So, Kester’s Blah…
Much of what Kester spoke about was based on his book, The Complex Christ, so if you’ve read that you can probably stop reading this, if not, maybe it’ll tempt you to read the book. I've also just realised Kester has released his own notes on his blog.
Kester began by talking about the need for change in the church and shared his belief that the model for change should be evolution not revolution. The nature of the church is that it is not a machine, he said. Paul does not write about the robot of Christ, he writes about the body and therefore a sudden change is just not possible. Living systems do not just change, they evolve… a process which takes time.
To encourage this change, Kester then went on to talk about the importance of disturbance. Refering to the development of the peacock, Kester spoke about how it is possible to evolve down a blind alley and the only way to stop this is disturbance.
The church as it increasingly walks down a blind alley, needs to be disturbed into thinking about its direction. Later on Kester went on to talk about how this might happen and specifically mentioned the role of leaders in the emerging church. Their role, he said, should not be one of direction, but one of enabling and specifically enabling communication.
Kester also spoke about evolution in our cities and drew parallels between Fowler’s ‘Stages of Faith’ and urban development. He was arguing that the church, as a people group, should be at the forefront of this development for three reasons:
1) missional, this work is crucial in the growth of the kingdom of god
2) theological, the city is important. It is the place where God and man co-operate; in the countryside it’s just God’s creation, but the city is different, in the city man has had the opportunity to play with what God has given us.
3) sociological, the only way society really changes is bottom-up
Returning to the issue of leadership and models of church, Kester finished on a really interesting point. He spoke about the supermarket and the dinner party. At the supermarket there is a market exchange; you get what you want and in return you pay a certain amount, there are no favours and nothing is owed. The dinner party is different; at the dinner party it would be rude to offer money, because it is a different culture where gifts are exchanged freely. Perhaps under pressure from our culture, Kester argued that the church is showing signs of moving towards a market exchange where people expect to get something in return for what they give, be that a visit once a month (in the case of the elderly) or a warm fuzzy feeling at church next Sunday.
On the way out I bought a copy of Kester’s book and having read quite a bit on the train journey home, I am enjoying it. But one thing that does concern me about this whole movement is where the discipline of theology fits in.
I’ve been to a couple of Blahs now and heard people talk about Emerging Church elsewhere, particularly Greenbelt, and it strikes me that theology is becoming less and less important. In my first year at Cliff I read Threshold of the Future, by Mike Riddell and it blew me away because the author really seems to engage with theology. But I don’t find that in many other places in this conversation. Instead it seems there is equal reliance on other discipline; particularly cultural studies, psychology and sociology. So for example, looking at the back of Kester’s book his categorised bibliography has seven books on theology but twenty on culture & philosophy.
If the Emergent Conversation isn’t to be viewed by traditional thinkers in the church as a watering down of the gospel then I think we need to pay careful attention to this and recognise the importance of engaging in these issues theologically. Yes, Erikson and Jung have much to teach us, but surely that should not involve displacing theology from its rightful place at the centre of this discussion…
End of report, end of rant… comments very welcome!
hi, it was good to meet you again, hope you got back safely.
In general I agree with you about the place of theology, if you're talking about the church or God then good theology is vital, but I found it a nice refreshing change to hear someone talk about other things for a bit - the science used as metaphor was interesting and there's no reason we can't gain insights from disciplines other than theology. My worry would be more that thologians pick up on snippets of pop-science and use them without really understanding them.
Posted by: lou | October 23, 2005 at 07:44 AM