good friday 2012

After an African-American tradition, every day I wear a silver bangle baptismal bracelet that reminds me that in baptism Jesus Christ's biography becomes our biography, becomes my bio: suffered under Pontius Pilate, crucified dead and buried... on the third day he rose again...

I've gone grunge on my blog background for a while and last night, Maundy Thursday evening, at church I participated in foot washing that some denominations routinely practice as a sacrament or ordinance. Heidelberg Catechism: "Why is the Son of God called Jesus, meaning 'Savior?'" "Why is the Son of God called Christ, meaning 'anointed?'" "But why are you called a Christian?" "Because by faith I share in Christ's anointing and I am anointed to reign with Christ over all creation for all eternity." When God signed me on for this Living Baptized gig, it was going to be counter-cultural and sometimes subversive. It might have included feeding the hungry, toppling the mighty from their positions of power, friending the needy and afflicted. It had a lot to do with justice, righteousness and making a eucharistic, shalom-filled world for all creation. However, I didn't reach this point of brokenness from working hard almost forever with Mother Teresa's peeps, or spending days on end stirring soup at the homeless shelter, or demonstrating and creating legislation for fair employment conditions for the neglected and underserved. In other words, it's not from visibly bearing the cross in ways that alienated conventionally polite society and the over-dollared Überclass.

My life cries out for resurrection! When you attend a graduation or ordination, the ordinand or graduate always thanks everyone, always explains they could not have gotten there alone and they didn't get there by themselves. In this military town, we frequently observe farewells and homecomings on the news. In those I get the impression people are supposed to get attached to other people, to miss them when they're gone, to long for their return. What about me?

Most likely I heard from Channel 10 the Daily Llama was coming to town, but these days I'm in a radically different world and space than ever I'd anticipated and so much of the past is coming back to bite me. Or is it? End of this paragraph: I didn't go to the Daily Llama event any more than I've been attending or participating in anything else well-educated, supposedly middle-class types occasionally do. But I have been celebrating eucharist and recalling why, at least to the extent a mere, broken human is able.

All of 8 or 9 years ago on the old UCC forums, Marian Conning said to me, "Leah, I think you're the kind of poet-theologian Pastor [Alan] Roxburgh (author of The Missionary Congregation, Leadership, and Liminality—you can search my tags for blogs and an amazon review of the book) is talking about; the church so needs your leadership at this time—thanks for sharing some of it with us." For the sake of the world, the church and for myself, too, I yearn for the life of participation that anyone with my gifts, education, experience and hard work reasonably could expect and anticipate. I've done my part and it cannot happen without an invitation or at least permission.

During Advent 2007 I developed and facilitated a (3 Fridays at one church, 4 Sundays at another) class in incarnational theology; for Advent 2 we talked about God's Presence in liturgy, preaching, and sacraments/ordinances. We concluded the discussion with this reflection for Maundy Thursday by Paul Hammer. Dr. Hammer offered one of the Taking the Bible Seriously talks they posted on the old United Church of Christ site and that's probably still online somewhere—besides a few times on this site.

love one another

Jesus, how common can you get? Foot washing, bread, wine!
If you're going to be religious, at least use something special.
No, my friend, I came not to perform special religious rites
But to touch the daily life of everyone
With God's love in the commonest of things.

O.K., water, bread, wine.
But isn't foot washing a bit ridiculous?
And what about "this is my body"?
And "this cup is the new covenant in my blood"?

Foot washing is the work of the commonest servant—I came to serve.
But it points beyond to the "washing" of the cross—
God's self-giving service in me to cleanse away estrangement
And heal the distortions in people's lives.
The bread points to nourishment in that same self-giving of God
At work in my body, that is in me.
And the cup points to the new community drawn together and nourished
In my blood, that is in God's total self-giving in my death.

Do you mean that this common stuff of water, bread and wine
Becomes in you the very focus of God's love for me and for the world?
That there is no excuse for my not loving my common neighbor?
Because you have shown the depth of God's love for me?

You've got it!
But it isn't a love for special occasions.
It has to be that daily love that's as common as water, bread and wine!

missionary congregation review

"...we are faithfully to indwell the gospel in a culture that has disembedded itself from that tradition."

In The Missionary Congregation: leadership and liminality, a handbook for doing mission that you can read through in very little time and that'll take several readings and considerable pondering to understand and appropriate, Pastor Alan Roxburgh explores Victor Turner's book-length essay on liminality, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, (Cornell University Press, 1969) as a framework to help us understand the historical, contemporary and maybe even future call of the church. The experience of liminality, of being on the threshold between old and new, neither back where we were nor yet where we think we're heading typically applies to ritualized liturgical rites of passage that dissolve and dis-embed aspects of an individual's or a group's old identity and are at least the beginning of incorporation into a new group or community along with a new status. For Christians, baptism is our primal liminal experience. As we enter the waters, should we be prepared to drown? Yes! And we should be equally prepared to be surprisingly raised from that death by drowning! And then there's also the desert...

Although Pastor Roxburgh insists "The church's lived experience is marginalization," then he says center-margin language is obsolete and also cites the contemporary Spirituality Smorgasbord. And then he says a possible center-periphery relationship may exist between urban and non-urban, though he claims the urban center itself has no margins. This is fascinating and highly thought-provoking and brings us back to the tendency to equate modernization with urbanization as it evokes Max Weber and rationalization, too. Pastor Roxburgh strikingly observes (page 38): "...it is not marginalization that shapes our context but a liminality without center points from which to gain perspective or meaning." Continuing both/and, neither/nor language, marginalization presupposes a center and a periphery. Amidst all the talk about community, Pastor Roxburgh cites Christianity's shift to a "private, individualistic center." We still keep hearing far too much about a proprietary Jesus...

