sustain:if:able kiwi

images of church in society: Why we need salt not exodus

Exodus is a powerful and repeated Biblical motif. For Israel, and for many oppressed people’s through time, it has defined a profound liberation from bondage and a life of service in response to a God who led through perils to a new land.

But spatially, Exodus relies on a “going out.” The people are to leave behind what is bad.

Contrast the metaphor of exodus with the metaphor of salt and leaven, which work only by staying within. Salt needs meat, leaven needs dough and so the metaphor acts spatially, in a startlingly different way than Exodus. Rather than leave in order to become God’s community, we become God’s community from within, by digging in and staying put, by infiltration, rather than by separation and removal.

Marianne Sawicki suggests that this metaphor, of salt and leaven, was actually the dominant metaphor for the very early church.

“Jesus’ first followers knew that there was no escape, no place to get away from the civil war and personal evils confronting them. They had to figure out how to live in a landscape compromised by colonial oppressions. They would seek and find God’s kingdom precisely in the midst of that.” (Marianne Sawicki, Crossing Galilee: Architectures of Contact in the Occupied Land of Jesus, 155)

She describes this as a “stealth operation” that looks for the Kingdom of God in the midst of (Roman) oppression. “It presumes that imperial structures will remain intact so that they can be infiltrated. This is a resistance that exploits the empire; it does not defeat, neutralize, kill, or escape from its host.” (162) She draws both on the parables and on the missionary text that is Luke 10, in which the disciples “indigenize themselves by attaching to the family that employs them.” (163)

This is a pattern of cultural immersion. It’s deliberate.

It’s also a pattern of cultural resistance. Salt not only preserves, it also corrodes. In other words using the metaphor of salt and leaven to understand ourselves as the church, allows “the gospel to be both corrosive and preservative like salt … to be infectious, expansive and profane like leaven.” (155) As a metaphor it still encourages the church as a contrast community, refusing to bless the culture.

Sawicki suggests that perhaps the church today – globalized, enmeshed in consumerism – might find the salt and leaven metaphor a most useful stance in relation to our world:

The kingdom of God is not free-standing. It has to be sought in the middle of something else … [it] can take the form of small-scale refusals to comply with the alleged inevitability of the pomps and glamours of middle-class life … the commuting lifestyle; so-called “life insurance” and retirement funds; careerism; the “soccer mom” syndrome and the overscheduling of adolescent activities; fast food; fashionable clothing … (174, 175)

It strikes me as a fantastically practical, deeply Biblical way for Christians to see ourselves in the world today.

the state of play: Australian film

Eric Repphun, who graduated last year with a PhD in religious studies and film (a project which I was involved in supervising), is currently writing on Australian film, specifically Balibo, Van Diemens Land and The Proposition (here). He is arguing for a growing genre of film in which he sees Australia film seeking to engage it’s past. He writes:

These two very different films hammer home something that has been increasingly clear in the past few years: Australia, as a nation, is attempting through the cinema to shed the shackles of its national ghosts, or at least bring these spectres into the full, harsh light of day. This is more than simple katharsis, it seems, bridging over into some more elemental; expiation maybe, even exorcism. Australia – or at least Australian art, as the Australian government seems to be committed to continuing its long history of criminal behaviour – is engaged in a collective exorcism. This is true, I suppose, of only those people who make these films or the people who choose to see them instead of Transformers. Perhaps this needs a further clarification, as this exorcism is largely confined to the ghosts of Australia’s European past. The long plight of the Aboriginal peoples is still largely consigned to the darkness, or is subject to well-meaning but ultimately hollow official attempts at apology. Something like Philip Noyce’s film Rabbit-Proof Fence, for all its striving nobility, simply doesn’t pack the emotional punch and the raw sense of wrongness that characterises the film-as-exorcism.

Seeing as I’m doing a paper on Sociology of Ministry in a few weeks, I’d be interested in how Australian’s respond to what Eric names and claims, as I am sure would Eric.

indigenous tables and the prayerful art of gentle space-making

The phrase

belongs to Sarah Coakley (from her Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender (Challenges in Contemporary Theology), page 35. She is wrestling with what to to with the kenosis, the word found in Philipians 2 and used to discuss the vulnerability and self-emptying of Jesus.

