Sacred Science Book

A comment on my post on Darwin's novels mentioned an entry on another blog that connected for the commenter.

That blog is a couple of years old, but an interesting post on the Bible is not a science text.

BTW, I don't entirely 'follow' the blog I got this off....its a tad fiesty for my inclinations; but this post had a connection for me. Maybe it does for you too.

Servant Leadership?

Caught this quote, from the fellow who invented the term 'servant-leader', with a critical comment on the idea. It is from Creating Leaderful Organisations by Joseph Raelin (Berrett-Koehler Publications, San Francisco 2003)

Darwin's novels

I took some time off from a recent conference I attended to browse a local bookshop. In the history section I picked up Darwin’s two novels: the Origin of the Species and the Descent of Man, thinking I must re-read them.

As I was mulling over those who think that Darwinism’s ideas as they have now transmogrified inform the Genesis creation account. I don’t think Darwin saw it that way, though; and nor have many other commentators who consider that account of origins as in diametric competition with the biblical account.

The very title of Darwin’s “Origin of Species” in the light of its content, sets it at odds with Genesis 1.

Indeed, the claim at the outset denies that Genesis 1 does provide any information about origins, because if not self-sufficient, then how accurate? After all, if it did provide information (and not a mythic tale, as some seem to think it is), and was accepted, there would be no need for a competing account!

Darwin clearly thought that his thoroughgoing materialism set to right people’s views of the origin of life and all its forms, denying in terms that there was any real alternative and the alternative explanations offered being merely emergent from the materialism that he proposed as what is finally real.

But Darwin did more than make a claim about sources; he implicitly made a claim about the metaphysically basis for our take on final questions. This is not simply a claim about a technical matter that can be relegated to science’s closet of details, but is an over-arching statement about the nature of the world and our place in it, that has to throw other such claims into competition in their own ‘struggle for survival’

In Darwin’s formulation, man is attached to the soil, but without any ‘breathed in-ness’ of God, and no modelling by God, but by chance; this breaking the relationship of love and joining us not to a person, reflecting his image, but to dust, inevitably seen as being it its image; arisen in a struggle for existence that refers not to a very good creation, which is devoid of struggle, but to an already broken world where the hand of God is obscured by our rejecting of his kinship.

That Darwin sets out from a completely different starting point to the Bible is evident in that struggle for existence in Darwin presupposes and is based on a world in pain. The “Origin of Species’” claim of ultimacy detaches us from the personal and plants us squarely in the material. There is no middle ground.

Earthworm?

I was more than amused to read that the English polemicist Richard Dawkins likened Senator Fielding, to the Senator’s disadvantage, to an ‘earthworm’in his (Dawkins) recent outing in Melbournes festival of atheism.

My amusement was not for Dawkins, for his rapier wit, or delightful use of language; none of which was in evidence in the jibe, but against him; and for Fielding.

The background to this is that on an ABC TV program, Sen. Fielding aligned himself with those who believe that the creation is but a few thousand years old, as against the those who think that the cosmos, and earth to boot, are many billions of years old.

Dawkins was on the same program and declared the young age to be a ‘non-trivial error’, akin to thinking that the United States was only 8 metres from coast to coast.

I agree, it is a non-trivial error, but on the other foot. Dawkins’ position is akin to thinking that the United States is wider than the Earth!

But my amusement?

Dawkins, if you’ve not detected, or do not know, adheres at least implicitly to philosophical materialism: he thinks, or so it seems, that what exists is only material, or the result of material; thus mind is an epiphenomenon of matter, as is language and, for that matter, grand opera; but so, of course, are love, intellect,  and ideas.

When thinking of this, I think of Darwin’s recursive defeater; he observed something along the lines that if his idea of evolution was the result of random changes in a monkey’s brain, then what would commend it to our attention: the whole of our world becomes just a jangle of atoms aimlessly rearranged by mute forces. Whence ‘aimfulness’ when all that is real is mere aimlessness? How, then does anything have any meaning: everything has the same status and is finally a value-free pile of material; and nothing else.

So Dawkins’ comparing Fielding to an earthworm falls flat. What after all, is the basis for comparing intelligence in a material world where random material action has caused everything? With the only final point of reference being material, Dawkins can say nothing meaningful about either himself or Fielding and so his claim has no content, unless he can explain how value is derived from material when there is no reference for value within a material universe and no source outside it.

