Lama's log

Some time ago I went to the dentist. I have a love hate relationship with my dentist. He loves the amount of cash I give him and I hate the pain he provides me with. Still, I keep going back. On the particular visit I have in mind he was prodding about my mouth when he came across the tooth I told him was giving me a load of jip. I said 'Aughwww' in the way you do when your mouth is full of someone else's hand.

He then sat back and shook his head for a bit. 'I know you are telling me it hurts,' he said, 'but I think you're wrong.'

You can imagine what was going through my head at this point. I would have said some of it too but there were still bits of threatening metal instruments in my mouth.

'I think,' he said, 'you have some "transferred pain" going on'

This was a new one on me. The concept that my brain was throwing pain off to another place like some mad ventriloquist act. The result though was that he gave me a filling in a different tooth and the pain stopped.

I reckon there's a bit of transferred pain going on at church. We're talking a lot about mission. The more we talk about mission the more people talk about how crap church is. This leaves me with a bit of a dilemma. I could have a conversation which goes a bit like this:

Me: Let's do some mision
Bod: Church is rubbish, make it better.
Me: Errr, OK then

and then try and address a list of percieved needs. Or I could have a conversation which goes like this

Me: Let's do some mision
Bod: Church is rubbish, make it better.
Me: Yep lets start by doing some mission.
Bod: But it's rubbish here, fix things.
Me: agreed, I reckon mission might help.

The second conversation might work or it might be analagous to two people covering their ears whilst shouting la, la la la very loudly.

The first conversation allows people to carry on talking about church as if it is something other than them and which needs fixing before anything meaningful can be attempted.

I don't have as much control as a dentist in all this. No ones going to sit back in a chair and do as they're told for me whether I have drills in my hand or not. There is something about keeping your head down and walking forward even when things are not so easy. There is also the slight worry though that by doing that you fail to see the pain that is not transferred but a gaping wound that might need some attention.

I went over to Bradford this week and in and amongst watching a bit of drama I had another discussion on the frustration felt over experiencing real community in church. The dilemma of when to leave a church because it is not being community it is simply doing community.

It's a toughy. Meeting in a building, singing songs and listening to a preacher just doesn't hack it. If you change that all about though and get a small group of folk together and do a bit of liturgy and 'alternative worship' and call yourself emergent church, my guess is that that won't hack it either. The buzz word seems to be 'authentic'. I hear it so much I am beginning to tire of it a little. There is a lot in it though.

Authentic meaning that people commit to each other and seek to explore faith seems to work. I'm not sure the format is all that important but the intentionality is. If services are held in order to preserve what has always been done, after a while folk may struggle.

We have started a mid week service at our place. For all the world it seems to me to be emergent church but the term has never been used because being is emergent it not the aim, being community is. I found myself this morning being in the position to invite one of the families from my son's school along, something I haven't attempted in some time. It is a group of people enjoying each other and seeking God (last nights discussion on the agenda's of the Gospel writers with regard to the transfiguration is something I have not experienced before in a church service).

The people in the group have come though not with a sense of washing their hands of an existing community but from working with it. The aim is not about worship but about people and the commitment to community and the work being invested is high. In other words they are not expecting 'the church' to put on a more authentic worship event. They instead are seeking authentic discipleship.

Sometimes church is such a gorgeous place I want to bust.

I am frustrated with the reports on Rowan Williams. I am frustrated beyond belief by Christian reactions to his comments on Sharia law. It seems that few people have actually listened to what he had to say and there has been little time given that to the fact that it may actually be worth pondering.

I am annoyed at the fact that at best he has been patronised as a 'lovable academic'. Making being clever an outrage and an offence and dumbing down the respect he has as being sourced in him being a good chap rather than insightful and disciple.

There is a huge challenge in what he says when we come to consider our Christian identities, what governs us and the relationship that has with society and the law. There could be a great deal of pride and a good few links with Baptist history when we consider a religious leader speaking about how people of faith come to live amongst each other in a just society. If we as Christians recognise that we follow Christ and only obey the law when it is in line with Godly values; if we can glimpse at this, then maybe we can see that when we seek to coexist with other faiths under a jurisdiction that is meant to be universally accepted but rooted in church history, we may be looking at a complex issue that needs depth of consideration.

Williams says in his lecture,

'So much of our thinking in the modern world, dominated by European assumptions about universal rights, rests, surely, on the basis that the law is the law; that everyone stands before the public tribunal on exactly equal terms, so that recognition of corporate identities or, more seriously, of supplementary jurisdictions is simply incoherent if we want to preserve the great political and social advances of Western legality.'

But as Christian we must understand that this will bring us into conflict and as William's said in a radio 4 interview. Christians and Muslims alike do not want a situation where their discipleship in faith causes them to need to square up to 'the law'. That's not beneficial for any of us.

There's huge amounts to unpack in the lecture with nuances abounding and it needs careful consideration. I am disappointed in our communities, that we have joined the media pack in hounding Williams. In joining the scrum of anti Islam feeling and using this to feed the tabloid lynching.

I leave you with some words from his lecture and hope that they encourage thought ,

But if the reality of society is plural – as many political theorists have pointed out – this is a damagingly inadequate account of common life, in which certain kinds of affiliation are marginalised or privatised to the extent that what is produced is a ghettoised pattern of social life, in which particular sorts of interest and of reasoning are tolerated as private matters but never granted legitimacy in public as part of a continuing debate about shared goods and priorities.

But this means that we have to think a little harder about the role and rule of law in a plural society of overlapping identities. .......

But the point of defining legal universalism as a negative thing is that it allows us to assume, as I think we should, that the important springs of moral vision in a society will be in those areas which a systematic abstract universalism regards as 'private' – in religion above all, but also in custom and habit. The role of 'secular' law is not the dissolution of these things in the name of universalism but the monitoring of such affiliations to prevent the creation of mutually isolated communities in which human liberties are seen in incompatible ways and individual persons are subjected to restraints or injustices for which there is no public redress.