Author: Jengie

After Virtue and the Elephant in the Room

I am reading Alisdair McIntyre’s After Virtue for my PhD. I have no idea what its connection is with Congregational Studies but as quite a few papers cite it, I am reading it to find out. I am not at all sure that I will agree with the conclusion and if I do I will argue that it has come about in a very different way. This is because he is using a tradition I was brought up in as his starting off point and I disagree with his reading. In fact in my view his reading is far too kind what happened.

Lets start at a point where I can agree, that is with the Nicomachean Ethics and the idea that ethics is made up of a threefold scheme of “man as he happens to be” is discordant with his true nature with discordant ethics and needs to be instructed to realises what man could be. Thus there is natural state, ethical training and ends ([i]telos[/i]).

He goes on to posit that during the enlightenment what happened is with the idea of science that it could only deal with means not ends and turning ethics into a science (legitimate form of knowledge) then the telos was got rid of. That is there was no end to which ethics were directed.

To discredit this I only have to state the end and the very argument that he makes turns around. The ideal of instruction was to become the “purely rational man”. In other words there is a telos, but it appears to be a telos that at first glance fits our own world. In actual fact it is one of the most potent myths to inhabit the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty first centuries. I can trace it back that far.

Firstly when I did my early theological trainng or that first beyond the home to be exact, I did it in St Andrews, where David Hume is still a celebrated former member of the academy. However it was theology not philosophy I am talking about which is still Presbyterian. We were introduced to Kierkegaard but also to Schleiermacher. There you start to get the idea of the aethete, who has mastered rationally various arts, who becomes the new man.

Turn wider to a Sociologist Emile Durkhiem and read how he builds a picture of religion as starting off in superstition, through monotheist Judaism, Christianity and laterly Protestant Christianity man is slow able to gain a purer and purer religion until it becomes so pure there is no need for God, and the enlightened man is an atheist.

Darwinian evolution has been interpreted in this way then you get eugenics. No that is not accidental, I said my criticism of what happened was harder. The idea of a super-race that is purely rational and so on also haunts this form of ethics.

So to me the threefold scheme is not broken, but the telos is changed and in changing it becomes a monster that eventually leads to the holocaust. It is humanity faced with an ethics based on the “superman” myth driven to its natural conclusion that is repelled by what it has created.

To me, indeed to my theology teachers at University the ethics triad is not broken by the Enlightenment (perhaps that is one of the reasons my father does not believe in the Enlightenment) but rather it is broken by the carnage of the early twentieth century when it is obvious that even if man has developed rationally he has not developed ethically and no amount of rational training secures better moral outcomes.

Nor are we clear of it. The militant atheist are often so busy promulgating this myth at least indirectly. The idea all religion is about control and that a rational person must dispense with it and that the purely rational must triumph is yet this in another guise.

Graduate Tax

Is it just me but I assumed that graduate tax would be a on all graduates. Indeed the only ones who should be let off (and maybe be able to claim their loans back during the first decade) are the ones who went in the last twenty years and had to pay fees. The rest, self included have absolutely no excuse not to pay the graduate tax. People like me, got not just our undergraduate tuition at tax payers expense but also a grant to live off and then a second round of this for a second degree albeit only for a single year.

Alright so we have not planned for the tax, but then we are nearly all in better paying jobs and more settled than those just out of University i.e. we are better able to pay the tax..

If the don’t feel they can do this, then there should be a grad tax as well as current fees rather than increasing current fees

Jengie

The Elements of Faith

I am going to try a new tack on the first five stages of faith by Fowler. I have known about Fowler’s stages of faith for over a decade now and for various reasons I have been unsatisfied with them as a model and yet have been drawn back to them as containing explanations of what I see happening around me. The two major problems I have are that I do not see faith development as the simple progression that is implied by his structure and I find the sixth stage too dependent on Liberal Christian hagiography.

Before I even start, the sense that I mean by faith here has almost nothing to do with salvation. Faith in this entries take is a human activity that most if not all humans partake in or at least most Western humans do. I am not defining what is correct to belief, I am rather describing those activities that create a person as a being of faith or at least a western person as a person of faith. There is space for the development of correct belief in the descriptions but that space could equally lead to false belief.

Equally too often in the past Christians have thought that what it is to belong to another faith is the same as what it is to belong to Christianity. There is a lot of room for different forms of faith, but I am no expert of different faiths, therefore my thinking and data which I have drawn on is at broadest a western perspective and at its narrowest a perspective from within a specific Christian Western tradition.

