sustain:if:able kiwi

seeing formation: a theology of colour

Can we see formation?

In the Jesus Deck, the card for John 20:16 invites us to see the colours of formation. The risen Jesus appears to Mary. This, for Mary, is a life-changing moment. An encounter, a discovery, a recognition. It is a culmination of a number of years of discipleship, of questioning, following, pondering.

And this is visible. You hear it in her words “Master.”

But you also see it, in the Jesus Deck card, in the colours of the face of Mary. You see, around Jesus is a wheel of colour – hues of pinks, oranges, yellows. What is intriguing is that these same colours are in the face of Mary – she reflects, in hues of pinks, oranges, yellows, the colours of the Risen Jesus. This is deeply theological, a way of seeing the likeness of Christ.

But not Mary. Mary can’t see this. She can feel it. She can verbalise it. But we all know it is impossible to see our own faces. So only the viewer, the other, the outsider, can see the life change, can wonder at the colour.

This suggests a profoundly communal approach to formation. Mary needs us to see. Mary is blessed when we name back to her these colours, tell her what we are seeing. Alone we are limited. Together, all the senses are able to be appreciated.

This connects for me in two ways. First, personally, what are the colours currently in my face? Looking at the card, it struck me that I’ve worked too hard this week. Which directly effects the colours in my face. My being out of balance, my lack of formation, physically, becomes apparent. When I’m rested, when I’m relaxed, when I’ve laughed with friends, that shows – in colour, in my face. That’s interesting to ponder.

(Use of Skype for Formation Panels at Uniting College, to enable connection with remote candidates)

Second, this week at Uniting College has included formation panels. For our ministerial candidates, three times a year, for what amounts to a six year period, they meet with same panel of experienced ministers (for more here) Contemplating John 20:16, looking at the Jesus Deck, I realised that these processes are actually about seeing colour. The candidate can feel the impact of training for ministry. The candidate might verbalise this impact. But they can’t see it. It is the gift of the panel, however humanly, however falteringly, to try to name the colours back to the candidate. This is gift, to have what is happening in you and for you discerned and described.

This is deeply communal approach to formation. To reframe Martin Buber, this is not only the “I” of growth, or even the “I” to “I” of a person with a supervisor or mentor. It is an “I” to “we” encounter, a three way partnership between the Risen Jesus of John 20:16, the individual and some members of the body of Christ.

Third (thanks Lynne), this is missional. Anyone can look at the face of another, or in this case the face of Mary. Those inside and outside the community. The encounter with Christ is not only for Mary, not only for formation, it is part of the work of Christ made visible in our world.

Reframing Lindbeck, through time Christianity has developed a grammar for how the colours are described, named, affirmed. This introduces another layer of embodiment. The body in history has this grammar. Saints before (saints current, other candidates in formation, those in the formation panel, Christians and ministers in general) are also colour carriers. This is another dimension of mirroring. Mary can hear her colours described, Mary can also see colours in the lives of others.

(I realise as I write that this is all grist for the mill in preparation for my September presentation in Sydney – Living libraries: Embodiment and transformation in the context of e-learning)

For more on colours and formation see –
Last year I reflected on the colours of formation – to ask what colours are the processes of formation and the use of a colour wheel to capture the organic changes through life.

Let theory and practice kiss

The separation of theory from practice, the academy from the pulpit is, IMHO, a curse of modernity. Historically theology emerged from the church, from bishops, often in sermons. It grew out of the practice of ministry.

In recent centuries, theology has tended to shift into the university. It has been linked with words like ivory tower. It has tried to pretend in the importance of objectivity, that there is so neutral place by which an overview can be gained. It needs to be research active, supported by academic publishing. And so a dangerous set of either/ors have been set in play. Theory has been opposed to practice, academy to church, lecturers to ministers .. and so the story goes/

At Uniting College, one of our 5 strategic signposts is to promote scholarly and practical excellence in our living, teaching and writing. Is an attempt to get beyond the either/ors that divide us. We value both.