God used evolution?

I was discussing with a friend the notion that God might have used evolution to complete the creation.


We were talking about Wilder-Smith’s wonderful book “God: To Be or Not To Be” and came to the conclusion that for God to have used evolution he would have had to make it do that which it is not able to do.

That is, he would have to use change processes not to produce chance outcomes, but purposed outcomes. He would have to inject teleology into that which is purely stochastic.

But that means he would have made a thing (chance) which could not achieve his ends (a creative purpose) and so work against the thing made (chance); which is to say, that he couldn’t have used chance at all, because chance leads to dissolution, not creation!

So God could only conceivably use chance to create by not using chance at all, but by over-riding (guiding, people might like to suggest!) it. The very notion breaks down under the weight of its own incoherence.

Evolution weekend

A quote from a newsletter I received recently:

The compatibility, or lack thereof, of evolution and faith remains a hot debate among Christians. Prominent evangelical [Ecumenist] theologian Dr. R. Albert Mohler Jr. has said he finds it impossible to reconcile the two. While he does not deny that changes do take place in the animal kingdom and that there is even a process of natural selection, he firmly rejects theistic evolution and the argument that the process is entirely natural and in no case supernatural.
"God was not merely fashioning the creation of what was already pre-existent, nor was He merely working with a process in order to guide it in some generalized way, nor was He waiting to see how it would turn out," Mohler has said.

Which question?

Thinking further on  my previous post which was just a quote from Schaeffer's True Spirituality:
Schaeffer's driving us back to a universe that is at root personal indicates that final questions are of 'the personal' and not of material.
So discussion of origins, for instance, with all that such discussions suggest for 'first philosohpy' and how we make an ontological structure of our world (that is our conceptualisation of the world...the world in our head) comes up as either a question that is finally personal; that is, related to God and thus the only connection we have in these terms is the creation account in Genesis 1, and its corollaries throughout the Bible, or is finally material, when, to my mind, the question recurses upon itself and becomes its own annhialator.
If ultimate questions are finally material, then there is no real ultimacy to them, as the question becomes merely an arrangement of material and has no meaning beyond that arrangement.
This then puts Satre's first question into an interesting light. I think it was Satre, who proposed that the basic philosophical question is "why is there something, rather than nothing?"
From a materialist perspective the question is strange. It seems to ask about reasons, which are an attribute of personal volition, rather than causes in a strick mechanistic causal sense. If it is mere the latter, then the question is highly uninteresting, becuase it will just give us matter 'all the way back' and so grind to a halt in a tiresome regress. That is, it will tell us nothing more than we (think we) know now: that material is all we've got! We end up where we start out.
 However, if it is a question of reasons, then it is interesting. Only, how can it be answered if it is denied that the universe is finally personal?

A couple of articles that I think overlap:

Terry Mortenson on philosphical naturalism and Normal Geisler on beware of philosophy

A Christian philosophy?

I wonder if this is the starting point of a Christian philosophy. It's from Schaeffer's "True Spirituality" the beginning of chapter 5.

Its a long quote, but please stick with it.

