For those of you [like me] who are out of this particular loop, the following information might entice you [like me] to put it in your diary…

Dr Campbell is an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University and one of the world’s leading scholars in religion and online media. Her research has taken her from inner urban life in Glasgow through mainstream churches in Auckland to where religion, history and politics collide in Israel.

Heidi’s teaching and research centres on the social shaping of technology, rhetoric of new media, and themes related to the intersection of media religion and culture, with a special interest in the internet and mobile phones. She has written a book, Exploring Religious Community Online: We are one in the network, looking at how members of online religious communities connect their online and offline social-religious networks. Her current research is an investigation of Jewish, Muslim & Christian communities’ historic perceptions and contemporary use of media technologies, forthcoming as a text, When Religion Meets New Media.

For those who have any interest in how online technology is shaping how people are seeing and interacting with the world, or want to know how creative uses of new technologies are making new opportunities for people to connect, grow and learn, this is a chance to have questions explored.

Heidi is also keen to hear stories of Australians who have tried out religion on the Internet, whether the experience is good or bad or somewhere in between. Come along and share with her what the 21st century Australian spirit sounds and smells like.

Date: Monday 12 October 2009. 7pm.
Venue: Pireaus Blues Restaurant, 310 Brunswick St Fitzroy (Melbourne).
Sit-down dinner, a la carte (Main prices from $15 to $30).
RSVP: Friday 9 October to paul@teusner.org

from here, exploring Walter Benjamin’s book ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’

i’ve been playing around with a few ideas about next year’s UK trip today. they’re still consolidating, but they’re based in the belief that we need to be finding new ways of offering encounters with stories that are bigger than our own – and that doing that is at least as important a conversation for the church to have as what new communities of faith might look like.

i’ve been thinking about who communicates the essence of faith best to people who are disinterested or disenchanted with Christianity; about who offers a moment of hope, peace, redemption, grace to the world, and who enters into the world’s agony, tragedy, ecstasy. it’s largely artists, musicians and poets. we know that, alt worship emerged from that reality. but often, even in alt worship, we’re simply using art as a way of explaining what we already know and what we think others should believe [the same theology in a different wrapping].

i’ve been reading a lot about the process of creativity recently, mostly interviews with artists and authors. so many of them talk about not knowing when they begin how something they create will end. the shape is uncovered in its making. the artwork’s creation is a revelation, and the artist is shaped by the artwork as much as the artwork is shaped by the artist. i know that my theology and shape has been changed dramatically since i started to write about it [someone told me once that i would believe anything if it made good poetry, and there's more than a little truth in that]. i wonder if it’s one of the reasons why anything beyond straight descriptive art is so terrifying to many christians. – that, and that we lose control of meaning with art, where we had control of meaning with words [well, we thought we did - i've got a whole other post about that coming up!]…

none of this might make sense. it doesn’t quite to me yet. but i’m putting it up in case it resonates with someone – and whether you can push it a bit further for me… but back to the original point of the post: next year’s trip I want to be a kind of hothouse for a group of people who want to explore this in very practical ways – and preferably because it’s in their blood, not because they think it will be good for the church…

last time i was at fed square with a group this size was when we were protesting some of the policies of the last government. it was unbelievably good to be listening to a prime minister who was speaking about soul, not economics. It was a moving and beautiful moment – obviously even more so for the indigenous people in the crowd, and those who were part of the ceremony in Canberra.

it’s funny how in christian circles the concept of forgiveness is so dominant in much theology. the demand to forgive can become as oppressive as the original act that needed to be forgiven. we rarely, if ever, talk about apologising [which is very different to confessing]… and yet today seems proof [if we needed it] of how good it does one’s soul to apologise, and to do so without demanding forgiveness in response.

The photo below was taken during the Leader of the Opposition, Brendan Nelson’s, response. Most of the crowd at Federation Square turned their back on him during his speech. His speech, and the apology within it, felt to me like the kind of apology that a 10 year old gives his sister on the insistence of his mother.

One of the things that Kevin Rudd said in his speech accompanying the apology was that turning points aren’t born through sentimental moments, they’re born through action. and that’s the task ahead of us from here.

until the last few weeks, the majority of people who got in contact with me were those from within the church, wanting me to come and do stuff with them, or to find out about workshops or resources, etc. That balance has changed. The majority of uninitiated contact – emails, phone calls, etc. – is now coming from people who aren’t part of the church – never have been, or never want to be again.

I’m writing a rationale for the body who auspice this project, about why we would want to get involved in an alternative space in the city that might never have any impact on the church – which wouldn’t privilege christianity over other faiths, and in which the uniting church would not be the ones offering hospitality, but rather just one of the parties at the table. in the rationale i’ve been reflecting on what i’ve heard as i’ve been in conversation with people recently – and i wrote this paragraph:

Unexpectedly, we’ve discovered a growing number of people in the second and third groupings [those who have left the church and christianity, but still see themselves as having faith; those who have never been to church and never will] who are contacting us to find out more about alternative worship and sacred spaces. Their trust takes a long time to be earned. Their involvement is deeply hesitant. They aren’t necessarily anti-church, often they haven’t been hurt by the church, but they simply aren’t interested in the world of the church. They say, quite openly, that they never intend to go into a church [and, if asked, will look completely bewildered as to why they would be expected to]. They don’t come to an event or space because they want to talk [except, perhaps, one on one in a different space and time], they are [often] quite faithful to a set of beliefs, they aren’t particularly lonely, they don’t want / need to be ‘fixed’, they’re not looking for a new group of friends, they’re involved in community and, often, in acts of justice. They know about christianity, and have often been formed by it, but they’re not there any more. They’re not searching for constructed meaning or belief, they’re looking for a place that will bring to life the stuff that is at their heart.