A conversation with a colleague yesterday resulted in the following advertisement being made:

Calling OT Preachers – Liz Boase would love to hear from ministers who regularly use the Old Testament in preaching and worship and would be interested in contributing to her Interpreting the Old Testament unit. Classes start Wednesday evenings in late July. If you have sermons and prayers or would like to find out more, please contact liz.boase at flinders dot edu dot au. This is an opportunity to help students make links between classroom and church.

A class, in which those who use the Bible regularly, are placed in conversation with students and with a PhD qualified. Which would be richer for student, for “practitioner” and for lecturer.

A moment, it seems to me, when theory and practice begin to kiss.

defining church, community, theology, formation and College

Just an advertisement for a car company. And yet –
if a picture says a 1,000 words, then this is a powerful visual question –
what type of church, community, theology, formation and College do we want to be part of?

And if so, how then should we act, what should we practice, what should we affirm?

Where are the theologians?

This is the one of the three stories I used to begin my conference paper at the ANZATS Christians in Communities conference.

I am here among these working-class people in this post-industrial landscape because I want to hear their stories. I take their voices seriously. This is what research in religion means, I fume, to attend to the experiences and beliefs of people in the midst of their lives, to encounter religion in its place in actual men and women’s lived experience, in the places they live and work. Where are the theologians from the seminaries on the South Side, I want to know, with all their talk of postmodernism and narrativity? When will the study of religion in the United States take an emperical and so more realistic and human direction? Robert Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them

It is used in Perspectives on Ecclesiology and Ethnography and so enabled me to engage this new series -Studies in Ecclesiology and Ethnography – from Eerdmans. The story also asks some important questions about theology. Who does it? Where should it be done? How should it be done? Who should it be for? Those questions essentially shaped the rest of the paper.  I began with three examples of ecclesiology and ethnography, including one from my fresh expressions ten years research. I offered a “down under” critique, drawing on the post-colonial work of indigenous researcher, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, to argue that research should be for the community, not the researcher of the academy. 

Finally, I explored how ecclesiology and ethnography could be theology, rather than simply social sciences with a theological cherry thrown on top at the end. This was, I felt, the most creative section of the paper.  I returned to my initial three examples, and argued that in them was a triptych of places in which theological reflection was found – in the researcher, in the community and in the subsequent reflection. By way of example, I then pointed to two places in the second Eerdmans volume, Explorations in Ecclesiology and Ethnography which I consider intriguing illustrations, of the unintended yet potential trajectories made possible through ecclesiology and ethnography. Thus each example returned us to my initial question – Where are the theologians? Because if they are, like Robert Orsi insists, with the congregations in mission, it sets off a rich train of questions about the nature and practice of writing, teaching and formation.

Working on this paper has been about stepping back from my actual ethnographic research into fresh expressions, in order to think more carefully about the very discipline I’m part of.

Living libraries: Embodiment and transformation in the context of e-learning (Conference paper abstract)

A few hours in the air between Adelaide and Sydney gave me time to put together a potential paper for the Learning and Teaching Theology Conference: The Way Ahead. It is being held in Sydney, September 27th- 28th, 2013. It looks a really worthwhile attempt to keep theological colleges thinking about theological education. Since I’ve been involved in a review of distance education here at Uniting College, which has caused me to think theologically about distance education, I scratched together the following abstract.

Living libraries: Embodiment and transformation in the context of e-learning

This paper, in considering the way ahead for Australian theological education, will apply the theological motif of transformation to the task of e-learning, using the notion of “living libraries” as a conceptual bridging strategy.

Recent research by the Transforming Theology project cited the Adelaide College of Divinity (ACD) Bachelor of Ministry as an example of good practice in curriculum design for transformative learning. “The innovative Bachelor of Ministry of Adelaide College of Divinity quite intentionally included a number of such independent and supervised Guided Studies in the final year … In these units an attempt is made to model the process of transformative integration.”

This paper will use a practical theology methodology. It will begin with a case study from recent ACD activity, the participation through video conferencing of a New Zealand church leader in a supervised Guided study “Church Re-think” class.

This moment will be brought into conversation with “living libraries,” an approach to learning that began in Denmark in 2000. Rather than produce a written resource, a youth movement provided people to libraries who had experienced violence. Rather than borrow a book, the community could book a person, and through conversation explore the perspective of another. An independent audit has recorded benefits including new learning and improved levels of community cohesion and engagement.

