MaryAnn Koopman has written a generous review of my book The Upside Down World of St Francis.
Tag: Book
Emerging Butterfly?
Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God, Paraclete Press 2006. E-Book 2012
Reviewed by
Ted Witham
The key idea of How (Not) to Speak of God is that many Christians in the “Emergent Church” movement embrace paradox. The first few chapters unpack the implicit idea in the title: that the moment we speak of God, we deny who God is. All attempts to define or describe the Christian God are doomed.
This is, of course, not a new idea, but it is unusual for evangelical Christians to push the point as hard as Rollins does. Essentially, Christians are atheists, because our God is beyond human category. At best, we can glimpse God in icons which often appear to point away from the reality of God, but which express metaphors that are self-consciously metaphors and not definitions.
Christians are defined not so much by what they believe as by how they believe; and this dynamic faith will manifest in works of mercy and restorative justice in the real world.
The second part of this encouraging book is a series of liturgies designed by the house church in the Menagerie Bar, the pub that Rollins calls his spiritual home. The themes range from Judas to Corpus Christi to Eloi Eloi Lama Sabachthani. The description of each liturgy is preceded by a reflection introducing the theme. The liturgies emphasise imagination and emotion and are described in practical detail, so that readers could use them as they are, or adapt them for their own setting.
If this is the coming, emerging church, then I would not mind belonging.
Ratzinger and the Reason to be Christ-centred
1974 Theological College – (Trinity College, Melbourne)
A fellow theological student and I were arguing ferociously. I was 25, and presented the Left’s view of Aboriginal rights in the sharply political terms I had learned from the Campaign for Racial Equality.
‘Come back and talk to me when you can argue as a Christian,’ my friend told me.
~~~~ ~~~~ ~~~~
I remember clearly the challenge he put to me that day, although I know he looks back on that statement with embarrassment at the priggishness of his former self.
Unless Christ is central, goes the argument, it’s not Christian. And unless Christ is central to your thoughts about any subject, then they are sub-Christian. All these decades later, I am still challenged by this position, and even more so by my reading of Joseph Ratzinger’s The Theology of History in Bonaventure.
I have wanted for some time to read this exploration of Bonaventure, and I am enjoying the experience. Ratzinger is learned and lucid, a teacher whose range is so wide that he includes the reader by providing enough backstory. For example, he shows how Bonaventure differed from Thomas Aquinas in his treatment of Aristotle, because Bonaventure wanted to preserve the primacy of Christ in his philosophy. Ratzinger delights by showing not only where they disagreed but the courtesy with which Bonaventure attacks the arguments and never the person of Thomas.
And the central challenge Bonaventure throws to us is to argue for a radically Christian view of history, in which Christ is the central point, and in this age of the Holy Spirit, we are returning to the Father. As Ratzinger diagrams it: Father > egressus > Christus > regressus > Father. (To read Ratzinger, your Latin needs to be reasonably tuned.)
In our age, we have become so used to secular versions of history and time, notably the past-centred view of conservatives; the apocalyptic view of ruptured time promoted by the Green movement and the various views of time implicit in scientists’ narratives around cosmic and biological origins.
Bonaventure’s challenge to us is to see history in God’s terms. The victory of Jesus on the cross and his sending of the Spirit change the direction of history – not just salvation history, but political history, human history and the history of creation. Bonaventure is a medieval scholar; he does play with different schema of sevens (seven days of Creation, seven days of Redemption, seven aeons of the new Creation), threes (Creation, Redemption, New Creation), and twos (Old and New), but these elaborate and fascinating frameworks all point back to the centre-point who is Christ.
We are rightly enthusiastic for inter-faith dialogue and the ways other faiths can deepen our own. But how do I deal with Bonaventure’s insistence that the final word is Christ’s? We fear ecological destruction, but does the confidence of our return to Christ sharpen our concern or bolster our hopes for the future? We worry about the imbalance of the world between a wealthy West, a rising China and poverty and violence. Do Bonaventure’s certainties reduce those worries?
