Am thinking through the material I want to cover for our second Saturday celebration tomorrow evening. In January we looked at some aspects of Youth Culture by using clips from DVDs. Recap on January:-
"Young people don't come to Church because they are secular; rather they see themselves as spiritual and the Church as secular"
We thought about this by watching :-
Red Hot Chili Peppers - celebrating in community
The Matrix - experience over knowledge
Lord Of The Rings - Christian ideas in fiction, not reality
The Truman Show - freedom to make own choices, not safety
We also listened to:-
REM - loss of previous certainties about religion
Tori Amos - anger at being made to feel guilty by Christians
As a result there were lots of big questions
What are we going to do? Where do we go from here?
To make progress on this I intend to show a clip from Toy Story where Buzz and Woody and initially lost at the petrol station. Woody can "be saved", but not on his own, but by sticking with Buzz (to rescue them both) he becomes a "lost toy". Also from the dialogue between Woody and Buzz there is a good example of how two people can achieve vastly different views of reality from the same data.
In the two Brueggemann books mentioned in recent posts the key to achieving a new "consciousness" is for the community of God's people to lament their situation. Live footage of U2 singing Sunday bloody Sunday gives a much stronger sense of lament and protest than anything else within mainstream Christianity (at least that I could find), and puts many of our more liturgical forms of criticism to shame.
Some of the phrases used by Bono in the song (I use the version from Slane Castle in 2001) seem very Psalm-like (how long must we sing this song?) and others are reminiscent of Isaiah (wipe your tears away). Following on from The Prophetic Imagination this leads to the question "where about in history are we?". Some parts of our current situation seem very much like the last few kings prior to being conquered, and so some of the prophetic writings, with their call to renewed trust in God, seem very applicable.
I would also like to discuss some aspects of the GATHERING, what have we done in the last few months and what have we learnt?
I have recorded the things that we have been doing earlier in this blog, so I am not going to repeat them here, but it is interesting to consider some of the things we have learnt, especially in the light of re-reading Liquid Church by Pete Ward.
Some of the points he makes which sprang immediately to my attention are the following:-
1. Liquid Church will be centred on networks, rather than a solid congregation. We have seen something of this as people have been able to mix during times of worship, and have drifted into, for example, school groups. We have worshippied in different ways each evening, and so although we have always met in St. Martin on the Walls, we do not feel that we are Church because we meet in a certain place or at a certain time, but because we meet together to move in Christ together.
2. The network of relationships is core, and modern communication allows this. The main reason for the web site and the blog is to maintain the conversations about ideas, and allow dialogue about planning and reviewing worship. This never happens in my experience in solid forms of Church, rather people come expecting a certain thing, and are unhappy if it is not right.
3. We aim to worship in a de-centred way, that is the focus is on Christ and not on the leader or participants.
4. For all the possible criticisms of a liquid style of Church I would want to argue that we have worshipped, prayed and listened to the Word in a more varied number of ways than a regular attender at solid Church would experience in a much greater time scale.
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