They do speak of wanting a constructed space, which they call sacred, where they can place their hopes, fears and faith against other resonating stories. It’s this kind of space that we are looking to create in the city.

i used the language ‘post christian’ to describe this group yesterday, but i think they’re perhaps better described by Fowler’s Stage 5 – conjunctive faith. Fowler himself says that stage 5 is hardest to grasp, but he describes it as the following:

Stage 5 accepts as axiomatic that truth is more multidimensional and organically interdependent than most theories or accounts of truth can grasp. Religiously, it knows that the symbols, stories, doctrines and liturgies offered by its own or other traditions are inevitably partial, limited to a particular people’s experience of God and incomplete…

- from Fowler’s Stages of Faith

I think within the Uniting Church we have created communities that are expressions of Fowler’s stages 3 and 4 – even if we don’t always do them well. There’s plenty of space for conversation and disagreement within the church [much to the frustration of many who think the uniting church doesn't actually believe anything]. There are strong progressive theology networks, plenty of spaces for deconstruction, leaders are trained within a theological college that probably privileges stage 4… but i think, largely, that we let people drop off the edge when they transition into stage 5… or else that people stay around but get their life and energy from somewhere else. we assume people leave the church because they’ve lost their faith, but maybe it’s because their faith has taken them into another space that the church doesn’t reach?

which leaves me wondering what kind of spaces can we construct that might be ‘home’ to those within stage 5… which also reflect the realities of a postmodern culture and context.

and it also leaves me hoping that the uniting church has the capacity and vision to be involved in resourcing these kinds of spaces, knowing that in reality it’s not going to get anything in return… people aren’t going to come to church in response to them, and they aren’t going to sign up to christianity… because even if they resonate most strongly with an expression of the christian faith, they’re on the search for the truth in the ‘other’…

altworship_wisdomsfeast.pdf

it also doesn’t have explanatory notes – i don’t do notes, i just go from the slides.

the workshops went OK, i think. i felt a bit out of place, going back to working with a group of [largely] ordained people, and an older group than what i’ve been working with recently, but i really enjoyed it. i really love that my pre-conceptions about who in the group will ‘get it’ are always shattered. [i have a theory about people over 70 that keeps bearing out in reality... about their willingness to explore the new, and their longing for a different kind of worship...]

the big sticking points, one of which almost led to a revolt, were reframing our concepts of community and rethinking our use of music. i mentioned at one point that i hadn’t used singing in worship for years now, and for a moment thought everyone would walk out…

At the beginning of alt worship workshops i normally throw some quotes around – including one from steve collins about planning for alt worship begins with a blank sheet of paper. in the ensuing conversation i ask people what they would find hardest to leave off the blank sheet of paper. singing is the only thing that is always mentioned [in all the workshops i've run, i've never had an exception to that]. yet when i curate alt worship spaces for those same people, they never mention that they missed the singing. ever.

but no matter how often i say ‘this is alternative, not mainstream… i’m not saying we should ditch singing from worship’, or ‘i’m not saying we should never use singing, i’m just saying we shouldn’t assume we’ll have singing’, people still get quite disconcerted.

these are the reasons why i rarely use singing
- a large part of alt worship is getting people beyond the purely cerebral – moving from the head to body – but most of our songs gets people out of their bodies and back into the cerebral realm… unless we use songs that are really repetitive, songs we know almost by heart.*

- lyrics have an agenda and a message. by inviting people to sing along to something, we’re assuming we know what will be happening in peoples heads at that moment. that seems antithetical to what we do in most of the worship i’m involved with.

- when we begin planning alternative worship the process doesn’t normally begin with asking what the prayer of confession should be, what form the sermon should take, or what hymns we should use. it asks the question ‘how do we create a context for people to encounter God through this story?’. communal singing rarely seems to be emerge as a way of encounter. someone asked whether it was because that was my preference. i honestly don’t think it is. it just doesn’t emerge organically within the context of everything we’re doing.

[of course, given that john bell was in the next room running a workshop that included - as always - beautiful singing, my point was somewhat diluted...]

community is a whole other conversation… how do we define community? do we need to change our language so we don’t talk about community, but we focus more on resonance?

*someone mentioned, which talking about singing and liminality, that in much mainstream worship, the singing is the liminal moment… i wonder whether that’s why people want the same old hymns in worship. it’s not for nostalgia, it’s to have a ‘thin’ moment, to lose yourself… something you can only do in a song which you know as well as you know your own name…

no doubt that’s true for many people … but i also keep being told these amazing sacred stories of redemption, transformation and grace by people “in the world”, who would never use the Christian story to make sense of them (in fact they’re often preceded with the words “I’m an atheist, but…”).

In conversation with a friend a few weeks ago, telling our stories to each other, he made the observation that for both of us our stories of transformation and conversion happened outside the church. Our biggest moments haven’t been in the church, or orchestrated by it. In fact, the major act of redemption in my life happened in spite of the church and the beliefs it proffered (and no, i’m not going to explain that further, at least not in the context of this post!). If that’s been the case for us, why am I so surprised that it’s like that for so many others? How much of our language (even the best language) and how much of our insistence on the Christian story being the way the story of salvation needs to be told, stops people from recognising its unfolding in their lives?

What if we began curating public ’sacred’ spaces that assume people already have a story to tell – of longing or fulfilment, of agony or transformation… and that it can be told right where they are… that you don’t have to come to church to find it or tell it?

i’m not saying that’s the end point. i’m wondering aloud whether it might be the starting point.

[i wrote this last week... but wanted to put up the Age article first. I want to say that it's not written in response to this post from Blair...!]