churchasart

Manifesto of Hope

I haven't posted about this yet, but I am excited to have been included with 24 folks, all better at this than me, enlisted to describe the emergent conversation. The book, An Emergent Manifesto of Hope, was released April of this year, but I'm just now finding the time to blog about it.  My chapter, "The Art of Emergence: Being God's Handiwork" is a synthesis of the theories of missiology, creative systems, and anthropology.  I had a lot of fun with it.

I've you've had the chance to read it, I'd love to know what it did in you.  If you haven't you can click on the "Search inside" link on Amazon and search art, and start reading on Pg 60.  But You'll have to buy or barrow it to get the whole deal ;)

emergent cohort

Atlanta Friends

The Atlanta Emergent Cohort is meeting this Tuesday, October 30, 8-10pm at Carroll Street Cafe in Cabbage town. This month's conversation will be convened by your's truly and center around the metaphor of church as art. The following is an adapted article to prime the pump and to suggest some possible lines of discussion for the group. But as usual the discussion will be open and its outcome belongs to those who come for the fun...

We are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance to be our way of life.

                                                    from Paul’s correspondence with the Ephesians

God is a craftsman (excuse the gender). God makes. You and I are among the things that God fashions. Those recipients of the epistle to the church in Ephesus are told by Paul that we who have been made in Christ (you know, the new creation) are made for the purpose of making/working.  It is important to our maker how we make- good. Rule or principals that underline how artist make, are called aesthetics. And a cohesive narrative of such rules is called an aesthetic. At the core of aesthetics are reasons for making, and postures or ways of perceiving. Our posture of making is informed by God’s posture: mission. And this making is everything, it is our entire way of life, not just what the Ephesians were asked to do when they gathered or when they were ask to give a reason for their faith. The good work of being created in Jesus is our way of life, it is an art inspired by an aesthetic, God's mission. This month’s Emergent cohort discussion is about that art and that aesthetic, and the community of artists commissioned to good lives in the inspiration of the Spirit.

God has commissioned a work of art. This art-installation has been God’s dream from as early as the Trinity’s eternal dance. Long before the Spirit of God hovered like an artist in front of a canvas over the waters that would become our studio, the triune God wanted to make man in God’s (literally the creator in Genesis said “our” implying a conversation with the creator) image. This is our commission: to be God’s art exhibit, a trail of artifacts rendered by God’s people and made through God’s ongoing relationship with creation. This commission precedes Jesus, it is what Abram and Sari were called to do and what the prophets both did and called others back toward doing. And this is our aesthetic the stories of these communities found in scripture, tradition, and experience, that narrate our work. So we are commission to make and to be made, to act and invite God to act upon us.

The examples of God’s dreams reach to us from deepest in our history. One of God’s earliest masterpieces is ha adam, literally the dirt, into whom is breathed the Spirit of life. And in Adam’s first orientation to his surroundings, God commissions him to name creation’s creatures, to be the poet lariat of life’s beginnings. Shortly thereafter, Noah, too, was commissioned to build an artifact to save people. Ten generations after him, God calls Abraham and Sara to parent a nation of people who’s art-of-life was to be a reflection of God’s plans for all creation, to bless all nations. The prophets, like Jeremiah, and psalmists like David, both live out the realization of and lament the postponement of God’s dreams. And this drama continues with some artists demonstrating courage and faithfulness and others stuck in self-sabotaging habits of self-preservation that build hedges around their imagination.

Into this drama the Author became Actor.  First, second, and third person were interwoven without being confused.  The Word was made into flesh, completely creat-ed (material) and completely creat-or (divine). God was subjective (seeing equality with God not as something to grasp but being made into the form of a servant) and objective (All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me, therefore go…). It was Jesus, the one-of-a-kind perfecter of the art of living in God’s creation, who insisted that God’s art installation was open, in session, “at hand.” He fashioned withered hands into whole ones, he made party wine out of holy water, and he re-animated lifeless cadavers into dinner guests. It was Jesus who called a community of disciples to tell this story and to do even greater works of this art than he. And these disciples, in receiving the breath of the Holy Spirit, had the courage to witness to God’s plans for creation. By initiating a new art-of-life they began sharing meals, reflecting on precedents set by apostolic letters and sacred Hebrew texts, and setting new precedents making all sorts of music, adopting the exposed, and befriending the poor and widows. This is the narrative that we are a part of. This is the art we have been commissioned to make. We are apprentices who study these rhythms of life and practice them as lives of worship preparing creation for future generations. We are, like John the Baptist, and in the words of the poet Isaiah, preparing the way of the Lord.  And our practices tell an ancient story that is yet to be complete, “proclaiming the Lord’s death until he comes.”

