I've been at the Hard Questions day in Manchester today. Angela Tilby was exploring Catholic ecclesiology and contemporary mission. Here are my notes and thoughts on what she was saying.
I thought that the picture of the tradition church that she was painting was a utopian christendom ideal, it was a picture of a church that existed outside of culture, and culture did not have an influence on it. She felt that there was not much that we could gain from sociology and that we should be looking to the past more.
The church lives in time, it runs in time, history is formative, theme running through history from the beginning – history, church and mission go together. I wondered where the future hope was in this...
She commented that there seems to be either 'a theme park' approach to tradition, where we just pick at it without really understand it or a fundamentalist approach to it where it takes over and people become fundamentalist in their approach to history. She was looking for a third way...
She felt that Fresh Expressions were not liturgical enough and that the body of Christ is formed in it’s liturgy. Robust belief that worship and liturgy forms identity. However, I commented that i thought that she was being too narrow in her understanding of Fresh Expressions. She had not recognise the creative ways that the emerging church is engaging with liturgy.
She was calling for a disengagement with culture and paradoxically through that transform it. My comment would be that the catholic movement is not a disengagement with culture it is still engaged with the culture of christendom...
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