Returning to the case study, the potential of “living libraries” for new learning in theological education will be analysed under headings of context, lecturer and learner.

This will allow a three fold argument. First, that “living libraries” provide a fruitful way to understand selected pedagogical factors in transformation. Second that “living libraries” provide a way to foreground theologies of embodiment. Third that “living libraries” provide a way bring an explicit theology to bear in regard to pedagogy and digital technologies.

Rev Dr Steve Taylor
Principal, Uniting College for Leadership and Theology

But is it theological? theology as celebratory, communicative, critical

What is theology? Earlier this year, I had an chapter – engaging popular culture then turning to work with one systematic theologian – turned down for a book project. The book, I was told, was in the genre of systematic theology and my piece, while imaginative and of a high quality, did not fit.

I sat in a post-graduate class recently, with a person doing an outstanding presentation on their research. It would involve talking to people about what God was doing in their lives. And the question was asked – but is it theological?

I have a friend with a passion to share the gospel. They want to be able to do this apologetically, engaged with the questions being asked by the culture, by everyday people in everyday conversations. They also want to do PhD study. Can the two mix? Can ordinary communication find a place? Again the question – what is theology?

Rowan Williams, in On Christian Theology proposes that theological activity occurs in three styles.

First, a celebratory style. For Rowan, this type of theology is nourished and nurtured in the language of hymn and prayer. Examples include the theology of the Psalms, the sermons of Gregory of Nyssa, the icons of Orthodoxy and the writings of Hans Urs von Balthasar. Theological activity as celebratory occurs because of the intention, not to argue, but rather to “evoke a fullness of vision – that ‘glory’ around” which theology circles.

Second, a communicative style. “Theology seeks also to persuade or commend, to witness to the gospel’s capacity for being at home in more than one cultural environment.” Examples include Clement or Origin, engaging Stoic and Platonic thought with “enough confidence to believe that this gospel can be rediscovered at the end of a long and exotic detour through strange idioms and structures of thought.” Or more recently (for Williams), the use of Marxist categories in liberation theology and theological readings of feminist theory.

Third, such experimenting often leads to a degree of crisis. As Williams describes it “is what is emerging actually identical or at least continuous with what has been believed and articulated?” This becomes the critical style of theological activity, a self reflection on continuity and coherence. It can be conservative or revisionist and has two ultimate directions, one a nihilism, the other a rediscovery of the celebratory.

Williams observes that each of these styles of theological activity has a different public. Celebratory is for a believing public. Communicative is for those to whom Christianity, in both vocabulary and grammar, are strange. Critical often occurs within the academy.

So what is theology? Often it is deemed to be the third area, the critical area, among the academy. But using Rowan Williams typology, a chapter in a book that explores popular culture and theology is communicative theology. And researching lived experience of people, if they are inside the church, is celebratory and if outside the church, communicative. And a concern to apologetics, for the gospel in everyday life, is communicative.

Hooray for Rowan Williams and the place of hymn, icon, story, gospel, culture as well as textbook and academy.

Sense-gesis: What does Jesus smell like?

Sense Making Faith continues. We have 3 “guides” who share the teaching and 7 participants. Enough for a very rich group experience. Like all good classes, I’m learning as much as the participants.

Last week a rich learning moment occurred as we listened to the noises around the cross. This week a rich learning moment occurred, first as we walked outside. It had just rained and as we walked we became even more keenly aware of night air, wet air, petrol fumes and takeways. We wondered together if a community could have bad smells and what it meant for the church to be a good smell.

Then we returned inside to “smell” the Bible. What are the smells of Christmas, the smells at the calling of the first disciples, the smells of the Easter garden?

The conversation turned to Jesus. What does Jesus smell like? Is the classical Christian affirmation, of Christ as fully human and fully divine, embodied in smell?

In Psalm 45:8 the robes of the Lord are fragrant with Myrrh and aloes and cassia. Is this poetic language? Or does holiness have a smell? Would the resurrected Jesus smell different than the unresurrected Jesus?

