Disaster Area

Fear and Gloating in the Anglican Communion

I've pretty much avoided posting about the Anglican Primates meeting in Ireland last week for a variety of reasons. Schism, schmism. I think by now I really don't care how things shake out. As the late Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill once said, all politics is local. Tony Campolo said much the same of religion recently, and I'm guessing he may well be right.

I'm amused by the word primate, because on the one hand it means a bishop who has precedence in a province, group of provinces, or a nation, which is the intended meaning here, but it also includes any of an order (Primates) of mammals comprising humans, apes, monkeys, and related forms. Indeed, when these esteemed archbishop types get together it is sometimes hard to distinguish the leader-like behavior from the ape-like behavior.

And so it proved.

Now don't get me wrong, neither side in the great Anglican debate have covered themselves in glory. They're both quite adept at flinging monkey feces at each other.

The liberal leadership of the Episcopal Church in the USA, while doing what it believes is right, has run pretty much roughshod over any naysayers through the years, to the point where endorsing Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire was pretty much an "up yours" message to the conservative wing of the Anglican communion. The Griz and his pals have proved quite adept at pissing people off over the years.

Then on the other side, in the red corner, we have Archbishop Peter Akinola, presiding over the Anglican church in Nigeria. Nigeria is a country where over 5% of the population is living with AIDS (compare that with only 0.6% for the US and a mere 0.1% for the UK). And yet here's the report of the Standing Committee of the Anglican Church in Nigeria from September 2004. See any mention of AIDS there at all? No, neither did I. In the most populous nation in Africa, its leading Anglican has nothing better to do than fret and fuss over a gay bishop thousands of miles away. Nero would have been proud.

Oh, not that the Anglican church in Nigeria doesn't have a plan. It's just that it's mostly along the lines of the Just Say No campaign. And we all know how stellar a success that has been.

And what of the Anglican moderates? Rowan Williams is attempting to hold together a frail coalition that is slowly tearing apart in many places. Let's not forget the Jeffrey John episode. While placation may seem the like the expedient thing right now, and it does buy some time, in the long run it may not be the best course of action...

Attempting to placate the "southern hemisphere conservatives" is only going to last so long. Akinola isn't going to suddenly wave his arms and say, "Oh, sorry guys, I was just kidding!" And let's also not kid ourselves that the ultra-conservatives in the Episcopal Church (now AAC, AMiA, ACN, whatever they're calling themselves this week) will ever give up either. For them it's not just the gay issue - they are dead set on rolling back women's ordination too. Hello, Deacon Mary.

In all of this, both sides claim to have God on their side, but you know what? In many ways it just looks like the same mudslinging crap we went though in the recent US election, and may well end up with some of the same in the UK.

John 11:35

ec2005 - Brian McLaren on Public Worship as Spiritual Formation

Whew - long weekend playing music for a missions conference and today's service, all while still under the weather from a three week old cold and sore throat. Anyway, I've been listening to yet another great seminar on CD from ec2005 - this time from Brian McLaren. I really hate to gush about anyone, but Brian's speaking style is much like his writing style - friendly and inviting, challenging yet companionable and a joy to listen to.

With the advent of some of the new alt-worship style communities that eschew big communal meetings I was interested to hear Brian's take on this subject. With Maggi's post about the upcoming Worship, Arts, Liturgy and Preaching Conference coming up in April this seemed even more apropos. Obviously from the title Brian is advocating that there are good reasons to have regular public worship meetings. Like any great communicator, it's not so much that what he says is so radical or innovative, but that he makes clear that which often lies hidden in our subconscious.

He starts by saying that the "go and make disciples" would be better translated as "form disciples". With that in mind, public worship is an opportunity to actually do some of the forming. He says there are (at least) eight reasons to engage in public worship as spiritual formation, and here they are. I give you the title and one line summary as Brian gave it (italics) and the rest are my meanderings.

