benedson

Speaking at Greenbelt and other GB bits and bobs! #GB10

I'm really excited that I'll be speaking at Greenbelt this year, in fact next monday!  The title for my talk is 'There's no place like home' and it is explores how we find a sense of belonging and home in contemporary society.  I spend some time looking at boundaries and suggest that what we need to find is places of collision where the diversity of Oz can inhabit our everydays, places that are not a borderless wasteland but a creative space of belonging.  If you want to hear more then I'm in Galilee at 14:00 on Monday.

Alongside that I've been working as part of a group called Frunt to develop a worship installation based on the 'hall' of a house.  You'll find this next to a bathroom, living room, bedroom and kitchen installations in one of the boxes around messy space.  

Other that that I'm looking after the worship programme, which with such a good team around me usually goes quite smoothly.  I'm going to spend quite a bit of time exploring the new childrens festival so that is probably where I'll be most of the time

Finally, if you get the chance go and see Micah Purnell's Posters on the area around Jesus Arms and Bethlehem (You'll also be able to buy them in G-Store).  Micah is a Manchester based artists who creates some stunningly evocative posters that he plasters in advertising space around the city.

See you all there.

Greenbelt - Worship Highlights

As regular readers will know I look after the worship and spirituality programme at Greenbelt.  Each year about this time the Church Times makes contact with me to ask me for my five 'top-tips' from the worship programme.  Here are the ones that I've chosen this year:

1 - The Rend Collective Experiment:  Rend take worship in a new direction, looking and sounding like no worship group you'd usually see in a church!  Alongside that they've supported Rob Bell and Shane Claiborne in recent tours introducing thousands to their innovative worship style. (Since when have preachers done tours with support acts?)

 2 - Blessed:  On Friday night Blessed start the worship programme with a multi-media mass in the Big Top.  It promises to be audio-visual, sacramental feast!

3 - The Filid:  Occasionally a group comes along who are stretching boundaries and The Filid are one of those groups.  A a collective of artists from Canada, they're bringing their fusion of storytelling, installation art, dance, poetry and contemplative silence to the festival.  

 4 - Abide Campus:  Our Eco-spirituality venue 'Abide' this year has expanded into a campus!  Late night story-telling and meditations around an open fire and a meditation yurt alongside a diverse programme will make this one of the most innovative areas within the festival village.

5 - Home in a Horse Box:  Five worship groups have created a home for you to explore in the horse boxes around messy space!  Five worship installations, each based on a different room in a house will enable you to reflect on the home as a place of encounter with God.

The Full worship line up is here!

 

Doubting in Community

I've been thinking a bit about Thomas recently (it was St. Thomas' day on Sunday) and I was struck by the role that community has within doubt.  Thomas’ restoration to Jesus is not an individual experience but is one within the community of disciples.  The community where he has publically doubted Jesus is the community where he is publically restored to Jesus.

I think that within this we see something fascinating, Thomas is not asked to leave the community because he doubts – a week later and he is still part of them, he is still a disciple, still one of the followers, still a member of their community.  Hence, to be a part of the community that follows Jesus does not require certainty in faith but commitment to community and within that community commitment to have people at different stages on their faith journey.  Those who are certain cannot be the thought police that kick out those whom them do not think are ‘sound’ enough, and those who are uncertain should not give up on the community because they’re not sure if they believe.  

I think that this is challenging to both those who doubt and those who do not, when we do have doubts there can be a tendency to walk away from the community that we are part of as we feel that we don't fit it...Thomas shows us a different way, he remains with those people who do believe - he doesn't form a community of doubters.  The community of belief hold him in their presence and I hope that they learn off one another so that when they experience doubts Thomas's experience resources them. 

Matthew 10:40-41: Being the Welcomed rather than the Welcomer...

I preached on this yesterday and so what better to do with my thoughts that post them on my blog...

Often when we think about welcome in a church context we can forget that it is a two-sided process.  There are two sides to every welcome, the one who is being welcomed and the one who is welcoming.  When I welcome a person to my house I am the welcomer and the person who is visiting is being welcomed.  And I think that there can be the tendency when we read this passage to think of it as instructions on how to welcome, and whilst I think that is an important part of it, I think that we need to recognize that Jesus is talking to the people who will be welcomed.  He is speaking to his 12 disciples, who are about to embark on a journey.  A journey away from the place they know, away from their family, their community, away from their master and into the unknown.  They are to leave the securities of home and become the outsider and I think that gives them a real sense of vulnerability, being reliant on the welcome of the other and Christ’s assurance that they will be welcomed. 