What I am going to suggest is that there are five elements of faith which are loosely characterised by Fowler’s stages 1 to 5 (I will leave the sixth for the present as I am not so sure about it). I have chosen elements rather than stages as I wish to make it clear that they are no successive, although I freely admit that it is possible for one element to be dominant at any stage of faith development. However, as I see it a fully developed faith would include parts of all five elements. However, it is not essential to develop all five equally or to keep a specific balance between them.

Moving onto the five elements:

  • The element I wish to draw from Fowler’s first stage (which he calls Intuitive-Projective faith), is what I call passive faith. This is perhaps the simplest. It is when the faith of others keep the faith for you. I think it is often derided and forgotten, treated as pre faith, but this simplest form of faith reminds us that at all times our faith is not ours alone but that shared with others. They hold us and we hold them. In this, I am picking up the projective part of his definition. That is the faith is projected onto us by the people around.
  • The second element I want to draw from the second stage (Mythic-Literal faith) is participatory faith. This is about performing the faith, when an individual starts to be involved in active listening and doing within the faith. It is this sort of faith that gets one to pray, read the bible, take communion, do acts of charity. This one concentrates on doing faith in a very active way. The evidence suggests that this is more basic and more important than is given credit. How one what one understands as happening when one performs will vary with age, faith stage and previous experience but the emphasis is on performing of the faith.
  • The third element that seems to predominate in Fowler’s Synthetic-Conventional faith, I call belonging faith as it stressed being part of a faith community. This really becomes about knowing what the group norms are and conforming to them. The norms can be both about the practice and about belief. Under this one also comes the developing of deeper relationships with other believers and participating in communal events. Perhaps to be understood as faith similar to that of a football team supporter.
  • The fourth element which I have drawn from Fowlers Individuative-Reflective faith is owned faith. I might well have called this is a questioning of faith, asking whether you agree with the communal norms. This is when it is no longer good enough to take other’s answers and you want to work out answers for yourself. However, as people inevitably do find answers for themselves by this process and by so doing come to ownership of faith I am referring to this as owned. It should be stressed that the process of developing an owned faith rather than just accepting what is taught often involves searching and asking awkward questions.
  • The fifth element drawn from Fowler’s Conjunctive faith stage is accepting faith; this is about learning to live with the unresolved. The struggle to understand and create a coherent faith, also in the end is doomed to failure. Things can never be that tidily sorted. There comes a stage where a person of faith needs to let go of the questions knowing they have pushed them as fully as they can and the answers that do exist are incomplete. Others may refer to this as learning to live with mystery. It is a coming to terms with the lack of answers, finding that despite not having everything tied down, that somehow faith continues and developing an ability to let go of the questions.

Now at any one stage, an individual’s faith will have different mixes of all five elements. However the lower number an element is the more basic it is. Yes, there are stories of people who have come to faith without contact with others, but I think our most find that something holds or draws them towards a faith, long before they actually make an active personal connection. Equally the second is often held to be the essence of any faith tradition. Please note at this point no intellectual assent is necessary. It is only with the third element that this starts to play a role. I suspect that for an active faith an adult needs some component of all of the first three.

Equally the final two elements are the harder ones to develop, I suspect that fifth is always a struggle and does not come easily to anyone. I am also suspicious that some people only ever have low requirements for these elements of faith. The conventional answers of their faith community, on the whole, satisfy them. For others, the very opposite happens and only when they are practising these elements do they find they can with integrity participate in the participatory and belonging elements of faith. I also suspect that some people with a tendency to approach things with their intelligence rather than emotions may find more need for owned faith than others. That is not to say people who approach things emotionally are without this struggle just that it plays a lesser role.

I also suspect that people who go through a conversion experience go through a process where different elements dominate at different stages of the process. I suspect that at the start people are developing the owned part of their faith, this leads them to question what they have received from their current community. They are then drawn to another community, passive faith if you like, as they start exploring it then participatory faith becomes dominant, finally as they make the commitment belonging faith dominates. I suspect this cycling happens to a lesser degree with those within faith traditions. Some will cycle many times, quite often moving in a consistent trajectory with each cycle, others will never need to make such big changes.

This cycling while distinctive of conversion experience but it is not the only way elements can change. For instance, I suspect that to the strengthening of owned faith leads to a weakening of belonging faith, although I suspect that for many belonging faith is important even when owned faith is quite strong. A growth in accepting faith may well produce a situation where the other four elements of faith can flourish as well.

A reason why the episcopal churches aren’t getting the liturgy they would like!

This is part two of my pieces from this conference. It also in part answers why Liturgical Studies has not addressed issues of power. I offer this in the sense of ecumenicity and partly because I am in non-episcopal tradition, I can say things people in those traditions can’t.

