Faithworks 360 Conference

This weekend I attended the faithworks 360 conference.

The event included the UK launch of Brian McLaren's new book A New Kind of Christianity. So I heard Brian speak several times - a good experience.

I want to blog about several aspects of the event, but first some general impressions:

• Here is a group of people passionate about finding a "360 degree" theology, and applying it to all parts of life. This is a good thing.
  
• They're enthused about working in partnership with the community - and with government bodies - to deliver things which help the poor and needy in society. This is a good thing.
• Some manage to retain a fairly traditional understanding of Evangelical faith: others were probably more alarmed by Brian's ideas. This is interesting.
• I'm not used to hanging out with big groups of people so implicitly aligned with the left of politics. I'm not saying they were partisan (both Labour and Tory MPs spoke at the event), but you knew which kind of people were the fellow-travellers of most of the organisations represented with stands etc.
• For an event so well connected to such right-on action, it was surprisingly middle-class, white, and middle-aged. There were some younger people, there were a handful of black people; I don't think I saw anyone obviously from an Indian or Chinese ethnic background. The majority were well-distributed around my age - many older; some somewhat younger. This is surprising. [I was minded to wear a baseball cap for the whole weekend, as I often do. But I would have been in a minority of one, had I chosen to persist. I caved in.]
• Perhaps as befits that demographic, the engagement with new media was decidedly patchy. That was a big surprise. [I would have written a live blog, but there was no wireless on offer. I could probably have done so via my phone, but wasn't ready to jump through hoops to do it. Doesn't everyone have wireless these days?]
• I struggled for a while to work out quite why the whole thing seemed quite 'other' to me: in the end I worked it out. I had spent the whole of the preceding week at a very different conference - a business event, in Miami, populated by all the multinational names familiar to you from the world of IT. Moving from that very big business picture to the world of small-scale charities, volunteers, and government grants gave rise to more than a little ... cognitive dissonance! This was a surprise.

As I say, these are just first impressions of a process kind. More about the content, later.


Note on commenting: I don't want to have a 'comments policy' - I don't think there are enough comments on the blog to warrant it. But I will delete comments written in any language I don't understand, for fear that they may be offensive (or worse). Sorry about that.

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evolving Christianity

Michael Dowd has a nice, thought-provoking piece on his blog on 'the salvation of religion: from beliefs to knowledge'. It won't sit well in an Evangelical stomach, but it is not unrelated to my post on why praying for changes to the laws of the universe is problematic. He sets out his core idea thus:

The primary cause of the Church’s decline in size and influence in Europe, and now also in America, is this: valuing the Bible as scripture while failing to see that today’s science, interpreted meaningfully and mythically, reveals God’s nature, God’s ways, and God’s guidance far more accurately than anything the biblical writers could have accessed millennia ago.

Then he goes on to discuss how the advances of science in the latter part of the last millenium, and in particular the 20th century, reveal a world more wonderful, more marvellous, more exquisitely beautiful than anything the biblical writers could see.

And as any kid will tell you, dinosaurs and black holes are just way cooler than bible stories.

Now, Dowd's perspective is outside even my post-evangelical realm. He is happy, I think, to remove the bible from the normative role that most churches would give it - whatever their doctrine of inspiration. I'm at the stage myself of wanting 'both, and': but I find his perspective most refreshing and more than a little inspiring.

When church leaders study the Epic of Evolution as they now do the Bible, and when they teach and preach the discoveries of science as divine revelation—God’s word for us today—Christianity will experience a revival unlike anything the world has ever seen.

private religion

There's a meme with an ever-growing strength. It says that religion (or faith, or belief) is for the private sphere, and not something that should impact public life. It says that the state should be neutral about the faiths which compete for attention, and favour none. It says that equality and fairness can be achieved only if we demote religion from its previous normative role. It goes so far as to say that previously long-held beliefs are not merely out of date, they are positively damaging.

