Forward to Basics

>>>This article first appeared in Reality Magazine, October/November 2001 by Mark Pierson.<<<

I’m a U2 fan. I love their music, their style, their involvement in the culture and causes, their ability to not believe their own publicity, that they’re reinventing themselves as they get older, and I love their spirituality. I’m not a groupie and I don’t own every album, but I have been fortunate enough to participate in their last three concert tours – Lovetown, ZooTV and POP. Each overwhelming in it’s own way. Each an experience in which I sensed the presence of God and ‘my heart was strangely warmed’.

After the massive high tech multimedia assaults of ZooTV and POP the current Elevation tour is a low-tech contrast. As this concert is unlikely to get any further ‘downunder‘ than our cousins across the ditch, the best way to absorb some of the experience, beyond numerous replays of the album, is by visiting U2.com. And at this site the best insights, as always on a U2 tour, come from the diaries of show designer Willie Williams.

Willie is one of the top five concert lighting and show designers in the world and has worked with David Bowie, The Coors, REM, and many other artists. He’s been doing U2 shows for more than two decades. His diaries are always humorous and insightful, not only into the backstage workings of a rock’n roll tour, but in his deconstructing of it all and his making connections between that and literature, movies and world history. He provides a fascinating contextual commentary as he exegetes the daily activities of the most successful band in the world.

I think some of his comments about the Elevation Tour also have something to say about worship as we know it. On 24th of March following the opening concert in Fort Lauderdale he wrote, ‘I coined the phrase "Forward to Basics" in a Rolling Stone interview, which was a bit of a throwaway line at the time, but it could be a most apt description. There are certainly echoes of U2 shows gone by…but the whole event is certainly something new…it’s so completely against the grain of what else is out there…’ Forward to Basics. I like that. It could become the mission statement of a generation of worship curators working on new approaches to doing worship. It picks up elements of both the need to decide what is basic to what we do, and also the need to place those basics in the context of the emerging culture in which we live. It acknowledges that not all of the past is bad or unusable while at the same time it prevents us from simply repeating past patterns because ‘they worked then’. (‘The good old days’ never existed outside of churchgoer’s selective and idealised memories.) But there is much that is worth recovering and reframing from the past for current and future generations of worshippers.

What would you select as the ‘basics’ of Christian worship that should be carried forward as we shape worship for new generations and subcultures? Among the people I asked that question of, the most common response had to do with authenticity. They talked about wanting worship that was authentic and relevant to who they were and where they were at. Worship that acknowledged their humanity and the complexities and realities of their life. Worship that drew them into God and the community of God’s people where they knew they would be accepted and not despised, not dogmatic ‘one-size-fits-all’ approaches.

This was felt to be one of the basics of worship: taking all that we are into dialogue with God. Not having to leave any parts of who we are at the door. Honest, non-sexist connecting with God and allowing our lives to be realigned within ourselves, with each other, and with God. Andre Tapias, in a work that I have not been able to name or source, described his top 5 qualities of worship in a postmodern culture as, authenticity, community, abandonment of dogma, focus on the arts, and diversity. To which I would add a sixth, participation. These are the six basics of worship that I am suggesting we need to move forward to.

Authenticity is the most important. It is also the most difficult to achieve. When a community gathers to worship there is a tremendous weight of history and expectation that comes into play. One person’s authenticity is seen by another person as a lack of self-control, or being overly emotional, or sloppy. At it’s heart the call for authenticity is a call for honesty and integrity in what we are asked to do in worship and in the words that are said about God and about those who are at worship. ‘Worship’ that is slick or superficial isn’t worship and doesn’t enable worship. Where is the lasting benefit and life changing power of worship that ignores or overrides the reality of how I’m encountering life?

Like the Mother’s Day service that over hypes the values of motherhood and leaves unacknowledged the childless, the single, the aborted, the stillborn, the bereaved, and those unable to have children, in-authentic worship becomes whoreship. We prostitute ourselves when the song leader drives us to expressing beliefs we don’t believe, when the preacher preaches rather than lives, when going to church is a segmented compartment of our being unconnected to any other part of our living, and when we are unable to express our doubts and fears among those who profess to being sinners saved by grace.

