benedson

Cloak room community vs Alternative community

What is your church community like? Here are two examples of community - Cloak room community as suggested by Bauman and the Alternative community as suggested by Bruggemann:

Cloakroom communities need a spectacle which appeals to similar interests dormant in otherwise disparate individuals and so bring them all together for a stretch of time when other potentially divisive interests are temporarily laid aside and put on a slow burner of silenced altogetherness. Cloakroom communities offer temporary respite from the struggles of everyday life as individuals withdraw into this temporary community. The theatre, football match or mega-church provide this temporary community, where a similar interest brings a disparate group of people together. There are a number of problems with such communities and rather than bringing social cohesions they do, in fact, break it. Cloakroom communities scatter rather than condense the untapped energy of social impulses, they therefore contribute and perpetuate the solitude so often felt in contemporary society. Cloakroom communities are a symptom of the social disorder specific to contemporary society and this symptom is also manifest in faith communities.

The Alternative community aims to dismantle the dominant consciousness rather than conforming to it. The alternative community of Moses had at it’s centre ‘God’s freedom as an alternative to the static imperial religion of order and triumph and a politics of justice and compassion as alternative to the imperial politics of oppression’ (2001, 9). The community of Moses is not about freeing a small band of people from their oppressor, it is about establishing an alternative community that provides an alternative social order to that of oppression and exploitation.

The alternative community is the antithesis of the cloak room community. A community that is radically engaged with society, committed to justice and to working for justice.

Polarizing is fun!!

Technorati Tags: Alternative community, Baumen, Brueggemann, Cloak room community, theology

Learning communities

I was at The Fresh Expressions Discipleship roundtable yesterday. There were some interesting ideas and thoughts, and a lot was centred on web based learning. There have been a couple of sites launched recently that have developed online discipleship programmes such as Foundations21.

I started think about two things, firstly how I learn online. My online learning doesn't involve going to one website, but involves about 20 or 30 blogs that come directly to my computer through an RSS feed. Therefore i construct my only learning community, there are some sites that i give more credibility to than others and some that I know i'll disagree with - but the point is that there is not one site, one point of view but a diversity of opinions and through this my online learning happens.

My other thought was that perhaps our discipleship has got to focused on the rights of the individual rather than creating a just society...i think that the individualistic turn in contemporary culture has meant that discipleship has become more and more individualistic. It's about getting my relationship right with God, my learning, my faith, etc. and then from that we hope to have a impact on society and make it more and more just. I think that discipleship should, perhaps, be focused on creating a just society first, and then from that the personal individual disciple grows.

Technorati Tags: Discipleship, Fresh Expressions, Just Society

blah...manchester

Emerging Church in Multi-faith Contexts

Churches in the West are increasingly experimenting with more symbolic, reflective spiritualities, drawing from Orthodox and Celtic traditions, and using digital technologies and ambient music. How far can we engage with the Eastern spiritualities of our Sikh, Hindu and Muslim neighbours whislt retaining our Christian integrity? What might an emerging church look like in a multi-faith context? What is British Asian spirituality? What lessons can we learn from cross-cultural mission in the development of fresh expressions of church?

Pall Singh and Richard Sudworth are both from Birmingham. Pall is the Director of East + West Trust and team leader of Sanctuary. Sanctuary is wonderful – alternative worship meets Eastern spirituality. He is from a Sikh background and became a disciple of Jesus in his late teens. Pall has been married to Joy for 22 years and they have two gorgeous kids, Josiah & Jasmine. Due to some very bad 'Karma' he is a Birmingham City supporter.

Richard is a CMS mission partner in Sparkhill, Birmingham, working alongside asylum seekers and developing creative ways of bridging church and community activity in a Muslim majority context. Richard is also a Mission Consultant for Faith to Faith with a special brief to help the 18-30 emerging church generation engage with other faiths.

blah...manchester is a series of conversations hosted by CMS in partnership with The Church Army and Manchester Diocesan Board of Education in 2005 on mission, worship, church and Christianity in today’s rapidly changing culture. It’s a time to keep listening, chatting and reflecting as God beckons us into the future.

Thursday 9th February
6:30-8:30pm
Drinks and refreshments provided
Admission free
Venue: Nexus

Drinks served from 6:30
Input begins at 7:00

We have a limited number of places. It would help us to know in advance if you're coming, so please book a place and turn up!

E-mail Ben Edson on: blah@sanctus1.co.uk

Venue: Nexus, Dale Street, Manchester, M1 1JW

For a map see: http://www.nexusonline.org.uk/contactus.htm

Please forward this e-mail on to anyone you think may be interested

Videos...

In Sanctus1 over the past month we've been looking at some of the tough sayings of Jesus. Last week we looked at this saying: it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into heaven. During the evening a used the Hard-Fi video for Cash Machine.

It's really quite a sad video about how we can easily get trapped in the cycle of debt due to the pressures that there are on us to spend, spend, spend...My thoughts at the end of the evening were that we need to develop a culture of contentment.

The City and Fragmentation

The city has always been a place of social division. Over two thousand years ago the Chinese philosopher Kuan-tzu highlighted this when he replied to a question regarding to the organization of the city commented:

The scholar-official, the peasant, the craftsman and the merchant…should not mix with one another, for it would inevitably lead to conflict and the divergence of opinions and thus complicate things unnecessarily…Let the scholar-official reside near school areas, the peasant near the fields, the craftsman at the construction workshops near the officials’ place, and the merchants in the shih (commercial wards).

As the influences of post-modernity grows and the feeling of ‘incredulity towards all metanarratives’ accelerates the cultural and social architecture of the city divide even further.

Each little cultural and social segment could now exist in it’s own right, and refer to it’s own logic, without an apparent need for overall coherence….this is “Life in Fragments”, relating only to the floating signs that seem to merge and mix without any overarching meaning.

The city centre of Manchester reflects this fragmentation. ‘China Town’ exists alongside ‘The Gay Village’; the bohemian ‘Northern Quarter’ alongside the commercial centre of Piccadilly; and ‘The Millennium Quarter’ alongside ‘The Medieval Quarter.’ Is this diversity something to be celebrated as an example of pluralism and diversity, or is it a great a cause of despair as our city centres become ghettoised?

The answer to this question lies in the permeability of the boundaries and the cross-fertilisation between the different areas. If people are free to move between areas without discrimination then this diversity should be celebrated, however if the areas are metaphorically walled-in then this is ghettoisation. The walling-in of various communities has historically been a physical form of discrimination against ethnic or religious minorities. During the Reconquista of Spain, the Christian liberators, if they did not expel Muslim residents outright, confined them to a walled quarter called a moreria. In contemporary western culture there should be no place, either physically or metaphorically, for walling-in.