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The loss of church as public
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.
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What is Deep Church? : In Outline
So my theme for my time in Germany, of Deep Church, comes from my PhD research, and my association with Kings College London (see www.deepchurch.org.uk).
I’m particularly keen to help connect academics with the concrete reality of church, and to help church leaders interact with the reflective and theological aspects that arise from the notions of ‘Deep Church’. In this post I want to suggest some aspects of what Deep Church means for me. Rather than reducing deep church to one way of being church I see it is about setting out principles that lie within the spirit of deep church. So below are a number of these principles in no particular order.
Deep Church as…
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The Will to Action: Deconstruction and Reconstruction in Church
Why is the Emerging Church drawn to de-constructive theology?
I am at the early stages of my Ph.D research and my thoughts are those of the theological/philosophical neophyte, trying to see the ‘wood for the trees’, so please excuse my crude conclusion and suggestions. I’ll approach this topic from two perspectives, in terms of ‘best’ and ‘worst’.
If deconstructive theology teaches us anything it’s that our new theologies, and concomitant ecclesiologies will embody some wonderful new things, as well as drifting into some dire productions (which in any event locates the emerging church in the continuing nature of the historical church).
‘At it’s Best’
De-constructive theology enables us to be open to the ‘other’, and to take a position of epistemic humility. Whilst deconstructive philosophy has enabled us to unmask the a priori commitments of the church to modernity, theologians like John Milbank (in a non nihilistic and non Heideggerian/Nietzschean way) have so ably shown and unmasked the a priori commitments of secularism to liberal protestant ideals.
Christians are called to search for others not like us, not in aggression (as that destroys our openness and theirs to us) but so that we might hear and assess ourselves in light of others and they may in turn learn from us. This is so unlike pluralism, where consensus is the goal, or as in exclusivism with the crushing of the other into submission.
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Immediacy and Mediation
At the book launch for Remembering our Future, Ian Stackhouse gave a small talk in the Chapel at Kings College, that tied into his chapter in the book, and his experience as a charismatic evangelical, with regards to immediacy and mediation in worship, that correlated to my experiences and journey being within Vineyard Churches.Ian outlines how within the charismatic evangelical stream of church (whose decedents birthed the emerging church), there was the move to equate immediacy as antithetical to mediation. The immediate experience of God was to be had by removing traditional practices of mediation, such as word and sacrament. The immanent experience of God came unmediated by the Spirit in our worship and prayer times, once we removed all those religious things that got in the way. Ironically it is the modern worship style that then mediates the experiences of God.
It got me thinking about how this process has continued, the project of pursuing non mediation, that culminates in the logical conclusions of self mediation, that capitulates to the post modern world, of consumer agency. If church had become about individuals gathering to/for my non-mediated experiences, then why do I even need church/others at all?
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Deep Church: Facebook
We’ve set up a facebook group for Deep Church, here. -
RSS, Migration & Posting Schedule
We’ve got the site migrated to it’s new installation here. We’ve got new RSS feeds http://feeds.feedburner.com/deepchurch .
We’ll be posting a main item once a week for discussion here on the topic of Deep Church. If you want to contribute a piece please let us know.
Jason
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The ‘Wellness’ of Church?
In the world of psychiatry, students study not just the manifestations and causes of mental dysfunction, but the idea of ‘wellness’, of what helps the well part of a patient become ‘more well’. In the worlds of education, and business, rather than focus on people’s weaknesses, there is the move to explore and develop people’s strengths. In looking at developing countries,debt relief agencies, look for positive attributes for assessment, instead of previous models that just measured the bad ones.
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Schedule, Re-design of Deep Church
Our aim is to post items once a week, for sustained reading and discussion here. Due to the initial interest and high volume of traffic, we are going to migrate this site to a hosted new word press install this weekend. So it may go down for a couple of hours whilst everything moves over.
The URL for the site www.deepchurch.org.uk will remain the same, but the RSS feeds will change, so if you read this please refresh/visit the site to see them.
Next new post will be monday next week. Have a great weekend.
Jason