In some lights, that perspective seems entirely rational and reasonable to me. If we are not to organise our state as some kind of theocracy (or do I mean thearchy?), then eventually its norms and ruling principles must come from somewhere else; somewhere other than religious faith. Of course, the foundation of the British state is almost postmodern in its multi-faceted splendour: to suggest that church, government, and justice flow from the Crown is just to repeat a convenient fiction; it doesn't really work that way. There are many influences, many norms, and their pattern is constantly shifting.

Should the state get out of the business of who may marry whom, and just register civil partnerships instead? Should a Prime Minister who invokes faith as a basis for decisions of state be excoriated? Is it professional misconduct for nurses to offer to pray with their patients? Can religious symbols co-exist with official uniforms?

I heard a lecture recently by Roger Trigg, a philosopher. He was talking about religion in public life. He was most scathing about a modern tendency to identify religious faith with other kinds of belief (so he dislikes making being a Christian and being a Vegetarian into equivalent categories). I rather disagreed with him, but he put his finger on (but didn't explore) an important point: religious faith matters precisely because people believe it. I could expand: being a servant of Christ is manifestly different from being a follower of Dawkins' flying sphagetti monster, exactly because the former does, actually, in practice, change how a community of people acts, whereas the latter does not (the creative web site linked here notwithstanding).

Many seem to want to argue that faith should hold a privileged place in society because it is religious faith, long-held, and deeply believed. But that seems as amiss as arguing that faith should not be allowed a place in public debate: that an opinion arising from faith is somehow unacceptable (whereas an opinion arising for some other reason is not).

Perspectives which arise from and within community do matter, because people hold them. That doesn't mean they can't be challenged, poked, prodded, re-shaped: unless of course your faith doesn't allow any of that. The idea that we can disentangle this from everyday life is truly fanciful.

Value-free individuals don't exist; value-free education doesn't exist; value-free public policy doesn't exist. I don't necessarily want to elevate my value system above that of others - but to imagine that we can find a neutral place is absurdly optimistic. Being inclusive and affirming is not the same as being neutral or faith-less: indeed, the two can be at odds.

Many/most/much faith cannot be purley private, because it presumes to inform the whole of one's life. That doesn't mean I can impose it upon others given free will in the image of God, but I can't hide it, either.

on prayer (part 2)

So what can we say about prayer - intercession and suplication, in particular?

Undoubtedly, it helps to calm and focus the individual pray-er. Many religious traditions involve prayer and/or mediation, and as far as I know, there is evidence that those who participate enjoy a better quality of life, less stress, maybe even better mental health. Does that make sense? Well, it seems to me, yes: prayer makes us think about what really matters to us. It gives us space and time to think about what we hope may happen. It tends to cause us to be less superficial in our treatment of whatever we are praying about (though I find that it is easy to get stuck with trite vapid prayer). I think that this applies whether the tradition of prayer is one of quiet contemplation, or extatic exuberence.

Corporate prayer helps to strengthen the community, too. We rehearse together the things that matter to us, and so strengthen the shared vision, the shared ownership of the ideas. Some people's prayers are quite evidently more directed to those around than to the Almighty: but even the others give us a shared language, a common purpose, and a perspective it's hard to dissent from. It is very difficult after someone has just prayed for some particular outcome to say that one hopes that outcome does not come about.

And then, they say that prayer - the listening kind of prayer - entails learning what is on God's heart. I wonder to what extent our understanding comes from God, and to what extent it comes from the two things above - sorting out your own thoughts, and learning what others are thinking. And I wonder why it should be that God talks to us when we adopt that prayerful attitude: rather than, say in the hubbub of busy life, or when watching the television. But I suppose we find that God works in all sorts of ways.