Pastor Alan reminds us historically the church building – the physical church structure – was a place of refuge, a place of sanctuary. As people of the Good Book we affirm wherever God meets the people is holy, sacred ground, "sanctuary." In biblical – in covenantal – terms, God indwelling the people, God's encounters with the creation to which Godself so passionately has "attached" Godself sanctifies life.

Pastor Roxburgh definitely is not talking about business models and parallels as he considers the leadership of the church in a time of liminality, which requires leaders whose identity is formed by the tradition rather than the culture and leaders who listen to the voices from the edges where the apostle, the prophet, and the poet are found.

"...leaders whose identity is formed by the tradition rather than the culture." But he doesn't explain how the tradition has formed the identity of those leaders. I also need to quote, "...they are cries that long to be connected to a Word that calls them beyond themselves into a place of belonging that God gives within a people." "The alternative community...is formed as the prophetic word addresses the pained recognition of our liminality." For Christians, baptism into the alternative, counter-cultural community that daily walks the way of the cross and lives the reality of resurrection is our primal liminal experience. And then there's also the desert...

Finally, we can consider the re-symbolization and professionalization of church leadership, as it has become and continues becoming yet another clubby priesthood with all of the occultisms, rituals, secrets, insignia, gnoses – and bureaucracies – associated with all of those other royal priesthoods...remember the Jerusalem Temple? I hope this short selection of ideas from The Missionary Congregation Leadership and Liminality will encourage you to read the book, which would be an excellent choice for study by a parish mission or outreach committee, council, session or vestry. There's enough material in its less than 100 pages (71, actually) for at least 5 or 6 serious discussions.

edges, centers, culture and counter-culture...my amazon review

Cross Pieces

After spending more time with Water Buffalo Theology by Kosuke Koyama to prepare for the Theology of the Cross series, I finally decided to blog about the book, so here it is—but only sort of!

This noontime was the 5th Theology of the Cross class of 6; the discussions have been wonderful, and my only real regret is that I started out with close to 20 pages of notes and found the amount of information so overwhelming that in the end I just "did something" related to the original outline for each class handout. For the blog at hand I'm using some of my Water Buffalo Theology notes and a few notes from the class handouts I prepared. Actually, I'd figured this would be a good opportunity to prepare for Sunday, because it would be the first of the pair of classes in which we try putting together some of the concepts we've discussed; originally I'd thought to post Saturday evening, but it's now Sunday afternoon! Disclaimer: as I revisit and assess my blogs - and my sermons - I've found the best ones, meaning those I'd "get the most from" if someone else had written them, almost always are those that aren't too tightly argued, leaving space for the HS to insinuate and make inroads. I've been thinking about this blog for too long now, so despite its needing lots of further developing, here it is.

Way back then at UMassBoston in my cultural anthro classes we learned about the concept of the liminal, which can be applied to formal, liturgical rites of passage as well as to a wide range of other social and psychological situations and encounters. Just like when you're on the limen or threshold of a building or room, in life passages and other circumstances there is a stage in space and time you're no longer where you started but not yet at your destination, either. Needless to say, just as with the pictogram depicting crisis as both danger and opportunity, when you're on the limen, there's a possibility of staying stuck neither here nor there and besides, although you have a clue as to what was in your past, you only can imagine what the future holds, making it unsettling at minimum and scary plus at maximum.

Our primary liminality text for anthro of religion was The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure by Victor Turner; one of the books about missiology we discussed on the old UCC forums was The Missionary Congregation, Leadership, and Liminality by Alan J. Roxburgh.

Regarding the geographically liminal, shorelines, the forest's edge and river's edge, a city's suburbs, the rim of the Central Business District come to mind; try the gates of a gated residential community, too, or for a more optimistic example, the door – or maybe the narthex (in some traditions termed "foyer") – of a cathedral or your local church building. Summer and winter solstice, vernal and autumnal equinox, dusk and dawn are ambiguous times neither here nor there, neither this nor that. We've particularly discussed and I've blogged almost incessantly about baptism as border and boundary between life, death and life, as well as bounded border between the world in the thrall of death and its agents and the resurrected community that in the sovereignty of life serves in the image of its Servant Lord, Jesus Christ. We've talked about the cross of Calvary as "more than atonement; more than God's definitive self-revelation; more than the ultimate example for us to follow" but a transformative reality, the way God initiates the New Creation, City of God and The Way Christ Jesus in the Spirit calls and enables us to follow. Related to this blog title, I'm now imagining the cross as a liminal place. Last week for Class 4 we talked some about God’s action and presence in the sacraments – considered a means of grace – and began imagining ways we can be means of grace in the world around us!

It's common to view the vertical piece of the cross as reaching up to heaven, while the horizontal reaches out to connect us with others--with all creation. Transformative as it ultimately can prove, for sure relationship of every kind is fragile and breaks all too easily. But in any case, at any stage, relating is an inevitably here and now aligned with an invariably not quite yet: on the limen, on the threshold of something different, some new creation, something synergistic: more than you started with and more than simply the predictable sum of the discrete parts!

This noon we specifically asked,

What does the cross mean for each of us as individuals, for this church community, for our nearby neighbors? Contextualizing the sacraments!

Theologian Jürgen Moltmann describes baptism as "sign, witness, representation and illumination of the Christ Event, and" we can claim the same about the Eucharist. We know Jesus Christ as sovereign, prophet and priest; baptized, we participate in that royal, prophetic priesthood. Especially related to those roles, how can our lives signify, witness to, represent and illuminate the birth, life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ?