Sometimes the Pope’s present pronouncements seem to come from another world. Maybe they do. His love for Bonaventure and the place of the Franciscans in history indicate that Ratzinger’s views have been heavily shaped by the ‘other world’ – that of medieval theology.
I am glad to be challenged again to argue as a Christian, and to place Christ at the centre in all my thinking.
Read Fiction and Live Better
Moved by Priest’s First Love
Glynn Young, Dancing Priest, Dunrobin Publishing, 2011
ISBN-13: 978-0983236351, paperback 380 pages (from $AUD14.15),
Kindle $US2.99
Reviewed by Ted Witham
I was surprised at how much this first novel moved me. The two main characters, Michael Kent and Sarah Hughes, are attractive young people who have fallen in love with each other, but who believe that Sarah’s lack of faith is keeping them apart.
Michael Kent is charismatic, an Olympic cyclist, and a theology student in Edinburgh. His life keeps turning out for the better and the better, even despite tragedy at the Olympics and other obstacles in his way. He is also good at dancing. Sarah, too, is talented as an artist, and gains recognition for her paintings late in the book.
Of course, I identified strongly with the main character: I was once a young theological student, and I once fell in love. Reading the book recaptured a lost and idealised youth.
The story is set primarily in Edinburgh, Athens and San Francisco. The sense of place was strongest in the descriptions of California and the topography of San Francisco, particularly from a cyclist’s view point. All cities, however, are exotic enough to be interesting.
Glynn Young writes about faith in a believable way, sympathetically capturing an evangelical mind-set in thought and action, and describing well the dynamics of a parish staff.
I had been so disappointed by US ‘Christian’ novels in the past, where ‘Christian’ equates to avoiding swear words and sex, but Dancing Priest is a refreshing change. Here ‘Christian’ equates to thoughtful prayer and care of others.
I had some quibbles with the Anglican aspects of this novel, the worst of which surrounded Michael’s ordination at St Paul’s cathedral in London. In most dioceses I know, the days before ordination are spent in retreat: playing tourist is a poor preparation for such a major step. (It may be that the Church of England is different precisely because it does gather candidates from all over England, some of whom may not have visited the capital). More jarring was the fact that Michael was not ordained deacon before his priestly ordination. Two-step ordination is fundamental to Anglicanism.
For the most part, however, the picture of a church that was like the real Anglican Communion, but not like it, with splits and tensions like the current ones, but not quite the same, was stimulating and entertaining.
Young’s writing has reminded another reviewer of Madeleine l’Engle, and I see the connection. But in the fresh characters, the way the plot invites the reader onwards from page to page, I was more reminded of C.S. Lewis in his Space Trilogy, only with more open emotions.
Untimely, but gentlemanly, Dying
P.D. James, Death Comes to Pemberley
London: Faber & Faber, 2011. Pback 310 pages. ISBN 9-780-57128358-3. RRP $29.99
I’ve had to have been persuaded to read Jane Austen; despite the enthusiasm of some friends for the 19th Century novelist, I have been put off by her high style and the brittle world she builds of English class distinctions at the end of the 18th Century.
I was anticipating the next police procedural of P.D. James, a modern stylist and great crime writer, and I admit to some disappointment when I read the advance publicity for Death Comes to Pemberley: an amalgam of a Jane Austen novel and a crime thriller.
Elizabeth Bennet has married Darcy and settled at Pemberley. They have two sons in the nursery and their marriage is a happy one. Each year, Pemberley Hall is the scene for a grand ball, named in honour of Darcy’s late mother, Lady Anne. Pemberley is thrown into disarray on the night before Lady Anne’s ball by the bloody death of an army officer in the estate woods. The scene needs much untangling as Wickham, a man never to be received at Pemberley is found kneeling over the body, drunk, and exclaiming that it is his fault that his friend is dead. Wickham is married to Elizabeth’s sister Lydia, and causes ongoing distress to the Darcys by living irresponsibly beyond his means. Darcy as a paterfamilias has in the past been obliged to pick up the tab.
