i so hope this will be like this too.

I’m changing jobs at the end of the year – i’ll still be with the UCA, still working from the same office, just changing titles and some tasks. i’ll no longer be part of the culture and context unit [for which i feel a deep sadness], though I’ll continue working on basement spaces and spirituality, and i’ll be taking on some broader responsibilities. The title intimidates me, just a little: Associate Executive Director of the Commission for Mission. It’s an unexpected move, and certainly not one i sought. But i’m here, i’ve said yes, and i’m grateful.

I’ll be in the prison again tonight and on Sunday. I’ll put up the services early in the new year. And hopefully next year there’ll be time to collate all the resources for prisons into some kind of printed collection…

Until then, this is a prayer for the start of the space on christmas day:

We light the Christ candle:
our act of faith
that love is born into the world today,
lighting the darkness of our story
with its justice, hope and peace…

A focus of Sarah’s work at the moment is helping schools create installations and places for transformation. It’s a particularly exciting project to watch unfold…

I quote from the report [which i won't name here - because it's not fair to single this one out over any other]:

Societal changes have meant a move from the modern belief in reason, progress and human potential to post-modernity with its scepticism concerning reason, suspicion of established institutions, pessimism about the future and relativism.

Have you ever noticed how many church reports frame post-modernity in negative terms [scepticism, suspicion, pessimism]? It’s really starting to piss me off.

Relativism is indeed a feature of a post-modern society – because we’ve recognised that the declarative truths of modernity emerged from within a particular cultural framework, and that they come with an innate bias [where the normal, for example, is male, middle class, educated, white, Christian]. The language that mediates truth is always culturally bound, so even if we’ve located a universal truth, our ways of communicating it will never be pure. Post-modernity has meant a move from ‘one size fits all’ in terms of education, belief, family structure, community; it doesn’t mean that there are no longer moral standards but that moral authority no longer comes automatically by virtue of position or status. The scepticism of progress has come because we recognise it often has a cost, and most often that cost is paid by those who can least afford it. Perhaps instead of speaking of ‘a suspicion of established institutions’, we could say instead ‘our society now recognises the limitations and failings of institutions, and readily critiques their assumptions and self-given authority’… Thank god for all of that, i say.

Of course, post-modernity is bad news for those who previously demanded authority by virtue simply of position. It’s bad news for those who equated knowledge with power, and kept it from others. It’s bad news for people and groups who want everyone to think like them, or who need absolutes to feel safe. It’s good news for everyone whose voice has been excluded, or dismissed as ‘wrong’ or ignorant because it speaks a different truth. Well, it could be good news, if we let it. Coincidentally, the church has a gospel imperative to make it good news.

Continuing the paragraph:

In relation to the church, we have moved from a Christian society to a post Christian, individualistic, consumer society in which the church has far less prominence.

Basically, the church is not the [self-selected] centre of the world anymore. We weren’t doing that good a job at being the centre of the world, and many theologians would argue that the church can only do its job when it isn’t. But that’s not what really bothers me. It’s reducing the description of post-Christian society to being simply individualistic or consumer. It’s both of those things, of course, and i wish it wasn’t. But it’s also become a global society – which means people understand the diversity of the world better. Our society understands the limits of knowledge, and the extraordinary potential and the dangers of human progress. It’s cynical, idealistic, optimistic, pessimistic, all in the one breath. Our society is made up of people who want to change the world, and others who want the world to stay as it is – much like every generation before us. The pressures to consume are enormous, more than ever before, and the church needs to speak prophetically against that. Alongside that, though, is also a capacity to be informed about the world more than ever before – and its about time the church started to celebrate that.

Surely incarnational theology would have us believe that the gospel speaks into and from within every culture, context and era. I wish that those who see post-modernity as a threat would also understand the damage that modernity has done to the gospel – and i guess it’s up to the rest of us to invite them into the world of possibility that post-modernity offers.

i have changed where my home is.

The Culture and Context Unit, within which i work, celebrated its first birthday last week. It’s been a fun ride so far…

I’ve been spending today writing up some medium to long term strategies to match the Synod’s priorities. One of the Synod’s priorities is risk-taking, and as part of the planning process we need to show a link between our units work and that priority. It’s a fabulous aim, but i’ve found myself having to rationalise why some of the things we do are risks. Staying as part of the church, for instance, when most people would assume the risk is in going out into the world.

One of the principles that formed the unit was the idea of being a guest at the world’s table. I suspect that one of the reasons why this team gravitated together at the beginning was because that was our natural instinct anyway. We like being out there. We know ourselves in the world. And increasingly, for many of us, the church is almost a parallel universe, operating in a different orbit. This is where we feel alien, not there.

I don’t know where home is, but i don’t mind not having one. And in letting go of the need to make the church my home i’ve found unexpected appreciation for it. Not wishing the church different has meant I’ve started to recognise its worth. I’ve given up the fight, relinquished my right, and found its goodness. It means that while this is not my home, and i doubt it ever will be again, i love that it’s yours, and i love that you let me stay when i need somewhere to crash for a while…

so thanks. that’s all.