Community flows out of authenticity. Being loving and accepting is easier when we realise we’re all in the same boat. As long as some people check their real life at the door as they come into church, community will remain allusive. Holding common beliefs isn’t enough. Being in the same place doing the same things doesn’t help much either. We have to know each other at some level as well. Authentic worship builds community.

Abandoning dogma isn’t a plea to give up on the basics of the faith. Rather it’s a reminder that good worship is more interested in connecting the grace and love of God with the real and tangible issues of life than with theoretical ones. If our corporate worship doesn’t address the realities of our life’s it lacks authenticity and will not build community.

Focussing on the arts in worship is a plea for passion and creativity. A call to recognise a broader range of gifts in worship. A recognition that people learn in a variety of ways and through all five senses rather than just numbness in the backside. It doesn’t necessarily mean using a painting in place of a sermon (but it might).

Acceptance and encouragement of diversity in all it’s forms - ethnicity, age, background, intelligence, time on the journey, maturity, perspective, ability, etc- among the worshipping congregation can only strengthen the authenticity of the community at worship. Participation almost seems to not need to be mentioned after what has been said above. Perhaps that’s why Tapia didn’t separate it out, it flows from the other basics. But I want to emphasise it lest anyone think that authentic worship that builds community and reflects the reality of the people worshipping can be planned and led by one man. It can’t. Not even by one woman. Not even by one theologically educated and ordained person. Liturgy is the work of the people. Active involvement in shaping our worship week by week is a basic right of every follower of

Anti-Excellence

<<< this article first appeared in Reality Magazine, August/September 2001. Mark Pierson >>>

I’m anti excellence in church life.

And I’m particularly anti excellence in worship. It’s not a popular opinion to express in some churches today. In fact excellence has become such an important value in these circles that they sponsor and attend expensive conferences devoted to the theme.

I don’t know much about what happens at these junkets for pastors, but I did come very close to attending one earlier this year. I even had my ticket, but when I looked at the programme and discovered that the creative-arts-in-worship track consisted entirely of an exhaustive treatment of every aspect of vocal technique and worship-band performance I decided that staying away would be my contribution to excellence that week.

I wonder if excellence is a cultural value rather than a biblical one?

I’m sure someone will quote a First Testament verse referring to the excellence required of artisans working on the temple in King Solomon’s time, but I think they’d be hard pushed to squeeze one (even that tenuously linked) from the Second Testament. Particularly from the lips of Jesus.

I don’t think excellence in worship is a goal that has any biblical support. Which isn’t to say that excellence in church life is always bad. It doesn’t have to be, but a preoccupation with it is never good - particularly when those promoting it have been reading books like In Search of Excellence1 and A Passion for Excellence.2 Here’s what the latter of these widely read and revered books has to say about excellence.

“Even a pocket of excellence can fill your life like a wall-to-wall-revolution. We have found that the majority of passionate activists who hammer away at the old boundaries have given up family vacations . . . birthday dinners, evenings, weekends and lunch hours, gardening, reading, movies and other pastimes. We have a number of friends whose marriages or partnerships crumbled under their devotion to a dream. There are more newly single parents than we expected among our colleagues. We are frequently asked if it is possible to ’have it all’ — a full and satisfying personal life and a full and satisfying hard-working professional one. Our answer is: no. The price of excellence is time, energy, attention and focus. At the same time the energy, attention and focus could have gone toward enjoying your daughter’s soccer game. Excellence is a high cost item.”3

That sounds like a description of some Christians I know, responding to the vision and expectations of their churches. It doesn’t sound much like a statement you’d find Jesus making to his followers.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not against excellence per se. Just its elevation to the level of doctrine. In fact I’m really not so much anti excellence as pro participation. I reckon participation is what church life should be about. Participation rather than performance, and a pursuit of excellence always, always, ends up being about performance.

If excellence is a primary goal, then the weak, the timid, the depressed, the disabled, the unskilled, the sick, the introverted, the overweight, the less attractive, the poor and the untalented aren’t going to get a look in. They’ll be relegated to being spectators for someone else’s worship performance.

