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In a Dec. 2002 interview with Asma Assad, English born to Syrian parents, and now wife of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Asma was asked about her sense of identity, about how she saw herself with regards to both her English and Syrian heritage. She responded by saying, “I am not one or the other. I am part of both worlds.” I like that. I think it captures something of how many people see themselves relative to their experience of mainline, Evangelical and Pentecostal denominations, and the broader cultural contexts within which they live and with which they engage missionally. They have serious questions about what it means to be church, the forms of church, the relevance of church, and the purpose and mission of church in the 21st century. They see themselves as “part of both worlds”, but they don’t quite fit in in either ‘world’ – church or culture.
Many Jesus-followers today find themselves, relative to the established church, grappling with the paradox of both needing to belong but of also realising that in the end it’s impossible for them to fully belong. They inhabit the “margins” of what’s been and what is, while all the while deconstructing and reconstructing with an eye to what might be needful up ahead. They explore, as Theologian Terry Veling writes, “relieved of taken-for-granted conventions” and the need to unquestioningly perpetuate established models, values, and practices. Instead, they will question; they will engage vitally and meaningfully with lived-in-contexts and their notions of what it means to follow Jesus, individually and corporately. As poet T.S Eliot has written, “With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling [they] shall not cease from exploration." Exploration in all its dimensions. They will experiment. They will find out for themselves what faithfulness to this Jesus-following life means in practice. They will feel for themselves the meaning and significance of this crucified and resurrected God. They will renew connections with the past. They will construct new parables – new stories – new ways of forming authentic identity, of nurturing meaning and purpose in the interplay of the sacred and the everyday. In any church these persons will ‘work’ the edges; they will lovingly subvert; they will extend in new directions the old fabric of church identity and praxis.
Alan Roxburgh and Mike Regele, in their book, Crossing the Bridge: Church Leadership in a time of Change, helpfully situate these ‘marginal,’ or ‘liminal’ experiences within a period of “massive destabilizing change” within Western society. Change that sees congregations moving from a phase of relative stability and on through a disembedding phase when any remaining stability is all but gone. This is certainly the experience of the Church in countries like New Zealand and Australia. In this latter phase the power of the-way-it’s-always been-done no longer has the ability to act like glue holding the system in the place where it has long been. Both external and internal pressures become too great for merely maintenance and management of what has been. The systems and the people in it are now experiencing increasing levels of distress as they try to manage the challenges from within the remaining vestiges of power, stability and tradition. The clearest evidence of this ‘disembedding’ process can be seen in the movement of the Church away from its long taken for granted place at the center and heart of Western society. As theologians like, Douglas John Hall write, its life and voice has been successfully marginalised in the public arena.
As the Church finds itself marginalised, so too do many individuals within churches. For them the margins of church life and praxis have become ‘in-between spaces,’ spaces carved out of this sense of not fully belonging, of their not completely fitting in. Not a few people talk of their experience of being ‘in-between,’ in terms of trauma, in terms of their feeling incredibly lonely, misunderstood, unlistened to, and uncomfortable. They feel, in talking of change and new possibilities, as though they’re speaking a foreign language, one that very few others understand. They feel a need to build some depth into their lives, a need to ‘push’ below the superficial. In ‘belonging’ to their churches they feel their energy, their passion, and their creativity slowly ebbing away. Tragically, as pastor/sociologist Alan Jamieson has recorded in his excellent book A Churchless Faith, for many in this group, the ‘margins’ become a ‘back door,’ a way of exiting the Church.
Thankfully though, many also choose to stay in the flow of transitioning modernity within the life of church, and instead see these ‘in-between spaces’ as giving birth to an exciting new range of relationships, new networks, new conversations (both national and global), new worship contexts, and ways of responding to God. These people choose to inhabit these spaces, because of, and for the sake of the gospel - an ancient story – lived out in what a friend has called, Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet world.
Former Anglican Archbishop of South Africa, Desmond Tutu captures well this sense of being ‘in-between,’ which for him is also a dangerous place. He writes: “…I am the marginal man between two forces, and possibly I will be crushed. But that is where God has placed me, and I have accepted the vocation.”
Author, Peter Renner talks of churches as needing “solid cores and soft edges.” A sense well captured by Ponsonby Baptist (Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand) church when Mike Riddell was the minister there in the 1980’s. Church praxis, for them, was defined by the motto, ‘Committed at the Core, Open at the Edges’. Now while the core is critically important and necessary, it seems to me that there is a need for a renewed focus, by the established and the conventional church, on the creative ‘edges’ or ‘margins’ of many of their church communities. These ‘forward,’ open, permeable edges, are the habitation of those grappling with the “disembedding” and “transitional” dimensions of a churches life. They want to belong. They feel the pull of the center, the pull of the spoken and unspoken assumptions about what it means to belong, about what is expected of them, about where they’ve come from as church, but all the while they also strongly feel the pull of different futures. As Kurt Cobain, deceased singer of the band Nirvana, has written, “…there are those who have the gift to challenge what is expected of their future…” These are the people in the margins, on the edges of the ways church is currently being worked out.
This is nothing new. Culture, society, and church have always experienced the ‘pull’ of change. They’ve always had their edges, their margins within which apostle, prophet, artist, restorer, and recycler have played “loose” with hand-me-downs. Some they have kept, while others they have either discarded or reconditioned. At there best these ‘edges’ or ‘in-between spaces’ have always been pregnant with new potentialities – some realised, some not. These “edges” and “margins,” and those who inhabit them, are God’s gift to us. God’s means of challenging us to freshly interact with the “ancient text” of Scripture and to make meaningful its story in our contemporary cultural and missional contexts. To give it voice. To clothe it in flesh.