For Coakley, Christology is “what rightly distinguishes Christian feminism from various secular versions of it” (3) and so the question she wrestles with is how to lose one’s life in order to save it, particularly in light of feminist anxiety around themes of fragility, vulnerability, self-emptying.

In other words, if I am vulnerable, won’t I then be taken advantage of? If I’m a minority, what hope is there in the notion of losing one’s life in order to find it?

Earlier in the week I blogged about the privilege of sitting with Covenanting Committee, a group set up to maintain relationships between indigenous Aboriginal people and the Uniting Church. It seemed to me that some of the same questions and anxieties were present – how, as a minority, might we find voice, be heard, be part of change, yet in ways that are distinctly Christian?

Coakley offers a number of suggestions.

Firstly, there is her approach. She is a careful, exacting reader, looking back through history to argue that the Christian history is rich and complex. Thus various notions of kenosis have existed and when rightly understood, are not in fact demanding complaince, but a strength made perfect in weakness and in a way that does not replace one form of secular power with another form of secular power.

Second, there is her conclusion, prayer. In particular, wordless prayer. The regular habit of responding to God. This is not pietism, a withdrawal, a silencing but rather “the place of the self’s transformation and expansion into God.” (36)

If anything it builds one in the courage to give prophetic voice. (35)

It’s a fascinating place to conclude: that each and any of us, no matter how marginalised, have power: are invited into a spiritual way of living, in which space is made for the other that is not us. In so doing, we let God be God.

indigenous tables and Sarah Coakley’s Power and Submissions

I spent today with the Covenanting Committee. Five “white’s”, five indigenous people’s and me! – the visitor! – sweating under fans on a day forecast to reach 37 degrees.

The Uniting Church has a partnership with the Congress, developed and managed by Indigenous people to provide spiritual, social and economic pathways for Australia’s First People. It is the task of the Covenanting Committee, who met four times a year, to ensure ongoing dialogue between the Uniting Church and the Congress. It was a profound privilege to sit in a church hall, surrounded by indigenous art and simply listen to contemporary struggles. Here are some notes I took:

• don’t forget that equal partnership will require similar resourcing
• the importance of oral tradition
• the systemic damage of memory loss
• the importance of places in which Aboriginal people feel comfortable to go
• “breaking of spirits” caused by ongoing injustice
• the despair at the lack of a treaty as a starting point for relationships between indigenous and colonisers
• the need for non-Aboriginal advocacy, by “white” folk, and thus a key role for the church today
• that the experience of colonisation continues in Australia today
• why can’t there be a real, dinkum, Aussie “fair go” for Aboriginal people
• the hope found in the Biblical narrative – that the earth is the Lord’s (not the coloniser’s), and the curtains/walls that separate can actuallly be turned down
• the need for voice, not just to speak once, but in shaping the process and leading to action
• the need of missional leaders – able to be pastoral, political and prophetic – in all areas – health, housing, schooling, prison, church and community development
• how does self-determination link with needing resources
• why is this Congress church so much more run-down looking than all the other Uniting church buildings I’ve been in?

Needing some processing space, I stopped for a coffee. Needing to read, I pulled out Sarah Coakley’s Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender (Challenges in Contemporary Theology).

What is normally dense theology suddenly became alive. Does Christianity repress people, including indigenous? How might the way of Christ and the relationships of the Trinity help the repressed find voice? I’ll try to blog book notes over the next few days, but today I simply wanted to name the personal vitality present for me today in the table at which I sat and the reading I began.

seachange, foreshore and seabed, as a theological category

Earlier in the week I blogged about seachange as a important strand in contemporary Australian identity and the wonderful article by Wendy Snook in Reimaging God and mission, edited by Ross Langmead. As I read, a number of factors were resonating for me and with me.

First, was the importance of the foreshore in Kiwi cultural identity. New Zealand is an island nation. All people that arrive in New Zealand must come by the sea. The recent foreshore and seabed issue simply highlights the importance of the sea for identity, both for Maori and Pakeha (recent developments here). For Maori it is a place of feeding. Equally, Kiwi theologian Neil Darragh writes of the impotance for Pakeha

“the beach, the sea, the sand, not so much as the holiday beaches of sun and sea, but the sand – shifting margin between solidity of land and fluidity of water, a standing-upon, walking-upon, lying-upon margin of sound and touch and taste and smell and sight.” (“The Experience of Being Pakeha,” CIT, Unpublished paper, May 1991.)