From this perspective excellence doesn’t look so good. In fact it sounds quite unChristlike, almost evil. How can a process and a value that excludes large sections of a worshipping community from active participation be named in any other way?

Jesus had some pretty harsh words for those in his day who devised ways of making it tough for ordinary people to worship God. Something about them being as spiritually alive as painted up tombs, and not being able to see clearly because they had something in their eyes.

It seems to me that basically church must be about supporting people in their following of Christ in the world. Everything else flows from that.

We come together as followers of Jesus so we can share stories of the successes and failures of our life in the world, find encouragement and support in being with each other and in worshipping God together, and separate to follow Christ through another week. What we need to value most is community - our relationships with one another.

That’s why I’m pro participation, regardless of how excellent or poor that participation might be. It’s only in being open to as much participation as possible that community can be built. The prayer of confession I lead the church in may not be the best theology, it may not be the most polished performance, it may even offend some people with its awkward language, but it will reflect who I am and where my relationship with God is at and you’ll get to know me a little more than you did before, and maybe you’ll even get to make your confession.

During the week the pastor or some one else may talk with me about how I did, and offer some encouragement and some other perspectives on the theology of forgiveness, and next time I’ll do an even better job. Our community will be strengthened, and most importantly, I’ll have taken a little more responsibility for my own spiritual maturity.

I’ve said I’m anti excellence in church life, but I’m pro excellence in my life and in the life of every person in our congregation. I want to be the best I can be at what I do and who I am. I want the same for everyone at Cityside Baptist where I worship. I want what we offer as worship to be as good as it can be, but I’ll take participation over excellence every time.

Our worship is made up of a set liturgy that we follow pretty closely most Sundays, but variety and creativity comes from having eight or nine different people lead a segment each service. Each person can do her or his segment in whatever way they choose, eg setting up a paddling pool to throw stones into, playing a secular music track, having us paint, or singing a hymn.

We have talked together and agreed that no matter what anyone offers as worship we will support that person and participate appropriately, even if we don’t like what is being done. We will do this because we are first and foremost a community at worship. We trust each other and care about each other. We want to see everyone growing in Christ-likeness. We want everyone involved who wants to be - regardless of his or her ability or training.

There may be some robust discussion after (or during!) the worship, but the intended outcome of the discussion is a greater understanding of the variety of perspectives shared by the congregation, not conformity to a prescribed view. I may not like everything we did in worship last Sunday, but next week other people will be doing things differently and chances are it’ll be more to my taste. At least I can be sure it’ll be down to earth and real and will model for me that I too can be involved here.

At Easter our church produces an art installation consisting of 14 pieces of art, one for each of the Stations of the Cross. Any Citysider can participate by contributing art. No qualifications are required. No standards are applied. No checking of content or quality is carried out.

Artists are trusted to be involved in honest reflection on the biblical event and to produce the very best art they can in the media of their choosing. The art always comes in a wide range of media, and standards vary considerably - from the technically poor through to technically excellent. Pieces that move me through to pieces I’d like to see moved!

This year over 600 people used this installation to reflect on the Easter story. Many recorded comments to indicate they had found it a profoundly moving experience and some named specific stations that God had spoken to them through. Technically poor art can be as effective a medium for the Spirit of God as the technically excellent. (This is not to excuse shoddy work or lack of preparation. I have never been let down in my trusting the commitment of the ’artists’ to their art. They all take it very seriously).

Some of the most profound statements have come through the work of young children. The impact on the ’artist’ of being able to participate is incalculable.

I hope our worship and wider life together at Cityside will produce confident, maturing followers of Jesus Christ who live creatively and courageously in the chaotic emerging culture. Maturing followers of Jesus Christ able to interpret their faith in the market place of life.

If we produce excellence in some of our services along the way, that’s excellent, but it’s not our goal.

NOTES

1 Peters, Thomas and Waterman, Robert. 1982. New York: Warner Books.

2 Peters, Thomas and Austin, Nancy. 1985. New York: Warner Books.

3 Peters and Austin p 495-496. Quoted in Schaef, Anne and Fassel, Diane 1988. The Addictive Organisation. San Francisco: HarperCollins.