All of these, theologically, are pushing at embodiment, what it means for Incarnation to take real presence among us. Some wondered if Jesus smells different ways to different people at different seasons in their lives. Are there times when the full humanity of Jesus is a more pastorally connective than the full divinity? If so, what are the implications for our mission and ministry?

You can see why I love Sense Making Faith!

hearing the cross as sense-exegesis

We are now three weeks into Sense Making Faith course. Each week we take a sense. We explore its use in our world today. And it’s abuse. We explore it’s use in the Christian tradition. And it’s abuse (often through neglect).

Last week we explored hearing. We brought our favourite spiritual music. We listened and made a list of all the noises we heard. We reflected on how much we miss – of ourselves, of God, of our world, because we don’t listen (ie abuse the sense of hearing).

Then we turned to the Christian tradition. What Bible stories describe God speaking, I asked?

The cross, was one response.

Let’s push that further, I said. What noises do we hear around the cross?

And we began to reflect, “hearing” the cross in a whole new way;

• tears
• wailing
• nails being hammered
• gamblers rolling dice
• centurion ordering
• a last breathe being drawn
• thunder
• a curtain being torn

Within two minutes, we had engaged the cross in a much deeper, richer way. This, I suggested, was “sense-exegesis.” We have taken a sense, one sense, and applied it to Scripture. We can do this with any passage. And with any sense.

For more on sense-exegesis, see here and here.

missional communion

An introduction to communion that I shared today, working with our candidates, faculty and visiting ministers, gathered around the topic of self-care.

There is a story of some ministers gathering. Much like us today, to wrestle with ministry. In the question time, a question is raised. A person aware of their world, concerned about the church. How can we bring people to the altar?

The response is made. Is the question how do we bring people to the altar? Or is the question, how do we bring the altar to people?

An important reminder as we gather. It is not that we come to communion, but that in communion God comes to us. In this we are invited to participate in God’s mission.

Yes, it is about our care. In communion God feeds us, centres us, re-values us around grace and redemption.

But it is more than that. It is also about care for the church. In communion God feeds the church, centres the church, re-values the church around grace and redemption.

But it is more than that. It is also about care for the world. In communion God wants to feed the world, wants to centre the world, wants to re-value the world around grace and redemption.

And so we pray; Spirit, fall on us, that these elements of bread and wine may be for us a participation in your life, love and mission, your bringing the altar to people.

the fraility of Follow me

The Bible reading for Sunday, from John 21, got me thinking about aging. It is Jesus encounter with Peter after the resurrection and it is interesting the way discipleship looks both backward and forward.

Backward, to Peter’s denial, as three times Jesus questions Peter’s loyalty.

Forward, as Jesus looks to Peter’s future.

“Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.” John 21:18

This is often taken by commentators to refer to how Peter will die. But it is a fairly standard description of aging. The reading occurred in a church service in which an elderly minister, with significant health concerns, was presiding over what might in fact be their last ever time to lead communion.

Hence my connection with the aging dimension of the text, the inevitably of time in which all of us no longer be able to dress ourselves and rely on others to walk us.

What left me pondering was how the call to discipleship in the text, both forward and backward, is the same: “Follow me.” Whether to previous denial or to a less than mobile future, God invites us into discipleship.

We live in a society that prioritises youth. I like that Jesus calls folk, no matter their age, to discipleship. I see this as encouraging, a reminder that we’re invited into God’s purposes no matter our faculties, that God does not put people on the shelf as their bodies waste.

All this has echoes with a book on my beside table, John Swinton’s Dementia: Living in the Memories of God which is a Christian pastoral response to aging, in particular dementia. It refuses a medical model in the search for a wholistic and fully human theology, of God’s memory.

Which is exactly what is happening in John 21. Peter has been frail, in denial. Peter will be frail, in the future. Both are held by God in Jesus, in the practicalities of food, in the warmth of fire, in the invitation to discipleship no matter one’s age and stage.

Studies in Ecclesiology and Ethnography series: a “down under” perspective

Today I took a break from the Sustainability in fresh expressions book project. I’ve written about 26,000 words, plus transcribed 10 hour long interviews in the last month, and I’m a bit knackered. Lacking sustainability! Plus there were a number of pressing tasks on my academic “must-do” list.