…..

But here’s the fix we’re in today: in late modernity most churches in the Western world are stuck in creative block. These commitments betray the converting spirit of the gospel by placing equal signs between God’s work and our certitude regarding liberalism verses conservatism, contemporary verses traditional, or theology verses aesthetics. This keeps us from rendering authentic artwork and performances that witness to the kingdom of God. What if the church recovered disciplines of creativity, imagination, and ingenuity as practices unto faith? What if we stepped out of our cultural captivity to “either-or” thinking into organic habits of embodying biblical texts and reforming the tradition we have been handed? What if the church saw herself as both God’s artwork and God’s commissioned artists?

Not only that, what if the work of God of bringing righteousness like an ever flowing stream, and bringing the lion to lay with the lamb were acts that included the art of other people, other tribes, other cultures; be they socio-economically, politically, nationally, or religiously different from ours? Are these “others,” then, partners in the kingdom of God, other artists participating in God’s beautiful unfolding creation?

At the core, I believe the church does matter–but for entirely different reasons than most are fighting to keep the church safe or to make it grow. What if the church mattered as a community committed to this art: to joining God’s dreams, making God’s dreams, becoming patron’s of those making God’s dreams, and learning from others making these dreams? What would we do differently if the mission of God were our aesthetic, as people commissioned to make God’s beauty in the world?

Now here is what I’m hoping the cohort can help flesh out. 

1.    Push back at any and all of this! Let’s have some fun fleshing this out.
2.    What are the reasons we are not creating more new possibilities to participate in God’s dreams?  Or to put it another way, How does writer’s block manifest itself in the church and how have you seen it addressed?
3.    What are some entry-points to this idea of church as art?  Where does it break down for you or folks you serve with?
4.    What art are you making and seeing made around you and how do you see it participating in God’s dreams?

saying goodbye

After 12 months as designated pastor at Church of St. Andrew,  our shared season has ended. I learned some remarkable things from the beautiful folks there, and made friendships that I hope will continue for years to come.

I have learned the value of focusing on a few understandable good things so that as many folks as possible might join the conversation and participate fully.  I've learned how much space and the ordering of space can create new possibilities.  I've learned that old folks can learn new things, a great 80- year-old friend at church smiled with radiance after a service in which we made space for meditation.  I learned that, even in the suburbs, partnership with neighbors matters deeply!  I learned that everywhere people are thirsty for authentic communities to share faith practices with and a safe place to doubt and be vulnerable.

I've also learned more about my limits.  I am more clearly seeing the strengths I have for orbiting deeply layered institutions and the chaos I bring to my life and others by colluding to those institutions. I am seeing that having a burning passion within me to share the good news with anyone is not the same as being universally qualified to teach the good news with anyone.  Another limit I've learned is that I will always be drawn more deeply to the verbal behavior of being church (ambassadors of reconciliation, harbingers of the kingdom of God, salt, light) than to the proper noun of being declared a church (building, organization, certain cultural authority).  This gives both Kelley and me pause when i consider what is next...

Oh, and I have missed writing music.

I'm sure I'll learn more and reinterpret the above learnings more and more as time passes.  If your reading this as a friend, my deepest need right now is to take time to grieve.  So I welcome the encouragement and prayers that I get off my arse and do that now while things are fresh.

A  week after the session, and presbytery and I agreed that we were to conclude the contract as designated pastor I was at the former community  house where Kelley, Eve, and I had lives for 3 years.  We looked out at a more-than-60 year-old Water Oak that had just been pruned.  Branches that were no longer nourishing the trunk and no longer being properly nourished by the tree had been carefully removed for the sake of the tree’s health and their home’s safety.  This might be the clearest way to describe what has happened recently with and for St.Andrew’s. 

But with any good metaphor no one thing equals the other. The tree is not the church alone, and the cut branch is not just the change in personnel.  No, the tree is also my family and me,  the Presbytery, and the city of Sandy Springs –even God’s entire World. And there are many branches being addressed in this process. In many ways our family, nourished for quite some time by the members and leadership of COSA, has felt further grafted into our neighborhood and the Presbytery, nourished by them in this process.  And in many ways the session and I, with the help of Presbytery, have seen with clarity where nourishment was taking place and where breaches in trust had caused certain branches not to get sufficient light or nutrition.

So the habits of grafting, while they do include cutting, are cultivating, generative practices.  I am feeling all sorts of nutrients as our family settles into this new reality.  My imagination is growing because of this all.  New opportunities to create are emerging.  New employment opportunities long range and short range, are presenting themselves.  And great chances to thrive here in Capital View are showing up.  So I hope that the folks at St.Andrews will also be met with the grace of imagination and possibility as they look into the their horizon.