So what might be some of the characteristics of church communities who make welcome these people inhabiting these ‘edges’ or ‘in-between spaces’?
? They will creatively s t r e t c h outward from the edges. They will preserve the old without resisting the new. They will be characterised by an opening outwards, an unfolding of creative and meaningful new praxis and forms. They will have a firm grasp of their core beliefs and values, and will operate out of a strongly theological framework. Their life will be less about perpetuating trendiness, about being ‘trendy’, and more about integrity, faithfulness, authenticity, and relational depth.
? They will be experimental, with a greater sense of ‘movement’ and focus on ‘journey’. There will be a greater sense of fluidity. Pete Ward, a lecturer in England, talks in terms of ‘liquid church.’ He’s advocating a move away from church structures and practices of church where the focus is on key performance indicators such as increasing attendance, financial giving, number of programs and small groups, and on the one-size-fits-all approach to church form and praxis. He believes the church must – in line with culture – liquefy itself and adopt an increasingly informal, diverse, and fluid approach. Andrew Jones, in Prague, has blogged about diverse, interacting, co-habitating “layers of church expression.” Steve Taylor, a friend down here in New Zealand talks of this fluidity in terms of DJ’s and their practice of sampling. Fluidity is less concerned about what the one best model of church might be, and is more concerned about being faithful to the One who calls it into existence, nurtures it, and enables it in all its diversity.
? They will have a greater commitment to creating ‘space’ – both breathing space, and creative, exploratory space. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, has been quoted as saying that “churches need to offer more space where people can ‘draw breath’ without demanding a big commitment.” This kind of space will be opened up to the possibility of encountering God present by his Spirit – God encountered through story, symbol, scripture, art, music, poem, movie, and physical movement / symbolic action. The gathering of these church communities (in whatever form) will be about the ‘framing’ or ‘curating’ of open-ended space within which to listen, to dream, to reflect, to pray, to learn, to be energised and replenished, and from there, to be sent out into all the world.
? They will be characterised by a very real sense of DIY (‘do-it-yourself’) and participation. For me, Annie Dillard most succinctly captures this sense: “…I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means at hand. There is an anomalous specificity to all our experience in space, a scandal of particularity, by which God burgeons up or showers down into the shabbiest of occasions, and leaves his creation’s dealings with him in the hands of purblind and clumsy amateurs.” Another friend, Mark Pierson, a Baptist Pastor, writing on the subject of excellence of performance versus increased congregational participation, has this to say, “If excellence is a primary goal (rather than participation), 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…It’s only in being open to as much participation as possible that community can be built.”
It seems then, to me, that any Christian community that takes seriously it’s being called by God-revealed-in-Jesus, must also take seriously both its own marginality (for it is not of this world) and its ‘servant-for-the-sake-of-the-world’ calling. It will be out of this recognition of who we are and why we are, that we must learn to value, listen too, and care for the marginalised voices of artists, vagabonds, poets, the harshly trodden underfoot, and the excluded; all who ask questions, who hold up alternative visions, who challenge and help the church continually, meaningfully, and creatively stretch toward a genuine encounter with the ‘other’ outside of the ‘walls’.
In our churches we need both “solid cores” and “soft edges” or margins. We need those who are part of both the world of Church and the world within which the Church finds itself. We need those people who connect us with past, and those who diversely orientate us toward the future.
We need the ‘pull’ of the solid core (continuity), but perhaps more importantly today, we need the ‘pull’ of the edges (discontinuity) as we begin to honestly discern the wind of the Spirit, and to grapple with the constitutive elements of what it means to be an intentionally missional people; the people of God located in the unique contexts which each of us finds ourselves in, be it the outback of Australia, Melbourne, Japan, England, Prague, Lexington, Cincinnati, California, Florida, or Cambridge New Zealand, from where I’m writing.
Finally, a parting Kierkegaard quote that I think captures something of a montage of texts and stories happening below the reach of my attempt at pulling something from the boat of belonging to the surface of not fully belonging, in my worded ‘net’. Quote sourced from a friend who creatively inhabits the ‘edges’, Jason Evans:
Although the scribes could explain where the Messiah should be born, they remained quite unperturbed in Jerusalem. They did not accompany the Wise Men to seek him. Similarly we may be able to explain every article of our faith, yet remain spiritually motionless. The power that moved heaven and earth leaves us completely unmoved.
What a contrast! The three kings had only a rumour to go by. But it spurred them to set out a long, hard journey. The scribes, meanwhile, were much better informed, much better versed. They had sat and studied the scriptures for years, like so many dons. But it didn't make any difference. Who had the more truth? Those who followed a rumour, or those who remained sitting, satisfied with all their knowledge?
References.
Terry A. Veling, Margin Writing and Marginal Communities: Between Belonging and Non-Belonging, Pacifica 9 (February 1996). Quotes are from pages 37 and 42.
Alan Roxburgh and Mike Regele, Crossing the Bridge: Church Leadership in a Time of Change, Precept Group Inc. 2000.
Steve Taylor, Romeo & Juliet and Alt-Worship, Seven Magazine, Dec. 2002. See http://www.sevenmagazine.org/index.php?archive=122002_04
Peter Renner, Cores and Edges, Moonchpa Publishing. PO. Box
Pete Ward, see http://www.cix.co.uk/~pb/natcons2002/p-ward.pdf
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm, Harper and Row, Perennial Library edition, 1988. Quote is on page 55.
Andrew Jones, see http://www.tallskinnykiwi.blogspot.com/ His post of 8.36am on the 15th Dec. 2002.
Mark Pierson, see http://www.reality.org.nz/articles/48/48-pierson.html
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