• some lyrical editing (out) of a co-authored paper, with colleague Liz Boase, on Public lament, a conversation between Biblical lament and live concert performances by U2 and Paul Kelly, in order to meet 10% copyright fair use
• complete two book reviews for International Journal of Practical Theology on the initial volumes in the Eerdmans Studies in Ecclesiology and Ethnography series: Perspectives on Ecclesiology and Ethnography and Explorations in Ecclesiology and Ethnography (the latter which will be a must read in my Theology of Ministry Practice Masters class next semester, two wonderful chapters on reading baptisms at a worship service and reading ministry metaphors used by street pastors working with the homeless)
• provide an abstract for the Australia New Zealand Association of Theological Studies (ANZATS) Christians in Communities – Christians as Communities conference in Auckland in July.

It was good, in the midst of a major book writing project, to pause and actually get something done. For those interested here is my conference paper abstract for the Christians in Communities – Christians as Communities conference (more…)

Easter friday childrens talk

(Flowering the cross from an Easter at Opawa Baptist)

Last Easter, sitting in church, I heard a 3 year old ask her mother the “Why” question: Why did Jesus die? I wondered what I would say if I was asked. How to explain something so complex? I had a crack and blogged it at the time – (Why did Jesus die? the 3 year old asked)

There was some helpful comment, folk wanting to grab it for their services, so I thought I would re-post it, but also try and explain some of my working.

I think that Easter Friday is the toughest service of the year for a Christian minister. It is an extraordinary communication challenge and I hope that some of my thinking helps you in your task.

Theologically, there are some things I was trying to avoid. One is an anti-Semitism, which blames the Jews. Not that the three year old might notice. But her parents and the tradition of the church most certainly need to. So the shift that goes on at the end is important (“Not just the people around Jesus. All people. Through history. Even you and I. So much of it.”)

And some things I was wanting to encourage. First, a visual and tactile encounter. So the use of a cross, the horizontal and vertical, as a way of trying to engage that part of a person’s memory making. Communicating is always much more than a rational exercise.

Second, the wholistic. I begin with the social, with all the people. I’m trying to work with more corporate understandings of the atonement, rather than an individualistic “Jesus died for my sins.”

Third, and finally, a range of atonement images. Scripture gifts us a range (Understanding the Atonement for the Mission of the Church) and the least we can do is honour that range, rather than stick with our favourite.

A liberationist (“He said and did things they didn’t like.”) In this model, Jesus is the liberator, who stands for justice. This liberation has a particular approach, a refusal to take up arms against the oppressor, instead choosing, by non-violent acts of protest, to spotlight evil. The result is death. Yet in the economy of God, death leads to life. The death continues to inspire many, down through the centuries to work for justice.

Then there was an Aberlardian exemplar. (“Jesus died as an expression of love, God’s love.”) In this image, Jesus, in life and death is an example of God’s love. I am also riffing on some of Julian of Norwich, her notion of God’s love as being a judgement on us (“Jesus took a different approach. He decided to love them”). In her understanding, we all have our human, selfish, twisted, (subjective) notions of love. We need something outside ourselves to define love in all it’s beauty and purity. That comes to us in the person of Jesus.

Then there is sponge atonement image (“a sponge that soaks up all the spilt milk”). I’m not actually sure that this fits with any of the historic images (Christus Victor, satisfaction, Abelard’s exemplar, substitutionary, liberationist). Perhaps it’s new and unique and I’m a genuinely creative theologian (lol). But I knew that a 3 year old would be able to relate to spills, to mess. And in a much more helpful way than “your sin.” And I personally really connect with the sense of God in Jesus as a sort of cosmic shock absorber. All that pain, torture, desolation, is absorbed on Easter Friday by that body. There is no pushback, no desire for revenge. Simply a care for his family. I am riffing of Miroslav Volf, (Exclusion & Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation) his insight that we need to find ways to break the cycle of violence and that this happens in the cross.

So there we are – some explanation of my theological “workings.” I welcome push back and I hope some of my thinking even if you disagree, helps you in your task.