Lets get the definition out of the way, by episcopal, I mean ruled by Bishops. So Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism are both forms of Episcopal churches. It is technically possible to have Bishops but not be Episcopal. There are situations where the Bishop is the chairperson of a council that rules rather than the individual through whom power moves.

What I gathered from the process was that basically what they were doing was gathering together a number of people who had studied liturgy, asking them to work on the new edition of the liturgy, then taking it to the Bishops who if they did not like it, chucked it out and re-did the work themselves. What is more if someone higher than a Bishop did not like that, then they chucked it out and re-did it once again.

Three things are wrong with this process:

Poor consultative technique

In my home church, we have an eldership which at times requests a group of members, normally a mix of elders and non-elders, to carry out a piece of work on behalf of the eldership. The assumption when the piece of work is done is that it will be accepted. If it isn’t accepted the first line is not for the elders to do it again, but to refer the task back with a directive request from the elders. Quite often a committee will suggest several routes forward and the elders will select which or ask for more information. To reject it out right given that the elders requested the work in the first place is seen as bad form and only to be done as a last resort. Now if a local church can think that far why cannot a Bishop’s council.

The wrong make up of the committee

You would not set a group solely made up of English Literature students to write a piece of poetry to be performed, or a group made up solely of Historians to stage a pageant, would you. However that is basically what the committees are being drawn from. This creates problem as the concerns of tradition and doctrine are pushed to exclude such things as drama, and performance. Safety becomes the dominant thoughts of those carrying out the task. What is more it is the interpretation of the critique and not that of the lay person participating that is dominant. The fact that there is solely an authorised liturgy to use is also problematic. People just cannot get the experience. I a lay non-worship leading individual has probably written more liturgy than most of the Liturgist in episcopal Churches. I simply have written stuff for weekly services when required and for personal devotions. I started doing that about 9 or 10 years of age; normally I work as part of a group, so I learnt from the senior people.

Power is totally Centripetal

Everything works towards being conservative and going with the dominant power. This has become a highly controlled process,where the central discourse is the only one that matters. Now I am not in favour of a total centrifugal process, that is chaotic, but a centripetal one is conservative, dry and rigid. It really does not have the vitality to survive the changing society around the Church. The effect of keeping thing under this sort of control is not to stop change but to make change huge when it does happen. The fact that any difference from the centre is over-ruled may make for a uniformity but does not make for a healthy tradition. It is alienating those who would support a more tolerant centre and in so doing it is creating a smaller group of people who have power, and a larger group of people who feel marginalised. To be healthy a tradition needs ways of including the insights of those on the periphery.

If the episcopal churches want to produce better modern liturgy, or even create people capable of doing it, they need to:

  • have better self discipline when asking people to write it;
  • widen their committees to include non-liturgists such as poets
  • and develop more open consultative methods so as to incorporate the insights of the laos, the entire people of God.

At present I suspect that this is being handled differently at present within the two traditions. In Anglicanism it is leading to the increased use of non-authorised liturgies, whether it is through the use of evangelical style praise services or through the use of Roman Catholic or historical liturgies. Within Roman Catholicism I would expect a growth in folk devotion and a decrease in the attendance and centrality of Mass.

Why so few free church liturgists attend SLS conference

Right this is the first of two short pieces in spired by attending this conference. I was the only URC person there, although there were a couple of Methodists, a solitary Pentecostalist and an American Reformed Pastor. Apart from that everyone was either high church Anglican or Roman Catholic. At one point someone said that they wished that more “Free Church liturgical theologians would come as those that do are interesting.” Well here is my reason why such people don’t come.

Firstly the discourse of the conference is totally against them coming. They define themselves as “liturgical” and free churches as “non-liturgical”. Now why would someone defined by a liturgical conference as “non-liturgical” come to it? They are wanting Non-liturgical liturgical theologians to attend. Sorry that is like asking for hot cold water or is oxymoronic. If they want free church liturgists and liturgical theologians they need to make a space for them.

Secondly our liturgists and liturgical theologians are very different from theirs. The prime task of them is to write the liturgy and they do it week in and week out. They are not primarily critics of liturgy and by that I mean those who bring their mental faculties to the task of analysing how liturgy is produced. They are primarily artisans producing liturgy week in week out. It would never occur to them that you might invite in later a poet, or musician to the creation of liturgy as if there is some secondary function they could add. The skills they bring are part and parcel of the task of creating liturgy.

