Deeply engaging our shared spirituality
How do we integrate our minds and hearts and spirituality holistically when we engage our faith?
It seems really easy in Christian circles to engage our heads in discussion, in exegesis of the Word, in analyzing and studying different concepts and terminology. In small groups, we can begin to explore issues of the heart and share of our personal lives. But that part of us that deeply connects with God (our spirituality?) so often seems to remain a private affair, divorced from the other head and heart stuff.
Margaret Silf http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780385504638) has this wonderful way of integrating head, heart and spiritual stuff (if one can even categorise these!). I can just imagine how she would incorporate into her discussion on a site like this, a reflective meditation that would lead one to a deeper encounter with others and with God. With apologies to Margaret, I could imagine her saying something like, “Hold your experience of the Emergent Africa site before God. What about this site has made you angry? What has made you excited? Hold the people on this site before God. Is there anything you feel you need to say? Are there words you need to fast from? Are there people on this site you feel you need to hold before God on a more regular basis? What is God saying to your heart through your encounter with Emergent Africa?”
What if all our discussion took place in the context of deeply seeking God in our postmodern, postcolonial, post-Christendom context together? What if we shared from our lives with each other, and out of that context began to grapple with ideas and concepts? What if at the heart of this site was on-line praying for each other, our country and our continent?
Using a Rob Bell approach, I’ll end this post as he ends his Nooma DVD’s: May this site be a place of deeply seeking God together. May this site be one of engaging each other in meaningful community. May this be a place where we share our lives together. May this be a place of healing, where people find hope and meaning, and a way to make sense of their faith in Jesus. May this be a place where God is glorified.
*I wonder if a deeply holistic spiritual context out of which discussions develop would not draw a more diverse crowd to this site.
**I wrote something like this in a comment on the Facebook group ‘The Emergent Church Conversation in South Africa’ in case it looks familiar!
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Yeah!
Thanks Cori, for this :)
I've been thinking about this lately in regards to the emerging conversation, and a large part of the church in general. There is too much discussion around head stuff that we're disconnected both from what the Holy Spirit may be saying to us, and therefore we don't know how to engage the culture in a relevant way.
We ought to be 'listening to what the Spirit says to the churches' but instead seem to be listening to what others are saying ABOUT the church.
www.ryanpeterwrites.com
"The Glory of God is man fully alive" - St Iraneaus
whole-wards
Cori
I hear 2 things:
1. You consecrate this site as potentially sacred, looking actively and expectantly for the work of the spirit in us.
2. We tend to be abstract, theoretical, and passive.
In my mind the blogosphere/internet provides part of a solution: It preserves conversation, sparks ideas and shares information. But it cannot create a full expression of community in or of itself.
For that, we need to be together, we need to devirtualise and get "into the flesh" ie incarnate. Other expressions are called for. My attempt (faltering as it may be) is to have another blog, Cape Conversation dedicated to the Cape Town area only and emphasising local meetings and activities.
Conversation is not only about words, especially typed words, but exchange - ideas, time and space, and ultimately, life. Shared Life. I'm thankful for theology, for ideas, books, debate, but more so for touch, eating together, mutual dreaming, imagining and creating, hosting, looking at people in the eye, deepening involvement.
I listen to the penguin: "The Glory of God is man fully alive".
Shared lives
I agree deeply with you, Nicpaton, that community is about shared lives. But that it can only happen in the face-to-face encounter is doubtful to me considering our 21st century, postmodern reality. I find it interesting that the emergent conversation is sometimes dubbed 'a Christian response to a postmodern reality' and that I nevertheless come across quite a bit of resistance in emergent circles to postmodern realities taken to the further extremes of its philosophies. An interesting articles on virtual relationships, virtual communities and the like can be found here: http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle.html. It is by Julian Dibbell who is seen in some circles as quite a significant postmodern thinker in the area of new media. New media seems to me key in my understanding of postmodernism, not merely as a medium, but as an end in itself.
Sherry Turkle is another academic in the field of new media who has some interesting things to say about how our interaction with technology, computers and the internet has moved beyond them being objects or things we use but are rather implicitly part of the very way we socialise, relate and form community. A link to her can be found here http://web.mit.edu/sturkle/www/.
This is not to say that face-to-face communities are replacable or need to be less than central to our existence as human beings and as followers of Christ. But it is to say that we need to question very closely our understanding of new media and its role in our society. We can insist that what happens on-line isn't 'real' or we can begin engaging people for whom an on-line identity and existence and community is a very, very real part of their lives. It is a very real part of my life and I am thrilled to also meet Jesus here.
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