Ancient Worship

So the BBC is bringing Bill and Ben the flower pot men back to our television screens after 3 decades away! Those of us old enough to remember the pre-digital animation of the talking flowerpots will no doubt find their return a little unnerving. Our children (grandchildren?) may be surprised to discover us singing along with the theme song, but we’ll be the ones surprised by what comes along with the men in flowerpots – storybooks, videos, t-shirts, toys, cd’s and cassettes. The whole merchandising and advertising thing. None of which happened the first time around. It’ll be the same Bill and Ben, but it’ll also be different. Very different.

The Sex Pistols (founders of punk) are touring again after two decades of not playing (or liking each other apparently). ‘The Filthy Lucre Tour’. They’re doing it unashamedly for the money. Peter, Paul and Mary, the soul of the sixties, tour in the 1990’s and beyond. Some of the best selling music albums today are reissues of material recorded 30 or 40 years ago. Digitally remastered of course. Retrospective compilations are huge. Nostalgia sells. The Beatles have sold more albums since they broke up than they did when they were together. Elvis sings to us from beyond the grave and is even touring this year! (Thanks to video technology) The same, but different. Volkswagon’s Beetle rises from the rust heap, Chrysler revamps the late 1930’s American sedan and comes up with the best selling PT Cruiser. Nostalgia with electric windows and power steering.

This Easter millions of Christians around the world walked the Stations of the Cross. This very ancient walking meditation traditionally based on the events of the last week in Jesus’ life (Jesus prays in the garden, is betrayed by Judas, is condemned to death, and so on) developed as Christianity spread around the world and followers of Christ found it impossible to get to Jerusalem to walk the ‘actual’ sites of Jesus’ last week. In the fourteenth century the Franciscans established shrines outside monasteries and churches in Western Europe to help local pilgrims remember Christ’s passion. More recently the Stations have settled at fourteen and been marked on the inside of churches with small carvings or sculptures or with stained glass windows. Some as simple as a small cross and numeral.

In Auckland, and Glasgow, and London this Easter a few thousand people walked a different path. Stations of the Cross, yes. But in a very different form. Instead of using simple traditional minimalist mono symbols they used contemporary symbols and media and electronic multimedia to portray the events leading up to Jesus’ death. And they didn’t just do it for the faithful pilgrims in the Church. They opened their electronic and traditional art up for meditation by anyone, of any or no religious persuasion. Theirs was no attempt to reproduce the Stations as faithful descriptions of the events, rather it was an offering of their interpretations of and insights from meditating on these events, presented in whatever form of medium or media, electronic or otherwise they could draw on. Digital arts as well as traditional ones. Cartoon, found art, junk sculpture, video and interactivity sitting alongside gouache and oil and canvas.

Leonard Sweet describes this as AncientFuture Faith. ‘Faith that’s filled with new-old thinking, that re-appropriates the traditional into the contemporary, faith that mingles the old-fashioned with the newfangled, faith that understands the times in which we live in order to claim the era in which God has placed us for Jesus Christ.’ It’s from Len that I have taken the title for this column, AncientFuture Worship. I believe the church of the future will be radically different to the church of the past. But it will also look the same in many ways. It will draw on the best of the past and recycle it in contemporary ways. Not just repeat or reuse, but truly recycle by providing new contexts and new content for some of the old rituals, patterns, and words.

The contemporary Stations of the Cross is a good example of this AncientFuture Church in action. They have taken a very ancient and traditional form and given it a new context and content that connects with the mindset of the emerging culture. The old form remains available for those who still wish to access it in traditional ways, and the new form is offered to those who do not, or would not find that a helpful way into the Easter story - the heart of our Christian faith. They are also drawing on the interest there is in the culture for art and images, the growing hunger for mystery and spirituality, and the longing for connections with the past.