In the reading Jesus lists three people who are welcomed:  ‘A prophet, a righteous person, and a little one’.  I suspect that this is not a descending order, where the most important is first, as we can easily read it, but an ascending order.  Let me put it this way.  I find it more likely that I might welcome a prophet or a righteous man, than go out of my busy way to do such an insignificant task as offering water "to one of these little ones."  But I have a sneaking suspicion that in the upside down structure of the Kingdom that such small ‘seemingly insignificant tasks’ acts actually have an eternal significance.  I think one of the inversions of the Kingdom of God is that the greatest glory is found in unexpected places. 

The challenge of welcoming is to welcome regardless.  Regardless of class, ethnicity, status and the list could go on.  Strangely I would suggest that what might seem like the most basic act of welcome to the most insignificant person is where we welcome Christ.  I’m sure that last week the Bishop and the MP felt very welcomed by us as the church community, that’s good, but the inversion of the Kingdom says that when we welcome the asylum seeker, the prostitute, the drug addict - we welcome Christ.  That is giving the little one a drink of water…

But I think that the real challenge of this text is to put down the securities of being the welcomer and be prepared to be welcomed.  To be prepared to leave the comforts of home and move out into a strange land.  A land where at times we will feel like the vulnerable and marginalized, where we will be the ‘little one’, where we will be the outsider sent on that mission from God and within that context trust and belief that God will provide people of welcome for us.  Jesus is talking to the disciples about the welcome that they will receive, he is not telling the disciples how to welcome he is quite simply reassuring them that when they are sent in mission, to a tough place, they will be welcomed. 

It is the relationship between guest and host.  We may be good hosts, making sure that we welcome guests into the church, into our communities – that’s great.  But I think that part of the challenge of this text is to be as vulnerable as guest.  A guest who has no authority, no status, no place of privilege, but is a humble wandering disciple.  A guest who is welcomed rather than a host who does the welcoming.

I led a church in the city centre, it was a church community that I set up and hence I knew everyone who was part of that community.  If a new person came I would welcome them, I would show them the ropes, show them where everything was, show them how we did things…I like to think that I did those things well and did them to all who came in regardless. Yet, I was always the one in authority, always the welcomer, the host, rather than the person being welcomed- the guest.  I was the insider inviting in the outside and that was a comfortable place for me to be. 

 The call of Jesus in this text is to leave the comforts of home, to move from the inside to the outside, to leave the place of security and move to a place of vulnerability.  And when we move to that place of vulnerability to be totally reliant on Christ to provide those people of welcome because in those people of welcome we see the welcome that God extends to us all.

Christian Celebrity| still looking for a saviour?

 

 

 

 

 

 

I hate Christian celebrity. It makes me puke…

That could be the end of my post but I’m also really fascinated by it. I know I should read Pete Ward’s book…but time and all that.

I’m fascinated by it not because I want to slag people off who find themselves as a ‘Christian celebrity’ but by what it says about humanity and particularly Christians. I’m intrigued that people want to put all their hopes and dreams about the church into one person and forget that our hopes and dreams should be located somewhere more heavenly…

One area that I’ve been thinking about is how we respond to the claim that life is fragmenting into a series of perpetual presents, rather than having a sense of the linear. All is present, all is now, there is no such thing as history. Yet, whilst this maybe the common culture experience of post-modernity it is also deeply unsatisfying and so how do we reach beyond the present into something more lasting – celebrity.

I’ve wittered on about Poeisis before and one area of poiesis is the desire to reach beyond the cycle of the present. This can be done in many ways, one is procreation, one is artistic works and another is by raising a celebrity who is ‘more important’ than ourselves. A celebrity who has the potential to influence more than the immediate to reach beyond the present as their ideas are seen as the future. A poiesis – if we align ourselves with this celebrity we in a way reach beyond the present into something else.

It maybe that in Christian celebrity we see a person who we hope will reach beyond the perpetual present into something more permanent. Therefore I'm not going to blame 'them' but perhaps its something in humanity that reaches beyond us...

