The issues explored in the resource are prisons, alcohol reform, indigenous rights, mental health, water management, climate change and gambling reform. Each addressed issue has fast facts, current policy, the positions of the major parties, and questions to ask your local MP. The full resource can be downloaded here. It’s a great resource.

I really like that they’ve addressed some of the current rhetoric around prison sentencing. As the resource says,
• When people are provided with more information on a particular case — similar to the information a judge would have — they impose a very similar sentence to a judge.
• Suspended sentences are as effective as prison terms in reducing repeat offending rates (slightly more effective for people who have previously served prison time).

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.

- 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.

it comes straight after reading Isaiah 43:18-22

The promise echoes through history

whispered by angels and shouted by prophets

But did they know how dry this desert could be?

How do we hold faith
when the cracks in our reality are deeper than ever before
when the pressures add up relentlessly
[fire
flood
drought

unwieldy bureaucracies
financial crises
unprecedented demand...]

You are making all things new?

We are trying to hold faith.

We need a glimpse, God
a moment

something to carry us beyond what we know

So we pray
with no faith
and with all faith

give us eyes to see
faith to believe
courage to live
today

these are the liturgies we used, by days.

unitingcare_monday.pdf

unitingcare_tuesday.pdf

The Uniting Church – like many other faiths communities and christian churches in victoria – has had an extensive prison ministry over many years. This includes a team of prison chaplains, and also some post-release care through various Uniting Care agencies. It is, obviously, important work, but it’s a little like putting the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. There’s been a growing commitment over the last few months to broadening our focus – or really, to changing the paradigm out of which we operate, hence the restorative justice project.

[if you're new to this, wikipedia has an excellent overview of the principles and practice of restorative justice.]

Why is the Uniting Church making this a focus?
theologically… i said in the last post that the prison work had become the question to which the entire alt worship project needed to answer. i was understating the case somewhat – Luke has Jesus beginning his ministry with the verses from Isaiah 58 [Luke 4:16-20], in part to remind us that every part of our ministry – our community life, our worship, our theology – needs to answer first to the blind, the widow, the poor and the prisoner… if our theology, and its outworking, doesn’t first bring freedom to the prisoner [and there are no convincing arguments as to why we shouldn't take that literally], then it won’t actually bring freedom to anyone [our natural inclination is to reverse that: to get 'ourselves' right, and then we'll 'do' justice and compassion].

We link justice to punishment; the bible links it to restoration. We talk about God being pure grace, love and justice; yet when it comes to prisoners we’ll invoke vengeance without a second thought. Sure, it’s prisoners who make it hard to speak of a god of grace, love and justice – but that’s the exact point. it might be hard, but it’s in that context we have to make it work. There are some people i would quite happily judge as irredeemable, but it’s not up to me to do that. If i’m to call myself a person of faith, then i give up the right to judge another person.

sociologically… the politicians keep telling us that crime rates are down in victoria, yet statistics tell us that the rates of imprisonment are higher. The basis of this project is for the Uniting Church to join others involved in this area, to do what it can to reverse that trend. It needs to be said that the aim of this project isn’t to close all prisons. There are some people who need to be kept separate from the community. But for the many prisoners who don’t fit this category, there are other forms of justice that actually restore wholeness – both to them, and to the community they’ve damaged.

so, what does the uniting church need to do for a prison to be closed?

This is not a short term project, obviously. And it needs to be approached from a multitude of angles: for it to work we need to begin conscientising the members of congregations and faith communities to the issue – much like the process that was undertaken with asylum seekers a few years ago… though of course, this is a much less sexy issue, and it’s much harder to do the face to face conversations that helped so much in that issue. We need to begin speaking in a different language – in our theology and our worship. As Jenny said last week, we basically need to convert congregations to a vision of the kingdom of heaven. Alongside that, we need to be talking with politicians, members of the judiciary and the media.

so, the next twelve months looks like this:
gathered events

- we’re beginning with a community justice forum – listening to the groups and people involved in the existing justice system, and in restorative justice already, learning from them, and then discerning what it is that the uniting church can offer to that conversation

- then we’ll launch into other more general educative forums for the uniting church – starting a conversation between prison chaplains and Uniting Care community service agencies, to identify the gaps in the care of people who are moving through and beyond the justice system.