Our generation is overwhelmingly naturalistic. There is an almost complete commitment to the concept of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system. This is its distinguising mark. If we are not careful, even though we say we are biblical Christians and supernaturalists, yet nevertheless the naturalism of our generation tends to come in upon us. It may infiltrate our thinking without our recognising its coming, like a fog creeping in through a window opened only half an inch. Immediately, Christians begin to loose the reality of their Christian life. As I travel about and speak in many countries, I am impressed with the number of times I am asked by Christains about the loss of the reality. Surely this is one of the greatest, and perhaps the greatest reason for a loss of reality: that while we say we believe one thing, we allow the spirit of the naturalism of the age to come in upon us, unrecognised. All too often the reality is lost becuase the 'ceiling' is down too close upon our heads. It is too low. And the 'ceiling' which closes us in is the naturalistic type of thinking.
Now the Christian's spirituality, as we wrote of it in the previous chapters, does not stand alone. It is related to the unity of the Bible's view of the universe. Theis means that we must understand--intellectually, with the windows open--that the universe is not what our genreation says it is, seeing only the naturalistic universe. This relates directly to what we have been dealing with in the earlier chapters. For example, in chapter one we have said that we are to love God enough to say 'thank you' even for the difficult things. Now surely, we must immediately understand, as we say this, that this has no meaning whatsoever unless we live in a personal universe in which there is a personal God who objectively exists. To claim that we are to say 'thank you' to God in the midst of the hard things of life, without this being framed in the reality of a personal universe, in which a personal God objectively  exists, makes 'thank you' an absolutely meaningless phrase.
Similarly, in study two we  touched upon the same thing, when we saw that in the normal perspective it is very difficult to say 'no' to things and to self, in the things mentality and the self-mentality of men, especially in the twentieth century. But we saw that on the Mount of Transfiguration we were brought  face to face with a su pernatural universe. Here we find Moses and Elijah speaking to Christ as he is glorified. And we saw that this supernautural universe is not a far-off universe. Quite the contrary: there is a perfect continuity, as in normal life. So (Luke 9:37) the day after these things had occurred Jesus and the disciples went down the mountain and entered into the normal things of life. Indeed, the normal sequence was continuing while they were there on the mountain. There is a perfect example of the temporal and spatial relationship here. As they went up and climbed the mountain, there was no place where they passed into the philosophic other. As they went up the inclined plain of the mountain, there was no break. And if they had had watches upon their wrists, these watches would not have stopped at some point: they would have ticked away.  and when they came down, it was the next day and the normal sequence had proceeded. Here we find the supernatural world in relationship to the normal sequence and spatial relationships of the presesnt world.
Also in chapter two we considered Christ's redemptive death, which has no meaning whatsoever outside the relationship of a supernatural world. The only reason the words 'redemptive death' have any meaning is because there is a personal God who exists and, more than that, has a characrer. He is not morally neutral. When man sins against the character, which is the law of the universe, he is guilty, and God will judge that man on the basis of true moral guilt. In such a setting, the words 'the redemptive death of Christ' have meaning, otherwise they cannot.
Now we must remember what we are talking about: the fact that the true Christiain life, as we have examined it, is not to be separated from the unity of the full biblical teaching: it is not to be abstracted from the unity of the Bible's emphasis on the supernatural world. This make sense of the biblical image of me as a Christian, face to face with the supernatural world, as the bride, linking himself to Christ, the Bridegroom, so that he, the crucified, risen and glorified Christ, may bring forth fruit through me...
This is the Bible's message, and when we see it so, and are in this framework, rather than the naturalistic one (which comes in so easily upon us) the teaching that Christ as the bridegroom will bring forth fruit through me ceases to be strange. The Bible insists that we live in reality in a supernatural universe. But if we remove the objective reality of the supernatural universe in any area, this great reality of Christ the Bridebgroom bringing forth fruit through us, immediately falls to the floor, and all that Christianty is at such a point is a psychological and sociological aid, a tool; and that is all. So as soon as we remove the s upernaturalness of the u nivesre, all we have left is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, in which religion is to be simply a sociological tool for the future. In Huxley's concept of romantic evolutionary humanism, religion has a place, not because there is any truth in it, but because in the strange evolutionary formation, man as he now is simply needs it...Remove the supernatural from the universe, in thinking and in action, and there is nothing left but Honest to God [a book by Robinson], which deals only with the fact of anthropology, and has nothing to say to questions of the reality of communicating with God...All the reality of Christianity rests upon the reality of the existence of a personal God, and the reality of the supernatural view of the total universe.

Death by Leadership

I quote from Mintzberg's latest book "Managing"

By the excessive promotion of leadership, we demote everyone else. We create clusters of followers who have to be driven to perform, instead of leveraging the natural propensity of people to cooperate in communities. In this light, effective managing can be seen as engaging and engaged, connecting and connected, supporting and supported.

How different this is from the tired rhetoric I hear too often in church circles about 'leaders' and 'leadership'. Also, how remarkably congruent with the community life extolled in the New Testament.

But, what gives me pause for thought is that this challenge to the hollowness of 'leadership' as a notion did not come from a bible-based Christian critique of business, management, the treatment of people in organisations or the like: that is, the church being prophetically attunded to the scriptures, but from a scholar who simply seeks to go where the data and his observations lead him.

I often wonder what we pay theologians for...and suspect that we get a very poor return for our investment on some occasions!

What about evolution?

In a blog on the crusades, Peter Bolt made this statement:

Now, during my high school Scripture teaching years, I often had a formally parallel question thrown at me: “What about evolution?” After this gauntlet was thrown down with appropriately monotonous frequency, I honed an equally monotonous answer: “Well, what about evolution?”

