Gerard Kelly's Blog, page 8
July 4, 2011
Makoto Fujimura | A Letter to North American Churches
I have long admired Makoto Fujimura as a brilliant artist and deep and honest theologian of art. Spirituality so invades his work that he qualifies, in my mind, as a visual mystic. His 'letter to the church' , though set in a U.S. context, has something to say to all of us…
Tour de France 2011. This is how close we get to immortality on...
Tour de France 2011. This is how close we get to immortality on Thursday. Stage 6 of the Tour - Dinan to Lisieux, passes 340 metres from Bethanie. As a result, not only will we have a fun day on Thursday, but we now have a newly paved road, beautiful for cycling on and precisely coinciding with our route to the Cafe at Le Billot. Tell me that's not God…
July 1, 2011
Sermon on the Mound (by phos pictures)
I found this very...
Sermon on the Mound (by phos pictures)
I found this very moving… also other Eliot Rausch projects, which have a real depth to them…
Welcome to the Age of the Church
My recent reading has included a fairly major trawl through high-level theology and ecclesiology for 'Church Actually' Spring Harvest's 2012 theme. This has included some of the 20th Century's biggest hitters from across the denominational spectrum, not least Hans Kung (Catholic), Wolfhart Pannenberg (Lutheran), Miroslav Volf (Pentecostal) and Jurgen Moltmann (Reformed). Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen's IVP book 'An Introduction to Ecclesiology' is a great way-in to these and other scholars. The most striking thing about reading these thinkers side-by-side has been the extent to which they agree on so many core ideas. Strong themes emerge for the church that, from all sides, are affirmed. Among these are four emphases - the church as a movement of people, all of whom are called; the church as a community formed and in-dwelt by the Holy Spirit; the church as an embodiment of the incarnational servant ministry of Jesus and the church as a foretaste of God's world-wide, every-culture dream for the human family… Naturally enough these massively talented theologians have some issues with each other on specifics and definitions, but they are remarkably united on core themes. And those same themes resonate with much of what we are seeing God do in a rising generation. Here in the UK, projects like The Eden Network, Urban Expression and Street Pastors (among many, many others) are hearing a resounding call from God to step out into these same themes: loving the church, even with all its history and histrionics, but moving forward into a real engagement with community, unity, mission and transformation. The term 'missional church' has moved in just the last five years from being a fringe academic concept to being on the lips of thousands. There is a tide rising which puts God's church front and centre as the hope of the world, God's Plan A. It may not be easy to see after the 'long dark night of the soul' that the 20th century has been for the Western church, and it is surely not yet clear just how it will come to pass - but is there a movement rising in the world that will make the 21st century, perhaps more than any era before it, the age of the church?
June 29, 2011
Welcome to the Merging Church
As part of research for Spring Harvest next year, I've just read again through Eddie Gibbs' and Ryan Bolger's "Emerging Churches". Published in 2005, the book is based on research and interviews conducted over the preceding 5 years. As such it is a very worthwhile snapshot of the way those self-identifying as 'emergent' felt about themselves, and it highlights really well the principles and practises driving the movement. But as I read through, I was struck by the strangest feeling. I realised that these are for the most part the same principles currently shaping the ministries of dozens of leaders I know in well-established, mainstream churches. These include a number who have moved from emergent expressions into formal ordination but who haven't, in doing so, changed anything of their goals or preferences. Rather than caving in to institutionalism, they have found institutions all to willing to welcome and deploy them. It is our churches that are changing, adapting to the findings of a radical and revolutionary movement. So here's to the most significant development in 21st Century ecclesiology, the merging church: the unexpected love-child of a radical generation looking for work and an established church looking for a future. Bringing continuity and creativity together and marrying mission with maintenance, the merging church is the most hopeful movement we have seen for decades, and is already producing a crop of new groundbreaking churches….
June 28, 2011
Humanic...