In the subsequent investigation and trial, family loyalties are stretched to breaking point, and Pemberley looks set to be shamed for generations to come, until the final resolution, which – in Jane Austen fashion – is a set of happy outcomes for all.
James’s writing is so good that I was drawn into this complex web of family relationships and intrigue and enjoyed this novel almost as much as her other crime novels. (I don’t think she can better Death in Holy Orders – but then, I’m a priest!)
I was amused that Darcy consulted his wrist-watch and Elizabeth her bedside alarm clock: they were needed to establish times of alibis. The year in which Death Comes to Pemberley is set is 1803, well before the mass production of wrist-watches and the miniaturisation of alarm clocks. Darcy, as a gentleman, would much more likely have a pocket watch, if any time-piece on his person, and Elizabeth would more likely be used to consulting a maid who might know the time from a large hall clock. I can’t help feeling there’s a joke element here. P.D. James is too careful to have simply made a mistake.
The incongruity of the time-pieces emphasise how complete the world is that James has created. I believed her portrayal of reactions to death among the British upper-class of the time. I suspect Baroness James has some nostalgia for a time when gentlemen lived on their estates and as magistrates kept good order in the realm.
The downside to this nostalgia is that Death Comes to Pemberley lacks some of the social edge of James’s earlier novels. This has been a divertissement, and a thoroughly enjoyable one, but I do hope she returns to more modern settings if we are blessed with future novels.
Ted Witham
Meat and Right for Lent
Meat and Right for Lent
John Warner, We Believe: studies in the Nicene Creed, Perth: John Warner, 2011
(available from St John’s Books, Fremantle)
68 pages, A4 paperback
Reviewed by Ted Witham
The Rev’d John Warner believes that “Christians should say what they mean and mean what they say”. The question raised by these substantial Lenten studies is whether most Anglicans do have a spiritual and intellectual grasp on the Nicene Creed, or whether we rattle it off Sunday by Sunday unheeding of its meaning.
One school of thought says that we don’t need to understand all the philosophical ramifications of our central statement of faith. It is expressed in the philosophical categories of the 3rd Century, not in a contemporary framework, so we should recite the Creed believing that we believe the same things about God as Christians did 1,700 years ago. There is a grain of truth in this, but if we rely on it as a reason for not trying to understand the Creed better, then Fr Warner would say we are guilty of hypocrisy – not to mention sloth.
Fr Warner divides the Creed into 30 days collected into 5 sections of various lengths. At the end of each section is a series of discussion starters. The sections are traditional — Belief in: God the Father, God the Son, the saving work of Jesus, God the Holy Spirit, and The Church and the Last Things.
The teaching for each day is both solid and solidly orthodox: meat and right for Lent. The teaching is seasoned with some helpful analogies, metaphors and anecdotes. Fr Warner is aiming to reach thoughtful parishioners, though some readers may need a little encouragement and support to get the most of out the materials.
(On a personal note, I was Associate Priest in Claremont parish when John was Rector. We have worked together in study groups and in Education for Ministry (EfM), so I am accustomed to John’s teaching style.)
The five sets of discussion starters will stimulate worthwhile discussion both on the intellectual understanding of the Creed and on the practical and spiritual implications for life in the Church. I would have preferred more discussion starters and more guidance on how best to use these materials in a group, but restricting the amount of questions will keep group participants focused on the Creed.
There are too few educational materials directing us to know and understand the central teachings of our faith. John Warner’s new studies fill a real need. I hope many parishes will want to use them this Lent.
Learning to Talk the Talk in the Community of Faith
Learning to Talk the Talk in the Community of Faith
Review Essay
Reviewed by Ted Witham
Christian leaders desire to have Christians fully prepared for ministry and mission. They desire a church engaged in activities appropriate for Christian faith, especially worship, service and learning, a community of practice where people go beyond simply identifying as Christian.