In coming to Australia, aware of the symbolic importance of the outback, I feared that this strand of identity might be lost for me. So it was such a joy to see it narrated as essential for Australia.

Second, it resonated with some Biblical work I’ve done around the seashore. In the midst of the foresore and seabed controversy, I began to read the gospels, wondering what Jesus did on the foreshore. What happens when we read looking for change on the beach? Here is some of what I wrote:

Sea(as-a-place-of)change is a recurring motif in the ministry of Jesus, as he engages with human identity, history and relationships. There is a dynamism at work, in which boundaries are challenged, dis-placed, and re-storied. The call narratives (Luke 5:1-11) occur on the seashore and it becomes a place of encounter, call and commitment. On the seashore, Jesus announces the Kingdom, as in the Kingdom parables in Matthew 13, which are placed “by the lake” and Jesus challenges the ethics of Pharisee encounter with anOther.

Above the seabed Jesus miraculously demonstrates his identity as Son of God. The calming of the sea (Matthew 8:23-27) illuminates Jesus as the Lord of Creation. The fear of the disciples, caught without warning in “a furious storm,” is symbolic of the fear of a land-locked nation. In response, the Son of Man turns chaos into order and bring peace by facing the storms that are part of seachange.

In John 21:1-19, the seashore again stands as a place of encounter, call and commitment. This post-resurrection narrative places the disciples doing what they do best, working the seabed, and the foreshore as a place of encounter. Jesus is on the foreshore, where he has lit a fire and is cooking some fish. One might suggest that the narrative theologically places Jesus as exerting his customary fishing rights as Lord of Creation and Chief Fisher of people.

Hence the metaphor of seachange is both a sociological reality shaping identity (Australiasian) and it’s a theological category that invites us to consider life change. It’s also an ethical category, in light of climate change.

seachange and Australian spirituality: updated

(Updated after email conversation with Wendy Snook.)

On Sunday afternoon, our youngest suggested that we think carefully about our church participation in Adelaide. What about inviting people to walk the beach and give them different things to think about and do. Then we could all meet afterward at our house and share together. A creative idea from our youngest.

And then to stumble this week across a fascinating article by Wendy Snook, “The Gospel and Sea Change/Tree Change Cultures,” in Reimagining God and Mission: Perspectives from Australia, 179-198.  The title is a play on the ABC TV programme, Sea Change, in which a high flying city lawyer undergoes a ‘Seachange’ and moves to a smaller beachside community. Snook argues that this migration pattern is a major driver in Australian culture and as such, has considerable implications for mission in Australia.

Sea change and tree change migration is a significant event in Australian spirituality, demography and the Australian landscape. People going through a sea/tree change are searching for major transformation, physically, mentally and spiritually.

She argues for a shift in Australian identity, from outback to out-beach. Australian identity has shifted to the edges and “that here is the place of creativity and potential for individuals and nations.” (Snook, 181). She notes that in the last 35 years more than a million people have left cities for smaller seaside towns. Many are under 40, most are Australian-born Anglo.

She then argues that there are six types of “sea change/tree change” people, resulting in diverse lifestyles. She names the following:

• daily commuters, in which home is a rural fortress from urban stress
• weekend migrants, in which people maintain two homes, “vege” out by the sea over the weekend and take a long time to integrate into the local community
• wealthy alternative lifestylers, perhaps with large investment incomes, with time and who often enter with great gusto in the local community
• service providers, seeking economic opportunities as populations increase. They tend to fit easily into communities although their children often leave for higher education
• retirees on fixed income, often asset rich but cash poor
• lower income welfare recipients and unemployed (including radical alternative lifestylers).

These six groupings have shared concerns, including a concern for the environment a hunger for the natural environment and “often a search for an experienced spirituality” (192).

