sustain:if:able kiwi

living bread prayers as active, silent, take-home-able

I was leading worship and preaching at my local congregation. The text was John 6. A few years ago, I had used bread rolls. When baked hard, they can be written on with felt pens. It allows a tactile and personalised engagement, as people are invited to write on the bread roll.

This year, I built on the bread roll stations, particularly around prayers for others. I introduced our intercessions as being a time for active but silent prayer. I handed around the baked loaves of bread (cocktail rolls from a local supermarket). I observed they had been baked long enough to be hard enough to write on. I invited folk to pray actively, but silently, by using the felt pens and writing on the bread roll the name of a person or situation that needs Jesus as “living bread.” Perhaps we know someone who is not well, or a situation of conflict.

After several minutes of active silence, I then invited people to place their bread in a plastic bag. The invitation was to take their bread roll home. The plastic bag meant we wouldn’t get crumbs in our handbags or on car seats. And people could use the bread roll during the week, to keep holding, to keep praying, to keep adding things as they came to mind. It was a way of praying actively, silently and in a way that could be taken home into life beyond the gathered service.

It worked well.

Ordinary Time Festivals: An Application of Wisdom Ecclesiology published in Theology Today

I’m delighted with news of a journal article published with Theology Today, a peer-reviewed, quarterly journal connected to Princeton Theological Seminary.

Steve Taylor, “Ordinary Time Festivals: An Application of Wisdom Ecclesiology,” Theology Today (here). (It’s behind a paywall and I can provide an accepted version if folk don’t have institutional access).

Its been quite the writing journey. It began with some thoughts on festival spirituality in my 2005 The Out of Bounds Church? book. During 2018, I began reading theologian Amy Platinga Pauw, particularly her Bible commentary on Proverbs and Ecclesiastes and her book Church in Ordinary Time: A Wisdom Ecclesiology. I wondered if her work on the doctrine of creation and her proposal for a wisdom ecclesiology could make sense of how churches engage in community festivals.

To develop my proposal, I used empirical research of three festivals – a harvest festival in Scotland, a Blessing of the Fleece service at a craft festival in Australia and a neighbourhood festival in Aotearoa New Zealand. I outlined the different ways in which these festivals provided concrete examples of new ways by which the church might theologically participate in their communities today.

I submitted the article around the middle of 2021. It was accepted early in 2022 and was finally! published online this week. I really enjoyed creating a dialogue between theology and qualitative research and was delighted to have the peer reviewers called it “interesting,” “helpful,” and “novel.”

Here’s the conclusion:

Hence, ordinary festivals provide imaginative possibilities for faith communities today. Instead of the present festive barrenness of ordinary time, new opportunities emerge. In ways similar to how the church puts energy into the seasons of Advent and Lent and the festivals of Christmas and Easter, the church can put energy in ordinary time into wisdom festivals. The church turns outward, finding imaginative ways to join hands with God’s ongoing work in creation, making ordinary time good news for church and world. A church could join an existing community festival, like Spin and Fibre, using Pauw’s themes to offer a distinct liturgical presence. A church could, like CompassionFest, offer ‘initiatory’ capacity for a new community festival. This would begin by paying attention through placemaking. The church could enrich existing festivals, for example, exploring ways that a harvest festival might deepen faith formation. As Jesus grew in faith through Passover, so Pauw’s six themes become similarly generative, deepening discipleship during ordinary time. Wisdom ecclesiology becomes a distinct resource, offering a Biblically formed and flourishing praxis of delight, wonder, and perseverance.

knitting is gendered

With Tom Daley knitting at the Paris Olympics, 3 years on from his knitting at the Tokyo Olympics, there is a fascinating article in The Conversation:

Knitting helps Tom Daley switch off. Its mental health benefits are not just for Olympians

The article notes the benefits of knitting for wellbeing and for community. The article also names the gendered nature of knitting. Knitting is an activity, usually done by older women, and normally at home. Each of these three reasons – wellbeing, community and gender – are reasons why I’m researching Ordinary knitters – people who have knitted for church projects. I am seeking to understand what happens when an activity, associated with women, is taken from the home to public places as an expression of Christian witness.

To date I’ve interviewed over 50 people, including people who have knitted Christmas angels to yarnbomb in their neighbourhoods, climate scarves to give to politicians and LOUDfence strawberries to express solidarity with survivors of church abuse. Given that only two of my participants have been male, knitting is clearly gendered.

What is fascinating is how in different ways, a hobby that is domestic and private is being made public. There is Christmas love made visible in streets and parks, concerns for future generations expressed in politicians offices and the secrecy that surrounds abuse made visible in public places. Knitting becomes a way for women to express a public theology.

Cross-training and research capacity

I’ve been privileged to spend the last two weeks at the University of Birmingham, participating in the Psychology Cross-training Fellowship Programme for Theologians. The fields of psychology and theology have multiple points of shared interest. These include what it means to be human and relate to the world around us. Yet often the worlds of psychology and theology talk past one another. Hence the Cross-training Fellowship, funded by John Templeton Foundation.

The Fellowship runs for 16 months and is structured to include

• an initial two week intensive
• monthly online training
• a contestable grant to undertake new research
• a mid-point one week workshop
• a final gathering to share research

The two week intensive has involved training in research methods, introduction to current developments in social psychology and workshopping a research project in psychologically engaged theology. It’s been full on, 9 am to 5 pm Monday to Friday.

Some highlights for me include:

• some really helpful professional development, particularly around research empirical methods and open-science. I use plenty of empirical methods in my work with AngelWings Ltd, as we use different research methods to serve the church. So it was superb to have 3 days listening to current best practice
• space and support in thinking about a research project, supported by a small grant. The support included space to present a possible project, followed by feedback both shared and immediate, and individual in the days following. Having a concrete research project possibility helped to focus attention and provide inspiration
• plenty of formal and informal opportunities to build connections with others interested in interdisciplinary research. These include the other 18 fellows. It also includes networking with theologians and psychology academics. I suspect that connection-making will deepen and interweave even more over the next 16 months and beyond
• the greenery of English summers and the long evenings, in particular the Winterbourne Gardens.

It’s been a rich, intense and engaging experience, for which I’m very grateful to the organisors and funders. I am looking forward over the next few weeks and months to experiencing how the doing of a small research project can further build capacity around interdisciplinary research. That begins with an grant application process. But first, the long trek back to Aotearoa beckons.