2008/07/29

Things I have learned

I've been in the USA for over two weeks. It's my longest ever visit. Watching Fox news has become something of a morbid fascination. Here are some things I have learned:
  • The real problem with universal healthcare is that the 46m people who don't have medical cover right now will want it. And that means they will want doctors. And there aren't enough to go around. So the whole idea is a non-starter.
  • Obama's international tour was foreshadowing his would-be role as Commander-in-Chief. Not as top diplomat, or representative of all branches of government. No; as guy-with-the-nukes. Gee, that's really encouraging.
  • Americans have to tell their doctors which drugs they want. At least, that's what I surmise from the adverts explaining how wonderful the therapies are. In my country, the doctor tells you what she/he thinks would be good for you.
  • Fox news is fair and balanced. Say it every five minutes, like a mantra, you might start to believe it.
  • $4 for a gallon of (albeit ludicrously low-octane) fuel is a lot of money. [Ha! What a joke. No; I don't believe that one.]
  • If you are poor enough to qualify for Medicare, you can still get pressured into buying a top-up card to cover all the things that Medicare doesn't. It could save you thousands of dollars, apparently.
I'm sure there are more gems, but eventually it all just washes over you.

2008/07/27

Preaching by video

So, most of the sermons at Mars Hill church are presented by (live) video. That's of interest to me: I've often wondered how we would "do" church differently if the apostles, or the reformers (or any other era that's had a big impact on how we conceive of what we do) had had access to modern media.

If the objective of the sermon is to teach the Word (as most churches from the somewhat reformed rightwards tend to say it is), then it seems peculiar that, today, we have pastors, lay preachers, and others spending hours preparing sermons for themselves. Some are much more gifted and insightful than others; and some are simply much better communicators: why not have videos of them preaching, teaching, and admonishing, rather than one of us stumbling through our own particular thoughts? You can make a classical evangelical argument out of that: spiritual gifts are given, surely, to the whole church. Modern media means that there really doesn't have to be a one-to-one mapping between gifted preachers and local fellowships.

I see a number of counter-arguments:
  1. The "sermon" isn't really just about teaching the word (or the Word). It's about the formation of the community. It's about deepening the speaker's own spiritual life. It's about addressing the issues germaine to the moment, in the community.
  2. Educational establishments are widely giving up on traditional lectures, finding them to be one of the least effective ways to teach anyone anything, and (with notable exceptions) have not found video a terribly effective substitute. What lesson for the church?
  3. Why get together to watch a video?: we can do that better in the comfort of our own homes. Indeed, watching Driscoll on the big screen is rather like watching the God channel (though I confess he's better than most of the programmes on the there). You can view the video for yourself on the church web site. That is part of the bigger question about why come together at all. What is church for?
  4. There is a huge danger in being attendant upon every word of a man (hey, it's Driscoll I have in mind; no danger of it being a woman in Mars Hill's case) at a distance. I come from a tradition with a deep fear of a "one-man ministry": often a source of eccentricity, heterodoxy, eventually out-and-out manipulation. That's what would worry me most about the set-up at Mars Hill, actually, but in the more general case, this is the most easily answered: the local leadership could select videos from all sorts of different preachers, and thereby gain really rather a balanced view.
Re-imagining our time together as a church fellowship seems terribly important for the present times. The world has changed so much from the era when everyone knew their neighbours, would walk with them to a large local church building, and sit together to receive the word (and sacrament...). We have much less need of large buildings these days, and much more need of community. Much less time, perhaps in a "service", and much more time serving each other and those around. This is not to say that the disciplines of spiritual formation are not needed today - perhaps they are, more than ever - but the shape and form they take can be so, so different, if we allow them to, and if we take advantage of all that the modern world has to offer.

2008/07/23

"Americans don't do Atheism"

Here is a new blog which will join my blogroll, at least for a while. The writing is interesting enough, and has attracted a good range of comments.

I was particularly struck by the mention of Rick Warren/Saddleback as a significant milestone in the American election campaign. In Texas last week, I had a conversation in which my interlocutor described the seeker-sensitive churches as liberal and loosing their way. It's all very interesting.

2008/07/21

Mars Hill Church, Seattle

Since I'm staying in Bellevue, Seattle, for two weeks, it was almost inevitable that I would go and check out Mars Hill Church (Bellevue Campus).

I approached with some trepidation. If you read Mark Driscoll's books, the church was founded with some of Seattle's most far-out people. Mark is a fan of Mixed Martial Arts, and the Bellevue campus has its own MMA club. It's the first church I've ever attended that had a group of burly guys with shaved heads hanging around outside, wearing T-shirts marked "security" (and no, that was not some kind of joke). Driscoll's theology is more-or-less at one with St. Ebbe's, which also scares me. (Though in the case of Ebbe's, it's more the preponderance of privately-educated members of the congregation that re-awakens in me undergraduate feelings of inadequacy. You have to be English to understand that.)

