Wherever two or three are gathered in my name . . .
- Suggested topics for upcoming classes. We decided to study The Good and Beautiful God by James Bryan Smith, one chapter a week, starting with Chapter 1 for next week. John will e-mail the congregation, and C. will order copies of the book for folks who don’t already have it.
- In light of Smith’s focus on “narratives” about God, and the effort to re-acquaint ourselves with the Jesus’ narratives and Jesus’ concept of God, we had some conversation about narratives and accounts of reality in general. Despite postmodern claims, most people need a unified narrative. John suggests that as science gives us more and more sophisticated accounts of the material reality around us, it becomes more and more challenging to craft a unified narrative that encompasses science, traditional religion, the Bible’s account of reality, etc. But the effort to do that produces a thinking faith that is ultimately deeply satisfying, even though we have to go through periods of doubt and work to arrive at it.
- We are also looking at The Great Emergence by Phyllis Tickle. The thesis of this book is that about every 500 years, Christianity goes through a period of turbulence and re-adjustment to the surrounding society, its prevailing communications technology, and finds a role for the Church to fill in Western culture. Surprise! We seem to be in one of those turbulent re-adjustment periods now. (Maybe the next evolution of the church is that we need to become ‘viral’ — able to connect with people in all kinds of ways, across all kinds of media.)
- From Tickle’s account of things, and in light of the conversation about narratives, we did some thinking out loud about our children and their faith, and how we are doing introducing our children to faith and faith to our children. We hope that encouraging critical thinking and seeking deep satisfaction rather than superficial contentment with concrete, black-and-white answers will have benefits in later religious life. C. tells us there’s research that shows that many young people have imbibed a “feel-good-about-yourself” religion that contains very little sense of obligation to the other, whether God or the neighbor; these young people may be swelling the ranks of churches where the belief system is centrally focused on personal salvation and satisfaction. Scott shared an influential article by Walter Brueggeman from The Christian Century, “Counterscript,” in which Brueggeman claims we are living in a time of a “therapeutic, technological, consumerist, militarist” script, from which it is the task of the church of Jesus Christ to disengage us, in favor of a script centered on the “elusive, irascible” God of the Bible.
- We talked about the problem of silence — we don’t always share our views on things; (shades of this morning’s Present Word class!). Heather says this is sometimes because it may be difficult to let people who may scorn religion in general, or Christianity in particular, know we’re “one of them” — want some sense that this person can be OK with that. Scott qualifies: at least, will stay in relationship or conversation. Linda added that we need to be more forthright about speaking up and publicizing an alternative Christian viewpoint on public issues, like a couple of people have done recently by writing letters to the local paper. Because if the public conversation features a completely one-sided view of what it means to be Christian, what Christians think and believe — doesn’t our failure to take a public stand permit that view to persist?
Gordon has a colleague who has volunteered to visit the class and share his first-hand knowledge of Haiti; we think we can add a presentation like that to the book studies, and in fact, might want to make that more of a community event, maybe with a lunch or dinner.
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Tags: Christianity, faith, James Bryan Smith, Phyllis Tickle, religion, spiritual practices, The Good and Beautiful God, The Great Emergence, thinking faith