However, these groupings are also quite diverse and Snook now believes (personal communication) that this has major implications for minister and ministry. These groups can be chalk and cheese and the usual rural pattern of one minister for a number of grouped communities will lead to conflict. What is required is the proactive placement and nurturing of leaders, ideally local, to match the groupings present.

She gave the example of St Georges Uniting Church, in Eden, where careful leadership development has resulted in much innovative life, including the Garden of Eden project. This looks a superb missional long-term experiment in community development, including

• places for organic food growing, bush tucker, and a cob oven
• a semi-Circle Garden with local flowering natives gives a beautiful entrance to the Church and Garden
• a mud brick shed, with our own mud bricks!
• spaces for reflection, meditation and worship
• arts and crafts, such as mosaics, murals and sculptures
• cultural heritage, such as the “Eden Heritage Garden Trail” that links with other gardens in Eden

So, returning to my introduction, my youngest is on to something. Seachange – sea-and-change – is an important strand in Australian spirituality. It will demand though, a careful listening, in order to discern the variety of factors that push and pull people, and to consider how “life, and life to the full” can be nourished.

mate, that church is freezing and boring! australian religious identity

Some fascinating perspectives on Australia and religious identity, from Philip J Hughes, “Religious Trends in Australia,” in Reimagining God and Mission: Perspectives from Australia, 27-43.

While the Pentcostal growth has been significant in relation to the history of religious groups in Australia, the overall growth in relation to the picture of the Australian population is small. Only one percent of the population identify with the Pentecostals. Many people try them for a short while and move on. The Pentecostals are not taking over. They are attracting a small portion of the population, but leave many Australians cold.  Many people are wary of the enthusiasm, commitment and attitudes to authority within Pentecostal churches. (Hughes, 30)

Only two-and-a-half per cent of all Muslims in Australia were born of Australian-born parents … All of these [Islamic] groups will weaken over time. They are struggling to adapt to their new cultural milieu. (Hughes, 33, 34)

The militant forms of secularism and atheism, which show their faces from time to time in the mass media, are rarely found in the younger proportions of the population. (Hughes, 37)

Much has been made of the rise of spirituality in the Australian scene, in contrast to the decline in religiosity. However, the size and importance of this movement has been considerably over-emphasized. The actual proportion … [is] about two-and-a-half percent of the total population … While few are antagonistic to spirituality, for comparatively few Australians it is even on the radar – despite the small and enthusaistic numbers who fill classes in some university courses on it. (Hughes, 36, 37)

In other words, Pentecostalism, Islam, new atheism and the rise of spirituality have been over-hyped.

Q. What is going on?
A. The “whatever” of postmodernity

Since the 1960s and 1970s, there have been huge changes in the nature of culture. Globalisation and the Western emphasis on the individual have contributed to culture becoming more fluid, created by individuals rather than being tied to ethnicity … Most engage with religion if they find it helpful … many are put off religious services because they find them boring and irrelevant. (Hughes, 38, 39)

Hughes also notes the notable absence of the following groups from churches:

• those in non-nuclear family groupings ie de facto, separated, homosexual
• working class ie those whose lives revolve around production, service and skilled trades. “There is very little of what happens in churches which relates to the world in which these people work and earn their living.” (Hughes, 40)

Immediate “missional church” responses as I read Hughes:
1. Offer CHOICE. Multiple pathways including diverse services, block courses, study groups, spirituality days, take home resources.

2. Get rigorously critical of your church services. Take the “Father Bob” test – earthy, humour.  Because we’re boring!

3. Ask each other “So what?” In the “lucky country” how on earth does God/faith/spirituality shape your everyday life? Hughes writes that “The spirit does affect every other dimension of life.” (43). So keep asking each other the “so what” question and then find ways to chatter that in the public domain (video on the internet, postcards, billboards, storytelling in church).

Religion in (Aussie) public spaces

While channel surfing last nite (looking for the tennis) I heard the announcement, that a “Father Bob” was the upcoming TV feature.

“Father Bob.” The name sounded potentially religious, and since my interests are in how church relates to society, I thought I’d pause the tennis and check out this “Father Bob.”