1) Inconvenience
I go to a place I didn't choose at a time I didn't choose to be part of something I do choose. This is part of disciplining oneself. In a world that caters to our every whim, the fact that I choose to inconvenience myself to go to church is an act of spiritual discipline and formation. In my experience my most profound experiences in regular church worship have been when I have reluctantly dragged my sorry butt there kicking and screaming against my own will.

2) Identification
Associating with some people I like and some I don't like for a purpose I believe in. While many of us attend churches where people are just like us, aren;t there always people we would rather not associate with, or that we don't get along with? Much like inconvenience, this is part of an ongoing process of disciplining oursleves to be around people who are not like us and that we may not agree with.

3) Ritual
Doing things I may or may not feel like doing to bond to the meaning they represent. Ritual is often dismissed as meaningIess, but that's only true if we don't understand what the ritual represents. We do need occasionally to teach what the rituals mean, like doing an occasional instructed Eucharist, for instance. Brian also tells of one pastor who gives one sermon a year on "how to listen to a sermon". I liken rituals to sacraments, in that they are an "outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace". Note: I think sacraments are rituals, but not all rituals are sacraments.

Brian says a book that has been helpful is Symbol & Ceremony: Making Disciples Across Cultures (Innovations in Mission) by Zahniser (retired faculty at Asbury College, Kentucky apparently).

4) Speed
Altering the pace of life and rhythms - weekly, seasonal, annual. Protestantism deconstructed the church calendar, eliminating much of the rhythm of the church year. Also, fast and efficient is so embedded in our culture we need somewhere to slow down. What paces are appropriate in our lives?

5) Hospitality
Using my presence and our space to help the other feel welcome in our presence and our community. Yes, the ladies (usually) who host coffee hour are an important part of community. Who is welcome? How do you treat newcomers? How do you treat and welcome the elderly, the very young, the disabled, the sick, the mentally ill?

6) Attentiveness/Receptivity
Waiting for what I may receive only by waiting receptively. Being available and open to hear what you need to hear when it happens in the presence of your community.

For instance - you sit in the pews and hear 52 sermons in a year (OK, so you're a stellar attendee...) Are ll 52 of those sermons going to touch you equally? No. But the discipline of presence and attentiveness puts you in a position to hear the handful that are what you need to hear. And we never know which ones they are ahead of time...

7) Generosity
Take greater pleasure in being fruitful and productive than in being consumptive. Not looking for "what's in it for me?" so much as "what do I have to offer?" Money should be less about funding church programs and more about honoring God with our wealth.

8) Modeling Mastery
Exposing apprentices to masters of the arts of the spiritual life - of prayer, teaching, artistry, faithfulness, service and hospitality (for example). All of our communities have great and experienced people. How can we learn from them, not in a classroom, but by observing them doing what they do best?

Listening to the entire 90 minute seminar there are many more illustrative examples of each and I can see many of them at work in my own church community to varying degrees and they are indeed things I find valuable.

Hope you found this useful too :)

My Church from Space

The Terraserver site is very cool - check out my home church:

That's my church on the right, with the rear parking lot being the stripey area just right of center. The big wooded area is also land we own, but it slopes steeply down the hill. The parking lot in top right is the Mormon church next door. The three buildings at the bottom are two apartment blocks (center) and our ratty gym (bottom right, somewhat indistinct, partially obscured by trees.)

Cool, huh?

Well at least it's a temporary distraction from the Anglican Primates meeting...

ec2005 SD: Listening to the Lost

Spent a lot of my driving time today listening to Jim Henderson's Listening to the Lost: Off the Map seminar from the ec2005 convention on CD. I had no idea at the San Diego conference what this was all about, so I went to something else instead, but heard great buzz about it afterwards, so I got the CD.

Basically, this is three unchurched/dechurched guys (the "lost" - loaded evangelical term, of course) who have volunteered to come in and talk about their lives, their upbringing, their faith or current lack thereof and answer questions. In this case it was a coffee barista, a tattoo/piercing parlor owner/artist and an advertising copywriter.

Amazing stuff, with a lot of great insight. If there's an overarching theme it's that people hate to be condescended to, to feel patronized and demeaned by the typical evangelical approach ("believe or you're going to hell").

