped in and began to exercise Israels imaginations. His
poetry forced them to remember their collective memory. He
simultaneously reinvigorated their imaginations, thereby inspiring new
thought and possibilities.

Begin to dream where God might now like to be found. Not in the house,
but in a stable; not in Jerusalem, but from Nazareth; not with his
family, but in the temple; not in the temple but with the sick, the
poor, the disinterested, the ordinary, the real, the drinkers,
smokers, jokers, deviators and slackers…In some new
post-Enlightenment place we never thought possible, God still lingers,
waiting to be born.

Next time you fly, let\’s hope you don\’t get this pilot!

I\’ve never read \”To Kill A Mockingbird\”, but after watching this, I really want to! It had me creasing with laughter!

PAIN. Let\’s talk about it. Childbirth is the most extreme, but this must come close!:

And my favourite: Don\’t upset your female Karate Partner!

It\’s amazing how few people know that for the last 14 years, Somalia has had no government, no police, no army, no law.

\”There is nothing you can do when kids with guns steal everything you have, even your clothes.\” Former Somali Army Major.

Today starts with the biggest digital picture in the world, and it all started because of a lunchtime bet! If printed out in standard 300 dots per inch resolution the picture would be 2.5m high and 6m long.

This is new to me: Text Movies! I like this one.

Have you ever been tucking in to a meal but needed to change the channel? But wait, you are using both hands to eat! Enter the Knork! \”Revolutionizing over 1000 years of Dining!\”

So America voted…and Bush is back in!?! But it was in no way a landslide, and just under half of the American population want to apologise to the rest of the world: SorryEverybody.com

And many non-US citizens have accepted the apology: ApologiesAccepted.com

But wait! Not every American is sorry: WereNotSorry.com, NotSorryEverybody.com

I say: \”Hey, less hatred everyone, and more Breakdancing Transformers!\”

First of all, WHY?

I was overjoyed to see that my new friend has a blog all of her own. She\’s a funny sprog!

Now that I\’m married, I found these TOP 10 REASONS WHY SEX AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT IS NOT AN ADVISABLE FORM OF PROCREATION very useful (and very funny).

How many toxic chemicals do you have in your body or in your house???

I have organised SWEET (Star Wars Evening Enjoying the Trilogy) for my guy mates tonight so I\’m really excited! Therefore, I can\’t not include this:

I\’m reading \”The Complex Christ - Signs of emergence in the urban
church\” by a guy called Kester Brewin. Having only read the introduction i have been blown away by the ideas and concepts and am really excited about the rest of the book. So here\’s my summary of the Intro (most of it is directly from the book, im not really that eloquent!).

He begins by saying that the fact that the Church is getting to grips
with thinking about what it is etc. is in itself encouraging. From
biology to Economics, science concurs: to stop changing is to die.
Unfortunately the Church\’s answer seems to have focused on personal
change as the route to revitalisation.

People have left the church because it was boring, unchanging,
irrelevant, and was completely unconnected to their life experience.
Using Politics as an example, it is not the party faithful in the
constituencies that are losing us elections,but the very structure of
the party institutions, and it is here that we must set the locus of
change.

People love to talk of revival but seem to fail to grasp that things
that need reviving are by definition close to death. Revival is not
going to happen thru an upsurge in personal holiness, but by a
radical transformation of our corporate practise.

How can transformation be achieved? Change is affected by either
legislation or education. Legislation is the exercise of power,
education is the exercise of empowerment. The advantage of the bottom
up (education) approach to change is that it evolves out of debate
from people on the ground, whose behaviour is transformed from within.

\”For the simplicity on this side of complexity, i wouldn\’t give you a
fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that
i would give you anything i have.\” Oliver Wendell Holmes. We need to
be in love with the ancient wisdom of simplicity, yet not allow
ourselves become simplistic.

An example to the bottom up approach to change where simple
fundamentals lead to complex solution, we can look at the world of
computer programming. The record amount of steps for a computer
program to sort 99 numbers in order was 66 steps. A guy called Danny
Hillis instructed a powerful computer to generate thousands of
mini-programs, which were made up of simple instructions selected at
random. But the best that this approach could get was 75 steps. His
genius was to realise that his system was facing the same hurdle that
many evolutionary systems do: it had reached a local maximum. As
though it was in the Himalayas, it was blindly exploring the landscape
for steep slopes going towards a peak, and once there thought it was
on top of the world.