Now, I'm glad he did scripture teaching at high school: a great mission activity, but on the surface it's a lame answer: more than monotonous Peter!

The question is one often thrown up, at least implicitly, in many conversations and writings. The not very sub-text of the question is: evolution eliminates the need for, if not the reality of supernatural explanations for the cosmos and life within it. Therefore, the questioner must believe, the Christian explanation, which is supernatural, fails and so thus fails the entire Christian program.

Beneath all this is of course the never articulated understanding that naturalism explains the basic reality of our lives: there is material; and that is all. It and natural processes are comprehensively explanatory at every level (bang goes philosophical idealism, of course, but I'd be pretty pleased about that particular side-effect).

The answer to the question is of course, not to say that the Biblical account of origins and evolutionary speculations can co-exist, because they can't and if it is suggested then it amounts to saying that the Biblical account is symbolic or metaphorical, but for the reality we go to evolution, but evolution is definitive and that eliminates the biblical explanation which only garners its force from materialist postulations and is therefore derivative and not definitive!

What is the answer then?

Well, I think it is to take naturalism to its end point: if material is all there is, and evoultion is true, then final questions can only be material and give us no answers, but leave us where we started, with only a causal chain between! That is, we've gotten nowhere. So the assertion disappears in a puff of its own logic.

But the biblical view is that final questions are personal, and are important as they tell us who we are (not material, and with real significance in real relationships) and by genesis who we are like and made by and therefore for fellowship with. Love has significance. In a material world, it is just a stochastic conjunction of particles.

Pain is a problem?

In Spectrum the other week was a fabulous article on 'Pain', by Elizabeth Farrelly. She referred to C. S. Lewis' book 'The Problem of Pain', where Lewis says a few things of interest. One is that pain is essential to justice. I disagree. Undoing the benifits of wrong is the essence of justice. I think he's referring to 'the wages of sin is death'; God's judgement on the movement of man in denial of God. That's different. Death is the antithesis of God's action in creation, and represents the outcome of the rejection of God's relation with his creation. Pain results and is the great marker of a creation in crisis. To that extent, Lewis' metaphor of pain being God's megaphone telling us that we are not a-right in a life framed by our own ends, is, I think, apt.

One 'benefit' that does come from pain is that people show thier nobility in insisting by their action that (a) pain is not to be accepted, but worked against (thus the floods of aid to Haiti, etc.), because it is not a right part of our lives, but a part of things-gone-wrong, and (b) that people in the face of personal pain will often fight against it and its effects. But in and of itself, pain has nothing to commend it. It is a marker of death, and death is the last enemy which Christ has done away with.

[I seem to recall Pannenberg writing that all fear is fear of death...how close this is to fear of pain, that which motivates us to avoid it!]

Doing things by slogan

As I was reflecting on the design and management of the 'Connect09' effort which the Diocese undertook last year, I came across this blog entry on the danger of 'management by slogan'.

I wonder to what extent C09 was the result of an analysis of the system deficiencies that lead to the need to connect, and what system changes were made to correct the deficiencies. Unfortunately,  my experience of C09 is that it amounted to substantial amounts of 'more of the same' which did nothing to either analyse or correct that which has broken the connections between the Anglican church and the community which I saw in existance in the 1960s and 1970s.

What, I wonder, happened?

Leading from the back

In a recent church news the following quote was printed:

Asked what would be his priority if he returned to leadership in a local church, New Testament scholar Gordon Fee replied: "No matter how long it might take, I would set about with a single passion to help a local body of believers recapture the New Testament church's understanding of itself as an eschatological community (The Ordinary Hero by Tim Chester, p. 165).

Now, there it is...'leadership' in a local church? I'm glad that Fee had the sense to realise that if he returned to serve a local church his job would be to HELP in some way. So often we take the notion of 'leader' from the world, maybe from the military, and think it has some application in the church.

An example of how this skews things came from a friend recently. She related how an acquaintance was over-awed by being asked to take on the leadership of a particular group. I'd be surprised if she was told what she would be expected to do, but being told it was 'leading' would be enough to give anyone the jitters if it was not stripped of worldly connotations; she would possibly have known that it is the Spirit that leads and we all follow together contributing as our gifts can provide.