So if you get the chance, see it in Nashville (apparently a National Pastors Convention event rather than emergent...)

This would be a cool thing to do in your own church sometime ;)

Again, wow.

We'll Have a Gay Old Time

So as the Flintstones, sorry, I mean the Anglican Primates, meet in Northern Ireland this week, it was appropriate that I spent my drive to work this morning listening to Tony Campolo's talk on homosexual issues at the San Diego conference. As I wrote previously, I attended all but the first twenty minutes in person, so this was more of a refresher than anything else.

First, let me say how absolutely amazing I find Tony Campolo. Here's a conservative evangelical who is a million miles from the shrill right-wing political suck-ups to our beloved president. The religious right label Campolo a delusionary liberal, when by any objective standard he is what he says he is - a conservative evangelical. What the religious right hates about TC is his absolute, utter, steadfast integrity in preaching the gospel as he sees it.

That gospel finds in him a heart for the poor, the disenfranchised, the sick, the needy, anywhere in the world. In his talk he wends his way around the traditional anti-homosexual arguments and finds that, for him, only the passage in Romans 1 essentially prohibits monogamous Christian homosexual relationships as we know them today. He rejects all other oft-quoted scripture on the issue as irrelevant or inapplicable to the situation we find ourselves in today. While he ends up on the other side of the fence to me I have immense respect for the integrity of how he arrives at that position. Not just that, despite holding that position, he argues strongly that there is no excuse for homophobia in the church.

His wife disagrees with him on gay relationships (determining that Romans 1 is primarily about temple prostitution and other wacky goings on at Aphrodite's temple) and is (I presume from his comments) in much the same place I am. A loving, stable, gay relationship that exhibits the qualities of the fruit of the spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, etc.) to at least the same degree as heterosexual relationships, can certainly be blessed and honored.

TC also talks about speaking to an assemblage of Anglican bishops (he doesn't say when - presumably sometime in the last decade, and George Carey was Archbishop of Canterbury at the time.) At that time TC notes that the Anglican communion featured Bishop David Jenkins (widely believed to be somewhat heretical, often cited as doubting the resurrection), Bishop John Spong (pretty much a heretic any way you look at it, but specifically on the issue that the bible has no authority) and significant supporters of the Jesus Seminar (there is no such thing as a living god at work today). All of which the Anglican bishops tolerated because "we're such an inclusive bunch". Yet he berated them soundly for jumping on the anti-gay bandwagon like a bunch of drunken pirates on their first shore leave in five years because "we have to draw the line somewhere". OK, that pirate analogy was mine, not his, but believe me, he pulls no punches.

I guess the bottom line to this whole situation is that he and his wife disagree vehemently on this issue. Yet they remain happily married. Why, and how can this be a model for a church about to be rent asunder?

Because TC opines that if we're going to "draw the line", shouldn't the defining issues be:

• that Christ is risen from the dead
• that the bible has authority (although I think we can still debate what the nature of that authority is)
• that there is a living god at work in the world

...rather than homosexuality? Hmm, don't you think?

And then we get to the actual Primates meeting this week, only to find that Nigerian Primate Peter Akinola and his reactionary friends have hijacked the agenda:

"Led by the primate of Nigeria, Dr Peter Akinola and primate of Central Africa, Dr Bernard Malango, the anti-gay evangelicals used their numerical strength to force the meeting to put subjects such as Aids and world poverty on the back burner and to spend all week debating the threatened schism over homosexuality."

It's good to see that trivial issues of little concern to Africans like, oh, AIDS and world poverty are now firmly on the back burner in favor of issues 5,000 miles away in New Hampshire.

One final point from TC's talk. He suggests that the end of denominational structures is in sight. Decisions in all denominations are being made more and more at a congregational level.

As I heard this at first I thought surely not, but as I've pondered it more and more I believe it to be true. If this is the beginning of the end for a power structure like the Anglican communion, then maybe that isn't the end of the world. In fact, I'm sure it isn't. Once upon a time we needed vast superstructures to know the people we were aligned with. Now with, for instance, the blog world, we know that on a much finer grained level. I'm not sure where this is all headed, but I don't think it's necessarily bad.

