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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?
read on…