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Book idea..?
Paul writes…Jason and I have been talking about writing a book about deep church. One of the practical difficulties of deep church so far is that it is: a) primarily academic/rooted in the academy at present
b) dense
c) hard to imagine what this looks/feels/tastes like in practice and therefore why bother/get excited about it.
My own feeling would be to take a book idea like Doug Paggitt’s book on Church re-imagined and adapt it to write practically about what we are doing around the values of deep church that we have in our own church community/context. Not that I’m saying that we are the example of deep church in action just an example that people may find helpful.
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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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Lament…
Tuesday 16th October was the first ‘Deep Church’ seminar of the term, Robin Parry speaking on the book of Lamentations. He posed the question “What can Christians do with the book of Lamentations?” [A reminder that the next one on political correctness and Christ is on the 30th October] James Prescott went along to the seminar and kindly wrote this piece on his reflections…I was unsure at first whether to write this as a straight report, but instead have decided to put down what I felt God was really speaking to me and others about.
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What does deep church mean to you?
Over the last few months we’ve been very glad to have had an awesome group of guest writers here, sketching out for us a whole range of different areas, contributions and impacts that deep church can have. A big thank you to them for their contributions!We hope you have enjoyed the painting of such a broad landscape but we are also conscious that Jason and I now need to present our own concrete thinking of how/where/what of deep church. Specifically where we see this fiting in with the emerging church conversation that we are already part and the vision we have for the deep church going forward.
We we would love your ongoing involvement with the site and therefore would love to hear your thoughts on what deep church means for you? If deep church is a blur we would love to listen to any specific thoughts, questions and concerns that you may have? I’m not guaranteeing you that we’ll be able to answer them but it would be great to listen and talk with you more…
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Is there still a need for church - true, deep or otherwise?
The Pope recently reconfirmed the Roman Catholic’s church position that only churches with apostolic succession are true churches, for those of us in the protestant tradition we are ‘ecclesiological communities.’ This may lead some to wonder whether we as protestants/evangelicals can have any truck with our Catholic brothers and sisters and perhaps deep church is at best a sticking plaster for ecumenicalism or at worst some sort of consipiracy/cover up/hush up/suck up?In these revolutionary post-church/pathological-church times I wonder if we need to move beyond arguements of legitimising our existence as gathering of Christians and instead address the question facing us in the west of why we should bother gathering at all?
Do we still resonate with the thoughts of Ignatius, from the 2nd century, that ‘where Jesus Christ is, there is the universal church’ or Irenaeus, ”where the Spirit of God is, there is the church and all grace’ or does that church now only consist of an audience of one - namely me (as pope, priest and parishioner).
Is chosing to be an independent/individual Christian a contradiction in terms? What can the deep church/deep ecclesiology response be to the question of not just defining “church” but addressing the questions of church: “so what?” and “then what?”
Whilst acknowleding the dangers of blueprint church and the romantic quest in vain for the perfect church - I think we also need to critique our own western ecclesiological lens and inparticular the underlying theme of individualisation/self-determination. My own suggested sketch for this critique for me would be for a Trinitarian lens - one informed by a 2/3 world view [where they have the opposite dilema an emphasis on the many but not so much on the individual].
