To be honest I've misplaced my notes, hence a couple of days respite from Christ's Body in Corinth. But I think it is worth pausing for a while over this idea of 'life on the knife edge'. In every age there are Christians who choose to live there and so are to some degree estranged from the mainstream churches.
Fresh expressions and some house churches are examples. Some still see themselves as part of a traditional church. Others position themselves outside of any tradition. In the Bible we see phrases such as 'new wine, new wineskins; or the image of the seed dying to bring forth new life.
The bonds between members of established congregations can be very stable. Social capital theory calls this bonding capital. Much of this is not exactly factional but will appear to be a close-knit community, difficult to access from outside. Bridging capital happens where bonded communities begin to form relationships with other bonded communities. This is what we tend to think of as typical local ecumenism. I think life on the knife-edge happens where Christians choose to take a step further and make a commitment to reach out to the marginalised.
Complexity theory is the study of what happens at the interface between order and chaos. I will be exploring this further in a future post but I think it may help us understand the knife-edge to be at the interface between the ordered life of mainstream churches and the world of the marginalised.
So, John Wesley brought together the first Methodists at the interface between Tory Anglicanism and the new industrialised poor. These people were beyond the margins of the church and Wesley provided them the organisations they needed to engage with wider society. Wesley was so successful he expressed fears that the Methodists would become too middle class.
Note this was never intended to be some sort of developmental process, moving the industrial poor over the knife-edge (into societies, classes and bands) and on into the middle classes. Wesley saw his organisations as the main activity for his movement; they were meant as an end in themselves, not as stepping stones to affluence.
There is a tendency for such movements to gravitate to some absolute version of truth. As they do so they always begin to marginalise groups who in some way embody the antithesis of what they see as the demands of truth. Truth on the knife-edge between fragile alliances of people always comes across as some sort of compromise. The Kara Project in South Bank, near Middlesbrough, is based explicitly on unconditional love; however people live, whatever they have done, they are loved without judgement.
The demand that Christians be perfect would kill a project like this stone dead. For marginalised people, in all their diversity, to be included a path has to be found around the demands made by a chaotic array of lives and moralities. But note absolute truth is a world away from Wesley's understanding of Christian Perfection. That post and the one following are worth reading because they describe perfection not as an endpoint but as a process. Through sanctification we become more perfect but never perfect. The knack is to stay on the knife-edge because it is there that perfection happens.
For marginalised people life on the knife-edge can be seen as the route to affluence. But for many it is a congenial place to continue to be. The Dark Holy Ground experience for example led people to say that now they understood long term unemployment to be the best thing that had happened to them. They experienced no change to their material circumstances but a complete transformation of their lives.
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