“Why did Jesus die?” she whispered beside me. Three years old, pretty in pink, shoes not yet touching the floor, her mother gently sushed her.  This, after all, was church. Where visitors want to be seen, not heard.

But it’s the question that needs answering each and every Easter.

“Could we think of the cross?” I thought. “It has a flat piece, a horizontal piece, that points to people. Jesus died because the people around him killed him. He said and did things they didn’t like. He said things about God they didn’t agree with. They couldn’t stop him, so they decided to kill him.

Jesus also died, not only because people did something. But also because some people did nothing. Stood silent. Kept their mouths shout.

But the people around Jesus, that is only one part of why Jesus died. The cross not only has a flat piece, a horizontal piece. It also has an up and down piece, a vertical piece. That points to God.

Jesus died as an expression of love, God’s love. There are many ways to respond to evil people and evil plans. We can fight them, run from them, avoid them.

Jesus took a different approach. He decided to love them. It was like he became a sponge that soaks up all the spilt milk.

In the up and down part of the cross, God sucking up all the evil and pain in the world. Think of all the bad things people have done. And not done.

Not just the people around Jesus. All people. Through history. Even you and I. So much of it.

No wonder he died, one person trying to love all the evil out of life. That’s why Jesus died.”

when it’s broke, there are ways, not to fix it, but to refound it

This has been part of my world this week – Methodist history.

With the guidance of President Andrew Dutney, I’ve been reading about John Wesley (and trying to avoid the interesting diversions like Moravian financial collapses and the resultant impact on mission). I’ve been following a research hunch and testing a research theory. Gerard Arbuckle, From Chaos to Mission: Refounding Religious Life Formation talks about the difference between renewal and refounding. Renewal modifies old methods. Refounding goes back to first principles and allows them to become imaginative resources in the radical rethinking of the way we do things.

Arbuckle thus encourages a focus on the stories, the fundamental questions and the founding vision of the group. Hence my research. If Fresh expressions is about mission what are the mission stories that lie in British soil? How might they be re-found? I’ve been looking at three areas, with Methodism being one. Hence the pile of books.

Take one example: a founding story

“The Wesley emphasis on mission as determining order.” (Rack, The Future of John Wesley’s Methodism)

So the refounding story:

“To determine its shape and structure the future Church may have to return to Wesley’s insight – that such matters be decided by mission.” (Rack, The Future of John Wesley’s Methodism.)

(For another, and very contemporary example, I think this is a superb example of refounding, Andrew Dutney returning to the Basis of Union,)

persuasion: a fine art in mission

You are invited to read this while listening to some wonderful Kiwi music, a song called Persuasion, by Tim Finn.

As part of my sabbatical, I’m reading through Paul’s letter, Philippians. I like to bury myself in a Bible book, to read it in one whole go, then segment by segment, a number of times, over a number of months. It becomes for me a sort of recalibration, a reminder of priorities.

Once I’ve engaged Scripture, as a whole, and in segments, I then augment it with a commentary, which adds depth and original context. So over the last few days, I’ve begun reading Ben Witherington’s, Paul’s Letter to the Philippians: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary

He argues for Paul’s use of rhetoric, that in a rhetoric-saturated culture, one in which the “vast majority of people were either producers or eager consumers of rhetoric,” (page 24) that Paul deliberately learns, then uses, this culture way of arguing.

So for example, a feature of Philippians is the absence of Old Testament bible verses. Paul is writing to a highly Romanised culture and in that world, he uses different ways to persuade, including the widely practiced communication art called rhetoric, the art of discourse, the study of how to engage head and heart, skillfully, with spoken words.

Why? Because of mission.

“One cannot command people to believe the gospel but must persuade them … [ever after conversion] … Paul knew that it continued to be better to persuade than to command one’s converts … The objections and the mental and emotional obstacles in the minds and hearts of the listeners had to be answered and removed.” (Ben Witherington, Paul’s Letter to the Philippians: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary 23)

We live in a culture that uses different forms. Not rhetoric, but digital storytelling, art and social media. So, mission in the way of Paul includes giving up on commanding belief, and being willing to not only learn, but also use, the fine arts of persuasion.

As Tim Finn sings,

I will always be a man
that’s open to persuasion