Lama's log

A few things have been floating around recently. Firstly I went to see 'The Golden Compass'. I was a tad excited about it as I loved the books and I really wanted to see Iorek Byrnilson in 'the flesh'. Just before going I picked up an e-mail from one of the church groups in the area asking us all to warn people about the film and the 'dangerous' message it gives. The mail warns against the atheism of the author of the books, Philip Pullman and the anti-church stance the books adopt.

It makes me want to spit. Why do Christians have to come out as the 'anti' group? Against stuff which actually might generate thought rather than engaging with it? The irony is that the church in the book (known as the 'Magisterium') spends all its time trying to shut down heresy and free thinking and seeks to control the information people have. Pullman seems to have got that right.

In the end the film was rubbish and doesn't come close to drawing you into the characters or the central questions of the novel. I was bored.

The other stuff I've been thinking about comes from the emerging church stuff I'm looking at and a post over at Sean the Baptist about how we go about teaching imagination to trainee ministers.

The emerging stuff I read, constantly talks about disaffection with the inherited church and the need to break out. I personally see this far less as a disaffection with worship form but far more a disaffection with a lack of authenticity. People haven't fallen out with preaching or hymns or even hymn sandwiches. There is not a dislike of church spaces or Sunday worship. There is a dissatisfaction with it being meaningless. We don't often experience church as a place where we really believe in and mean what we say. There is a lack of authenticity which leads us into apathy and disillusionment.

To tie this in with what Sean was saying. Perhaps we don't need to primarily teach or develop imagination. Perhaps instead we might start to teach people how to think. Or at least that it's OK to think. That we could well have an obligation to question and challenge what we believe and that our congregations can be trusted to do the same and bring with them the witness they have to the Gospel. This is harder than is seems at first because there is a fundamental liberalism that is as strong as the fundamental evangelicalism that I grew up in and it's just as stifling. The air of intellectual and spiritual superiority sometimes wafted from the emerging church is as real as the religious condemnation from the right wing of the church. Intellectual intolerance with regard to those who profess biblical literalism can be palpable in some areas and damage done to those on the edges of church such as homosexuals and women by 'inhereted church' is well documented.

Permission to think doesn't require imagination it requires a trust that Jesus might be bigger than the doctrine we have and that the doctrine we have may be richer than we give it credit for. Some sense of what we do being important to us and living with us will bread the energy and imagination that we often lack. Within this we may arrive at all sorts of biblical perspectives and positions. God may well burst in, in all sorts of guises and challenges. Church is starting to sound more engaging already.

It will also stop us being so ruddy threatened all the time and allow us and our kids to enjoy some good guilt free reading.