Power and Emergent Systems

Everyone was telling me to watch ‘All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace’. I missed everyone of them. So I sat down and watched them all last week on iplayer – (bless it, but I do think that everyone who uses it should have a TV license…).

Anyway, I found it fascinating particularly in regards to the theories of both self-organisation and emergence. The self-organisation of networks is often presented in a somewhat utopian way by emergent theorists, if we have a flat system people, communities and organisations will collaborate and organise themselves in an egalitarian way. No hierarchy, no leaders and this, it is claimed, is the way that church could be if we just let the system organise itself. (I blame the hippies...)

Unfortunately this theory assumes that all people will act altruistically. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace highlighted to me, once again, that this is not the case. Instead as the traditional places of power are evacuated of power and authority other places and people grab that power.  And it is not always the case that those who grab the power are people/institutions’ that know how to exercise that power in a more altruistic way.

For example as the Presidency in the US lost credibility and authority through Clinton the financial sector grabbed the power, and look at how that left us. People who were not accountable, who were self-selecting taking the authority that they wanted without a public mandate. Google is another example, the utopian view of the web as an open-source place of share collaboration is now seen as unbelievably nieve. Perhaps when it was conceived this was the case but we all know google knows a lot about me, as does mac and other large brands, and this gives them immense power.  Power that they have grabbed without any authority to do so...

So when we go emergent, go self-organising the people who are the most articulate, most likeable, most interesting get the power leaving the vulnerable voiceless, marginalised disenfranchised and powerless - and thats not Gospel... But what makes this different is that because the people who have grabbed the power are not accountable externally there is no way to challenge their power, other than to stop metaphorically using google…by following their blogs, tweets or facebook pages.

Back to the blog...

Things have been rather quiet around here the past few months. There have been a number of reasons for this; moving house, finishing my PhD (nearly there) and trying to remain totally focused on that. Alongside that we’ve left one church and I’m about to be licensed at another one next week and I’ve been finalising the GB worship programme.

Speaking of GB it’s looking good this year – I’ve taken more of a curatorial role this year and have actually programmed less but the team around me have pulled together a great programme. I think that I’m looking forward to The Filid and also seeing the installations in the horse boxes around the theme of home.

There are a couple of areas that I have been thinking about over the past few weeks and so I’ll kick off with them this week and see if that kick starts the blogging habit…which I prefer to twitter and facebook is becoming too much of a networking tool rather than a friend base.  So back to the blog, it's kinda like return home and putting on an old pair of jeans that have been shaped by you over the years.

Protestors at spirit of life!

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Music For Holy Week| Easter Day

Easter Day is a day of hope, and I convinced that we need a whole lot more of hope. Easter day says that goodness can come out of evil, that death will be defeated, that ultimately justice reigns and that there is eschatological hope. Living as an Easter Person does not mean living with the joy of today permanently etched on my face, it means living in the hope that today brings. Knowing that there will be days when that Joy had drained away, but that the hope never will.

One of my favourite services that I did when I was part of Sanctus1 was a service called 'high on hope'. It was based on a howies catalogue and was a simple reminder to live as people of hope. In the hard times there is always hope and we must never let hope die. If we let hope die then the cynicism and darkness have one; hope says that there is a different way.

The song for day. I'm not going to go for the Stone Roses - I am the Resurrection or Primal Scream - Movin' on up. Perhaps I've done them too many times. I'm going for song by the Beatles. It's a song that reminds us in the darkest of times there is the hope of the Su/on. Here Comes the Sun.

Music for Holy Week: Holy Saturday

Today is a strange day. I never quite know where to place myself - it's an in between space, framed by the horror of Good Friday and the day which is to come. My mind simply wonder - wondering what happened to Jesus on that in between day - did he descend to hell as the Athanasian Creed tells us or not? Was he just dead - dead as a Dodo in that tomb without a glimmer of life. My theology of the atonement doesn't really go big on the descent into hell to defeat satan. I find it superfluous to both the incarnation and the death and resurrection of Christ.

So today is a day to focus on the dead body and believe that God is Dead. I was torn between two songs for today, one was wake up dead man by U2. A song which I think sounds like a song that the Church is singing to Jesus. But I think that instead I'm going for a song by Burning Spear being sung by Sinead O'Connor, partly as I'm seeing her at MIF, but mainly as i think it's profound in its simplicity. Jah Nuh Dead.