Joining God in the Great Unraveling

Where We Are & What I've Learned

Alan J. Roxburgh

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781725288508, 9781725288515
• eBook ISBN: 9781725288522
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

The awareness that the churches shaped out of the European Reformations are in an advanced process of unraveling is becoming increasingly sensed by many. This book proposes a way of addressing this unraveling based on the experiences and knowledge of people who have always had to struggle with the unraveling of their own communities and worlds. It takes us outside the circular conversations of the Euro-tribal churches into dialogue with people who have been marginalized to see how they have learned to reenter their formative stories to discover ways of remaking themselves in the unraveling.The book then turns these discoveries into ways the churches can engage their own massive unraveling.

chapter seven

Joining God

Three Engagements in Joining
the Spirit’s Ferment

Introduction

What does it mean for congregations to know where God is at work in their neighborhoods and communities? This is not a question about tactics for evangelism or programs for neighborhood engagements. It is about how congregations might discover a way of knowing that is different from programs and strategies. Working with this question among congregations has brought to the fore important implications for being God’s people in the unraveling. Judicatory leaders and pastors, for example, are in the same space of disorientation and confusion as members of their congregations. In the final part of a ten-day intensive on missional leadership, a group of pastors worked together developing specific practices for how their congregations could concretely discover how to join with God in their neighborhoods. The learning among these leaders as they sought to introduce these practices among their people is the same. The members of congregation embrace practices such as Dwelling in the Word and listening to one another’s stories. But when it comes to being with and listening with neighbors—for most, this is a bridge too far. The expectations of church members are that these kinds of engagements in the community, which take time and effort, need to have some measurable return on investment, such as an increase in membership. Outside this frame there is little sense that in being with relationships we discern the kingdom Jesus brings. In most cases there is a central conviction that, as church, we already know (because this has been taught in sermons and Bible studies) what the kingdom of God is and what Jesus is doing in the world. The task is not discerning the movements of God but in getting people in the community to join the church so that they, too, will get this knowledge.

This is part of the conversion journey for many Euro-tribal churches. How might they discover that the Spirit is already ahead of them in their communities forming the kingdom of God? How will they come to know that the gospel story Jesus called us to embody is not about themselves and their survival? Nor is it about being good, meeting needs, or helping people. In the unraveling, congregations are called to discern what the Spirit is fermenting ahead of them in their communities in order to join with Jesus in remaking the world.63 But such an understanding of being God’s people, this way of knowing what the Spirit is doing in the midst of the unraveling, doesn’t make sense to anxiety-filled congregations. Their default is always to technocratic methods. We received a denominational form asking for a report on the joining God process. In one context where we worked with a cluster of congregations around how to do this joining with God, the denomination sent us a questionnaire to complete. It was loaded with questions about outcomes, asking us to provide data around numbers reached and results that would support ROI.

It is in this context that Simpson’s insights are incredibly helpful. As a university teacher embedded in the practices of a highly skilled technocratic, modern society, when confronted by her Peterborough experience (something akin to a Damascus road moment) she chose to step outside a world that, by virtue of her training and degrees, gave her a position of power. She chose a way of refusal so that she could embrace the way of her elders. It is unlikely most people reading this book can step outside their normal roles for two years or, like Saul, for three years separate himself from his culture, in order to reenter God’s great story in the light of meeting Jesus. These are rare situations, roads most of us cannot take. But little will change while the ordained remain inside the clergy industry functioning as technocratic elites. We are at a point in the unraveling where the ordained have to risk embracing work rhythms that make them independent of the full-time salary that so shapes their fears and decisions. This might seem like a radical, absurd proposal. But if the unraveling is true, then this letting go (as Simpson did) of such identity and security is an essential step in discerning the Spirit and joining the God who is already ahead of us making all things new.

If you were born into the cohorts after the Boomers then we already know, across most areas of work today, there are no longer those full-time jobs that provide one with security or predictability. What can the Euro-tribal churches learn from these generations and people, like Simpson and Saul/Paul, about this road? How might they guide us in alternative ways of participating with what God is doing in this great unraveling? What follows are three proposals critically important to this journey. These elements are: (1) embracing another language house, (2) assuming a new posture, and (3) becoming like novices.

One: Embracing Another Language House64

What do we mean by this term language house? The house in which you live has been built in a certain way. Not just in its external frame but in the composition of its rooms in terms of the kinds of space and usage allocated to each. The house is situated in relation to its outdoor space in terms of roads, front gardens, backyards, and the placing of automobiles. All of these elements of the house or condo/apartment in which we live are freighted with cultural meanings that shape, and are shaped by, how we read our worlds. In this sense, our house, as an example, is a language world. We usually don’t see this because the construction and position of the places we live are taken for granted, they are simply the assumed way the world works. But as we travel to another culture and live in it long enough we discover that others have very different ways of ordering their rooms or situating their homes in relationship to the external environment. It is then that we see there are different language worlds at play shaping how we see ourselves in the world.