Contextualizing Eucharist

I really like this from today's handout, so here it is again:

Jesus said, "Do this!" Do this liturgical action? Recall Israel and desert manna, enabling God's people to live precariously in the [liminal] wilderness:

• Bread = nourishing = body that is broken unto death and raised to new life
• Christ's body = revealed in the breaking of bread/body
• Church = Body of the risen Christ = nourishing the world, especially the stranger, the outcast and the "other"
• Church / reveals Jesus' crucified body in its redeeming brokenness
• Church / reveals Christ's risen body in its liberating wholeness

Water Buffalo Theology—a few notes on a few chapters, with a suggested new version of each chapter title.

Chapter 1: Theological Situations in Asia and the Mission of the Church | theological situations in Southern California and the mission of the church

Jeremiah 4-7

Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon, "Build houses and live in them; and plant gardens and eat their produce...Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf; for in its welfare you will have welfare."

This passage is both the original source of "where you're planted!" and practical, down-to-earth direction for living shalom-ly with self, with neighbor and with stranger.

Paraphrased from my earlier comment: I think all of us will be able together to celebrate a thanksgiving homecoming (after all, isn't homecoming the ultimate thanksgiving?) liturgy within a community gathered not only to perfunctorily and ritually evoke the presence of the risen Christ in Word and Sacrament, but when that gathered people attests to the presence of the Christ in each another: having gone slowly enough to know and to call each others' names, having gotten sufficiently grounded to ignore at least some of the babble of commerce and consumerism, having decided to "seek the welfare of the city" where they are rather than seeking the well-being of their purses and properties: looking outward to the other's interests and inward to an authentic, relational and re-creative self. The "crucified mind" can be as basic as looking to others' interests rather than our own...

Our Christian kerygma tells about our holy God's incarnation into the longitude, latitude and linear time of human history and of a particular culture and the ensuing reality of the death of death itself in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, the One we know as the Christ of God. And the same God whose passion from the beginning has been to journey with the people, continues incarnate in the Church, the Body of the Risen Christ, and still accompanies the people on their journey in the longitudes, latitudes and linear time of human history and now within many diverse cultures. We proclaim God Among Us in the spatial and temporal liminality of human life and endeavor! At the beginning of class this noon I referred to the book of Acts in passing, and as we left for home, I suggested everyone read Acts during this coming week, or at least turn the pages to remind themselves of the content.

From WBT: Jakarta is as central as Jerusalem and London in the mission of the Risen Lord. Though initially it may sound astounding to make Jakarta or anywhere else "as central as Jerusalem," if the person and work of the crucified and risen Jesus Christ is not for Jakarta just as much as it is for Jerusalem, he truly is not and cannot be Lord of all. One of the class participants, who always is full of great ideas, said he believes that for us, Jerusalem is right here and now.

Chapter 4: The "Efficiency" of the Crucified One in the World of Technological Efficiency | the efficiency of our witness in this world of technology

Rooting the Gospel: the Bible reveals God's attachment to the world of creation to the point of totally identifying with us to the extent of living and dying as one of us: learning and knowing us, creation – God's beloved – so completely as to walk in our sandals. Tevas or flip-flops or thongs or what kind of footgear, these days? Neighborology: our attachment to our neighbors to the extent of walking a while in their shoes, eating the same food or cuisine, working at the same job, being unemployed in the same manner. My identity needs to become translucent and transparent so "I" can get out of the way and see and feel the other. We're talking neighborology, the word about the neighbor!

Chapter 6: Aristotelian Pepper and Buddhist Salt | liturgical excess and low church blandness

Kitchen imagery is exceptionally apt in discussing Christianity, as the Bible is full of references and analogies to common, ordinary, everyday things (material, physical "possessions") and activities. As the author observes and as we all know, real theology is done in the venues and locales where actually people live--we need to begin practicing more and more neighborology! My blog readers know all about my "liturgical excess - low church" subtitle for this chapter, so I'll say no more.

Chapter 12: Cool Arhat and Hot God | Cool Dudes and Hot Jalapeños

This is southern California, where a few days ago I overheard a couple of young guys talking, one saying to the other about 12301298 times worth, "Dude, man, cool, dude!" Funny! God creates in order to have a creation to become passionately - hotly - attached to, so God and God's people live in particularly close attachment to each other. The God we meet in the Bible and in Jesus Christ loves creation enough literally to die for it!

Chapter 18: Three Modes of Christian Presence | Two Versions of the Gospel

WBT's author, Kosuke Koyama, mentions suffering because we're involved with others, involved with the other; suffering because we're involved in neighborology! Participating in the "glory of the crucified Lord"--the same Paul of Tarsus also talks about "the glory of the children of God!" And isn't our glory as God’s offspring also a crucified glory and a risen glory? Exactly what our discussion today was all about!

Possible modes of Christian presence: the geographically, socially, culturally, chronologically, theologically and/or spiritually liminal? Can our presence in the world and in our neighborhoods be a liminal, in the process of becoming, though not-quite-yet one? Partly in our own world and way, partly in theirs, and wholly in the sovereignty of heaven? Encountering each other in the church and our neighbors as Jesus Christ's representatives has got to be crisis-time, in terms of danger and amazing opportunity! About those Gospel Versions--for Paul, the Gospel is death and resurrection!

Mystical Poetic Blog

Today I'm returning to my blogs about some of the chapters in Brian McLaren's a Generous Orthodoxy.