It would have been more useful if she had been asked to help with the __ group. And the dimensions of that helping given to her: maybe organising the roster, helping people prepare their own contributions, finding fill-ins when someone can't do their roster, be the contact point, etc. More like convening, facilitating, organising, or just plain helping (Gordon Fee's word). My earlier post on Mintzberg on 'leading' is apposite here.

When we start to think 'ministry' and not 'leader' we'll all be better off, and as Christians we might all be encouraged that we have a part to play in the life of the church and not just sit and watch, which is what 'leaders' so often engender and the concept in its worldly configuration suggests.

BTW, I was very encouraged to hear a person who was going to serve at a remote area church talk about the 'contribution' he hoped to make: a much more Christian conceptualisation of joining the life of a church than any worldly hubristic notions of 'leading' (and, please don't start me on the oxymoronic idea of 'servant-leader')

Bible refs on gun sights

In response to the news of Bible references being inscribed on pieces of military weaponry, a minister at my church penned the following (in part) in our weekly bulletin:

The message is so wrong on so many levels. When will we learn that this sort of misguided tokenism only increases our fascination with the notion that God is somehow on our side. And this is wrong. It is never a matter of whose side God is on; what a bizarre thought if we really stop and think about it. Oh that we would remember that God is sovereign over the whole earth and that he is working out his plans and purposes. The real question for us is whose side are we on; God’s or our own?...

Because Jesus came to turn our world upside down and inside out; he knew that what is displayed on the outside of our lives has its genesis in what is going on inside. Is Jesus glorified by what is etched on a gun or by a changed life? Think on these verses:

Our thoughts. Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things. Phil 4:8

Our attitudes. Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.   Phil 2:5-8

Our lives: A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.  John 13:34-35

Our speech: et no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth, but only such a word as is good for edification according to the need of the moment, so that it will give grace to those who hear… but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and reverence; Eph 4:29, 1 Petr 3:15.

The external will always reflect what is going on inside. If our thoughts and attitudes are not being shaped by God then why would we ever think that our lives and speech will be? There is an order here. Let’s not be fascinated with guns and etched verses—the real question is how is God shaping our thoughts and attitudes so that we love one another and are always ready to tell others of the wonderful hope we have in Jesus. For in this way only will our world see that Jesus is indeed the light of the world (John 8:12).

The mainstream view

"The empirical observation that nature has, over three billion years, developed survival strategies..." (Pich, et al, "On Uncertainty, Ambiguity, and Complexity in Project Management" Management Science v. 48, n. 8 Aug 2002 pp 1008-1023).

This is, of course, the mainstream view. But there is no 'empirical observation' about nature developing survival strategies, let alone over 'three billion years'. This is merely a statement that assumes the truth of the rhetoric of evolution. But, to be fair, this is the sort of thing that one reads in even biological literature, where what is imagined, hoped, supposed, surmised or simply fabricated is considered to be empirically established because all alternative explanations are ruled out axiomatically. Rationally, how could anyone 'observe' something that supposedly took three billion years, when even R. Dawkins stated that one couldn't see evolution happening, becuase it is too slow. Stephen Gould on the other hand considered that we couldn't see it happening because it was too fast!

Just recently, this blog on a critical view of evolution came to my notice.

And, speaking of empirical, just what do we see?

Genes are produced by adult organisms;

Offspring are very similar to parents;

Genes don't change very much, and what variability we do know about seems to be strictly confined to the level of genus or family (see the finches that got Darwin so worked up: still finches).

Evil and its problems

This was recently left as a comment. I haven't let the comment through, but :

http://aristophrenium.com/?p=436

The problem is simple: If God is all-powerful, loving and good, that means he can do what he wants and will do what is morally right. But surely this means that he would not allow an innocent child to suffer needlessly (as he could easily prevent it). Yet he does. Much infant suffering is the result of human action, but much is also due to natural causes such as disease, flood or famine. In both cases, God could stop it. Yet he does not.

The author's comment is:

It is sheer irony that TPM would be found committing such a basic question-begging fallacy. In reality there is no tension at all between my answers. Notwithstanding my agreement that there exists a God with the above described attributes, I had agreed that it is morally reprehensible to “allow an innocent child to suffer needlessly when one could easily prevent it.” Notice that emphasized word, for it is critically important. If there exists a God who is omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent then there cannot exist gratuitous evil or suffering, for the two are mutually exclusive in the same way that an Irresistible Force and an Immovable Object are. One can posit that my two answers are incompatible only by begging the question (fallacy) that some humans suffer needlessly; to assert that gratuitous evil or suffering exists shoulders an enormous burden of proof in a critical evaluation of the God of Christianity.