But of course, the welcome was warm, and the whole experience distinctly un-threatening. In fact, if you leave aside the fact that the sermon was shown via high-definition one-way video link to one of Mars Hill's campuses (all the campuses get the same live sermon), it could have been any Evangelical church, anywhere. Perhaps it was more middle-class than some. I certainly felt the need to remove my baseball cap... I didn't see anyone with big tattoos...

The "worship" was a perfunctory two songs. The sermon, an hour. Followed by a loosely-structured communion. I'll write more about sermonizing by video tomorrow: it raises interesting questions.

The sermon was the first of a new series on prayer. If you leave aside the Driscollisms (I was disappointed. The Cussing Pastor is evidently a thing of the past), it was completely straight down the line standard teaching on prayer. That in itself raised lots of questions for me ("you don't have to argue/struggle with God"? What about Jacob. Or Moses, come to that.), but we'll leave those on one side. I learned that Driscoll prays for parking spaces. And had his prayers on that subject answered as recently as this week.

Will I go again? Yes, maybe. Next Sunday is free right now. Would I join, if I lived here? I think it unlikely: the membership programme sounds kind-of scary. I think I would ask the wrong sort of questions.


EDIT: I did go back on the following Sunday. Previously, I'd had to dash out right after communion. In fact the band does an extended set through/after communion: this is the church's main "worship time". That's quite attractive - and unusual in a reformed-minded fellowship (to go out with communion and worship on your mind, not the sermon).

2008/07/19

Community myths

Nick's post reminds me, as does something more lengthy from the Tall Skinny Kiwi (not to mention spending last weekend in Texas) of the curious, unshakeable conviction some Americans have that having lots of guns in the community makes everyone safer. There is little evidence to support that point of view, but some people are utterly convinced of it and will not countenance a different point of view.

Equally well, try telling an Australian that their quarantine rules are more than a little over-the-top (you get fined for taking an apple from the aeroplane into the country, and airport sniffer dogs seek you out; they're particularly concerned about cheese, too, for reasons quite beyond me), and they will look at you with a horrified stare, and say "but it's essential: we have a fragile ecosystem and must protect it". They learned this at their mother's knee, and had it reconfirmed through school, and nothing will shake them.

Of course, we all have this baggage we carry around (I don't know what community myths Brits tend to hold on to: perhaps someone can tell me). I guess it must be well-studied in psychology (though not by me). And these myths are so deeply ingrained that we seldom get to see ourselves as others do: you have to live outside your own culture for quite a while to get de-programmed (or maybe re-programmed).

And it's hardly an original thought, but I'm bothered too about the extent to which the same shared psychosis affects the Christian community. "The truth as we have received it" is often all that we have, but we imagine it's the same thing as the truth that, say, the apostles received. But it ain't necessarily so.

2008/07/17

Animals and human rights

I was reading USA Today the other morning (strange what staying in a hotel does for you!), and came across an article about moves in Europe to give certain "human" rights to apes. From memory, one instance was Spain about to legislate on the subject, and another was a story from Austria about someone petitioning the European Court of Human Rights to allow certain rights to a particular great ape: specfically, the recognition of its right to life, and the appointment of a legal guardian.

Now, let's leave aside well-worn (but rather valid) arguments about rights going hand-in-hand with responsibilities (it's a long time since a horse was last tried for murder), and comments about man (solely) being made in God's image. Moreover, I'll not explore Jason Clark's Is Christianity Irredeemably Speciesist?.

What really bothers me is the shape of the current argument: the rather naive observation that higher mammals are rather like young children, or certain handicapped people: capable of high degrees of cognition and communication, yet not sufficiently developed to be able to function independently in society. I say 'naive', because the comparison is rather selective, and tends to ignore the ways in which these animals are quite unlike people - young, old, or otherwise.

I'm less worried about extending further rights to animals; I'm more worried about the comparison running the other way - that children and handicapped people are somewhat less than human. If they are on a par with great apes, then eventually they have less human rights than you and I. That flies in the face of everything which has been achieved with Bills of Rights, the Universal Declaration, the European Convention, and the rest.

It's not very postmodern of me, but I'm inclined to think that, as a general principle, the notion of certain inalienable rights for all human beings is a good thing. Extending certain rights to animals seems to dilute, rather than strengthen, that position. And that worries me.

2008/07/14

tipping tyrrany

I'm in the USA, mainly to visit Microsoft HQ for a couple of weeks.