A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I am a missional, evangelical, post/protestant, liberal/conservative, mystical/poetic, biblical, charismatic/contemplative,...emergent, unfinished... by Brian McLaren on Amazon


11/3/2006 3:47 PM

Before getting in to the chapter at all, I'm going to comment on the chapter title from my own immediate perspective.

Mystical: of course the medieval Christian mystics instantly come to mind, but I also recall an evangelical (in the current popular American sense of the term) wannabe who really was mainline – a guy I knew ages ago – who kept insisting we wanted nothing whatsoever to do with mystic, because "mystic" implied "unmediated" and left out Jesus Christ.

Poetic: without reading much of anything I noticed McLaren references Walter Brueggemann's book of language for proclamation I read last winter or spring, Finally Comes the Poet. As y'all y'all know, I am a major WB fan! I'm also fondly recalling Marian Conning from the old UCC forums referring to moi as a "poet theologian" at the end of our online discussion of Alan Roxburgh's The Missionary Congregation, Leadership, and Liminality.

11/4/2006 9:57 AM

Having read this chapter, yes, me too: I consider myself mystical and poetic. For me, the most helpful things in this chapter were the quotes from Brueggemann, Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, Barth, et al.

From Walter Brueggemann: "By prose I refer to a world that is organized in settled formulae, so that even pastoral prayers and love letters sound like memos. By poetry, I do not mean rhyme, rhythm, or meter, but language...that breaks open old worlds with surprise, abrasion, and pace."

From Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar: "God needs prophets in order to make himself known, and all prophets are necessarily artistic. What a prophet has to say can never be said in prose."

On page 165, Brain McLaren observes, "But mystical really is a wonderful word, suggesting ways we partake of mystery, mystery beyond the grasp of reasonable prose."

And then quoting G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy: "The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits..." Then again Pastor Brian reminds the readers of Chesterton's observation that the Greeks made Apollo was patron god both of poetry and of healing.

This is a great chapter, even though I'm quoting rather than doing much thinking of my own. I love C. S. Lewis' Perelandra describing the season of spring as "ancient and young."

Roman Guardini (previously unknown to me—he was John XXIII's chaplain during Vatican II) wrote about the human who tries to speak about the Divine: "In the end he...says apparently wild and senseless things meant to startle the heart into feeling what lies beyond the reaches of the brain."

Kyriacos Markides, author of The Mountain of Silence, gets quoted, too: "Christianity, a Catholic bishop in Maine once told me, has two lungs. One is Western, meaning rational and philosophical, and the other Eastern, meaning mystical and otherworldly. Both, he claimed, are needed for proper breathing."

Water Buffalo Theology: Introduction and Chapter 1

Introduction

During Spring 2003 on the old United Church of Christ forums we discussed a trio of books about missiology; on this blog I've already posted some of my thoughts upon reading

The Missionary Congregation, Leadership, and Liminality by Alan J. Roxburgh was the last book of our missionary trilogy.

Water Buffalo Theology by Kosuke Koyam, published by Orbis Books), was the first book we talked about, and since I've already referred to it several times on this site, over the next few days I'll post some of the chapter-by-chapter ideas I had when we read it and, because now I'm reading the book again, maybe I'll have more ideas! The thumbnail description of WBT would say it's about the Christian-Buddhist dialogue and would describe it as both liberation theology and ecological theology. Since these days I haven't done much on the other ideas I'm currently thinking about, I'm planning to share some of our discussion of Lesslie Newbigin's Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture as well. Our discussions, all expertly moderated by Marian Conning, were wonderful, and I'm taking advantage of having the time to revisit these books as well as taking advantage of the convenience of what's essentially online file storage.

Part I: Interpreting History

Chapter 1: Theological Situations in Asia and the Mission of the Church

1. Part 1

As we keep learning all the time, "contextualization" is the jumping-off point in "doing" theology! And should be where we begin as practical and as academic theologians, anywhere and at anytime...just as the prophets, Jesus and the disciples combined theory (the written Torah) and urgent, passionate activism. Of course a few of them acted first and thought afterwards

The Hong Kong situation appealed to me mightily both as a "case study" - must be that one-time wannabe social worker in me :p - and in terms of my own tendencies and propensities. The Jeremiah 29 passage Professor Koyama cites is one I frequently quote to myself! It's both the original source of "bloom where you're planted!" and it's practical, down-to-earth direction for living shalom-ly with self, with neighbor and with stranger. He speaks of making "life meaningful and Christian (=slow) in the context of time running out" and oh, how that does apply to a hasty people like the people of Hong Kong and many developing, modernized cultures and societies and economies (is "modernization" still a viable concept?).

I also love his emphasis on the groundedness of a truly biblical lifestyle...although Singaporeans were his illustration of the people living ungroundedly high in the sky and out of reach of earthiness (humility?), the very same rationale could be made for the denizens of Hong Kong!

Where can Hong Kong celebrate their "slow" (=Christian) thanksgiving / homecoming liturgy? Not in the parking lot or heliport, Koyama asserts, and with that I agree. But in some ways it doesn't get any more post-urban-industrial or even more post-modern than Hong Kong, so is a physical return to the earthiness of soil necessary or even possible?

1. Part 2

One specific, contextual issue in my own life and ministry? Well, yes...I'll mention a couple things. First, Koyama's observing that doing the Word doesn't begin with Augustine, Barth and Rahner (though I've long been a major fan of Barth's), but you gotta "discard abstract ideas" for "immediately tangible" objects...IOW, to paraphrase the author, it's about enabling prophetic encounter between God's Word and God's World! I gotta get out of the way, because it's more than about history and about culture, more than about simple accommodation to where my people are: I'd call it sacramental, though he doesn't express it so.

