my peculiar place

I feel the need to communicate that my stance on Christianity is peculiar.. here's a story I hope apophatically explains why.

In 1947 the Church of South India was formed. One of the largest ecumenical experiments in recent history the church brought together Anglican, Presbyterian, Congregational and even in the 1990s some Baptist and Pentecostal groups. The sheer breadth of this unity is quite an accomplishment.

One of the churches earliest missionary bishops was Lesslie Newbigin. The bishop who was later involved with the WCC also inspired the Missional Church movement which has been extremely influential in my thinking.

Yet as I look at the Church of South India I am also reminded of this. There is a network of house churches in India that is showing to be highly effective in creating Christian communities and discipling people. Yet is not at all connected to the any church institution, let alone the CSI.

So how am I to reconcile this? On the one hand I appreciate the ecumenical movement as well as the liturgies and heritage of churches yet am very much drawn to the grass-root type stuff of simple church and in North America emerging church.

OCAP, The Salvation Army, the government and people

I will be honest every tuesday I think about Ivan Illich.

The reason is on Tuesday nights we go on StreetWalks where an outreach worker with the Salvation Army tours us around downtown Toronto explaining social justice issue. One questions that is perpetually on my mind anyway, and even more so on tuesday nights as the youth ask similair questions, is how can non-professionals show love and hospitality to those who have severe addictions or are criminally cultured?

Coming from the perspective of Youth who on the most part, realistically, will never be trained to be professional addictions counselors and are much to young to do anything like activist work this question is potent. I will not go into details but the youth are really impacted by this walk. Yet at the same time no non-institutional way of grapling with the issues is presented which leads them with out really anything to do about the issues.

Quotation

"Is there not in the Western view of human beings and society a delusion, which always looks to the future and wants to improve it, even when it implies an increase of suffering in your own societies and in the South? Have you not forgotten the richness which is related to sufficiency? If, according to Ephesians 1, God is preparing in human history to bring everyone and everything under the lordship of Jesus Christ, his shepherd-king—God’s own globalization!—shouldn’t caring for and sharing with each other be the main characteristic of our lifestyle, instead of giving fully in to the secular trend of a growing consumerism?" - Bangkok Declaration

This was written during the late 90's Asian Financial Crisis.

Theology as Lover

How are we to understand theology?

I ask this partially out of experience of people being adamantly against the discourse where I love it. One understanding that really captures me is Paul Tillich's in the History of Christian Thought where he describes the relationship between Theology and Scripture as Theology penetrating scripture. When I read that line the image immediately evoked is one a diver diving into water, that's what a theologian does to scripture making sense of by diving through it, swimming and exploring all it's details and basqueing in it's temperature.

Another image I had is theology as lover, lover on the scriptural text. It is not identical to the text, but it loves it. It serves it, it courts it, it has fights with it, it reconciles with it, it swoons over it, it gets confused over it, it desires it and it dreams about it. It hopes to produce something out of the relationship, and hopes the relationship last long.

What do you think?

Critical Praxis and my Summer Experience

So this summer I've decided that each week I will relate some of my mission experience with a favourite theorist, theories or theologians. Here is my tentative schedule for the next 8 weeks.

Week One - Service Sites, Institutions and Youth - engaging with Ivan Illich
Week Two - the Church and the Churches - ecclesiology, Christian non-profits and A missional ecclesiology - Darrell Guder
Week Three - Justice, prophetic action and leftist politics - Walter Brueggemann
Week Four - new friends at sites and the other - a little riff on Emmanuel Levinas
Week Five - the Story I find myself in - Narrative Theology
Week Six - the ideologies of missions trips - Marxist theory
Week Seven - finding meaning in service through Language - Derrida
Week Eight - the last week - I'm reading Moltmann this summer and I want to end with his eschatological ideas (to be fecisious)