Christian leaders in fact spend much energy and time in finding ways of forming Christians, and these ways are often introduced to Christian communities as programs. In my experience, these programs are often resisted. It is very difficult, for example, to establish the catechumenate in an Anglican parish despite its track record as a powerful tool for deepening people’s belonging, believing and acting.
The catechumenate for new Christians, Education for Ministry for Christians seeking to exercise a ministry of leadership in a local community and the preparation of local leaders for ordination as local deacons and priests have been a large part of my professional life. In addition, as a Third Order Franciscan, I am engaged in the formation of novices as they become professed members of the Order.
I have, therefore, a large personal stake in improving the systems by which we introduce people to ministry.
I thank my colleague and friend Craig Mitchell for drawing my attention to Situated Learning. The premise of this short book is that the process by which people become effective in a community of practice is more like socialisation than schooling.
Apprentices learn through their connection to a master, appropriate access to the ‘artefacts’ of their trade, and joining in the talk about their craft. Jean Lave discusses apprentice tailors in West Africa, meat-cutters in US super-markets, and midwives in Mexico. Difficulties with the meat-cutters’ apprenticeship are analysed, and apprentices fail to learn, for example, where there is not a ‘space’ where they can comfortably watch the saws as they are used by journey-men or masters.
Initiates to AA start with a problem with alcohol and end up as members of AA (non-drinking alcoholics) through a stepped process of listening to life-stories and shaping their own.
Situated learning works well when being a full part of the community of practice is more than learning a list of skills and supporting knowledge. Rather than focusing on the learners themselves, situated learning examines the total context in which the learners become members of the community of practice through their initially limited participation in it. As new-comers, they learn from old-timers and gradually become old-timers themselves.
The notion of participation thus dissolves dichotomies between cerebral and embodied activity, between contemplation and involvement, between abstraction and experience; persons, actions and the world are implicated in all thought, speech, knowing and learning. (p. 52)
The key concept of Situated Learning is legitimate peripheral participation, where learners are placed at the edge of the community of practice and they learn by staged participation.
Most of the examples have some rite to mark the beginning of this learning and phase and another at its end where they are recognised as full members of the community of practice. They become practitioners. The rites mark each person as a liminal member of the community, a member, yes, but not yet fully a member.
Rites not only mark the status of individuals, they are also powerful in renewing whole communities, as they focus attention on the role of the community in the formation of its new members. The Lenten rituals of the catechumenate, culminating in baptism (or renewal of vows) provide these markers for catechumens. The ceremonies of novicing and professing mark the beginning and ending of the formation of a Third Order novice.
In situated learning, a mentor may be provided for the learner: a sponsor or novice counsellor. As with an apprentice’s master, this mentor may not actually teach the learner anything about the community’s practices. Their function is to provide the mentor with one exemplar of a member of the community, whose life can be observed by the mentor, and to be the focus of the learner’s connection with the whole community.
In the highly relational community of practice of ministry (as lay, clergy or tertiary), the provision of a mentor highlights that relationships are the central act of all ministry. A sponsor or novice counsellor literally loves the learner into full participation.
Dr Lave surprisingly concludes that a learner becomes a full member of the community of practice when he talks the talk. This conclusion is helpful when the practice in question is ministry as a Christian, as a Christian leader, or as a Franciscan Christian.
It implies that the learner has been exposed to the teachings and stories of the community and reflected on them, and is able to continue that reflection by talking about them. It implies that the learner can participate in worship, either in the pews or the sanctuary, or in the specifically Franciscan practice of the Community Obedience, and that the learner’s ‘talk’ in worship is meaningful and life-giving.
It implies that the learner has had access to the ‘artefacts of the craft’: she has, for example, been able to reflect on what it means to receive Holy Communion in this community, to contribute meaningfully to the service this community engages in, has the tools – Bible, Prayer Book, Third Order Manual – on which her practice is now to be based.