Creators of contemporary Stations of the Cross are making their Christian faith accessible to people outside the Church who have little or no understanding of the core of that faith. They may be doing this unconsciously, as a by-product of being given freedom to respond how they will to the gospel story and to create using materials and forms that reflect where they stand in contemporary culture. There is no pressure to conform in any way to either traditional thought patterns or materials. Important connections are made with a wider audience as they offer their own experience of being part of the gospel story through their art forms.

Groups who are taking this new/old dynamic and shaping it into forms like the contemporary stations of the cross are usually described as offering ‘alternative worship’. These groups, who are experimenting with new ways of being church in the emerging postmodern culture, and who often sit uncomfortably on the edge or beyond of the mainstream church are not particularly happy with the term. It begs the question, ‘alternative to what?’, especially when much of their worship involves very ancient words and rituals and symbols. ‘New Worship’ was tried but didn’t catch on. I hope that Len Sweet’s term might do better. It is a good description of what ‘alternative worship’ practitioners actually do.

With one eye always fixed firmly on the undercurrents and eddies of their contemporary culture they plunder and pillage the Christian tradition (and other traditions) as far back as it goes, for artifacts that might be useful in assisting postmodern pilgrims in search of a New World (whether they realise it or not). To better follow Jesus Christ in the Third Millennium is their goal. AncientFuture Church is about much more than just what we DO in church. It goes much deeper. It is also about structures and leadership styles and participation and theology and what you think of the culture. Running a ‘Stations of the Cross: Contemporary Icons to Reflect on at Easter’, won’t make your church an AncientFuture one. But it might not be a bad start on the journey toward modeling some new and authentic ways of being church to those who can’t understand why they should even look inside a church for the answers to their questions. And the process that you have to go through to get it approved (or declined) by your church or deacons or elders or pastor may tell you a lot about why there is little hope of your church truly becoming AncientFuture. That in itself is a worthwhile discovery. Maybe it will be the Spirit’s prompting you to start something new further out on the fringes. AncientFuture worship in the AncientFuture church. I like it. I think it’s got a great future. In fact, I think it is the future.

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Funeral

INTEGRITY

>>> this article first appeared in Reality Magazine, April/May 2001. Mark Pierson.<<<

Today I attended a Memorial service for a young woman recently murdered. The service in the hot open sunshine of the Domain drew several hundred people, mostly her friends or acquaintances, many of whom were recovering from addictions of one sort or another. All news media were also well represented.

In his tribute her father described how she had taken him and her mother to Cityside Baptist Church one Sunday morning. He gave a glowing tribute to the peace, safety, and warmth they’d felt during the service. They were not church people or Christians he explained.

After the service, I talked with other people who weren’t Christians but who wanted to talk about how God could allow such a tragedy to take place, and why their friend had started coming to Cityside, and what did we do that she had found helpful. I met people who had been to church youth groups as teenagers and not been back for decades; young adults who saw nothing of value in institutional religion; followers of non-Christian spiritual paths; those damaged by appallingly bad (abusive) experiences of church. Some said they might come along to Cityside sometime. It sounded interesting.

I found it very difficult to explain in a few minutes what we were about as a church, to people who carried only very old, very traditional, mostly negative pictures of the Church. Their stories were sad and moving. I wondered how we will respond at Cityside if some of these people do turn up - still wearing his large pentagram around his neck, he obviously under the influence of something, she clearly selling all she has to support her habit, emotionally and spiritually starved. How would they feel in our worship services - the public face of our church? How would they feel in yours?

I am totally opposed to worship that is designed for ‘outsiders’. I think it lacks integrity and ultimately satisfies no one. It is ‘us’ trying to be something we’re not in order to impress and influence a mythical person who’s characteristics we’ve determined by some form of generalization and distillation. The outcome is a group of people trying to be something they’re not - i.e., outreaching, trendy, friendly, connected, concerned, interested, etc - toward someone who doesn’t exist in reality.

If there is one characteristic that postmoderns can smell a mile off it’s integrity- or lack of it. Their sensors are finely tuned even though their own lives may at times seem to lack what they look for in others. And their sensors tell them that the institutional church lacks integrity. The reality isn’t important. Image is everything. Perception is reality. So what we do in our public worship needs to above all, have integrity.

