The loss of church as public
18 Apr 2008
My first location for this post is as a church planter, trying to grow a church in the post Christian, secular materialist, and post church context of Europe. What does it mean within this context to try to establish a vibrant church community that enables Christian’s formation and grow in faith, and for people in our local community to convert to that form of life, as Christians, in and through our church plant?
Alastair MacIntyre has demonstrated how practices are prior to institutions, and yet good practices are only sustained over time by institutions. However those very institutions over time corrupt and undermine the good practices they were set in place for.
In referencing MacIntyre, I betray my second locations for this post, of being within ‘emerging church’ discussions and conversations (whether others consider me legitimately located within this context is another question).
Within my context the protestant church has seemingly retreated into the subjective private gnosis of ‘relevance’ with it’s myriad progressions of worship aesthetics, be that charismatic revivalism, purpose driveness, or alternative worship, whilst on the other hand it has turned to a reified and objectified faith around some form of biblical fundamentalism.
There are many types of shading to both of these streams, but they do seem to me to have something deeply in common, the shared feature of a loss of ‘genuine public’. There has been either an unwillingness to question current ecclesiologies and the inherent corruptions and distortions of the institutions of church that debilitate it from a genuinely ‘public life’, whilst on the other hand there has been the naïve and often-bourgeois indulgent fantasy of being ‘post institutional’ with regards to ecclesiology, that often goes as far as an ontological ‘post-church’ articulation.
Where the church in modernity has been reduced to an association of religiously interested individuals, and most ongoing critiques of that association seem to continue to spawn even more religiously associated individuals, is there any hope or need to establish churches that reflect more than a dissolution into private clubs that reflect the tastes of their members? And with that assertion I betray my other location, that of my PhD research.
In order to address that problem, to seek to diagnose its condition and extrusion within consumer culture, and to find and offer an alternative public ecclesiology, I have been orienting myself within the discourses of Catholic Social Teaching, Radical Orthodoxy, and Anabaptist theology. Unsurprisingly given the nature of my problem area, and thesis, my method has increasingly located itself within ‘political theology’, with the hope of finding an ‘embodied’ and ‘public’ form of church.
I have been recently been drinking deeply from the wells of William Cavanaugh, Bernd Wannenwetsch, and Reinhard Hütter. They have given me theological descriptions to my intuitive anxieties from working in the field as a church planter (I must plug the upcoming conference at Calvin in May with some of these writers, that I am more than a little excited about attending).
With regards to this loss of ‘genuine public life’, Hütter delineates five current ecclesial responses that he does not see as exhaustive:
1.) A return to the State
2.) A return to Rome (and I would add for many the turn towards Canterbury)
3.) A continued splintering around protest (I would find the children of the protestant reformation birthing the post-church movement here)
4.) A continued confessional church a la Bonhoeffer, that seeks to remain grounded in word and dogmatic confession
5.) A new charismatic principle of the hermeneutical horizon of discussions about confession
All of them are fascinating areas for discussion, but it is the last one, given my locations as a church planter, and my emerging church context, that I find for the purposes of this post the most interesting.
(And without any detailed analysis of these responses, I will lay my cards on the table, in that I think we can find ecclesial hope in the embrace of all of them, as well as the anticipated sixth alternative that Hütter offers)
Much of the emerging church has been self consciously located around the notion of ‘conversations’, and whilst I have found it’s largely irenic dialectic immensely helpful, I think Hütter exposes one of the ecclesial limitations of this emerging church moment.
When doctrine is no longer something we orient ourselves around, i.e. there is no ‘giveness’ and instead dogmatics becomes a dialogue partner that ‘discloses it’s content within the nexus and horizon of communication’, no wonder there is no ‘giveness’ and public to church life.
In other words ecclesiology collapses into the conversations about church, the flux and idealizations of talking about what church might be (and often the pathology of what it isn’t), such that ecclesiology remains a hermeneutical horizon of discussions about church, rather than a concrete reality of growing and new communities with new Christians. No reference is needed to practices and habits of concrete church locations and communities.
Or to put it another way, if there is no ‘church’, no concrete third space and alternative to ‘us’ and the public, if we too easily resent the notion of any third and institutional entity between the consumer quest for ‘community/fellowship’, and us as autopoietic agents, surely the church will continue to be forced into producing ‘private religious associations’?
Hütter suggests that there is no third space between the content of Christian traditions and individuals appropriation of that content for their own private spiritual formation due to this inherent and continued aporia of protestant thinking.
William Cavanaugh offers us a Eucharistic theo-politically imagined public for ecclesiology, Bernd Wannewetsch a similarly grammatically embodied public worship, and Reinhard Hütter himself an explicitly pneumatological ecclesiological that overcomes the modern alternatives of ‘autonomy’ and ‘heteronomy’ with a doctrinally embodied practice.
With all this I am seeking for a new ecclesiological method, an ‘institutional hermeneutic’ if you will, that enables the release and development of good practice, whilst remaining suspicious of itself, without falling into the naivety of post-intuitional thinking. An ecclesiology that enhypostatically epitomises the institutional realism of Alasdair MacIntyre.
I am increasingly convinced that what we need is a real ‘public’ church that counters the modern state church, and the private god space associations of much that is emerging. And until we do, we will see little in the way of vibrant communities filled with new and growing Christians, at least in Western Europe.
So I turn to you, gentle reader. Do you see a similar location for the problems of ecclesiology, have you interacted with my discourse partners, and what alternatives do you see available?