The roots of the kingdom are in God's divinity. It is because God is God that the kingdom is even possible. Without the reality of the God who is wholly other than us, all we've got is us. And 'us' has not been good news for planet earth so far… The Godness of God is our hope. But the fruits of the kingdom - the aims and the goals and the projects and the possibilities - are not in God's divinity but in our humanity. The coming of the kingdom doesn't change God - it changes us. Everything about what God wants to do is about what God wants to do in and through us…. The kingdom of God is a human kingdom in the sense that a tree that grows apples is an apple tree and a studio that makes films is a film studio. We are the product; the fruit; the result; the work in progress. When God declares a vernissage for his Kingdom exhibition, we are on display: in all the battered beauty of redeemed humanity. Forging love and justice from the raw materials of frail humanity is what God does. God is humanic - obsessively in love with people. We've been told for years that God is mad with us. It's about time we understood that God is mad about us….
The Beauty of God
One of the gifts an aesthetic generation is bringing to the church is a renewed appreciation for art, the arts and artfulness. The recovery of art, long overdue in churches obsessed with precisions of truth, has been liberating for many. But all too often our reflections on art are filed in the category of 'creativity'. Artists are seen as 'creative' people and their gifts are appreciated only is so far as they help us to be 'creative' in our faith - or in our marketing. This is valid up to a point, but doesn't go far enough. The category within which art can most revolutionise our lives is not 'creativity' but 'beauty'. Beauty is a category fundamental to the created world, and the search for it obsesses millions. We chase it; fake it; pay for it; idolise it. We falsely tie it to sexuality. We sell short our longing for true beauty and find satisfaction in lesser gods. Artists, when true to their calling, alert us to beauty. They make signposts to the deeper beauties inherent in the world around us. Their work doesn't need to be married to marketing, or for that matter evangelism, to be justified. To declare beauty is enough. Artists who are also people of faith serve their community by exploring the intimate connection between the beauty of creation and the beauty of the creator. To declare God beautiful is mission. Artists are heralds of the beauty of God. Along with recovering the practise of art, the church needs to re-discover a theology of beauty. When was the last time you talked about - or for that matter thought about - the beauty of God?
June 27, 2011
Re-writing 'missing' as 'mission'
There is a great deal of talk right now about the 'missing gneration' of the church. The UK Methodist church, the Evangelical Alliance ands the Presbyterian Church of Ireland are just three of the groups to have put their names behind the term: many others concur. Often defined as the 18 to 30's, but sometimes more widely as the 20's and 30's, the missing generation are the age group most conspicuously absent from Europe's churches. A 2006 church attendance survey revealed that in England over 34% of over 16s have never had meaningful contact with a Christian faith community. A host of responses are offered, from youth congregations to alternative worship services - all designed to attract young adults. But the most vital ingredient is probably not attraction at all. It is involvement. These same young adults who don't want to engage with church are engaging with their world. They are often spiritual, widely activist and deeply aware of the need to transform our world. Expressed in the most blunt of terms, they are not staying away from church because they don't want to be involved. They are staying away because they do. The root back to commitment is not through attendance but through mission - engagement with God's work in the world. Among the poor. In places of need. In the arts. The new generation want to discover beauty and love and generosity and justice and peace. They want to believe that a beter world is possible; that we can indeed be our best selves. They just don't see where these desires connect with church as they've seen it. There is only one proven means of reaching a missing generation. Invite them to become a mission generation.
June 25, 2011
Hungry for Heaven
Watching the BBC transmission of Coldplay at Glastonbury was mesmerizing. Like Mark Radcliffe I can confess to have been underwhelmed by Coldplay in recent years - but this was a performance in a different league altogether. To see thousands of people singing the gospel-inspired 'Fix you', a sea of hands in the air… there is only one word to describe such a moment. It was worship. Back in 1995 poet Steve Turner wrote 'Hungry for Heaven - Rock 'N Roll and the Search for Redemption', developing the thesis that popular music is ultimately religiously driven. If you need proof that music is born of a longing for the divine, this evening at Glastonbury offered it. What do people think they are reaching for, as they stretch their hands to the sky? Probably a thousand different things: as many different creeds and credulities as there are people in the crowd. But somewhere at the root of each longing is the same God-given dream. That the world can be as it should be. That beauty is possible. That love lives. Music may not hold the answer to such longings, but it is the loudest, the strongest, the most aching means we have of asking the questions.