Sure enough, on came Father Bob. He was an elderly gentleman. Full of cheer. Who seemed to be linked to a church. Who had a news assignment that, of checking out the Big Day Out. Cruising around, checking out the merchandise, interviewing band members (Powderfinger) and Big Day Out concert attendees, asking what would it take for them to come to his church. Then back to the studio and Father Bob continues his dialogue with the panel.

My mouth is hitting the floor.

You’d never seen anything like this on New Zealand TV. Priests and ministers only appear in the public media in relation to scandals and moral issues. They’re on the back foot, under the pump. Yet here, on prime time Aussie TV, at a prime time slot (7 pm), is a priest. Being portrayed in a human, humane and humerous way, helping carry a news story.

Is this unique to Father Bob? Or does this actually suggest that Australia is less secularised than New Zealand? And that the church has a much higher acceptance in the public (Aussie) space?

Oh, and the answer to Father Bob’s question: “What would it take for them to come to his church?” (Man I hate that question and the way it reduces mission to church attendance and spirituality to come-to-us consumption)

Question: What would it take for them to come to his church?
Ans: Music. Get some bands in. Entertain the back row. Get your hands in the air.

Australia Day 12 months on

Today is Australia day. A year ago, I participated in the Australia day synchroblog, an (excellent) initiative of Matt Stone. My personal contribution was a review of a book on Australian missiology: Credible Witness by Australian Darren Cronshaw (published by Urban Neighbours of Hope in 2006). Here’s what I wrote:

It’s an excellent missional resource. It takes Australian context seriously. It asks what the Spirit might have already been doing in that place. In the case of Credible Witness, it trawls Australian history and the place of chaplaincy, of shepherds, of advocates for the marginalised, of servants and of generous hosts. What I love is how it refuses to stay with history, but suggests contemporary expressions of these images.

At the time, I had NO idea, that in 12 months time, I’d be living in the great red land. But I did quote a prayer, by Michael Leunig, for myself and for Australia on Australia Day 2009, that in hindsight, looks quite remarkably prophetic:

God help us to change. To change ourselves and to change the world. To know the need of it. To deal with the pain of it. To feel the joy of it. To undertake the journey without understanding the destination. The art of gentle revolution. Amen.

To read the entire Australia Day 2009 post, go here.

Dark Victory: a window onto real Australia?

while sick, I read Dark Victory.

John Howard (then Prime Minister of Australia) said of the people rescued by the Tampa and sent for processing to Nauru, “We have always stood ready to take our fair share’. In the end, New Zealand took 186. Australia took one.” (page 289)

This book investigates recent Australian political history, most particular August 23-November 10, 2001. It begins with the Tampa incident, in which a boatload of refugees, seeking refugee status in Australia, were rescued by a passing cargo ship, the Tampa and then refused entry into Australia. It documents the politics, including the way John Howard and his Labour Liberal party fought, and won, an election, by merging a post 9/11 fear of terrorism with the arrival of Afghan and Iraqi people seeking refuge in Australia. It describes the military role, including towing boats back to Indonesia and the death and trauma that resulted. (The net impact was the forcing of 2390 boat people away from Australia, at a cool cost of about $500 million).

In doing so it suggests a profound racism lies at the heart of Australia, what one commentator called “dog whistle” politics, pitching a message to one group of voters that other groups do not hear. It raises some disturbing questions about the lack of hospitality in Australia, and the privileging of (white) colour.

The book is compelling written (I read it in a day, while sick), mixing personal narratives with the complex machinations of government affairs, military chains of command and media response. It is surprisingly free of editorialising, choosing instead to simply lay out the facts.

From a missiological perspective, it is interesting to see the church portrayed as prophetic in it’s critique of the government, sounding a clear call on behalf of the poor and dispossessed. This however, was what I call church “powerful” – leaders and thinkers. It left me wondering what on earth was happened at the local congregational level. What were pastors in rural churches preaching (or not preaching), during this period. (That would make a fascinating research project).

It is easy to feel a bit smug, reading this as a New Zealander, hearing our name mentioned as a country willing to make space. The cynical part of me wonders what would happen if we weren’t protected by the great red land, and if boat people were arriving on our shores? Is their “dog whistle” politics at work when Brash talks of Kiwi not iwi, or Winston Peters wants New Zealand land for New Zealand owners?