Exploring Ecumenism

Unity as a Rhetoric of Control?

Today I intend to change direction and return to the theme of unity and diversity.  I will do this by way of a short book with an interesting theme that links unity and diversity to justice.  The book is Christ's Body in Corinth:The Politics of a Metaphor by Yung Suk Kim.  It examines the metaphor of the Body of Christ in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians.

Over the next few posts I will examine what Kim is saying and how it applies to ecumenism in England today.

Before I do that I will review the three dimensions of ecumenism and identify where the divisions are. 

1. The first dimension is divisions between churches.  In Britain and Europe a great deal of progress has been made towards reconciliation between the mainstream churches. 
2. However, when we look at reception of the results of formal talks in the churches, things cannot be said to be quite so successful.  There is a definite sense of antagonism between local Christians and national church leaders.  Formal talks locally are seen as irrelevant and petty whilst church leaders do not take the experiences of local churches seriously or are seen as patronising when they do.  Frustration is manifested at the local level by the growth of fresh expressions and a plethora of small non-alligned churches.  Many of these see themselves as ecumenical, meaning they ignore denominational differences.
3. The introspection on the part of the churches leads to a perception that they do not care about people, about the marginalised.

From the perspective of oikoumene, ecumenism seems narrow and fixated upon relationships between church leaders, and the activities acceptable to them.

Kim argues (page 2) that churches tend to make claims of Christ as a 'boundary marker' and he asks the following questions (page 3):

Who gets to speak about unity?  Is unity an essential goal?  Or is it an ideologically disguised political rhetoric of control?  Did Paul really emphasise unity as we conceive of it today? 

These questions cut to the core of the assumptions made by ecumenists and perhaps reveal something of the tensions between local and national ecumenists.  Perhaps also it reveals something of the assumptions they have in common.  Kim writes (page 3):

... from the perspective of the powerless or the marginalised, unity is often not the solution to their predicaments, because it too often serves a rhetoric of power that sacrifices diversity.

I would argue this happens where the churches have stopped receiving from the poor and marginalised, where the churches have been too concerned with ordering their relationships with each other to the negligence of their relationship with the rest of the world.

Neighbourhood Church 5: Power

The problem is that presence, prayer, practice and proclamation are not always enough.  If churches genuinely care for their communities there are times when they must confront the principalities and powers.

I have already described the participative method Citizens' Organising and in the United States, churches have acted together to change policies that have a negative impact on their neighbourhoods (see Linthicum's Building a People of Power).  In Britain Citizens' Organising has been tried and has not been found to be very successful.  Many of its insights are helpful but a combination of British culture and political arrangements accounts for this.

I still maintain that churches need to take Power seriously.  I have suggested that in their relationships with the world outside of the churches, churches together need to engage in transformational reception.  It is not enough to provide services to our communities, however empowering they may be.  A further step needs to be taken to change things for the better.

So, here are a few points for local churches who wish to exercise power together:

1. Churches need to think very carefully about power and how they use it.  It is easy to use power for conquest.  This is not the example of Jesus.  It is easy to use power to impose solutions on unwilling people.  This is not about Christian hegemony.  It is about the churches leading and organising to bring about change for mutual benefit.
2. Churches choosing to do this need to understand the need for consent.  They do not have the material resources to challenge government policy and so their power derives from organised people.  This means there needs to be an active building of consensus through conversations, the use of force will simply not work.
3. Whilst it is possible to get away with isolated working for the first four Ps, this type of mutual power is only possible where churches are able to work together.  This should be the focus of local conversations.  National leadership can encourage these approaches but have a minimal contribution to make.
4. It is local issues that need to be the initial focus.  As the recession bites and other intractable problems kick in, it is the local focus that will result in some successes.
5. As churches develop this focus, it is possible they might also have an impact at the national level.  But this has implications for how churches work, particularly in terms of leadership. 

The ecumenical vision has to turn outwards if it is to survive.  The luxury of ongoing debates about the minutiae of faith and order are no longer seen as relevant locally.  But the problem remains, identifying what is relevant locally and how churches might effectively work together.  I will in future suggest new approaches and where possible quote examples where new initiatives seem to be working.