Something I so easily forget about this country is how much I hate the
tipping culture. It's not just that I am cheap, though I am. It's
not just that I don't always know when to tip, or how much. [When my
brother first moved to the States, he had the maxim "if it moves, tip
it". That seems to work.] It's not just that it seems so arbitrary -
as far as I can see, if the person stays behind a counter or desk, you
don't generally tip them; if they walk around, you do... It's not
just that in much of the civilized world, a tip is a reward, a thank
you for outstanding service, rather than an automatic right.

No. Over all, my problem with the culture of tipping is the way that
it puts some people in a permanent position of subservience. Much of
the service economy is built on this notion that we don't really want
to guarantee you a living wage, but if you make the customer happy,
you can get a bit extra.

Now, I'm not really advocating the opposite, that we should not care
about how well or badly those people do their jobs: travel in the
former Iron Curtain countries was certainly no fun. But there are
plenty of cultures - Australia is a great example - where they mange
to structure things so that people working in such jobs get paid a
decent wage, and occasionally get a tip, while at the same time having
generally great cusomer service. Is it really so hard?

Or look at it the other way: perhaps we should tip people in all walks
of life. How great it would be if students gave me some cash at the
end of each lecture? Or if we tipped the checkout assistant at the
supermarket? Or the preacher, after the sermon? Maybe we should tip
the dentist after the tooth extraction? Why do all those sound weird?

2008/07/04

Evangelical Manifesto

Here is a most curious document. This Evangelical Manifesto sets out "A Declaration of Evangelical Identity and Public Commitment". There is much to be said for it: the authors do not presume to speak for anyone other than themselves, but seek to be inclusive and invite others to sign. It defines an "old school" evangelicalism, concentrated upon the good news of Jesus Christ, and doesn't stray into fundamentalist territory. Nor is it a proof text fest, as I expected it to be: in fact, I don't think there's a single direct bible quotation or reference.

And this purpose seems good:
For those who are Evangelicals, the deepest purpose of the Manifesto is a serious call to reform—an urgent challenge to reaffirm Evangelical identity, to reform Evangelical behavior, to reposition Evangelicals in public life, and so rededicate ourselves to the high calling of being Evangelical followers of Jesus Christ.
So it doesn't focus simply on identity, but also calls Evangelicals to reform their behaviour. So, for example:
All too often we have prided ourselves on our orthodoxy, but grown our churches through methods and techniques as worldly as the worldliest of Christian adaptations to passing expressions of the spirit of the age.
All too often we have failed to demonstrate the unity and harmony of the body of Christ, and fallen into factions defined by the accidents of history and sharpened by truth without love, rather than express the truth and grace of the Gospel.
And many more passages in a similar vein.

But (and you knew a 'but' was coming, didn't you...) the very lack of presumption about it makes it, well, presumptive. The preamble is long on explanations about "we who sign this declaration do so as American leaders and members of one of the world’s largest and fastest growing movements of the Christian faith". But isn't that curious? They define Evangelicalism as a theological category (so presumably its expression shouldn't be contingent upon culture), and emphatically see it as a world-wide movement, but sign "as American leaders". Why not simply "as leaders"? Something doesn't stack up. I think that what they have written is an American Evangelical Manifesto, even if the title doesn't say so.

The prose is by turns very lofty, and then third rate. Perhaps it smacks of having been written by a committee: for a twenty-page document striving for clarity, it lacks sufficient structure. I somehow expected more. Perhaps this is why it hasn't achieved a higher profile. That, and the curious web-site design making it hard to find out who has drafted and signed it.

But, those criticisms aside, perhaps the most interesting observation for me comes from Tony Jones: he notes that, especially in America, "Evangelical" can be either a theological or a cultural category. In practice, most of the time, for most people, it is surely the latter (how many members of my local Evangelical church could unaided come up with the list of seven Evangelical distinctives from the Manifesto?). Yet, these (and perhaps most) leaders define it theologically.

However, I'd go further than Jones: they may define themselves theologically, but the document is emphatically a call to action, to praxis, to being Christ's people: the deeper message is anything but a dry, definitional, systematic, confessional, faith. It is heading towards being incarnational and missional. I find that rather encouraging.

Have I signed my name to the document, using the web site? No. Will I do so? Let me get back to you.

2008/07/01

And on a similar note

Is the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans really going to call itself FOCA?

Context is crucial

I love those little dissonances you get when you see signs and announcements in unfamiliar contexts...

Here I am in a German hotel. As is common in this country, the sauna is a fully mixed sex thing, with fully naked people... In the shower area, there's a basket of mini shampoo bottles, each with a large label saying "avoid eye contact". I guess that would work.