Jason Clark – London
(Please excuse any typos given my typing this on the fly, and with far too much haste whilst on holiday)
www.jasonclark.ws
www.deepchurch.org.uk
www.vineyardchurch.org
(Bibliography: Reinhard Hütter, “Suffering Divine Things”, Bernd Wannenwetsch, “Political Worship: Ethics for Christian Citizens”, and William T. Cavanaugh, “Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ” and “Theopolitical Imagination”)
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Comment by D.G. Hollums
3.42 pm on 18 Apr 2008
I wonder today, if we have gone past “Post-Christian” and (especially in Europe and the UK) are now back full circle in “Pre-Christian”. This; of course, saddens me but also provides hope that Christianity can grow and thrive in such worlds. But, I wonder if others have considered this and if it would affect in any way what and how we praxis the Kingdom in this world.
Comment by Jason Clark
7.13 pm on 18 Apr 2008
Hi DG,
I think in some way places like the UK are secular enough, that for most people they are pre-christian. The Christian story means very little if nothing to them, and they encounter it no where.
Then a large number of christians are ‘post-church’ with their faith, moving into private God spaces.
So I think all these elements are situated together at present.
Comment by Simon Foulkes
11.02 am on 25 Apr 2008
This is very thought-provoking and I’m grateful for it. I travel part of the UK visiting ‘Fresh Expressions’ set-ups, and I think the analysis you offer is perhaps too pessimistic. Where Christians are able to retain an authenticity, what one described to me as ‘rawness’, and truly rely on God at work in the world and in their lives, then mission does happen, and secularised people become part of the believing community. The institutions are problematic, because they are threatened by what they cannot control, and because they do not look as if they are appropriate places to send new believers. The C of E has managed to loosen itself up in what it will permit; but it has not yet directed itself to engage with it (at least one Diocese has effectively opted out in the UK).
Within the institutions, it often seems to me the central issue is that individuals adopt the mores of the institution in order to gain esteem and self-justification, such that the continuity of the institution is essential to their psychological well-being. Often, too, individuals gain significant power or influence over others. Self-interest prevents the embrace of outward-looking, publicly oriented activities. The leaders who we may recognise as having authentic spiritual authority and depth are generally those who are not deriving their self-esteem from the institution. So, in conservative institutions such as churches, those who exercise true leadership either have to do so from the margins, as radicals, or somehow rise despite the institution to positions of influence. Making the same point the other way around, any leader who derives their authority on the basis of their status within the institution is automatically suspect.
Therefore the search for public presence - which I agree is vital - is naturally perceived as hostile to the interests of the institutions unless those involved adopt personal disciplines or communal disciplines that challenge the tendencies to institutional self-serving. This is always patchy but thank God such people exist, it does happen, and we all know many of them!
Comment by Greig
6.17 pm on 11 Jul 2008
Some really interesting thoughts here.
One phrase I picked up on was the church as ‘public’. At its very nature the call of the church is to be public. jesus was public in His ministry, much to the disturbance and annoyance of those around Him. Yet it was not His simple acts they felt uncomfortable with, it was their consequences in relation to the reaction of the public toward their posotions of power.
The term public to me suggests the existence of relationship. To be in public means to be in a relationship, in whatever form that takes. This reflects the existence of God as Trinity. He exists as relationship, modelling unity and holiness. As a church, we should then be modelling unity in everything we do. As individuals, we should also be modelling holiness, just as Jesus did when He was here on earth.
Whether we are in community within our groups of believers or within contemoprary society, we have a call to act out our lives of worship in response to the needs of the people around us. This reflects the traditional biblical view of worship as a political act, rather than a gathering of believers simply singing songs.
Comment by dan Wilt
6.33 pm on 23 Jul 2008
Jason, would you do us the honor of painting, with brushes of faith, culture and history, a brief paragraphical image of what this brand of corporate faith looks and acts like - just to aid this discussion?
I.e. Can you convert this to a metaphor, possibly in contradistinction to another?
Comment by Charlie Boyd
9.51 am on 20 Sep 2008
I enjoyed reading the above descriptions of the search for ‘public church’At present I find myself in a private ‘God space’ outside groups that define themselves as ‘Churches’.At present my reationships with other Christians ( a diverse lot I may add) is my community.Many Christians in Northern Ireland are suffering greatly from the effects of ‘church attendance’ and membership ( whatever that really means).The alternative New Churches have become clones of the old traditional ones based on power systems of control by usually a ‘charismatic’ preacher pastor.I have found the writings of Rene Girard revolutionary in my understanding of the rivalry that causes group expressions of Chritianity to explode apart or fracture.Zealous followers of talented ‘model’ believers are sucked into a web of rivalry and interpersonal violence before being expelled.This model of community based on gifted leadership is bound to implode and deny the claims of the Gospel ( look how they love one another!). Emerging church thinkers are let’s face it as rivalous as the standard pastor/teacher/healer evangelist/ prophet of fundamentalist revivalism.A believing friend of mine says he has chosen to be discipled by ‘the world’ instead of the church - at first cynical of his statement I am beginning to see what he means.
Comment by David
9.53 am on 22 Sep 2008
Much of my thinking on leaders and institutions has been influenced by Eph 4:11 - that leaders are “to prepare God’s people for works of service” - which I (mis?)interpret to mean release, empower, etc. everyone to fulfil their destiny/mission/calling, etc. in whatever sphere they find themselves. And then to celebrate all that God is doing in/through others. Leaders are to be the “servants of the servants of God” (St Gregory).
My experience was that almost nothing that takes place “in church” (that should be an oxymoron) achieves this, and that any clergy/laity (or leader/follower) distinction exacerbates the problem.
Although the church I’m a member of is a (stereo?)typical large charismatic evangelical one, the leaders have (perhaps as much to their surprise as anyone’s) ‘released’ us into multifarious “Mission Shaped Communities”, where we are free to experiment with trying to be communities for others without institutional baggage. It’s a challenge, but my experience is that it’s a model that appears to have some mileage.
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