Neighbourhood Church 4: Proclamation

Linthicum's fourth and (sort of) final activity for the local church is Proclamation.  This is, of course, a highly contested area.  The reason is that some Christians have made this part of the Christian faith their own.  I want to state firmly it is only a part of the Christian faith and should not be left as the sole preserve of evangelicals.

Many evangelicals would agree so far.  It is a responsibility for the whole church alongside the much wider activity of mission.  The distinction is that mission relates to sanctification whilst proclamation relates to justification.

I have written a lot about sanctification in this blog and little about justification.  This is not because I think justification is unimportant but that sanctification is less well known and has important implications for ecumenism.

Justification is the experience of the individual who comes to know the power of Jesus and that they are saved.  It is the purpose of proclamation to tell the story and introduce the non-believer to Christ.  This is done in a variety of ways and all can contribute to it.  There are a few points I would wish to make though.

1. Like everything else proclamation should be thought of in terms of a conversation.  The word itself implies a one way transaction from those who know the truth to those who don't.  The reality is that a real grasp of the faith comes out of relationships which are two way.  To discuss the faith should deepen faith for Christians as well as those who do not believe.
2. The idea of Missio Dei is important here.  God is already out there in our communities.  The act of conversation uncovers where God is already at work and so the Christian will learn as well as those who work with them.
3. It is important to remember the commitment is to a community long term irrespective of their response to the faith.  The idea that Christians are saved and others are not is presumptive and offensive.  Christians are called by God to proclaim the faith.  They are not called to judge whether others are saved - their goal is salvation of the whole community not of particular individuals within it.  If lines must be drawn it is to include people, not to exclude them.
4. By making evangelism a specialism, most church people have been de-skilled in this area.  Instead of every member being a spiritual director for others, as Wesley intended, Christians tend to be de-skilled and lack confidence to simply to tell the story.
5. And of course it is essential to tell the story in a way that makes sense to 21st century people.  This is not to water it down but to confront people with the implications of their lifestyles and the call of God to each individual.

If we take these four activities - presence, prayer, practice and proclamation together, they offer many opportunities for local churches to collaborate and many do.  In my view these opportunities could be increased by developing new ways of collaboration and I may look at some possibilities in the future.  However, whilst mission will undoubtedly be enhanced by collaboration, it has to be admitted that collaboration is not essential.  All of these things can happen in a church working on its own and with some success.

However, Linthicum argues there is a fifth activity.  The four usual activities are not on their own sufficient.  There are times when it is essential to bring something else into play.  And this time ecumenical collaboration is essential.

Neighbourhood Church 3: Practice (or Praxis)

Yesterday, I presented a rather idealistic view of the prayer life of churches together.  This may be as it should be but in practice ecumenism can be a treadmill, the constant repeating of annual ecumenical events.  From the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, through the Lent Walk, Pentecost Sunday and then carols outside the supermarket.

It seems almost as if prayer together is too much trouble and so our Practice becomes drudgery, rather than a response we take from reflection together on the reality presented by our place.

Linthicum uses the word 'practice' but I think if we are prepared to pray together, then we will find the routine of ecumenism will be transformed into Praxis, integrated action and reflection.

There are many ways churches together might choose to respond, some I've already mentioned:

• Providing unstructured meeting places
• Offering hospitality to local people and those who from time to time are in need of real support
• Providing sanctuary from the despair of modern life, a place where people can experience something of God's call
• Through community development, offering people some sense of control over what can be random or chaotic lives

Churches together can offer some or all of these or perhaps other things entirely.  The area sets the agenda.  The churches respond out of what they have in terms of people, property and finance.

Many churches do this type of thing on their own; perhaps ignoring or duplicating the work of other churches in their area.  This is a luxury we can no longer afford.  Divided churches, perhaps acting on rivalries from many decades ago are no longer a luxury we can afford.  The problems that will face the churches through climate change, peak oil, immigration, the pressures of multicultural society and of course the credit crunch require careful discernment and co-ordination of effort.  We owe our communities that much at least.