The framework of legitimate peripheral participation takes into account the complexity of real communities of practice. It is:
Becoming a “member such as these” in an embodied telos too complex to be discussed in the narrower and simpler language of goals, tasks and knowledge acquisition. (p. 85)
The parallels between Lave’s concept of situated learning and the formation of Christian people for ministry are clear. The implications for action are more difficult to draw. This way of learning certainly takes the emphasis off the curriculum, what a novice has to learn, and places it on the community and the way it practices its ministry. It similarly de-thrones cerebral learning from the central place it might occupy and places it on the whole person. It suggests that learners should be allowed to do real ministry (as appropriate) and not learn facts about ministry.
This way of learning highlights the mentor-learner relationship, not for the transmission of knowledge, but as a simple symbol of the wider community.
Above all, this way of learning maintains the high importance of ministry to our community and its lived complexity. We attend to new members by building relationships with them at the same time as attending to the quality of our community of practice.
Programs like the catechumenate and EfM have their place, but they are not necessary to forming a more faithful community of practice. What is needed is the willingness of ‘old-timers’ – masters of the faith! – to engage new-comers in talk about ministry and faith, so that they too will come to talk the talk, and the walk will follow.
Beyond Brokeback Mountain: the church and rainbow sexuality
Stephen Hunt, Contemporary Christianity and LGBT sexualities, Burlington VT: Ashgate Publications 2009
Reviewed by Ted Witham
Check availability and price (Australian site)
Soon after its release, my wife Rae and I went to see the movie Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee’s brilliant adaptation of Annie Proulx’s short story. We saw it as tragic story of bisexuality book-ended by an outraged protest against anti-gay violence. Many of our friends reacted negatively to it, and most preferred not even to see it.
For some, it is so difficult to deal with these issues, to name them clearly and to discuss them. Their attitude, I fear, may be expressed in the cliché: “My mind’s made up: don’t confuse me with facts!”
There are many challenging “facts” in Contemporary Christianity and LGBT sexualities, but this book is too good to be dismissed just because readers find its subject confronting. In effect, the different essayists go through the letters LGBT and Q and explore the interactions between the “non-heterosexual” population and the churches.
Fact 1: Many gay Anglican clergy cope with their homosexuality by putting up a false – or incomplete – picture of themselves to the world. They effectively censor their public face. What they play on “front stage”, is projected by energetic manipulations of the person’s “back stage”. Michael Keenan uses the image of a tapestry with its beautiful face and crazily-stitched back.
Of course it is a fact that clergy hide their homosexuality. Over the years I have been privileged to see some of my colleagues and their beautiful stitching. This essay alerts us to ways we can be more supportive of gay clergy. But it also reminds me that we all have a front and backstage; we all stitch the back so that the viewed side of our personality is what we would like it to be.
In her chapter, Kristin Aune asks what it is about non-heterosexuality that evangelical Christians don’t like. Fact 2: She concludes that their prime concern is not their genital activity. On the contrary, what worries evangelical is that gay men are defective in their masculinity. They are not “real men”.
I found this to be a helpful insight. I used to work for an inter-church agency, and remember meeting many “real men” among the younger Government school chaplains. I was really seduced by their confidence as men, as heads of family and leaders of women and men. I acquiesced to their world-view, and even presented myself as “one of them”. To my shame, I did not challenge this too neat understanding of masculinity. As Kristin Aune describes it, being real men in these ways implied a lesser role for women, as men’s hand-maids, not their help-mates (Genesis 2). This gender polarity needs challenging not encouraging.
Marta Trzebiatowski sets out to explore the disapproval Polish women experienced when some announced that they are called either to monastic life or others came out as lesbians: Fact 3: Trzebiatowski finds many similarities between the two groups: both groups of women have refused the social role of motherhood, and they have refused the “heteronormativity “of their culture.
Perhaps the Third Order can be advocates for Religious as well as others who choose not to follow social norms. As a Religious Order which includes both singles and mothers, our members know both the inner logic of celibacy and the validating power of motherhood.
I found myself most challenged by Alex Toft’s essay on “Bisexual Christians”.