- there’ll also be a couple of forums that are open to members of the public, and church members, in order to get some broader community awareness.

- the commission for mission staff gathering next year will involve Elaine Enns, who is a restorative justice practitioner [she will be in australia with her partner, Ched Myers].

communication

- we’re going to blitz the church newspaper with stories, articles, interviews about restorative justice, and the people affected by the justice system.

- we’re developing a community information pack, including ways people can get involved on an individual and local level – advocating to their local members of parliament, establishing forums for restorative justice in their own context

- i’ll write faith columns about this for the newspaper

humanising the issue

- finding ways to tell stories of people who have been through the prison system [the film project will be part of this]

worship and theology

- workshops, resources, conversations with faith community leaders about the language and imagery we use in worship

That’s just the start of it, and it’s a massive amount of work… but we’ve started on it already, and that’s the most important thing…

Stay tuned, or come along for the ride if you’re able…

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’…

[speaking of which, lisa hall is a teacher in Utopia, a remote indigenous community in the NT. she's a voice I trust in the current sea of ignorant opinions... her blog posts at the moment are heartbreaking and eyeopening].

we realised pretty early on that working out what needs to happen before redemption and restoration are made real in our society is a never ending process, but that we need to begin asking the questions and naming the problems even if we don’t know the solutions to them. that’s counter-cultural in the church, we only like asking questions we can answer.

this was the beginning of our list today:

what do we, as a community, do with prisoners with mental illnesses and intellectual disabilities when they leave prison, and when their primary carers [normally their parents] are too old / unable to care for them… and when the government has dismantled the institutions that could have cared for them?
how do we, as a community, look beyond ’single issues’, which tend to focus on symptoms not problems… [take away gambling and some other addiction will take its place]?
what do we do about the fact that often the only accommodation, post release, that recovering drug addicts can find is with people who are still using?
what do we about the cycle where the parole board won’t release prisoners until they have accommodation, but prisoners can’t get accommodation without knowing when they’ll be released from prison
what do we, as a community, do about the fact that the prison population is increasing, even though the rates of crime are decreasing
what do we, as a community, with the knowledge that the majority of victoria’s prison population comes from just 14 postcodes… and with the knowledge that we’ve known this for years and done nothing about it….
what do we, as a community, do about the fact that much of the prison population is made up of people who are 4th generation unemployed and dependent on welfare…

[i've been thinking about why i'm pro-denominational recently, even when i'm pretty ambivalent about church! this is one of the reasons: a denomination has the capacity and resources to work on issues like this. the church has a vision of redemption and restoration which it can offer the world; a denomination has a loud enough voice to advocate to governments, and can do so unapologetically, as well as having resources to put into work that simply wouldn't get funding any other way.]

Initially the conversation was focussed on the involvement of ordained people in the things we do in this project [response: there are a number of ordained people who are involved in many different ways, but their ordination is incidental to their involvement]. After a while, though, the conversation moved into a really interesting space… we were talking about how one of the priestly roles in a worshipping community has been to ‘hold the line’ to ensure the community stays within the beliefs of the apostolic tradition. At its worst, that has been a form of control; at its best, it’s been a way of ensuring worship is a safe space for people. Ray was asking whether i thought there was a priestly role within alt worship and sacred spaces. I said no to begin with, but changed my thinking in the conversation… the focus in alt worship / sacred space is a little less on presenting a systematic theology for people, and more about creating a space for encountering and tangling with a sacred story in an open-ended way, so maybe the priestly role changes its focus too. It’s still about creating a safe space, but the focus isn’t on protecting people from heretical belief, rather it’s protecting people from heretical behaviour – from the danger of abuse within the context of curated worship and sacred space: manipulation, “power over”, exclusion… [and in that way the gifts of discernment and intuition become much more important for those who take the priestly role in this context]

[i don't think that priestly role needs to be held by those who are ordained... or else, obviously, i wouldn't be here!]

I’ve often talked about how alt worship is about playing, but it also involves knowing that we’re playing in the most holy of playgrounds. both Ray and I talked about the fear and trembling with which we come to plan worship… and how if we don’t take it seriously – if we don’t approach worship with that awe and wonder, and a sense of inadequacy for the responsibility – then the worship loses its heart and essence.