I understand that Daniel Berrigan, the American Jesuit and Peace Activist, was involved in the production of the film – “The Mission”, starring Jeremy Irons and Robert De Niro; “Well, I've been in several filmsincluding documentaries, but the big blockbuster, I was hired as advisor to the actors, I was trying to make Jesuits out of them.”

 

They were filming in Columbia and one day Berrigan took them into the slums of a town called Cartegena.  There he met a priest who told him ‘I wonder if we folks here are really Catholics’.  Berrigan asked the priest what he meant, the priest replied ‘We seem too little interested in people’.

Neighbourhood Church 2: Prayer

Prayer naturally flows from Presence, as a response to commitment to a place.  Prayer is of course an impossible conversation; conversation that brings about change. 

First, Prayer is about paying attention to the neighbourhood.  People will naturally do this alone but it is also important to share in this type of prayer because we will all see different things.  Ecumenical prayer might also bring insights from a range of traditions.

Second, the change we can most readily accept is in ourselves.  As we see more, we will change in response to what we see.  As we ponder the insights each person brings to prayer, we grow together.  In this sense we are spiritual guides for each other.

Third, we will in time see changes in the neighbourhood.  An active group committed to the welfare of the neighbourhood can hardly fail to make a difference.  Particularly if that group of people has taken the trouble to observe the neighbourhood and know it well.

Fourth, the great mystery is the changes we see in God.  As our illusions about the place we inhabit are changed, so we see God in clearer light.  We see that God is in conversation with us through the neighbourhood.  As co-creators, we and God will change.

Finally, what is the purpose of prayer?  This is prayer not for our own welfare but for the welfare of all the people with whom we share this place.

Neighbourhood Church 1: Presence

This short series about neighbourhood church will look in more depth at the role of churches in their neighbouthoods.  This builds upon several strands, (1) conversations as the basic ecumenical activity; (2) the development of an understanding of transformational reception as a basic characteristic of local ecumenism; and (3) the fourth chapter of Linthicum's Building a People of Power.

The latter proposes a basic four plus one approach to active church in a neighbourhood.  I will not refer to Linthicum very much as my purpose is to explore the role of churches together in exercising reception from the place they find their mission to be in.

The point is that churches are often the community organisations with the longest standing commitment to their neighbourhoods.  Churches can be present for decades or even centuries.  This Presence is important where the people who use church buildings see their calling not to their faith but the people they live amongst.  This can be expressed in a variety of ways:

1. I have already touched on an important aspect of Presence a few days ago when I posted about unstructured meeting places.
2. The ability to enter into conversations with ease and without embarrassment, grows naturally out of traditional ecumenical conversations.  The goal of any conversation is not to convert but to find a new place together, which neither side has inhabited before.  A conversation with someone who does not believe may help the believer see the weaknesses in their own faith, to understand and know God more intimately.  Hopefully this will be a discovery for all those who take part.  The Methodist publication Time to Talk of God seeks to help church members enter into conversations short of evangelism.  But even good evangelism is in essence conversation rather than proselytising.  I'll explore this in more detail in a few posts time.
3. Being a place of quiet, of inspiration of sanctuary.  Many neighbourhoods lack somewhere people can go for inspiration.  Churches are often full of art that no longer speaks to modern people or look like community centres and offer nothing beyond another meeting space.  The design of our meeting spaces needs to be done sensitively, as a response to the neighbourhood and not a criticism of it.  Father Jamieson's book Finding Sanctuary shows how many people are seeking sanctuary and raises the question in my mind, why are churches so bad at providing it?

Local people are seeking signs from our churches of a commitment to them and their lives.  Churches should never be havens for the chosen few but open to and committed to the places they find themselves in.  Churches alone cannot provide all that is needed; to fully address the complexities of a neighbourhood requires commitment from many traditions.