When I served in the inner city I found getting out of the way far easier than I do here in San Diego, possibly because the inner city setting was more congruent with my own life and experiences and understandings. Here in San Diego, all too often I find myself self-conscious about emphatically making my point about everything. As I frequently mention, God takes us out of our comfort zone so often, it can be helpful if the basic situation is comfortable, since it's guaranteed not to remain that way for long!

2.
Again from my own experience: although compared with the lives of our 3rd and 4th world sisters and brothers I've always had a relatively abundant diet and, by grace, despite some financially and otherwise precarious times I've never lacked physical shelter, some time ago I experienced a series of significant losses and subsequently for several years I sensed what felt like a real loss of self as well as a lack of the life giving and life enabling refuge, shelter and sanctuary of Christian community.

Although several years have passed since that time, I'm a way different person than I was before then!

His question on page 18 regarding the relationship of accommodation to proclamation, syncretism and "iconoclasticism" (iconoclasm?) is something we all need to be considering, all the time.

3.
Part 1

...the relationship of accommodation to proclamation, syncretism and "iconoclasticism" (iconoclasm?)...

Regarding the "symbols" of a culture - whether we're in Thailand or in Nebraska, somewhere in California or Amsterdam, learning, knowing and appreciating those "symbols" (both ours and theirs) and having at least some clue about their meaning is essential before we even begin dialogue with anyone "not like us." Here's a place to note when I think of the courses I've formally taken in school that have been most useful and influential to me, my two semester of cultural anthropology (Introductory and Anthropology of Religion) at UMassBoston definitely are up there in my top half-dozen.

Before writing about
...the relationship of accommodation to...
I want to say something about cultural symbols, because before we can recognize any kind of relatedness, we need to know what's relating to what!

As Christians and as the Church we live in a Christian context and our official, formal symbols are the scriptures and the sacraments. But how about the symbolic meaning of potluck dinners, church council meetings, committees, talk and talk and more talk, social and political activism? An individual Christian's or congregation's symbols also may include a particular social, political or theological image within or vis-à-vis the community; it may include friendliness or even exclusiveness. You catch my drift! The list is long, and many times we're not remotely aware of what to outsiders may be the most obvious and evident symbols of our culture - or our church - which is one reason studying cultural anthropology can be so helpful

In Thailand it's sticky-rice, bananas, rainy season; in Maine maybe it includes blueberries, lobsters. For San Diego: Big Box retailers (like the rest of the country), surfers and surfing, our rainy and dry seasons, desert, ocean, sun, sky - and a tremendous concentration of material wealth.

Attached to every symbol is a corresponding meaning. If the meaning ceases to be important, the symbol itself will fade and die, as well.

Part 2:

Proclamation: every entity proclaims and declares something, if only be the fact of its existence, but our Christian kerygma tells about our holy God's incarnation into the longitude, latitude and linear time of human history and of a particular culture and the ensuing reality of the death of death itself in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, the One we know as the Christ of God. And the same God Whose passion from the beginning has been to journey with the people, continues incarnate in the Church, the Body of the Risen Christ, and still accompanies the people on their journey in the longitudes, latitudes and linear time of human history and now within many diverse cultures.

Syncretism: In his preface to the 25th Anniversary Edition, Koyama says a couple of extremely revealing things: everyone everywhere inevitably read the Bible from their own experience's perspective (he was citing the situation of folks who knew the Upanishads), and he insists the gospel demonstrates its power in the pluralism within Christianity. There's little or nothing original within Christianity, but I've long been convinced the synthesis is unique! But the "syncretism" concern is how far can our basic proclamation extend? We know Jesus promises to draw all to himself, but one of the major problems in evangelism everywhere is to what extent the new Jesus people need to divest themselves of their former allegiances.

"Iconoclasticism" (iconoclasm?): I'll stay with the more familiar "iconoclasm!" As computer users we're really familiar with icons, but originally an icon was a static, fixed representation worthy of veneration. God's proscribed against image-making in order to lessen the likelihood people would worship the fixed and unmoving rather than the lively and dynamic. But, as you probably know, any society's or cultures icons hold a great deal in common with their symbols, and like Israel's Golden Calf often need to be shattered and destroyed, which brings us full circle back to:

Proclamation! Because for us, as Christians, Jesus Christ is over all, in all and with all.

4.
More thoughts about Hong Kong, homecoming and us:

Where can Hong Kong celebrate their "slow" (=Christian) thanksgiving / homecoming liturgy? Not in the parking lot or heliport, Koyama asserts, and with that I agree. I've already said it doesn't get any more post-urban-industrial or post-modern than Hong Kong, and I am unconvinced a physical return to the earthiness of soil is either necessity or possibility.

To respond to this I'll start with the author's claim (page 18), "Jakarta is as central as Jerusalem and London in the mission of the Risen Lord." And he says this immediately after insisting on Jesus' charge recorded in Matthew 16:24 - we need to deny ourselves, take up our cross and follow Jesus, IOW, live with the "crucified mind," in order to "participate in authentic contextualization." Though initially it may sound astounding to make Jakarta or anywhere else "as central as Jerusalem," if the person and work of the crucified and risen Jesus Christ is not for Jakarta just as much as it is for Jerusalem, he truly is not and cannot be Lord of all.