Integrity is slippery. My Form 1 teacher wrote in my autograph book (getting your teacher’s autograph was the done thing several decades ago), ‘An inch of integrity is worth a mile of make-believe’. If by that he meant that I shouldn’t try to be someone I’m not, it’s a good definition. If we think of integrity as ‘to thine own self be true’ it doesn’t quite hit the mark for me. It’s too narrow, too individualistic, too lacking in the breadth and depth that makes community. Integrity means that it works, it adds up. It’s whole. It brings the bits together. Think of it as integration.

Which means if our worship is to have integrity it needs to reflect who we are as a worshipping community. And your worship needs to reflect who you are as a worshipping community. Who we are as people. Worship that relates to life as our community experiences it. We shouldn’t try to be someone or something that we are not. But we do this all the time in our worship. We so often present a public face that is clean-cut, decisive, has all the answers, never has any problems, when privately the exact opposite is true.

I understand the main purpose of church as being a gathering of people on a journey toward following Christ and following Christ as best they can, who come together to support each other on that journey. I can’t see any other reason to justify meeting. If our meetings don’t do that then there is no reason to meet and we are not the church, we’re some other organization or club. When we come together, whether as the 6 who meet over breakfast or the 600 who fill the auditorium, if our being together doesn’t move us toward wholeness and healing and Christ-likeness and a deeper understanding of who we really are as people, then we have failed to be the church.

Who we are when we come together needs to have integrity, but what we do should be put under the same scrutiny. The Gospel we present, the view of God, the worldview, the language we use, the messages we communicate also need to have integrity. What we say and what we do need to line up with what we believe (and vice versa), which in turn needs to grow out of our understanding of following Jesus as the Bible portrays it.

If we can discover worship that truly reflects our humanity and the realities of who we are and how we live as well as the realities of the Gospel, then I don’t think it matters if the style is liturgical, fundamental, Celtic or Catholic, some of the people at the Memorial service may feel at home among us. The bottom line is nowhere put better than in Will Campbell’s description of the Gospel in 10 words or less, ‘We’re all bastards, but God loves us anyway.’

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations

>>>This article first appeared in Reality Magazine, February/March 2001. Mark Pierson.<<<

How was Christmas for you? More specifically how was church for you this Christmas? What did you think of the services you attended? Would you have been happy taking friends who weren’t part of church culture? What did the experience of Advent and Christmas services say to you about the Christmas story? Not just the content but the feeling too? Did you come away feeling that your church had helped you celebrate, and helped you cope, and enabled you to feel confident about taking friends to experience something of the ‘greatest story ever told’? Or was the opposite true? Church added to the stress of an already stressful time of the year. It’s easy for church leaders to not stop and think seriously about what needs to be done at Christmas and what is just habit and unreasonable expectation. This is exactly the mindset that continues to draw the mainstream life of the Christian church further and further away from the orbit of Kiwi culture. We still expect people to come to us, on our terms. It’s a mindset that will ensure the continuing demise of the church. There’s another mindset that is contributing to this decline too. One I’m still grappling with.

“The Church has only 10 or 20 years left in the West.” That statement from an American (now married to an Australian and living in Australia), Episcopalian become Benedictine, Professor of World Religions, recently really surprised me. It wasn’t the kind of prediction I’d expect from someone of his cultural and religious background. After all, the church is doing well in the USA isn’t it? (Actually it isn’t. Attendance’s are dropping dramatically, but with such huge numbers to start with it will be a while before the decline strikes the awareness of the average church goer.) But there it was. 10 or 20 years. He was quick to add that he was talking about church and not about Christianity; and in the West.

His thesis was that the Christian church in the West has traditionally exerted an extrinsic authority on the culture around it and called for a response of obedience from people within the culture. In other words the Church and it’s authority figures have said ‘this is the way, walk ye in it’. And when the hoi polloi ask ‘Why?’ They’re told, ‘Because this is the way, walk ye in it’. On the other hand, New Religious Movements, New Age Movements, call them what you like, appeal to intrinsic authorities. Lived experience and existential depth bring a ‘convincedness’. “I know this is right”. It’s not hard to see what approach will be most successful in today’s culture.