Why Churches must Engage with their Neighbourhoods

My posts over the last few days add up to an analysis of what I see as fundamentally wrong with community development in England.  To summarise:

1. There is a tendency for community projects to be dominated by unaccountable people, community organisations in general have problems with accountability;
2. The roles of volunteers and activists are confused, so that workers in communities tend to look on local activists as volunteers for their organisations' agendas;
3. At the same time the role of development work and activist are also confused, which means that activism is sometimes presented as development work;
4. These confusions are bolstered by the use of large-scale funding to divide communities and erode social capital;
5. this leads to even the basic needs for social capital such as unstructured meeting spaces to be overlooked.

Why should churches take an interest in community development or organising?  It is still the case that churches are the organisations with long-term commitment to our neighbourhoods.  They often have premises that can be made available as meeting spaces and they can also meet the spiritual needs of local people.

From an ecumenical perspective development work or organising is an opportunity for churches together to engage with the issues that effect the people around them.  It is an arena for effective and accessible mission for any church member.

A Methodist Church publication a few years ago Time to Talk of God encouraged church members to learn how to enter into conversations about God.  But almost any conversation can open new horizons for those who take part.  This is a practical way for churches to participate in the action of God in the world, to break away from the internal dialogues and engage with new ideas in the world outside the church.

Over the next few days I will pick up some themes from Linthicum's book Building a People of Power; these themes address the basic things churches must do together in their neighbourhoods.  They all open up the possibility of conversations that will broaden and deepen the churches' mission and their ecumenical commitment.

Two Types of Forum

The development of social capital in our neighbourhoods may seem to be a daunting undertaking.  I will in future posts look at why churches together should be addressing this issue and how they might go about it.  Today, I want to identify one last problem in our neighbourhoods and how many churches are already addressing it.

The basic need in any neighbourhood is for social spaces.  Places where people can meet informally.  Meeting rooms are often in short supply too but here I mean unstructured spaces.  These are of two types. 

One is often called the Forum.  Here local people will meet perhaps only a few times a year to debate matters of common concern.  My local Forum has been meeting 4 times a year for eleven years or so and rarely has attendance fallen below 60 people.  Usually these meetings have an agenda and some sort of structured process, more or less participative.  The meetings also involve a meal which is an opportunity for people to mix who might have few opportunities to do so otherwise. 

The word Forum goes back to the Roman Empire.  The Forum was a public gathering place.  The Forum was where news would be posted, it was a marketplace, the location of the courts and the baths.  It was the natural place to gather to share news and plan activities.  My local Forum does this only four times a year, surely a Forum would be more accurately be a place that is open every day?

Indeed it would.  And this is what so many neighbourhoods lack, a natural gathering place where people can meet and share news.  It is a place with perhaps tea and coffee (but not dependent on peoples' purchases to keep going), where information can be shared perhaps through notice boards or stalls, maybe some meeting rooms attached and also the availability of toilets.  Not so different from the Roman Forum.  Perhaps this is the vision behind community centres except that many do not offer this type of unstructured space.

When we look at many neighbourhoods today there are no such meeting places.  New housing estates often have no facilities whatsoever, where such a space might be opened up.  Ideally they need to situated at a local centre or on a main thoroughfare into the centre. 

Many churches occupy this type of place and some already offer a meeting point, at least for part of the week.  There are of course many issues.  The temptation to biase information sharing in certain directions may be a problem for some.  In a muilti-cultural area it might be difficult to encourage all to share in a space where there will be suspicions of an agenda for proselytising.  And yet, would it be right for churches to open such centres with no spiritual dimension?  I shall return to this question in a later post.

It is easy to identify problems.  The point is that organising depends on social capital and a meeting point or Forum is an essential first step.  Churches Together in a neighbourhood should be able to meet this need by identifying the most appropriate available premises and then resourcing it with time and finance.  They might do this in partnership with others and the premises might not be church premises.  The point they must agree about is why they are doing it. 

How Grants Erode Social Capital

About a month ago I posted an account of the early closure of the New Deal programme in my local area.  This post described some of the problems associated with this type of grant making and today I want to explore some of the problems in more detail.