To get over this problem, Hillis introduced predator programs that
would destroy these programs if they stayed in the same peak for too
long. so they had to crawl back down and find another higher peak.
Using this idea, he achieved 62 steps, a major achievement in
computing!

In our cities most churches have reached a \”local maximum\”. The
average style of church originated in the small country parishes of
hundreds of years ago. But in the new urban situation of the
post-Christian West we are beginning to see that this animal is now
unfit for its environment.

We all change and experience different phases in our beliefs, both as
individuals and as communities. James Fowler outlines 6 steps, the
first 2 are Intuitive-Projective and Mythical-Literal. At stage 1 a
child might have a view based on fantasy or what they have picked up
from TV. By stage 2 they are beginning to take on the stories and
beliefs of the community and are able to solidify them into some sort
of narrative.

It is at stage 3 (Synthetic-Conventional) that many Christians and
churches reach a local maximum. and for many it becomes a place of
equilibrium. While their beliefs and values are often deeply held they
are typically not examined critically and are therefore tacitly held
to.

Stage 4 (Individuative-Reflective) is where they begin to critique the
beliefs, teachings and practices of the group. It is a loss of
innocence, a realization that the truth is more complex than we
thought. People at stage 4 tend to widen their frame of reference
beyond the perceived\”small world\” of stage 3. Churches that are stuck
around stage 3 become intolerant of them; they in turn become
intolerant of an unchanging church, and many, many Christians give up
and leave the church altogether. Stage 4 is akin to the necessary
movement down from the local maximum back into the valleys.

Stage 5 is a place of humility, with none of the brash arrogance of
stage 3; a place where the doubts and criticisms of stage 4 are not
extinguished, but the self is able to hold things in tension and
appreciate mystery. Stage 5 is a place where \”in its richness,
ambiguity and multidimensionality, truth must be approached from at
least 2 or more angles.\”

Stage 6 is the Universalising. This stage is how we might describe
the Ghandis, Mother Teresas, Martin Luther Kings and THomas Mertons.
They threaten our measured standards of righteousness and goodness and
prudence. They subvert structures which maintain survival, security
and significance. They often die at the hands of those they hope to
change.

It is vital that the paths between these stages remain mapped, and
that communication between those at different points along them is
kept open.

The faith consciousness of a stage 3 church would be defined as
\”tacit, with an external locus of authority usually in sacred texts or
in the groups authorised representatives.\” They have \”hierarchical
authority and information control\”

We need to be Conjunctive, meaning the ability to hold opposites
together in a single frame. And we see this as a strong theme in our
post-Enlightenment culture. The first task is that of nurturing a
supporting political and cultural leaders prepared to claim and model
conjunctive faith. We must be modelling a conjunctive faith in a
conjunctive church, for it is only in such a place that people from
all stages can experience community and growth together.

The route to change must not be through the exercise of power, but
through an exercise in empowerment. The required energy will only be
summoned when we work together, from the bottom up, rather than
leaving it all up to the solitary professionals, who end up burning
out.

The body of Christ can change precisely because, in the incarnation,
we see a God who has changed. A map showing the position and ascent
routes of Everest is simply not available to us. We cannot know what
the new church is going to look like, if we could, we would construct
it now. We must first descend into the valleys and let the
evolutionary forces of our local urban situations bring a new mode of
being to birth.

The final irony of Hillis\’s work is that, upon inspecting the final
mini-program that had evolved into the everest of number counting, he
had absolutely no idea how it worked.

Thats all for now, it would be great to debate this stuff, so COMMENT below if it sparked something off in you or if you object or agree or anything!

Today is the 1st anniversary of Mary-Lou and myself getting together and going out! So it\’s also the 1st anniversary of my first ever kiss. See this blog to see how excited i was!

The US elections should conclude today (if all the tampering doesn\’t go to the courts and get in the way) and over the last few days ive had a change in heart for our old friend Bush. More about this in the coming days…

For a few days last week i was working on this for LiquidBronze (the company I work for) - Blair-ometer

And this is what I\’ve been listening to the last few days.

And this is an awesome animation revealing some interesting thoughts:

I love the way they all sort out their hair afterwards!