Decline

The church in the UK is not in decline because people no longer believe in God, rather people in the UK no longer believe in God because the church is in decline.

Kim Fabricius writing another bunch of doodlings on the Faith and Theology blog.

(Incidentally, when I worked for the Presbyterians there were several words that got used a good deal and which I began to baulk at being used so readily: paradigm, contextual...and most especially, decline. It's an excuse word, as I think Fabricius may be indicating.)

Homelessness

Kim Fabricius writes, in a sermon 'published' on Ben Myers blog, on the subject of homelessness....not quite the discussion homelessness you might expect, as the following couple of paragraphs indicate [my italics in the first paragraph]

There has been a lot of talk over the past decade or so about the church at the end of Christendom being a church in exile, often rather glib talk, in my view, because it has neglected to acknowledge the Old Testament significance of exile, and the traumatic experience of exile, namely, God’s judgement on Israel, God’s punishment of Israel by their dispersal to Babylon. Without this recognition, it is easy for Christians to slip into a victim mentality, in which we blame church decline on secularism or atheism. Without this recognition, we rather too quickly start “re-imagining the future” (as the process of renewal was called in the URC in Wales) without confessing and repenting the sins of our past – sins mainly of taking too much for granted, sins of apathy and lethargy, the sins of civic religion.

And then there are the three dangers of living in exile. The first is nostalgia, pining for the good old days and trying to re-inscribe them in the reality of today. But – remember King Canute – you can’t command the tides of time to withdraw. The second danger is withdrawal, disengaging from the big bad world of today altogether and circling the wagons. This is the sectarian option and it is not only cowardly and faithless, it is also a recipe for further decline and ultimate disappearance. And then there is the third danger, assimilation, whereby we think we can save the church by aping the ways of the world, as if all we’ve got to do is to market and manage the church more strategically and effectively to be “successful”. But then the customer, not the gospel, becomes sovereign, and though the church gain the whole world, it loses its soul.

A Nappy Christmas

Running short of an idea for your Christmas sermon? Check out Kim Fabricius' example on the Faith and Theology site. You might not want to copy it intact (though you might) but there are plenty of good lines, and plenty of good thoughts in it to give you something to grab hold of. Here's how it finishes:

Christmas: God’s PowerlessPoint presentation, God’s dressing down, God’s self-demonstration that he has no sense of occasion, that God is God in a messy birth (and, later, in a messier death). And there, I think, is the true wonder of Christmas: the miraculous not in some supernatural phenomenon but in the striking ordinariness of the neonatal (and the finally fatal). And there also is the real hope of Christmas: things are not as they seem; and, more, things are not as they have to be, they can be altogether otherwise. Is a new world possible? Absolutely, because a new world came. And because a new world came, a new world is coming.

I particularly liked the line: a God whose idea of a grand entry is a Nappy Christmas, which apparently he pinched from Godfrey Rust.

And round we go

One of the great joys of the Internet is the way in which you are not only enabled to hop from mind to mind, but are encouraged to by the sheer curiosity of finding out more about who this new person is that you've suddenly stumbled across.

Thus, heading from an entry by Bruce Hamill on Facebook, I find myself on Bruce's blog, which I don't remember coming across before. (It's called 'boo to a goose' in the best obscurely theological tradition.)

From there, an entry on his blog led me to Michael someone-or-other's blog, Beyond the Secular Canopy, where he had posted a new version of the Serenity Prayer:

Triune God of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, grant me:
the serenity to know that all will be reconciled in Jesus Christ,
the courage to participate in the change you are bringing,
and the wisdom to remember that ‘be realistic’ is not one of your commandments.

Another skip and a hop and we find ourselves at Inhabitatio Dei (these blog names - crikey!) where the prayer was re-posted, along with a further parody by Kim Fabricius, who wrote:

To lower the tone, do you know “The Senility Prayer”?

Ancient of Days,
grant me the senility to forget the people I’ve never liked,
the serendipity to run into the people I do,
and the eyesight to tell the difference.

Kim, of course, and to complete the circle, had turned up in a post on this blog just at the end of September.

Being human...

To be human is to be responsible. That is the inner meaning of the "dominion" of Genesis 1:26, which is a dominion not of domination but of stewardship, taking care of the world's back yard ... God the world-maker is God the care-taker. Humans properly stand over other creatures only as they stand with other creatures, showing them love, giving them space, and granting them "rights."

- Kim Fabricius,
from his book, Propositions on Christian Theology: a Pilgrim Walks the Plank

I thought it was worth adding this from the book's blurb...
In this little book, a kind of contemporary enchiridion [handbook], Kim Fabricius engages some of the main themes of Christian theology in prose, poetry, and song (his own hymns). It does not aim to be systematic or comprehensive; rather it goes straight to the main contested areas in the church today, the red-button issues in doctrine, spirituality, culture, ethics, and politics.
Fabricius's imaginative vision and lively conversational style moving freely between the interrogative and the polemical, the playful and the profound invite us all to the vertiginous experience of faith. The book's concise format and no-nonsense approach make it a perfect guide for inquiring Christians as well as committed disciples and an ideal discussion-starter for both church groups and college classes.
The author's passionate commitment to a self-critical faith is a provocative invitation to religion's cultured despisers to join him if they dare on the plank.

And a little more on Fabricius himself:
After spending most of the 70s wasting his youth (which he reckons is better than having done nothing with it), he was blasted into faith reading Karl Barth’s Commentary on Romans. This led him pretty directly into ministry, which Kim describes as “that wonderful vocation provided by the good Lord for displaced Christian intellectuals who are useless at proper work.”