Hong Kong will be able to celebrate homecoming (after all, isn't homecoming the ultimate thanksgiving?) within a community gathered not only to perfunctorily and ritually evoke the presence of the risen Christ in Word and Sacrament, but when that gathered people attests to the presence of the Christ in each another: having gone slowly enough to know and to call each others' names, having gotten sufficiently grounded to ignore at least some of the babble of commerce and consumerism, having decided to "seek the welfare of the city" (city="civilization") where they are rather than seeking the wellbeing of their purses and properties: looking outward to the other's interests and inward to an authentic, relational and re-creative self. The "crucified mind" can be as basic as looking to others' interests rather than our own…seems elementary, but in my own life simple inconveniences can cause me considerable distress.

We're baptized into the cross, and must never, ever forget that reality.

Truly knowing and calling another's name happens only when a person has slowed down…if you're going to live in Hong Kong, an actual return to the soil won't be possible, and some people may decide to go elsewhere, go where they can touch and smell and feel the good ground. Although I always, always try to avoiding over-spiritualizing Jesus' life and mission - and the Church's life and mission - still, I believe earth, soil and ground can serve well as metaphors for the individual's attitude and that of the community, for a spiritual earthiness, realness and groundedness. Recall that what we're reading is ecological theology as much as it is liberation theology...

5.
Though I said I wanted to respond to the question on page 18 about the relationship between accommodation and proclamation, syncretism and "iconoclasticism" (iconoclasm?), when I looked at my notes and the book's text, I noticed Professor Koyama also asks, "How do we understand accommodation in the mission of the church: in the church structure, in liturgy, in theology?" I won't attempt to answer that now, but it sounds like a subject for a series of books!

Living in Mission 6

The Missionary Congregation, Leadership, and Liminality by Alan J. Roxburgh on Amazon

Missionary Congregation Chapter 3

Chapter 3: Toward a Missionary Ecclesiology


In this concluding chapter Pastor Roxburgh considers:

"...the leadership of the church in a time of liminality, which requires leaders whose identity is formed by the tradition rather than the culture. It also requires leaders who listen to the voices from the edge. This is where the apostle, the prophet, and the poet are found."

Pastor Roxburgh definitely is not talking about business models and parallels in this chapter!

I love this chapter, too! :) I'd like to mention a few of Pastor Roxburgh's ideas:

"...marginality is the church's reality." "...leaders whose identity is formed by the tradition rather than the culture." But he doesn't explain how the tradition has formed the identity of those leaders. "Poets are the articulators of experience and the rememberers of tradition." Imaging and symbolizing! I also need to quote, "...they are cries that long to be connected to a Word that calls them beyond themselves into a place of belonging that God gives within a people." "The alternative community...is formed as the prophetic word addresses the pained recognition of our liminality."

Regarding pastor as prophet, Pastor Alan says, "Without this other Word, the community turns its pain into the ghetto experience of marginalization rather than the recognition that it exists for the life of the world."

Regarding Bible study, he perceptively observes, "...we are a culture that believes that if something has been studied, then it has been done." Oh, how true! :(

Living in Mission 5

The Missionary Congregation, Leadership, and Liminality by Alan J. Roxburgh on Amazon

Chapter 2c, Liminality: A Model for Engagement (pp. 43-56)

In this section Pastor Roxburgh claims

"The authenticity of the gospel and the church is recovered by those who, rather than being at the center, are functioning on the periphery. And, The continued assumption of cultural symbols of power and success will only produce an inauthentic church with little gospel, much religion, and no mission."

The new pastoral symbols of "credibility and identity in a society that has declassified the pastoral identity." On page 47 Pastor R reminds us, "The biblical tradition emphasizes God's dealings with us from the underside." Amen!!!!! Liminal assumes the re-assumption of the situation of prior "normalcy"; liminoid means there will be no returning to the normal we used to have, the normal that once was our "possession" to engage and exploit. There's massive loss of meaning with the liminoid, as well :( :( :( Liminal is collective; liminoid is individual. Hearing God from a place of strangeness. But that no one that no one can live as a stranger, no one can live without a home for very long without disintegration of their total place - social, cultural, familial, economic, whatever - is such a certainty. This is fascinating, and again resonates so completely with my own "individual" experience of loss and what felt like disintegration some years ago a I wrote about on this in section 4 regarding chapter 2b. BTW, again I finally experienced the faithfulness of our God Whose answer to dyings and death always is resurrection! :) Emerging from those years I finally realized how very changed I was and how I'd never be able to return to anything resembling my former place and "status," since in the process God had changed me in a multitude of ways.

"Communitas suggests the formation of a new peoplehood, the constitution of a new vision for being a group." And, Pastor Alan describes early Christianity as, "...a distinct and peculiar people with a strong sense of belonging to one another." Wow, would that we could be described that way! But then again, both communitas and liminality can lead to over-spiritualizing the church's life and mission, which definitely is one of the things I most constantly decry :( Pastor R says, "The captivity of the church is so deep and pervasive, the church's own symbols so fundamentally co-opted, that at present it is difficult to imagine how these symbols can engage our culture in a way similar to the early church." Earlier we discussed the migration of our central symbol, the cross, and in this section we've read how the symbol of "pastor" has become disengaged from its former "place." We know how fundamentalist Christianity has co-opted the Spirit-breathed dynamism of the biblical witness and turned its words that point to Jesus Christ, the living Word of God, into lists of dry propositions...and the examples are endless.