Simply throwing money at disadvantaged communities is not necessarily the panacea governments expect.  The need to be seen to be doing something overshadows the need to do something worthwhile.  Overall, if you throw £52 million at a neighbourhood, it would be an exercise in monumental incompetence if it were all wasted.  Of course it hasn't been wasted, many sectors of the neghbourhood have benefited from competently run projects.

What the money has been unable to do is to support the sense of a neighbourhood pulling together; grant aid tends to be divisive.  Where there is money there will always be struggles for unilateral control.  Most of the conflict within communities are over control of resources. 

Most community leaders in Britain tend to be leaders of sections of neighbourhoods.  Very few aspire to be accountable leaders across the neighbourhood as a whole.  Or if they do have these aspirations, they lack the skills to achieve it.

Time and again I have seen collusion between unaccountable community leaders and council officers to bring large grants into an area to fund projects with no local mandate and often duplicating work that is already going on in the same neighbourhood.  Most of the time this is quite innocent, no rules are broken and everyone thinks they are acting in the 'interests of the community'. 

The damage is done to what is sometimes called social capital.  When attention is paid solely to funds and not to relationships, then social capital is eroded.  Large scale funding tends to support the exercise of large scale unilateral power.  The building of relationships, will tend to lead to the exercise of accountable power on a shared mutual or reciprocal basis.  This is when funding can be most effective on a community scale.

Social capital is divided into two main types, bonding and bridging (see chapter 3 of Journeying Out by Ann Morisy).  Bonding social capital is within groups and bridging between groups.  So, multi-cultural communities will often show strong bonding social capital and weaker bridging social capital.  Large scale unilateral unaccountable grant-making will drive wedges between groups in a neighbourhood as they compete for funds but can also erode bonding social capital as communities compete once funds are perceived as under the control of one unaccountable faction.

Organised neighbourhoods can be a focus for investment into neighbourhoods beyond the capacity of government funding.  They do this by building relationships with those who are in a position to effect real change.  Sadly, many neighbourhoods are so poorly organised they are unable to visualise what the possibilities might be.  There is a spiritual dimension to this but the churches seem to share the lack of motivation to explore what might be possible.  In my next post, I will describe one simple thing some churches are doing which can help with the growth of social capital.

Why Activism is not the same as Development Work

One of the frustrations I have found in recent years is the inability of some people who should know better to distinguish between community development work and local activism.

The activist is a campaigner who will work with others for improvements to their neighbourhood. 

The role and skill set of the development worker are quite different.  I have seen successful activists appointed to a community development role make a poor showing - indeed it is a mistake I made in my early days as a community development worker.  The activist who enters another neighbourhood as a community development worker and behaves as an activist is grotesque.  What right has anyone to enter other people's neighbourhoods and continue their own agenda on the behalf of complete strangers?  But even in their own neighbourhood this role confusion is chaotic.

The development worker's role is to help others to improve their performance as activists.  This means that development work requires a degree of objective distance.  The activist is focused on the success of their campaign.  The development worker is focused on the effectiveness of the activist.

The activist in community development worker's clothes takes over the role of local activists and makes it their personal campaign.  Such activists invariably over-identify with their adopted community organisation and take on the role of immortal.

This behaviour is far too common in British communities.  Why does it happen?  As community development emerged in the 1970s, it did so with great ideals.  Development workers paid lip service to empowerment of communities and did so by down-grading their own professionalism.  In consequence there has never been any career structure for development workers.  The skilled workers eventually move to other roles; they do not stay in development work. 

This means there are few role models and very little mentoring.  It feels like development work starts all over again every 5 years or so.  The overall lack of career development; of a corpus of sound development work meant that community development was an easy target for council cuts.  Today many organisations put workers in the community but few understand the basics, nothing is learned and passed on.  Our communities are littered with the remnants of projects finished before their time and increasingly frustrated activists starved of the stimulation development workers should bring with them.

The churches?  Much the same as everyone else.  Lay work is devalued and has no career structure.  Similar roles to community development such as mission or evangelism workers are similarly devalued.  Academics and pastoral workers are afforded more value.  It is long past the time for change.  I suspect for Britain it is too late and neighbourhood work is dead in the water.