One of the intentions for those of us working in the new Culture and Context Unit is that our unit meetings will be biased more towards developing a learning community, rather than spending time catching up and listing events / diary dates. As part of our scope is to help develop the conversation within the uniting church that explores how we can be transformative presence in a post-christian world [and that phrase is proof of the need for new language...], we’ll be creating reference points by exploring a collection of articles and books. It falls to me to sort through which articles and books will help us start that process. I love my job.

While reading an article by Simon Barrows yesterday i came across this quote:

The world’s darkness is beyond human explication. What gives us hope is the strangeness of evil encountered by the greater strangeness (mystery) of grace, gift.

For some reason I really love the language of strangeness. There is nothing that makes sense in this.

One of the things i think we want to explore further next year is about being an alternative presence in systems that hold incredible power – the church is one of those; hospitals, prisons, schools are others. These are many of the places that the work of our unit is focussed. I think we need to do some work on understanding how people can be ‘present’ in a system without buying into the power dynamic within it, so that their presence is not defined by the power dynamic [either for or against], but instead is a different kind of transformative presence. When we watch people who work out of that different dimension, the words gift and grace come instantly to mind…

And today marked the day I recovered a tiny moment to get back to thinking about alt worship… it’s been literally weeks since i had the space to focus on that, and it does feel a little like coming home. The following is the draft of a prayer for an advent candle ritual that we’re developing for communities / congregations, which will highlight the prophetic vision of a transformed world, where prisoners are set free, and communities are made whole:

We are so easily mesmerised by the flicker of the flame
and dazzled by the brightness of the lights
that shine in your name

Yet your light comes not to overwhelm
but to illuminate the world around us,
so that we will see the deep cracks and stains
that mark the foundations and walls of our community.

Dare we pray for the faith of advent?
to pray for your coming
even though we know
that we will never look at the world
with the same eyes
again.

We whipped some postcards together at the last minute, as a take-away for those who came to help us celebrate. We’re framing the work of the unit around the questions we’ll be exploring, rather than the answers we’ll be offering, so the front of the cards showed some of those.

On Tuesday we had our first staff meeting. I had no expectations of it, or really of the way we’ll work together as a team, but I came out of the meeting thinking that I couldn’t ask for better company to be doing this with. I think this is going to be fun.

Diana is the author of A People’s History of Christianity, Christianity for the rest of us, and numerous other books on the practices of spiritual communities and congregations. Her expertise is in articulating contextual realities about culture, faith and church community, and making them accessible to a church which is largely confused by them… and seriously, i don’t think i’ve heard anyone express it better. She created a tinker toy model for explaining the continuums on which we ‘define’ different communities, and how all of that is changing in a postmodern landscape. In a nutshell, she talked about the continuum that we normally use to define church communities [liberal - conservative], added in another dimension [conventional - intentional], and then the third, new dimension of modernity and postmodernity. It offered such a useful framework for conversations, and understanding the emerging tensions and subtle differences between expressions of community that often look the same, but are somehow very different. It was lovely to hear someone talking about postmodern communities who has herself come from a liberal / progressive background. When so many books and blogs about emerging church are from people who are so passionate about disavowing any liberal inclinations [i always feel like the odd one out in emerging church circles], it was just brilliant – and a weird kind of relief, actually – to hear the possibilities of emerging communities from someone who values that part of her heritage, even if, in a postmodern world, it is no longer the defining paradigm.

North American speakers often don’t translate well into an Australian context. We’ve often wondered why that is – perhaps there’s too much of the readymade in what they present; perhaps it stems from a lack of awareness of how steeped in the American culture that their stuff actually is, or a lack of understanding of the diversities of cultures in australia. Diana got the subtleties of the audience really well, and seemed really interested in how her input made sense here, not just in telling us what was happening there. She was articulating our reality here, and it was quite astonishing to hear our truths being reflected so accurately back to us in an American accent. I feel unexpectedly grateful for the whole experience.

We decided last night that we will organise a gathering for people in the uniting church [or those not in the UCA, but who have come from similar 'quadrants'], who are working with or part of communities that have developed within a postmodern framework and know no other way of being. It would not be an event for those who are working with hinge communities, or for leaders who want their church to be different and are trying to work through the transition. Diana talked about the necessity to experiment and try new things, but to learn from the things that do and don’t work – this gathering [which would hopefully birth a network or ongoing learning community] would be a place to reflect on experiments and learnings. There are, after all, plenty of opportunities for those who are trying to create or lead hinge communities, and not many for those who are at another point in the story. It’s part of an attempt to build a body of people who can start the conversation at a different point, rather than covering the ground of ‘why’ and ‘what’ yet again…

I realised when I walked into the venue on Tuesday that i haven’t been to a church conference or meeting for the last two years. It was surreal. For the first time I realised how far away I have moved from the church, and how different the air i breathe now is. In the first plenary, someone talked about the implications of new forms of community for ordination, and i realised that i haven’t been anywhere where the subject of ordination has been raised for a very long time, where that’s been a consideration or a category. I felt like a fish out of water for much of the two days, and in the group conversations I realised I no longer knew or understood the language which was being used. It’s not my world or reality any more. Which is not a bad thing, it’s just surreal. And I realised that while i deeply respect that group of people and that community [and I do], I really love where i am now.