The commenter made the comment:

It's the omni-point and gratituous evil stuff that is sick. Ryft forgets there is a fall and thus there is gratuitous evil. His convenient enthymematic premiss is that God ordained the fall, an admission which would have atheists rejecting Christianity outright.

I reply:


The problem is in the construction of the assertion. They set up a 'god' to fail (the almost ever-present but non-existent 'god' of the philosophers). The Creator God is not fully described in relationship to his creation as per the first element of the syllogism. As you say, it ignores the fall, the doctrine of creation where we are the stewards of the created order ( and therefore responsible). He has done something about it.

Without adopting a calvinist definition, I prefer to adopt a more biblical description of God as being sovereign: this in relation to the creation, of course, but 'soverign' is a relational term, and starts to open the discussion as to what this entails, whereas technical terms such as the 'omni's' seem to ignore the system of relationships which God has entered by his creation, modified by the fall (where his life giving ness was rejected), and changed again in redemption.

Why do Christians keep accepting their opponent's definitions, instead of rejecting them from the outset as unbiblical and thus just 'made up'?

Pastor-Theologian

My comment on a blog on pastor-as-theologian at Euangelion:

It is almost inevitable that a pastor is a theologian, else with what is he or she pastoring? Applying the word of God to the growth or encouragement of another Christian involves engaging with that Word, does it not? Or have we entered the conceit of the world that some 'do God' better than others, and that because of specific studies? Not to confuse being a theologian with being someone whose job is to research, teach or publish about theology, or who is a paid Christian in a church...anyone can enter into a pastoring role by the circumstances my opening suggests.

I was a little concerned at some posts that seem to lock either pastoring or theologizing into formal jobs, or even a pastor being part of a therapeutic dyad...heaven forbid! It seems to me that there is or should be a relational dynamism in churches that would step beyond job titles to actual encounters of people with each other: in home Bible study/prayer groups, in formal 'classes', in the bus...whereever. It's what happens, not by whom it happens that sets the scene, I think...meaning we could all at times be pastor-theologians!

Leading to where?

Listening to 2CBAFM aka Hope-FM recently, I heard mention of a course at Tabor College on pastoral leadership… and a few days ago I read in Mintzberg’s latest book Managing the following:

…by putting leadership on a pedestal separated from management, we turn a social process into a personal one. No matter how much lip service is paid to the leader empowering the group, leadership still focuses on the individual: whenever we promote leadership, we demote others, as followers. Slighted, too is the sense of community that is important for cooperative effort in all organizations. What we should be promoting instead of leadership alone are communities of actors who get on with things naturally, leadership together with management being an intrinsic part of that. Accordingly this book puts managing ahead, seeing it together with leadership as naturally embedded in what can be called ‘communityship’.

Now I’ve blogged before, critically, on the penchant in contemporary church circles to talk ad nauseum about ‘leadership’ and bemoan the passing of the counterpoint concentration in decades past on ‘ministry’. The latter more biblical in every way than the former: the latter being about serving and building cooperating mutually serving communities abounding in the giving of the gifts of the Spirit; the former being about the promotion of the select few over and above the rest of the church, they reduced to a passivity that itself is unbiblical and in denial of the work of the Spirit in building the church. The former is about a supernaturally derived body, the latter is about a lifeless worldly organization that seeks to substitute mechanism, technique and ‘methodology’ to use that strange word, for the movement of God’s Spirit in people.

I reflect on two things coming out of this:

1. The church’s uncritical aping the world without being able to stand informed intellectually by the scriptures and say ‘no, we do things differently to the world’s organizations, because we are a people called by God to live together in service and love’. We look for different things, we seek to build up one another, not promote the few, we seek to live as a family of love, not as a business where we clock off at 5pm and look to 'leaders' because we don't know where to go'.

Alas, the church has said nothing of the kind, but instead wants to squander its heritage, and its Lord’s teaching in such crude and nonsensical ideas as ‘pastoral leadership’. Why not ‘pastoring’ or ‘pastoral care’ or ‘personal ministry’ as course titles? What does a ‘pastoral leader’ do, anyway?  Where do they lead, and how do they get followers? By dying on a cross? That’s where the church’s leader got his followers!