Red Sky At Night...

...refinery's alight (apologies to Alan Coren)

Musical Influences Top 10: #6 Roxy Music

The first half of my list has been mostly progressive rock bands. Today's entry started somewhere near that neighborhood, but veered off on a tangent later on. When they started out, Roxy Music were hard to pin down musically. Start with fifties doo-wop and rock, add a lot of synthesizer and tape effects (courtesy of soon to be ambient guru Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno), mix in Andy Mackay's wailing sax and a lead singer in Bryan Ferry who could (and still can) wring emotion from a turnip and you have something close.

Those of you remember later Roxy Music and Ferry's solo career might be surprised and shocked to discover just how avant garde Roxy music were in the early days (those being 1972). Also, you may be surprised to learn that they were one of the late lamented John Peel's favorite finds of the era.

"I think the early 1970s was a kinda boring period because the only bands that got recorded were bands that contained at least one member of a previously successful band, so there was very little coming along that was really new. This was around the time that Roxy Music emerged. In fact they were almost the only band during the first three or four years of the 70s that didn't contain a member of a previously successful band, so from that point of view they were very exciting for the time."

They recorded four sessions for Peel, and I remember listening to the first of them on my tinny little radio, recording the songs on my even tinnier cassette recorder. I was awestruck by the raw emotion that Ferry could summon up on the lengthy If There Is Something. For a sixteen year old with a long history of unrequited love I could identify, believe me...

I would do anything for you
I would climb mountains
I would swim all the oceans blue
I would walk a thousand miles
Reveal my secrets
More than enough for me to share
I would put roses round our door
Sit in the garden
Growing potatoes by the score

OK, maybe the potatoes aren't the most romantic part, but that was the quirkiness that was Roxy Music. Maybe it's also because Bryan grew up in my neighborhood and went to the forerunner of my school.

Eno only stuck around for one more album then went his merry way. The bass player left around lunchtime, to be replaced by a revolving door of bass players. The band has had more bass players than McDonald's has hamburgers.

The band drifted slowly but steadily towards Ferry's vision of art-rock lounge band. Ferry developed a nice little solo career in the mid seventies, starting as early as 1973 with These Foolish Things, and album of classic cover songs. The high point of his solo diversions for me was Let's Stick Together, with Mick Jagger's one-time wife Jeri Hall on, er, vocals I guess you'd call them. Man, those Texan girls can wail.

All righty then. Until next time...

Previous Items:
#7 Barclay James Harvest
#8 Yes & ELP
#9 Pink Floyd
#10 Wishbone Ash
#11 Glenn Miller

What Blogging Is All About

I met Anita at the ec2005 San Diego conference. We chatted a couple of times, and I remember her saying that she used to blog but gave it up a while ago. When she got home, apparently the blogger vibe was so strong in San Diego that she felt compelled to give it another shot, so here she is, reentering the blogging waters.

Today's story is one of those that touched my heart in a lot of different ways.

Happy birthday mom.

Welcome to the 21st Century

Andrew Jones, aka Tallskinnykiwi, advocates eloquently that all of us bloggers figure out the advanced techie options for syndication right now! Yeah, this means you, Dave Rattigan! ;)

Taking Andrew's advice, I signed up on feedburner (free and easy) and thus you see the new xml syndication link at left, and there's also a painless way to add my feed to My Yahoo, which is my favorite web portal anyway. That took all of five seconds to set up.

Hat tip to Andrew, who is a triple threat evangelist (Christ, blogging and Apple...) How he does all that from the Orkney's is nothing short of remarkable.

Sunny Day Out

Check out the photo album link to the right and you'll see "Sunny Day Out". Taking a diversion off the highway coming home yesterday, I stopped by the shore of Lake Washington (the big blue/grey thing in the middle of the greater Seattle area) to take a few pictures. I just put a few up, so check them out if you want to verify that February isn't all dull and grey here in the great Pacific Northwest.