Coercive decontextualized manipulation

David Fitch using unnecessarily big words - we are reacting against a coercive decontextualized manipulation of the gospel* - but otherwise making good sense in his new blog post: What the Missional Church is missing: Proclaiming the Gospel.

I like a lot of what David Fitch writes, though it puzzles me that he has such a strong focus on spending quite so much time in Starbucks - not on mission but on coffee.  However, as he notes in his third point: An understanding  of what it means to be with people, so as to listen long enough to create the opening whereby you are invited to proclaim the gospel as it most makes most direct sense within this person’s life. That's probably what Starbucks is all about....

Fitch's recent book, Prodigal Christianity, has had some mixed reactions - I haven't had a chance to read it yet (I'm in a P T Forsyth mode at the moment, thanks to Jason Goroncy), but I'll aim to get onto it at some point.  One Amazon reviewer wrote about it: Take a bit of David Bosch, combine him with Darrel Guder and Lesslie Newbigin, shake in Tim Keller, Scot McKnight, Alan Hirsch and bake on a broad Augustinian base, and you'll get Prodigal Christianity, an unique and filling book that Christians living in the 21st century should read.



*Or: there’s an epistemological shift here that goes way beyond the cognitive enlightenment modes of communication most Americans are addicted to.

New David Runcorn title

The Road to Growth Less Travelled: Spiritual Paths in a Missionary Church, by David Runcorn.

This is one of a wide-ranging series of booklets (all 27 pg long) from Grove Books. Part of what Runcorn is saying is that we need to be careful to challenge rather than mirror our culture, and that our very ‘irrelevance’ to the society at large may be one of our strengths.

He also explores why so many people are drifting away from churches, while still ostensibly remaining Christian. At one point he quotes Douglas John Hall: ‘the church of Christendom, so often growing in the wake of national, expansionist interests, missed [the sense of loss in the Christian life].’ ‘Christendom tried to be great, large, magnificent. It thought itself the object of God’s expansive grace. It forgot the meaning of its election to worldly responsibility. Today we are constrained by the Spirit to rediscover the possibilities of littleness.’

Paul Fromont has written four brief posts on the Prodigal Kiwi blog discussing some of the book’s points, starting here.

Finding a way home

I've snaffled the following snippet from the Prodigal Kiwi blog - hope they won't mind. (It was written back in August last year.) It comes from a talk (?) by Dave Tomlinson, and may in fact also appear in his recent book, Re-enchanting Christianity, which hadn't been published at the time the PK blog wrote their post (but has been now).

“Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.”
Lenny Bruce

“…People are no less spiritual today than they were in the past, but they are a lot less religious. A disconnect has occurred between religion and spirituality: people no longer see religion or church as the natural setting in which to explore or express their spiritual aspirations. So they are drifting away from churches in droves. However they are not doing so because they no longer believe in God, or because they have no spiritual hunger, but because in their experience church is neither offering a faith they can believe in, nor an existential spirituality that can excite or satisfy the deeper yearnings of the soul. Many long to reconnect with the sacred mystery of life, to discover their place in the cosmos, but they don’t see church or religion as a way of achieving this…I see no future in the twenty-first century for expressions of Christianity that are not Spirited. Our world longs for numinosity: for a sense of awe and mystery, for sacredness, spirituality and enchantment, for something ‘more’ than the purely rational and cerebral. If the church fails to engage with, and cater to, this longing, it has no real future…”

New take on the Prodigal Son?

Fr. Charles Curran was a moral theologian fired from his position at the Catholic University of America in 1986 for asserting a right of dissent from official church teaching on matters such as birth control.
Summoned to appear in Rome for questioning by Cardinal Ratzinger, he came out of the meeting knowing that he had failed to convince. He would be condemned as a Catholic theologian and fired from his faculty position: a public humiliation, a personal disaster, and also a rejection of theologians as a whole, who by and large agreed with Curran’s position.
The next day was Sunday. Bernard Häring, the influential moral theologian who taught in Rome and was Curran’s old professor and mentor, celebrated Mass in a chapel for Curran and his six university advisers. The Gospel happened to be the Prodigal Son. Häring’s homily went something like this: at this time, the church is the prodigal son. It is taking your treasure — your training, talent, reputation, contribution — and wasting it, feeding it to the pigs. The Spirit of Jesus calls you to be the father in this parable, not rejecting but welcoming back the prodigal. Do you forgive the church?
Häring went from person to person, grabbing them by the necktie or the sweater, and looked them in the eye with this question. The Mass could not continue until they wrestled with their anger and allowed the Spirit to move them to a different place.

From an article in the National Catholic Reporter online: Theologian Elizabeth Johnson: 'Drench anger with forgiveness'