So I went home last night feeling more courageous, i guess, about a few things; more confirmed in what we’re trying to do in this new unit, and this project, and oddly less lonely. It goes to show that you don’t always need the company of other people to make a journey. Sometimes you just need to know that your story holds its own with another’s.

And i feel like i’ve made a new friend in Diana, which is just lovely too.

- from a post I wrote last year.

I’ve talked quite a bit on this blog about the fact that many of the assumptions about what shape expressions of faith and community should take are debunked completely when one takes them into another culture and context, especially one where we don’t play host. Our language and patterns of being and behaving are stripped away when we don’t hold the knowledge or the power, when we don’t get to decide what happens, or what meaning it will take; when we are invited guests. It’s a very good place to be.

[This is a bit of an historical paragraph about structural stuff before talking about why i'm bringing this up again no...!] This alt worship project is part of the Commission for Mission [CFM] in the Uniting Church’s Synod of Victoria and Tasmania. Over recent years the Synod has been reconfiguring the way it resources mission in local congregations [the recent restructuring / focus on resourcing of presbyteries is a primary means of this]. What it’s meant is that the CFM no longer needs to take a primary role in consulting with / resourcing congregations. And that’s making possible some new things…

This week, the CFM has announced some structural changes. The old Mission Planning unit [MPRU] is to be reconfigured, and a few other independent streams of work that have been formed over the last couple of years to explore the edges of the church’s thinking about community, mission and presence, have been drawn together to create a new unit, named Culture and Context.

The Culture and Context Unit will have as its broad aim the discovery of new ‘language’ [in its broadest form] for faith that resonates with communities outside the mainstream. In practical ways, various people in the unit will be focussing on different areas: taking lead roles in some inter-faith work [in schools, disability services and chaplaincy]; exploring and extending chaplaincy education and development [in prisons, mental health institutions, hospitals, etc.]; through liaison work with schools [including a great 'schoolies with a cause' project], and the development of a road trauma memorial project with the victorian government. I’ll be continuing to work in alt worship, although we’re going to re-title this project so that it more accurately reflects what it is – the exploration of expressions of spirituality in postmodern contexts. I’ll also be co-directing the unit with Adrian Pyle, who will be focussing on the development of spiritual intelligence in communities and organisations.

At its heart, this new unit won’t be on about working in these areas on behalf of the church… we’re on about a serious exploration of what theology, spirituality and transformative community looks like in places that the church often doesn’t reach, or where it doesn’t know what to do when it’s there. In essence, we’re going out to to be guests at some of those different tables, in order to discover more clearly what hope, love and life look like when we’re there.

Someone told me the website had been very black over the last few weeks, and that it will be scaring people away. Alas, i wear black better than any other colour…

It’s not all dark here, by any stretch of the imagination, but i can’t write about the fun work stuff just now. We’re making a few changes in direction with the project, and with my role, and that needs to be sorted before things become public. This is annual performance review time, which i always love – no really, i do! – it’s the chance to take a breath, transcend what’s happening, put things into their proper perspective, get slapped down a little where necessary and elevated where that’s due too. More about that when i can.

But, back to the black… The grass is growing again along some stretches of the road to Kinglake West. I was up there again today. The new growth is beautiful, but it’s no comfort to the man I met last week whose children and partner died in the fires. I kept thinking of Auden: ‘Stop all the clocks‘, he says…

‘The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.’

It resonates with something I was thinking during the restorative justice forum yesterday. I know we need to see small things, beacons along the way to becoming new, as Anna McKenzie says, but the world needs the kind of monumental miracles that don’t come incrementally; the impossible, un-inevitable resurrections, that aren’t part of the natural cycle of life, but that break into it in a beyond-natural kind of way. We need them in the prison system. We need them in Kinglake West. We need them in the church. And i no longer want to be content with less.

The trip also includes two retreats – one in Merricks on the Mornington Peninsula [March 6-9] and the other at Acacia in Halls Gap [March 13-15]. I’m involved in creating sacred spaces for the latter, which I’m really looking forward to. The retreats will be open to registrations, so set the dates aside now.

It’s hard to imagine a more important relationship for the Australian church and community to develop at the moment – both our relationship with Indonesia, and our conversations with Muslims. This is a great chance to be involved in something that could have a long term effect on the way we understand ourselves and each other.

Jess can be contacted at jessica.butcher@victas.uca.org.au