Fact 4: There are, it seems, as many definitions of bisexuality as there are bisexual individuals. Should you define bisexuality as sexual attraction to both the opposite sex and the same sex? If the definition is not based on desire, then is bisexuality of variant of gender, not male, not female, not straight, not gay, but all or some of the above?
Does the fact that people who understand themselves as bisexual in fact void all definitions of gender and sexuality so that none is really meaningful? Or to follow another track, are we all in fact bisexuals? Was Jesus, “the ideal template for human existence”, himself bisexual?
Writing for the Church of England in 2004, Thatcher and Stuart concluded that:
… bisexuals undermine the whole sexual system, the neat classification of people into homo and hetero, the pathologizing of homosexuality as a heterosexual disorder, and so on. (p. 77)
This “dangerous” fluidity usually evokes only negative reactions from the church: Toft found that the church considered bisexual individuals to be “in a state of confusion” (p. 85), rejecting a God-given identity.
Unsurprisingly, bisexuals find it difficult to continue to relate to churches. Many bisexuals felt that the only way to continue as Christians was outside the official Christian community.
Those who do stay in the church, feel forced to separate their sexuality from their spirituality “and ‘act’ heterosexually within religious spheres”, creating “great inner conflict” for individuals (p. 85).
According to veteran researchers Andrew Kam-Tuck Yip and Michael Keenan, transgendered Christians throw up an even deeper challenge to the churches: Fact 4: To be transgendered is to experience oneself as in some way opposite in sexuality to what one “should be”. A transgendered person may feel trapped in the body of the wrong gender/sex, or may need to dress in clothes of the opposite sex, or may have physical markers of both sexes.
Again, the permutations defy clear definition. The way transgendered people come to a clear self-understanding is by paying attention to their bodies. Transgendered Christians recall the church to an embodied theology. Mainstream Christians too often devalue not only the body but matter in general. This leads them to wander into a docetic heresy, devaluing the incarnation, the embodiment of God in Jesus of Nazareth. Transgender brings us back to a more classical theology, reminding us that we cannot grow spiritually if we deny the body. “Transgenderism … is about spiritual growth as an embodied experience.” (p. 99)
Stephen Hunt untangles the different threads of the influence of gay Christians on policy in the church and in the community. Not surprisingly, he finds that they have been more effective in changing laws than challenging theology: Fact 5.
Richard O’Leary takes us to the very religious world of Northern Ireland where the difficulties gays experience are magnified by the culture: Fact 6.
Yvonne Aburrow asks “Is It Meaningful to Speak of ‘Queer Spirituality’?” Feminist theology has a “hermeneutic of suspicion”. Readers scour their reading for bias to find out whether the writer has smuggled patriarchal values into this text. Have assumptions of male superiority, distorted the meaning of the text? If so, the reader can then make appropriate adjustments.
Fact 7: Queer theology takes this hermeneutic of suspicion a step further, looking for any normative bias to any gender or sexual identity. For example, when we read Genesis 1:27,
(“God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.”)
do we read these words through the eyes of heteronormativity? In particular, does the little word ‘and’ deceive us?
The Hebrew word for ‘and’ ranges in meaning, sometimes joining two terms very closely, and at other times describing a real difference between two things? Do we see the “and” in the phrase “male and female” in the latter sense, as disjunctive, emphasising the separateness of the genders? Could we not legitimately emphasise the conjunctive nature of the “and”? “Male and female” may highlight not a clear separation between the sexes, but that humanity is the totality of gender and sex, and that, astonishingly, this unpredictability reflects the truth about God, as humanity is created in God’s image. This is not a new reading of Genesis: Phyllis Trible reads Genesis 1:27 in this way.
Queer theology intends to be provocative, and, because of its radical assumption that no expression of gender identity is normative, will at some point end up offending every reader. This offence validates the approach.
In fact, queer theology might take us back to Saint Paul’s radical idea that “in Christ Jesus, there is no longer … male nor female.” (Galatians 3:28), Christ, Paul says, is gender-blind, just as he is colour-blind. We need transgendered people to remind us of this foundational Christian value.
