Publishing Projects Update

The second in my series of essys under the working title Understanding the Times: Essays in Christian Engagement has been published today.

Alliteration has taken over for this second essay, titled Prayerfully Pursuing Peaceful Societies in a Post-Democratic Age. 

Comments welcome, as always.

Of course, you'll need to read it first!

The front cover features Benjamin West's Treaty of Penn with the Indians, from 1772.

Some Notes on Hunter

James Davison Hunter's recent book To Change the World - which I have yet to read - has been helpfully reviewed by Matthew Hosier here.

In addition, there is an excellent, must read interview with Hunter here. Be warned - the interview is lengthy, but fascinating.

The theme of Hunter's book is the nature and extent of the church's engagement with its surrounding culture, in which the author argues for a model of neither triumphalism nor withdrawal but for a idea of the church as a "faithful presence" within culture.

One tangential thought: there appears to be little of this kind of material written primarily from a British perspective. It is a shame that British Christians have to de-contextualise such a work before being able to think through its implications for their own cultural and nation.

Why Good News to the Poor is Not Enough

Many churches and Christian organisations have, over recent years, rediscovered their God-given mandate to serve and bring good news to the economically disadvantaged, both in their locality and further field.

Thankfully, the idea that such acts are a distraction from the gospel is now rarely heard in Christian circles, as local churches support night shelters, drug rehabilitation projects, food programmes, education support and a myriad of other good works which seek to demonstrate the presence of the Kingdom of God through words and actions.

Welcome though these developments are, they are insufficient to either address the needs of those who are disadvantaged or to fully express the nature of the rule of God in the earth.

The same Lord who was anointed with the Spirit to "preach good news to the poor" was also mandated to bring a rather different message to the rich.

The materially wealthy, according to the gospel accounts, will find it "hard" to enter the kingdom of God, are sent away empty by God, and are to be overlooked by Jesus' disciples when they organise social events.

If that were not bad enough, the Son of God explicitly pronounces judgment upon the wealthy: not only does he pronounce the poor as "blessed", but, in Luke's account of the Sermon on the Mount, he proclaims "woe" to the rich - this term being drawn directly from the writings of the Prophets when they announced God's judgment on individuals, groups or nations.

A church pastor recently shared his concern in discovering that two adjacent neighbourhoods in his city, both of which contain church members, had significantly differing rates of average life expectancy. Those living in the poorer area were likely to die nine years earlier than those in the wealthy neighbourhood next door.

It is questionable how far this gap can be addressed by only meeting the needs and empowering those at the bottom of the economic scale, without also addressing the income and consumption levels of those at the top.

The gospel, it seems to me, calls us to focus on both.

Transition Culture, Community and the Local Church

This article should be read by everyone concerned with communicating the gospel and planting churches in Britain.

Although written to explain the phenomenon of the Transition Movement (the grass roots environmental network that seeks to explore ways of enabling local communities to adapt to a post-oil environment) , author Jay Griffiths also provides an insightful description of urban life in C21 Britain - the culture many of us are called to minister into.

The article provides insight into one of the crucial "felt needs" (not to mention actual needs!) of modern society: the need for community.

Whatever else we think of the nature and practice of the local church, I'm sure that most of us would feel that fellowship ought to be one of its key components. My own view is that fellowship is also at the heart of how we communicate the good news: the medium becomes the message. We model what we speak - of God's redeeming love and the creation of a new humanity in Christ.

Invaluable reading as a discussion starter for those committed to seeing the local church engage effectively with the un-churched majority around it.

Among the many quotable insights from jay Griffith's article:

• Many people feel that individual action [on climate change] is too trivial to be effective but that they are unable to influence anything at a national, governmental level. They find themselves paralyzed between the apparent futility of the small-scale and impotence in the large-scale.

• At a government level, I find I’ve shrunk, smaller than the X on my ballot paper.

• We speak of economies of scale, and I would suggest that there are also moralities of scale.

• Community morality involves a sense of fellow-feeling, is attuned to the common good, far steadier than individual morality, far kinder than the State.

• The fact that they were trying out an idea without being able to predict the results has a vitality to it, an intellectually energetic quality, a profound liveliness.

• William Morris spoke of the gentle social-ism that he called fellowship: “Fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death.”

• Many people today experience a strange hollow in the psyche, a hole the size of a village.

• In this extreme isolation, we don’t interact except with the television and the computer. We’ve lost something, and we don’t know what it is, and we try to fill it with food and alcohol and shopping but it’s never filled—what we’ve lost is our connection to our community, our place, and nature.

• The colonial powers practiced the policy of “divide and rule” ... but in contemporary society there is a more insidious policy of “atomize and rule.” The world of mass media fragments real societies into solitary individuals, passive recipients of information.
  

• Although the French Revolution announced that it stood for three things, only two of these (Liberty and Equality) have survived in political parlance while the third, Fraternity, has been made to sound both quaint and unnecessary.

• We are ineluctably and gloriously social animals. We want fellowship.

• Celebrity culture is an opposite of community, informing us that these few nonsense-heads matter but that the rest of us do not. Insidiously, the television tells me I am no one. If I was Someone, I’d be on telly.

• Celebrity culture is both a cause and a consequence of the low self-esteem that mars so many people’s lives. So, the unacknowledged individual is manipulated into a jealousy of acknowledgment, which is why it is so telling that huge numbers of young people insist that when they grow up they want to be a celebrity.
  

• We all need acknowledgment (but not fame). We all need recognition (but not to be “spotted” out shopping). We all need to be known, we need our selves confirmed by others, fluidly, naturally. A sense of community has always provided these familiar, unshowy acts of ordinary recognition.

Comments, please.