What is in Kelvin's Head?

Cathedral as Emergent Community

24/10/2012

Cathedrals are doing quite well.

Now, as with all generalisations and stereotypes, this is both sometimes true and sometimes not. However, it is something that quite a lot of people are talking about.

The recent Grubb Institute report had some astonishing statistics suggesting that large portions of the adult population in England had entered a cathedral within the last year. Futhermore, people seemed to think of cathedrals as places which projected spiritual values and were places where the life of the spirit could be nourished and blessed.

I’m always interested in reports like this. The danger of them is that they make cathedral people smug and non-cathedral folk cross and jealous. However, it is important to try to listen to what is behind these reports of success in order to see whether there is something in the life of cathedral congregations that can be shared in other contexts. I happen to think that there is.

I was very struck recently by a conversation with someone in St Mary’s. We were talking about the emergent/emerging church phenomenon. There’s lots more to be said about that, but for now, we’ll just live with the idea that it means new, non-traditional ways of being a Christian community – pub church, late night church, fresh expressions of church and all the ballyhoo.

(I was entertained recently by the idea that I might get a grant for something to do with our regular Sunday morning liturgy by branding it as Mass Church – a Fresh Expressions Experience).

Anyway, back to the conversation. I was saying to someone that I sometimes wonder whether there might be space for an emergent expression of faith within St Mary’s. Some places have done this quite well, maintaining a fairly trad service in the morning, for example alongside an alternative community late on a Sunday evening. Maybe we are doing this already a bit with the Open Silence (an hour of shared silence on a Sunday evening) that takes place once a month.

I was musing that I was surprised that we had not got a more confident, weekly Fresh Expression going in St Mary’s and also noting that Scotland does not seem to be particularly fertile ground for it. As with Alpha, Fresh Expressions sometimes seem to be more of a thing south of the border than north of it.

The person I was talking to said, “Hmm, yes, but you’ve got to remember that you’re allowing the cathedral congregation to be a fresh expression…”

It was one of the moments where all the lights seem to turn on at once.

“Yes,” he said, “you’re allowing the congregation to grow using the themes that the fresh expressions people use. Remember that many of us here never expected to find that our faith could be sustained in a traditional church. Many of us thought that we had moved beyond all that. We’re all surprised to find ourselves here.”

What an interesting thing to think about.

Here are some of the themes that I think are sometimes floating around the emerging/emergent experience which I think we are playfully engaging with in and around St Mary’s:

art mattering
visual stuff being important
online being integral
networks of smaller groups making up something bigger
ability to live with apparent contradictions
freedom to experiment
radical hospitality and welcome
LGBT/Straight inclusive
embracing tradition without being hidebound
influence of monastic patterns, rhythms and themes
not being embarrassed by joy

Ring any bells with you?

cathedrals, emergent, emerging, growth, mission

7 responses to “Whither the Kirk?”

Pausing Place

25/08/2010

I missed last night’s programme, but I thought your comments were interesting.

In a sense, perhaps it’s unsurprising if the SEC is inwardly more positive about itself than the CofS. My take is that in the recent past, at least, the SEC started from a lower common denominator, not being the “local” church in the same way as the Kirk, and so it doesn’t have to contend with others saying of it “look how the mighty have fallen” in quite the same way.

As to the health of the Kirk (and the SEC for that matter), I think we need to reflect on our self-perception and to consider carefully the points and places in which a dying church (congregation or denomination) should be allowed to die gracefully, and the ways in which we might see new life emerge from the rubble.

As a young(ish!), relatively new Christian I have seen examples of (both urban and rural) SEC and Kirk congregations where there are few signs of new growth, little to draw in younger (under 50 year olds, to pick a random-ish number) new folk, and much to sustain negative preconceptions of church as boring, irrelevant and so forth.

We as a faith community need to get much better at stepping up to the mark in our creativity and engagement with our society. The sad truth is that most young adults do not know and have not heard about Jesus Christ, and unless we engage with them in ways culturally relevant to them, and which do not presuppose previous knowledge (too often taken for granted) they never will.

It troubles me, but I do think it’s true to say that in the SEC and in the Kirk we have a church sustained by the traditions and cultural reference points taught to a previous generation. Culture has shifted radically, with the result that the same will not be able to be said in 20 years time.

Our challenge is clear. Whether the Kirk and the SEC can step up to the mark to address what it means to live out the Great Commission in the 21st century is less so.

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Cal

25/08/2010

I didn’t really understand who this programme was aimed at, or even what its aim was.

Yes, numbers have fallen, but perhaps the small number of people who remain are there because they actually want to be, not because it’s the done thing on a Sunday morning.

And personally, I rather like the idea of a church “sustained by traditions”. Clearly the church has to be relevant to modern society, but in abandoning the traditions of worship then you lose the centre of why the church exists in the first place.

There was something very Presbyterian about the programme with its “we’re doomed” mentality. I find the SEC generally more positive in outlook.

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John

25/08/2010

The only book the presenter seemed to have used in his research was ‘The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800-2000’ By Callum G Brown – indeed Callum Brown was one of the speakers. The thesis of this well argued sociological study is that “quite suddenly in 1963 something very profound ruptured the character of the nation and its people sending organised Christianity on a downward spiral to the margins of social significanceâ€. That something he identifies as new media, new gender roles and a moral revolution which has dramatically ended peopleâ€™s conception that they lived Christian lives.â€ It could be said to have happened as â€œsex beganâ€ between the end of the Chatterly ban and the Beatles first LP as the poet Philip Larkin so famously put it.”
To balance this statistical decline the programme flagged up some of the “church without walls ” iniatives in a lame sort of way. All in all a most unsatisfactory programme that only told half the story.

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Kenny

25/08/2010

Good crit Kelvin. My reflection at the end of the programme was, “Lord, we visited this stuff over 30 years ago, and have come out of it stronger and better Church in the SEC.” Hopefully, we stopped longing for ‘the good old days’ a long time ago!

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MartinRitchie

26/08/2010

I thinking “Pausing Place” makes a good point about needing to creatively engage with society. From my own experience of working with a CofS congregation, this creative engagement is a weak spot for many.

As a counterpoint to the programme, interesting to note in the latest “Life and Work” a very positive article about a growing CofS congregation in Stornoway – and I mean really growing! So not all doom and gloom, and I’m sure there are many more examples of bright spots, just as there are in the SEC!

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Graham Vahey

28/08/2010

If the C of S disappeared completely we would be at a loss. During the dark and bleak years of Thatcher’s reign she refused to visit Scotland for 5 years. When she did she expressed shock that we had Royal Regalia and ordered it to be removed immediately for safe-keeping to England. Her ‘Sermon on the Mound’ is now historical for its condescension to the Scots. She was none too pleased to be handed two reports on poverty in Scotland by the powerful Church and Nation Committee. Indeed, it was to this Committee that the population turned to for a moral lead during Thatcherism. When James VI (‘Jamie the Saxt’) became James I in England, the population turned to senior Scottish earls for a moral lead. Unfortunately, the Piskie Church does not give a moral lead in Scotland, apart from the work of the Scottish Constitutional Convention in the recent past. The RC Church does pronounce on moral issues. Could it not be conceivable that all the major Churches could unite in a Committee to pronounce for Scotland on moral issues as the Church & Nation Committee once did?

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Aldous N. Gaiters

01/09/2010

Speaking as a Nonjuror myself I am sure the SEC has a right to a moral voice in Scotland. Taking the US daughter church of the SEC as a model you could see where the fissures would appear. There is room for a modern liberal Christian voice, but even I an old Liberal myself, would have to fear that such a voice might appeal to only a select few.

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