Derek Jay then sketches “Trends in the Spiritual Direction of LGBT People.” Jay uses the three-stage schema of St John of the Cross and its purgative, illuminative and unitive stages of spiritual growth as a framework to explore the particular needs of LGBT people in direction. For example, the spiritual director needs to note when the church’s attempts to enforce celibacy on non-heterosexuals lead to promiscuity, and then help the person to find integrity in their life choices. LGBT people need to accept and celebrate their differentness. Fact 8: Directors can encourage LGBT people to model an alternative spirituality – a more embodied, more accepting, spirituality, with more integrity about sin – to the rest of the Church.
The book challenges me to action at several points. Firstly it takes me to tapestry; not for the purpose of picking apart the tapestries of others trying to identify the stitching hidden at the back of the face their owners present to the world. Rather it is to pay attention to one’s own front stage and backstage; to examine with honesty how we stitch and how we hide our true selves. The purpose of the self examination is to allow our compassion for others to grow as we see how we manage our own lives.
Secondly, this book challenges me when I acquiesce to the too simple views around me, whether they are a cheerful masculinity that puts women down, and either ignores or destroys the lives of those who do not conform to the heterosexual norm.
It also challenges me to speak up, when people disapprove the life choices of others. I will not always agree with people’s choice of marriage partner or their vows of celibacy or the partner they take up with, but it is not my role in life to judge. Rather I am called as a Christian to affirm the way others see God leading them.
New Communities, Monastic Memories
Graham Cray and others, editors, Ancient Faith, Future Mission: New Monasticism as Fresh Expressions of Church, London: Canterbury Press, 2010.
Reviewed by Ted Witham
Published in Anglican Messenger, May 2011
From the time of Jesus, some Christians have felt impelled to express their faith in community. The early Christians in Acts 2 “were together and had all things in common.”
In the 3rd Century, desert hermits began to share their lives. By the 6th Century, Saint Benedict founded stable communities in Italy to become exemplars of true Christian living. The 11th and 12th Centuries saw an explosion of lay penitential communities. The friars, both Franciscan and Dominican, took the Gospel on the road.
Monks and friars flourished in England until their violent suppression by Henry VIII. But the impulse to make community did not die: post-Reformation foundations in England include Little Gidding, and William Wilberforce’s Clapham Sect. The Oxford movement re-seeded the idea of religious Orders: Bishop Charles Gore founded the Community of the Resurrection in 1892; James Adderley founded the forerunner of today’s Society of St Francis at about the same time.
Communities have been tried in Perth too. In 1977, for example, Canon John Abraham and an intentional community planted the new parish of Leeming. A group of priests and lay people last year inaugurated the Community of the Beatitudes.
Ancient Faith, Future Mission makes the argument that community living is essential to Christian faith: an argument with bite in the 21st Century where our individualism makes us vulnerable to the twin evils of consumerism and militarism. Communities make us accountable to others and inspire us to express the Gospel more fully.
The chapters of this book introduce readers to a number of UK and US contemporary communities, particularly those who illustrate novel ways of being church. Thus 24/7 Prayer Rooms practise hospitality to marginal city-folk. The Archbishop of York’s The Order of Mission is both centred on a home-base and is also dispersed. Maintaining a rule of life and rhythms of common prayer are vital building blocks for these communities.
Ancient Faith, Future Mission is heavily coloured by its English context. The communities portrayed in it would need adaptation for our Australian idiom.
These new communities clearly have both similarities to, and differences from, the traditional religious orders of the Anglican community. The book assumed that readers know about the Orders and their place in Anglican life, and was in places dismissive of them. The book would have been richer had more of its writers seen the contemporary Society of the Sacred Mission, the Order of Saint Benedict and a dozen others as resources rather than in “terminal care”.
The memory of “old monasticism” provokes “fresh expressions” seeking to find better ways of being Christians in a world full of challenges to Gospel living.
Mind Journeys 