"...in both liminal and liminoid places the group is removed from prior sets of symbols and relationships." And, "...prior sets of symbols and...classification...no longer hold." Significantly, Victor Turner says play no longer is possible with the corporate organizational forms our denominational judicatories have been employing - it's all been completely rationalized and bureaucratized, even when we run with local polity? Yes, even then. :(

It seems to me a lot of that society out there and too much of the churches in here have become designerized, as well, and I believe we can connect the local, regional and national church's preoccupation with business models as part of this designerization. Here I'm mainly referring to those church bodies that identify themselves as being of somewhat mainline persuasion. I don't remember where, but recently I read that combining the terms "Church" and "mainline" is a total contradiction. :(

Living in Mission 4

The Missionary Congregation, Leadership, and Liminality by Alan J. Roxburgh on Amazon

Chapter 2b, Liminality, A Model for Engagement (pp. 33-42)

I didn't remember what "symbol migration" was, and I believe the example of the cross becoming cutesy jewelry is apt: the salvific and reconciling Christ event has become so much about "me" and "my" rather than being about the called-out covenanted community. I know several people who always wear a cross but, so far as I'm aware, never, ever attend church. Symbol migration, and in the migration eventually the original meaning gets completely lost, but then the symbol often assumes a new meaning.

For another personal example, some time ago I unwillingly left my "tried and true" – literally my identity – and spend a very long time indeed in what at first I knew must be a liminal situation in which God would act mightily in my life and world to renew and reshape me, but then after far too much time had passed, not only did none of the old explanations work: no new ones that made a modicum of sense came to me. By now it's become close to clear to me that I may never have a reasonable explanation for those years.

Pastor Roxburgh strikingly observes (page 38): "...it is not marginalization that shapes our context but a liminality without center points from which to gain perspective or meaning." He also claims, "The church's understanding of its changed social location will determine its praxis." Back to structure as a conscious awareness and recognition.

Pastor R reminds us the church building – the church structure – was a place of refuge, a place of sanctuary. It used to be known that God's "social location" was inside the culture; in covenantal theology we affirm wherever God meets the people is holy, sacred ground, "sanctuary." In biblical – in covenantal – terms, it is God indwelling the people, it is God's encounters with the creation to which Godself so passionately has "attached" Godself (remember Water Buffalo Theology by Kosuke Koyama?) that sanctifies life.

New inside: the secular; new outside: the religious. Interesting!

Finally, the "resymbolization" and professionalization of church leadership, as it became and continues becoming yet another priesthood with all of the occultisms, rituals, secrets, insignia, gnoses - and bureaucracies - associated with all of those other royal priesthoods...remember the Jerusalem Temple? 2c is about "Pastoral Identity and Liminality!" Is that :) or is that :( ?

Living in Mission 3

The Missionary Congregation, Leadership, and Liminality by Alan J. Roxburgh

Missionary Congregation Chapter 2

Ch. 2a: Liminality, a Model for Engagement (pp. 23-33)

In chapter 2 Pastor Roxburgh explores Victor Turner's book-length essay on liminality, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, (Cornell University Press, 1969) as a framework to help us understand the church's experience.

The concept of liminality usually is applied to rites of passage and involves the stages of dissolving the old status and structure or identity, experiencing a ritual than changes one’s identity and then reintegrating into the group in a new status.

Pastor Roxburgh uses the Mertonian concept of structure as a conscious awareness and recognition: important for this chapter. In a liminal state the group - and I'd add the individual - has been removed from its former identity, from its embeddedness in social structures. He observed how in preindustrial societies the liturgical rites of passage "channel the anxiety and ambiguity" and the outcome of a formal and foreordained rite of passage is predictable and foreseeable, that in itself mitigating a lot of anxiety; we have no such liturgies to compensate for our own anxieties about the liminalities in our own individual lives and in our churches! Page 31: "The margins, therefore, become the place most characterized by the sacred." In the desert Israel first rendezvoused with Yahweh, and the desert frequently becomes the place of our meeting God and of self-encounter, as well. For us as Christians, baptism is our primal liminal experience. As we enter the waters, should we be prepared to drown? Yes! And equally prepared to be surprisingly raised from that death by drowning!

On a somewhat different subject, for some time "The Church" was simply CHURCH in a generic, more-or-less comfortably socially expected and validated way, but during those years it wasn't truly manifest as the Church of Jesus Christ. These days "Church" often seems to be equated with Religious as opposed to Worldly…or whatever, but your describing "The Secular World" as buzztalk for some kind of, any kind of "fluid, ever-changing" experience fits well: IOW, if it's not religious it's secular?

Our discussion moderator asked,

do you remember - really remember - your own experience of puberty? Did you have anything like a rite of passage during those tumultuous years?

Yes, sometimes clearly and sometimes in a haze I remember...I could write about a lot of people, places and events, but for me the primary adult-ing experience in my life definitely was getting my first job and earning my own $$$! Surprisingly, I don't remember the first time I drove alone, but my first car was important, too, and the financial responsibility so freaked me out I paid it off in a little over half the term of the loan :( :) Also regarding the car, the first time I passed another vehicle on the freeway was a tremendous high that really made me feel adult! First steady BF (though I don't recall my first date), first solo piano recital I played. Regarding the exterior and interior changes that happened to me as a result, I need to think this through.

Living in Mission 2

The Missionary Congregation, Leadership, and Liminality by Alan J. Roxburgh

Ch. 1b, Marginalization, Modernity and Loss of Center (pp. 12-22)

Chapter 1b almost totally has blown some of my old answers and assumptions sky-high! Jeremiah's charge to "seek the welfare…" long has been a favorite for me in terms of my own propensity to feel unsettled by change and uncertainty, my own frequent longings for the glories (indeterminate and specious comforts?) of Egypts past and most of all in my need to engage the people I'm currently serving in exploring visions of an open future rather than reverting to a desiccated past.