Let me outline what skill a great liturgists needs in free church tradition:

  • The poets sense of words
  • The dramatists sense of flow and drama, and the liturgy as something performed
  • The musicians sense of the role of music
  • The theologians knowledge of doctrine
  • A religious sense of the pattern and shape of prayer through life
  • A sating in the Biblical text, sometimes seen with elderly Presbyterians with the Psalms where not only can they summon verses to memory at will, but their language is shaped by it.
  • A biblical scholars sensitivity to the meaning and interpretations of the text.
  • A Sociologists awareness of how people participate and comprehend the liturgy and the role it plays in religious formation.
  • A critques understanding of the tradition of liturgy

At the moment only about four of these functions are acknowledged in the conference. Where were the workshops where people brought examples of their own work and worked on improving it? Where were the discussions on what people understood of the liturgy and took with them? Where was the collection of folk liturgy, the prayers of the everyday people? If the Society for Liturical Studies, wants to include those from the Free churches in England it is going to have to make a space and begin to understand that valuable though the historical and critical study of Liturgy is, it is not the sole concern of an active working liturgist, at least not when there is Sundays Worship to prepare and you cannot just pick up the book and read it.

Calvinist Church Finances

Yes John Calvin did say something about church finances. He said 25% should go on acts of charity and 25% on mission, I think it was also 25% on ministry and 25% on upkeep. Doesn’t sound like any church finances I have ever seen!

Okay so in Geneva the council kept up the buildings. So how about 20% on Ministry, 20% buildings, 20% upkeep, 20% on acts of charity and 20% on mission. Sounds simple doesn’t it, but I will bet now that a church that did that would look very different to any church around today!

Sometimes others say it better

Two things I have come across say things I am thinking better than I ever could. An interview with Malcolm King when he was warden on Iona Abbey which talks of how renewal might just come out of building community.

Secondly there is this blog article from the Alban Institutes on why churches need to identifying their primary and secondary customers. It simply points out that the church has primary customers who are not yet part of the church. In other words congregations wrongly define who their primary customers are by excluding a very large number. In fact if the church is to survive then it is dependent on people who are not yet members.

Overfished mission

This is a guess but I think there is at least some historical evidence behind it. The Church lives by mission. That is if it is to survive it can only do so by the act of people who are not yet its members!

Historically the church has had a fairly broad understanding of mission. Yes it ran evangelistic campaigns but these ran side by side with social groups and welfare provision. It clothed the naked as well as preached the good news. A church was a multifaceted organisation.

Then the church realised and I think around the 1950s, that certain actions brought in more members than others. So it argued that concentrating on these were efficiency. You did not need all the suprastructure of the other mission activities nor the random pastoral visiting, nor the social chit chat with friends. What you needed to do to grow was concentrate your resources on the receptive. Social outreach could be just for the sake of helping others it was not part of the churches central mission. A very good way to dishearten the volunteers.

Lets take the old Sunday Afternoon Sunday School. Well yes that was largely child minding so the parents could have sex without the kids around or go down the pub. So we concentrated on the Sunday morning Sunday School for church children which was far more productive in terms of immediate numbers. Except that now the children end up down the pub with the adults, or some other activity (e.g. junior football and rugby clubs often meet on a Sunday). So the kids instead of learning about Christianity, learn sport or go to pubs with their parents. That means they don’t gain the basic language in which the church puts the gospel. So we are talking to people now who speak another language. Children don’t know the Christian stories any more, this is a cultural and an evangelistic loss to the church.

The problem is that many of the other less effective programmes actually created the receptive demographic. The result of not cultivating them made people feel the church was “hypocritical” only interested in looking after those who were interested in it. The church was cutting what did not suit it and not necessarily what people around wanted the church to cut.

What is more the apparent success rate of some began to make the people in the churches began to feel inadequate in just doing the ordinary things that had supported people through generations. They felt no longer able to talk about their faith because they weren’t as good as Billy Graham. Not realising that unless they talked Billy Graham could not reach their friends.

Basically the church got into harvesting and forgot to plant.

To change metaphors for the last fifty years or more, we have fished in a non-replenishing pool. The stock is almost gone and we have not taken care to see it is replenished. In other words the Church has over fished.

This is bad news because the catches are meagre now, and the only way that the catches are going to improve is actually to put resources into replenishing the stock. To do that we have to take effort away from the catching and reinvest it in all the things we gave up fifty years ago. Yes that means social outreach, yes that means social activities for people around the buildings and yes that actually means putting their desires higher on our priority list. Only there are not as many people to fish and we are not as fit as we were fifty years ago.

The good news is that there is the wider sea, the bad news is our boat is less sea worthy than it was because we have not had to keep it up to standards for the last fifty years.

A generous church?