Of course not, the whole idea is silly. There is no such thing as ‘pastoral leadership’, relying as it does on the counter-biblical passivity of those ministered to as though a psychotherapeutic dyad comes into existence at each pastoral encounter, instead of the mutually committed support given to each other in Christ.

I’m saddened that I’m not aware of any Christian thinker who has made the argument about church life that Mintzberg makes about worldly organizations!

2. Christian organizations seem to bolt head over heels to adopt the titles and structures of worldly organizations. We have ‘CEOs’, Directors, General Managers, State/Area/Regional Managers, and so on. Why don’t we have such humble descriptive titles of functions as ‘coordinator’, ‘organiser’, ‘planner’, ‘secretary’, ‘convenor’, ‘teacher’, ‘facilitator’, ‘helper’, ‘worker’, ‘servant’ 'steward', and ‘minister’? Even ‘elder’ and ‘deacon’ have a good biblical track record for the right circumstances! As I’ve also said before, we even ape the world at the level of Sunday school (now with cute names such as ‘Kid’s Church’, or Sunday Club) and our children have ‘leaders’ not ‘teachers’. Is this not the first step in showing them that the world sets the pace, not the word of God; that we seek to build a structure and not live out the calling of the Kingdom of God?

In a way, I admire the trade union movement that my father was involved in. They eschewed the terminology of big business, and indeed adopted church terms at some levels, being organised into ‘chapels’ with the main worker in each ‘chapel’ being the ‘father’. But they had delegates, organisers and convenors. They had the focus of their convictions to make a new world for workers unlike the one they experienced. It is sad that the church, Christian organizations, seem to lack similar courage or insight and ape the world that it says it rejects! Naturally our witness falls flat because our actions say ‘we want to be just like you, not show a radically different way that is the calling of our Lord’.

Cathedral: the opportunity

In my previous post on an experience at St. Andrew's Cathedral in Sydney, I discussed what had happened.

Further thoughts on possible opportunities:

I've had the occasion to visit a number of cathedrals in Europe and North America (and parts of Asia, come to think of it), and at all, particularly those in the UK, I have pondered on the great ministry centre a cathedral might be.

Most of the cathedrals I've visited have been of a more liberal theological persuasion, and so seemed to exist for the aesthetic of the place, almost. The opportunities for ministry have not been obviously taken.

In Sydney I think we are heading in a different direction, but in stepping towards the cathedral as a ministry centre, we've also lost some richness in seemingly restricting ministry to an almost reflexive evangelical verbalism, missing out on wider opportunities to the poor, the not poor but spiritually needy, to workers and business people, as well as city residents.

I'm all for efforts like the city ministry school (apart from teaching people to 'lead' instead of perhaps, convene or serve Bible study groups: more biblical usages, in my view) and overcomers outreach (although I do wonder if it is really 'overcomers indrag': outreach services I've been involved with professionally, whether in marketing, human services or education have gone to where the client is, both physically and culturally; churches tend to think that tricking people to come to the building is 'outreach'; its not!), Bible study groups themselves, and the corporate meetings and the like. But I think there is far more that will meet people's more immediate felt needs as a path to showing them Christ.

One symbolic step back has been to shift the front door of the cathedral to the more architecturally and liturgically correct western end. Great, but why not put ministry first: the door facing the east, opening onto the city's main street made the cathedral far more inviting and accessible. Now it just looks like the assembly hall of the cathedral school!

True Spirituality

I'm re-reading Schaeffer's book of the name of this post. Third  time, I think, and worthwhile.

I like the way he addresses the pivot of Christian spirituality being in our inward movement, naturally, away from godliness, and Christ's turning of that.

But then I think of typical evangelicalism, where spirituality gets short shrift, as though the entirety of Christian life and experience is in the new birth. This touches on the earlier series of posts on sermons: do they help us, encourage us to live as though not of this world? as though thinking in a renewed manner about everything that can be thought about? do they point us to live as those who will live forever, and make decisions, adopt attitudes and join relationships with that as our theme: to be able to sacrifice, forgive, love and extend to others?

These are all places I am exposed in...but there seems to be a poverty of thought in these places to aid the Christian walk.