Over time, these language worlds can shift and morph. They don’t remain static. The forms of houses and apartments we live in today have changed considerably, both inside and in relationship to their external environments, over the past half century. The ways we build and use our homes give us clues about how we see our world and understand our relationships in a community. A common example of this is the shifting language worlds around the central locations of living in our homes. We have moved from housing designed around front porch to back deck living. Our apartment or condo spaces have become increasingly small, reflecting not only increasing levels of economic disparity but also a sense that we want minimalist commitments to space because the important elements of our lives are lived elsewhere. All of these structural and architectural changes are also about the language houses we inhabit and, usually, take for granted. None of the elements of our home (or church building) construction are by chance. We choose the place (many of us) we live in because its structural elements make us feel at “home” in the world or match our sense of social status and the kind of people we want to be among. The shape of rooms, their function, the language we use to describe room usage, and the furniture we put in them are how we structure and read our world.

These structures and forms give us our language. The language we use shapes how we read and respond to our world. In this sense we become aware that the language we dwell in, with its symbols and metaphors is, more often than not, given to us and not chosen by us. In terms of language, we are more like a fish swimming in water. Language is like the air we breathe more than something we choose. It is inside us from our birth and is, therefore, the “house” through which we see and interpret our world, neighborhoods, roles, identity, and the people with whom we connect.65 We can, as we’ll see later, be using language to describe our experiences in ways that actually no longer represent what we have come to believe. The leader of our worship life recently used the illustration of his mother, who said she read the creed each Sunday at the Eucharist but no longer believed in parts of it. Her perceptions of what was happening in the world and her understanding of certain language in the creed changed over time, but the language world within her from long practice on Sunday mornings kept directing her back to a previous set of perceptions and the actions.

I am a perfect example of the reality of this language world. As a young boy, the language world I lived in communicated to me that I was no good and would never amount to much of anything. This language world was given to me at school and at home in the words people used about me. The language world I grew up in was that of the post-war northern England of the ’50s and early ’60s. Life was traumatic and hard for working-class people in places like Liverpool. It wasn’t hard for me to look back on that time and place the experiences of those days in their context, a framework of hardship, of PTSD for many men and women who, after that war, didn’t have the resources to deal with trouble-making kids like me. My mother’s criticisms and complaints about what a terrible kid I was would, later on, be given perspective. Eventually, I could explain why that language world of growing up was so destructive. Over time God gave me new language to make sense of what happened so that I could forgive my parents and understand my teachers. It all came into focus as I grew into adulthood. When I got marriage, my wife, Jane, came from a radically different world. Her parents where the most generous, encouraging, amazing people I’d ever met. Initially, I could make no sense of this family—it was so far outside the language house in which I had been raised. Her mom was forever embracing others and making people (most of the time—there were a few glaring slips) feel blessed. Jane has all those characteristics. She sees the best in others. But in our marriage, it took a very long time (that old language world is still present, appearing in the most unexpected moments to trip again all those old insecurities) for me to believe that some of her statements weren’t those old “you’re no good” criticisms that still lie in my body and brain. That other language world keeps running just out of sight, waiting to trigger the defense mechanisms of growing up.

Leanne Simpson’s Peterborough experience woke her to how her language house as a First Nations person had been erased to be replaced by the dominant language house of the modern West. This led her to a series of actions that changed the way she was in the world (changed her language house). In a similar manner, the rabbi Saul was encountered by a counter-narrative that required him to fundamentally reimagine the language house that had become his world. But becoming aware of how a language house can displace the one we think we live in is a hard task. That was made clear to me recently while working with a group of Christians who were engaging together with our Joining God journey. The group had huge energy because their worlds were being changed as they became willing to have their lives disrupted as they found ways of being with neighbors rather than just looking for ways to help and meet needs. People were telling amazing stories of conversations with people in grocery lines, along the sidewalk near their homes, and in laundromats on the high street. Toward the end of the morning I asked them to take some time with one another and share some of the themes they’d heard emerging from each other’s experiences and stories. They fed back to me themes of discovering the power of listening, of how...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Missional as Joining God (in the Neighborhood)
• The Spirit’s Ferment
• Congregations and the Tearing of the Social Fabric
• Responding to the Fragility of Belonging
• Gospel Life in the Unraveling
• Protest from the Edges
• Joining God
• Taking Steps
• Finding “Elders” & Making the Road as We Walk
• The Missional Movement
• Conclusion
• Bibliography