I am beginning to think that church finances will only really be sorted when we stop talking about how to save money and start talking about how to handle money, not just as individuals but as institution. Let me be clear, I am not in favour of wasteful spending, but cheapest ain’t always best.

Let me start with some quotes:
2 Samuel 24:24
But the king said to Araunah, “No, but I will buy it from you for a price. I will not offer burnt offerings to the LORD my God that cost me nothing.” So David bought the threshing floor and the oxen for fifty shekels of silver

1 Timothy 6:17-19 (English Standard Version)

As for the rich in this present age, charge them not to be haughty, nor to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy. They are to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share, thus storing up treasure for themselves as a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of that which is truly life.

Psalm 112:4-6 (English Standard Version)

Light dawns in the darkness for the upright;
he is gracious, merciful, and righteous.
It is well with the man who deals generously and lends;
who conducts his affairs with justice.
For the righteous will never be moved;
he will be remembered forever.

What do we see?
That the giving of bits that cost us nothing that are easy, is not the way that God approves. Counting the pennies and making sure everything is done as cheaply as possible is also not the best way. What we need to do is to get people to think what the church could do if it wasn’t watching the pennies so closely.

Basically as the church is at present it is strapped for money for mission. The two things that take priority on spending are ministry and buildings. A healthy congregation should be spending that again on social outreach and mission, according to John Calvin. That shows the deficit in many congregations and it shows where our priorities are. How do we change our priorities and how do we finance the mission of the church?

Firstly we need to consider how we give. There is a joke out there about tithing:

A systmem of raising money that demonstrates that the average member of the congregation is living on twenty ponds a week!

Tithing is a system that is a flat rate tax. Lets allow people to use take home pay especially as the chancellor gives back basic tax. Then for a Christian that is the money that God has given you to live on. The person with first claim on it is not you but God. Tithing is therefore a sign that it belongs to God. The URCs suggestion that half the tithe should go to other charities and half the tithe to the Church seems a decent enough suggestion. However then you have only done the minimum, what you give beynond that is really what makes you generous.

I fully accept some people struggle to make ends meet as it is. Some of these members the church probably should help by teaching them budgetting skills. others are genuinely financially short and should not be expected to pay a tithe, in fact the church should be giving to them. However this should be more than compensated for by the extra giving of those who are “rich” and by rich I don’t mean the super rich I mean anyone who would class themselves as middle class due to income.

I also happen to believe that a congregation should tithe as well and give 10% of its income to situations where the Church is struggling to make ends meet. I don’t care whether this is overseas or places of mission within the UK. This should come out before we pay Mam or for buildings. In other words the first call on our finances is the church catholic in the broadest sense.

When we start to look as our money as God given rather than ours, then there should come a different attitude of heart to what we do.

Religious Vocation and the call to the Christian life

The title sounds pompous, and that is because I am trying to word something that is very difficult to word. Vocation is easy, the call to the ordain ministry, however I want really to talk about another call, a deeper call and a more personal call.

This is the call that I believe God issues to all creatures and that is the call to be what we will be. I notice that I phrase that almost identically to the name God uses in Exodus “I am what I will be”.  That is not intentional, I did not set this up to be like that, but it is not accidental either. There are thought processes that are on going that link this call, with the essense of God.

However to put this in worldly terms it is the call to strive to reach your potential as a human being. Now I am not being as simplistic as to suggest their is only one role for us and in achieving that alone we can be happy. Rather human’s are social animals, potential is only realised together with others. So this potential has to be realised by a process of negotiation and that process can lead one down many different tracks. However the striving to be, more yourself, so as to do the good only you can do, is an essential one of human beings. I happen to believe this call lies deep on all souls. We long to unify ourselves with the potential of the God, who is what he WILL be, to realise our potential.

The thing is vocation is a type of expression of the call. This call is different for every human being, but sometimes we recognise a group of them as falling into a generic type. Vocation is the name for just one of these types. I happen to believe educators are another, I can well believe that relief worker is another, and healer another. However agriculture is another, cook, mother, sportsperson and so on are also generic types and maybe there are types we don’t like to recognise such as person reliant on social welfare.

The problem is that when someone is blocked in the expression of one type, they don’t sit down and think “ok, so not that way at present, lets look at what is available now”, they think “that’s me denied, I cannot reach my full potential because they won’t let me” The vocation is grounded in relationship, no one can force themselves to be something the community does not wish them to be. It was no good Moses being called by God to lead the Hebrews out of slavery, if the Hebrews had decided that actually they would rather stay where they were than follow him.

What is more the basic call is not stopped by the fact that one expression is turned down, it remains, you just have to re-appraise the situation and see what other ways there are of becoming the person you would like to be.