The common response of the Church to this ‘attack’ on what it sees as it’s traditional values, is to try to assert more authority and demand greater obedience. In doing so it forgets that if Christian faith is to become mature and Christians become able to know what they believe and stand in the culture with and for those beliefs, extrinsic authorities must become internalised and gain intrinsic authority. How many ex-christians or ex-church goers do you know who have left the Faith or church because at some point in their life journey the Church or their church leaders or their understanding of the faith couldn’t cope with their life experience? Being told, ‘This is the way walk ye in it’, wasn’t enough on it’s own. No matter how loudly or forcefully or confidently it was said. It is the inability of the Church to help it’s communities to internalise faith in this way that leads to Christians deserting the faith. Faith that is accepted initially on extrinsic authority, perhaps in childhood, must be internalised if it is to last and mature.

In reality, being Christian involves maintaining a very important balance between both extrinsic and intrinsic authorities. There is an accountability to scripture and institutional tradition, and perhaps even to community, that is extrinsic. It’s outside of how you feel. But unless these also become internalised and transferred into something with intrinsic authority, something that you believe and know to be true from your experience, a living faith will not be maintained. Not a Christian one anyway. Western Buddhism, New Age Movements and the plethora of DIY religious alternatives available today offer an intrinsic authority (often through meditation) that either precedes any emphasis on extrinsic authorities (of perhaps food, diet, clothing, patterns of life) or ignores them entirely. You can access their spirituality directly and personally. Rules may or may not come later. Most often the opposite is true, or at least perceived to be true, of Christian faith.

It is the responsibility of the Christian Church, particularly of its ministers, Priests, preachers, teachers and leaders to understand what Christianity is competing with in the local and global market place of religions and to emphasise that perspective or aspect of Christian faith that best responds to that pressure. Right now we need to be letting people know – those already following Christ and those not doing so – that Christian Spiritually doesn’t involve only extrinsic authority. And we could start by looking no further than those already part of church communities. We could offer them some signs of hope that the Church understands what they are sensing – that there is more to faith than externals. As John Drane said at a recent Church of England conference to mark the end of their Decade of Evangelism,

“We often say that if we could only get people into the church they would realise that what it has to offer is good news. But it is the people who know us best, from the inside, who are rejecting us. If we could merely hold on to our own children, who desert the church in droves, the decline would be turned around”.

It is part of the human journey toward maturity to seek to transform extrinsic authority into intrinsic authority. By failing to recognise, understand, encourage and support that process, the church pushes out the very people it is supposed to be drawing in and drawing on to maturity.

What does this mean in practical terms? I believe there are a few simple significant ways in which we can begin to bring change that will have a significant long term positive effect on the maturity of Christians and therefore on the future of the Church in the West. One of them is to provide opportunities for contemplation and meditation in our services of worship. I hope these ‘activities’ would also become part of every Christian’s non-church life too, but that’s unlikely unless they’re modelled in our gatherings for worship.

Contemplation has to be taught. Just providing ‘a time of silence’ isn’t enough (although I hear many people saying that it would be a wonderful interlude in their current noise-filled worship). People need to be trained in contemplation and using silence. We proclaim that in Jesus and through the work of the Holy Spirit every follower of Christ has direct access to God. Our practice says that only a few special followers can be trusted to have that access. The rest of us need to be told, ‘This is the way walk ye in it’. So contemplation and silence are considered dangerous. Too dangerous for the average believer. How can the church leaders be sure that Joe and Mary are hearing God speak to them in their contemplation and not ‘someone else’? Well, how can Joe and Mary be sure that it’s God speaking to the leaders? Because they’re paid to listen to God? Because they tell us, ‘This is the way walk ye in it’? Church leaders need to recognise the power games they often play and become willing to trust that God is just as likely to speak through Joe and Mary as through any other person in our community of faith. We need to train people in spiritual exercises and contemplation so they can hear from God for themselves and realise that following Jesus doesn’t depend only on extrinsic authorities but also on that inner strength and confidence that come from an experience of knowing; of being convinced because you’ve experienced intrinsic and extrinsic motivations