Pastor Roxburgh begins this section with, "The church's lived experience is marginalization," but then he says center-margin language is obsolete and also cites the contemporary Spirituality Smorgasbord. And then he says a possible center-periphery relationship may exist between urban and non-urban, though he claims that [urban] center itself has no margins. This is fascinating and highly thought-provoking! :) and brings us back to the tendency to equate modernization with urbanization. Remembering Max Weber and "rationalization," too. Once again, the "new social location" where the churches find themselves and maybe can be found; I assume he'll be saying more about that and helping us to learn about it.

The symbol of "pastor!" Those old-timer church folks for whom the person they address simply as "Pastor" actually is a completely interchangeable anonymous entity and, truth to tell, is a "symbol!" rather than a real person.

Oh, yes…even baptized into "one's own kind," (Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian, whatever) rather than into a wholly inclusive eucharistic commonality with no barriers to fully belonging. "Privatized and personalized" keeps surfacing! :(

On page 20 Pastor Roxburgh mentions "growth, marketing and entrepreneurial leadership" models. That passage brought back vivid memories of the senior pastor I served with in the inner city reproving me often and telling me time after time I could not "afford" to spend so much time with people who wouldn't become part of our parochial report: he'd forever remind me "Cleveland looks for numbers." :( His words annoyed me mightily, but since my call (=livelihood, what I imagined was my very physical existence) was externally funded (I could trace back most of the $$$ I got to Cleveland as their origin), I'd heed his words for at least a few days, until the next incident. In addition, the senior pastor I was serving with informed me more than once :( "The Church must emulate business, [and business does the following...]" :(

Living in Mission

During late summer and early fall 2003, I took part in an online discussion of Alan Roxburgh's book, The Missionary Congregation, Leadership, and Liminality by Alan J. Roxburgh. Pastor Roxburgh is a working pastor, and the book was replete with thought- and action-provoking ideas, so I'd like to post a few of the author's ideas here on my blog plus some of the ideas I had in response to this book. It's a thin, trim volume with three short chapters, so I'll write separately on each chapter. Since today we're celebrating the Feast of the Spirit, Pentecost, I'll start right now.

Missionary Congregation Intro and Chapter 1
Chapter 1a page 12): "Marginalization, Modernity, and Loss of Center"

Oh, I love Pastor Roxburgh's saying "...we are faithfully to indwell the gospel in a culture that has disembedded itself from that tradition." To incarnate the gospel! At first I wasn't clear on what he meant by the locale of the church, but a couple of sentences later he says "social location," so that's probably what he means; I'd also point out the day of the big downtown First Church buildings and congregations in their early-to mid 20th century form is over and the real church, large, small and medium-sized, has different social, cultural and physical loci and foci these days.

Marginalization presupposes a center and a periphery. So true, and the reminder's helpful to me. The church's marginalization essentially was its "separation from the public sphere." "Christendom" had a "specific kind of theology..." Well, I am so glad the "Christendom church" no longer exists! :) In many ways, those big downtown First Churches were manifestations of a Christendom, the kind of socially established religion you were expected to "learn" if you were growing up in the mid-20th century. Pastor Roxburgh cites Christianity's shift to a "private, individualistic center."

Colin Gunton says, "Modernism…has displaced God as the focus for the unity and meaning of being…" To paraphrase Abram Joshua Heschel's words: God, the Shekhinah, is an outcast, God is in exile...we all conspire to blur all signs of God's presence.

• marginalization of the church;
• humiliation of the church
• disestablishment of the church

What's happening, or, what I hope has been happening, is that Jesus Christ truly is becoming the center of the churches: Christ Jesus, the Human One, with no place to lay his head, who "pitches a tent" among the people and who is the manifestation of the God who declares Godself a stranger and a sojourner with the people, traveling with the people wherever the Spirit leads, rather than in a remote house of brick and mortar. Since the church is the body of the risen Christ (esp in its expression as a local church), that church needs to live with the insecurity (in human terms) of a somewhat peripatetic life and mission, "locating" itself in the location of the need. The church's verbal proclamation and its lifestyle will remain markedly different from the established society's mainstream, thereby implicitly identifying it as a marginal "not-like-us!" However, the biblical witness is an extremely earthy and earthbound one, and we who are created of both spirit *and* of flesh need a physical place to call home! I've previously mentioned First Mariners, my first church home. The congregation was part of an American Baptist city mission endeavor, with the entire diverse project housed in a sizable brick building. But we had a sanctuary room where we typically worshiped, with old-fashioned, lined-up pews, a l-o-o-o-n-g and welcoming communion table featuring a cross, a somewhat out-of-commission 2-manual tracker organ and the grand piano we generally used for leading the music for our worship events.

Another digression: in one of my classes we had an assignment to design the absolutely essential physical structure for a local church, any local church, and my solution was by far the most minimalist: I said the church needs a gathering place, which needs to include a table, a font and a place of the Word. And, I said the community needed a distinctive name...I do not care for all those "First Church" designations at all! Since these days whenever possible I like to preach from the aisle, I might say an ambo is optional, though I still appreciate its symbolic value, and some lectors are uncomfortable if they don't have something to hide behind when they're reading.

Blog note: a while ago I posted about these worship essentials but neglected to explain the ambo was more symbolic for me than it was anything else. Now I'd insist on windows open to the world (ok, in a cold or rainy climate looking out at the world which could be looking in on the gathered assembly) and I might even be OK with a cross as well.