Of course, our first idea of prayer is of sharing with God what is on our minds: albeit, theoretically, as a two way conversation. And asking him to do things. A prayer of request or supplication entails asking him to intervene, to make things right. And that, for the reasons I set out in part 1, is where the problems seem to come from. Prayer which changes me, rather than God, I can comprehend (though I'm not entirely sure I've explained it well).

on prayer (part 1)

Blog posts have been rare lately. I have a lot of half-baked thoughts, but am in two minds about sharing them. This, however, I wanted to get off my chest, and is based on something I wrote last year which never saw the light of day.

Prayer is problematic. Someone remarked to me recently that they like to know who will lead/speak at church on the coming Sunday, so that they can pray for them. But presumably God knows who will be speaking: do I necessarily need to know, too? Is my prayer less effective if I don't?

In Richard Dawkins’ bestseller The God Delusion, he cuttingly tries to explain his problem with prayer:

“Remember Ambrose Bierce’s witty definition of the verb ‘to pray’: ‘to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy’. There are athletes who believe God helps them win – against opponents who seem, on the face of it, no less worthy of his favouritism. There are motorists who believe God saves them a parking space – thereby presumably depriving somebody else. This style of theism is embarrassingly popular...”

It would be easy to dismiss this as a strident dissenter woefully (wilfully?) missing the point, but sometimes I’m fearful that he actually comes close to the mark. Indeed, just a year ago, I heard a preacher in a pulpit say that he did indeed pray for parking spaces, and that God invariably came through for him. The preacher was Mark Driscoll: whether he also prays for his preferred winner in The Ultimate Fighting Championship, he did not say. I was struck, too, when touring the USS Midway (now a museum) in San Diego last year, by an exhibit in which the ship’s chaplain in a recording recalled the night before operation Desert Storm: he had prayed with the crew for “absolute victory”.

It’s easy to call out others, but I find myself confused as I approach prayer too, I confess: I would primarily talk about prayer in terms of relationship; in terms of opening my heart to God’s – wanting to be changed in the process; in terms of seeking that my will might become more like his. But all too often, a casual rider will be there – spoken or in my thoughts – that it would be most convenient if the laws of physics could be bent for a little while. When it comes to petition, my expectation of the orderly progress of the processes of chemistry and physiology seem to go out the window. More often, I suspect, my prayer is of a more vague character: for someone to be encouraged, or blessed, or to have wisdom or comfort – or is that really a request for an interruption in the normal processes of psychology?

I’ve lately become kind-of agnostic about most miracles: there are not a huge number in scripture – each is somewhat noteworthy, precisely because it is out of the ordinary. Maybe they really represent suspensions of the laws of the universe for a little while – or maybe they are about inspired timing and the lessons we can learn from the impressions of those who observed them. And maybe there are some of each kind: the resurrection of Christ is one which it is perhaps hard to fudge or be agnostic about. In any case, are we right, on the evidence presented, to expect to encounter lots of such miracles?

So therein lies my concern. A God who periodically grants wishes, a little like Aladdin’s genie (with some attendant capriciousness perhaps), is plainly not the God of the bible, but, as Dawkins says, that kind of God is embarrassingly popular. I sometimes find myself sucked into that way of thinking: it is very easy to do. An omnipotent God holds no philosophical problem for me, but a world in which the laws of physics are re-written every second, in answer to prayer, would.

That kind of approach is clearly more suited to a pre-enlightenment world when many of the laws of cause and effect were not so well understood: to appeal for a miracle seems not unlike appealing to a “God of the gaps”. And yet to do so is foolishly to dismiss the people of ancient times as simpletons: rising from the dead was no more common then than it is now; nor was the parting of seas or the turning of water into wine. Some would say that great events took place at pivotal moments – and did so with a purpose. That is almost a tautological point, however, I fear.

So where does that leave me with the supplication and petition aspects of prayer? I confess that I do not know – sorry to be negative – and that so far I have not encountered anyone with a constructive theology of this for the present age. I’m increasingly convinced that I need one, however, because the one I’ve received didn’t work very well in the modern era, and now looks far past its best.

If this is rather negative, I will try in Part 2 to be a little more constructive, though I'm concerned that I don't have much of an answer.