Skip to main content

Aahhh... The Good Old Days....


There is a myth so dear to most Christians that we have developed various versions of it to comfort ourselves with. It goes like this:
Once upon a time the Church was perfect. Unfortunately in [A] [B] happened and things have never been the same since. For [A] substitute some date in the dim and distant past. If you don't know the date, a vague nod in the general direction of some past century or other will do. For [B] substitute the name of whatever it was that ruined things. A helpful list follows:

* the fall of Jerusalem
* the end of the New Testament era
* the Apostle Paul
* the suppression of the Gospel of Thomas
* the Reformation
* Vatican 2
* Sunday sports
* Constantine
* St. Augustine

The last two are particularly popular as villains because they each mark significant turning points in the development of the Church, very few people are as knowledgeable about them as they give the impression of being, and it's not difficult to find incriminating proof texts. I spent today listening as Andrew McGowan tried, and in my view, succeeded, in putting each into their historical context, and discussed each as an exemplar of a particular strategy for relating temporal power to spiritual authority. As Andrew pointed out, the Church has been conflicted and ambiguous from day one, as is to be expected of those who gather round one whose strength is demonstrated principally in an act of vulnerability and weakness.

The implications of the lectures we have received here have been discussed in caucus groups; yesterday I talked to other bishops and today was in a men's group and a group of people in their fifties. Discussion has been warm, and occasionally profound. Talking has helped me assimilate the material from Andrew and relate it to the not unrelated stuff I had been serendipitously reading before coming here. One of the theses emerging is the resonance between issues emerging around the formation of Christendom, and those emerging around its ending; a resonance important not because it marks out some golden era to which we should all strive to return, but because it shows the sorts of struggles we are likely to encounter as we learn to be a different sort of church than has ever existed before.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Comments

Elaine Dent said…
Exactly. Over here in our corner, I am convinced that the church is in transition again, that somehow I am more like a midwife, but I don't know to what. In discussion last week with someone at Holden Village, WA, where lots of thoughtful conversation happens, she said being a pastor in a congregation is like being an interim. Pass on any helpful reading. Brennon Manning's "Ruthless Trust" at least reminded me of HOW to be in the church at this time.
Anonymous said…
"not because it marks out some golden era to which we should all strive to return, but because it shows the sorts of struggles we are likely to encounter as we learn to be a different sort of church than has ever existed before."

You are just assuming that you will be shaping the Church of the future. Are you shaping and changing lives now? Why not?
Elaine Dent said…
Hmmm. By God's grace and only God's grace, lives are being shaped and changed as we speak (write). I've seen it, and by God's grace we are sometimes being used as leaders in that formation. That by definition is the Church; it just isn't fitting into the conventional systems of the last century....and that, although it is hard for us to adjust to, is perhaps God's grace too.
Kelvin Wright said…
Thank you Elaine. Shaping lives is God's business. So for that matter is shaping the church. The dynamics I was speaking of aren't ones I am expecting in the future but rather ones I am encountering now. My task is one of listening and responding. Now and in the future.
Anonymous said…
hmmm.. . Being a Bishop or a pastor is then having an audience to pay attention to you . . . while you are listening to them? I'm Ok with that. But I think you both are fooling yourselves and I don't mind telling you that.
Lee said…
Sunday Sports can be blamed for a lot of things actually.

That whole "good old days" thing drives me nutty. The old days were not necessarily better - there were dumb people doing dumb things, just as there are now. And there were happy people too. And the majority just muddled along.

And the future is not necessarily going to be worse. There will still be dumb people doing dumb things, and happy people too. And the majority will still just muddle along.

The problem comes when we try to blame something other than ourselves for the way things are, and assume that we can't change them. It's the whole "let's sit back and blame X" philosophy that irks me.

Maybe we wouldn't have to blame X if more of us got off our overly padded rear ends and got active making our communities the sort of places where we can look back on history and say, "you know what? History sucked. Today things are much better. Thanks to us!"

Okay, now I'm procrastinating / waffling. Didn't you say something about that in another post? ;-)

Popular posts from this blog

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon

Return to Middle Earth

 We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including  the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my  copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night.  My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old