Anyway, here’s a photo of me in my finery. I’ve ordered a hood but it hasn’t arrived yet, so I’ll have to wait to get fully togged up one Sunday.

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Not through any sense of vanity or high regard for my work, but simply because some gracious people have expressed an interest, I’ve uploaded my masters research work. There are three research essays and the small dissertation. All-in-all around 26000 words of my ramblings as I tried to get my head around Emerging Church and how the Church of Scotland was and is interacting with it.

I was commenting to a friend that the days of struggling to find 1500 words for an essay in first year seem a very long way removed from churning out 15000 words for a dissertation, but the time has disappeared in a flash and I’m sure it will not be slowing down any as I head into probation in just over a week’s time.

Maybe I should have entitled the post, “And so it continues.”

ps – my thanks to Alan, Fiona, Lindsay and Maggie for being kind enough to proof my dissertation. I can only apologise for putting you through that.

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I suppose I could have blogged on some of these things, but then I didn’t really feel any great urge to do so – a bit of a break from blogging as well, I guess. Stewart has been covering the issue of resting and priorities with recent posts on ‘always available‘ and ‘busyness‘ – a useful reminder that we need, and benefit from, taking time out from our routine and the demands that are placed upon us. It’s also not been an issue of having nothing to have a rant about (OK, I admit it, I love a good rant) – there have been numerous things which have got me grumping (mostly associated with misrepresenting the Church of Scotland, misunderstanding the Reformation(s), and generally being utterly contradictory (that’ll be church services then). But again, I haven’t felt the need to rush off and blog about it (well, I was tempted, but really couldn’t pluck up the enthusiasm).

But perhaps the main purpose and benefit from this blogging/academic/placement interlude has been to clear the decks somewhat in anticipation of a panicked and pressured dissertation-writing drive. I’ve put off the writing for as long as could get away with as ideas and thoughts and readings all bubbled around in my head. But now it’s time to get that lot down on paper and see where it all ends up. So, chances are, this is not really an end to the blogging interlude, but it’s certainly an end to the timeout from academic obligations.

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Geneva, of course, was one of the wellsprings of the Protestant Reformation, famous largely, but not exclusively, as the place where Calvin taught and preached. But Geneva is also home to major world organisations: the UN, World Health Organisation, the International Committee of the Red Cross, UNHCR and many others. The group had the pleasure of visiting the World Council of Churches to get a flavour of the work they do and their vision for world Christianity.

We also took the chance to visit the cathedral, including the Sunday morning service, and we were able to worship with the Church of Scotland congregation in the Auditoire de Calvin which sits just to one side of the square occupied by the cathedral. Nikki and I also had the privilege of leading our evening devotions in the Auditoire on Friday evening. She’s written about it here and I still can’t quite get over how some silly ideas came together in the way they did. I’m still not convinced that Calvin would have entirely approved, but it was so very appropriate for the occasion.

Add to that some sight-seeing time, an excellent art gallery and some great company and it was an excellent long weekend. I’ll post some more reflections on specific parts of the trip in due course. My photo album from the trip can be found here.

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My last essay (from the Barth class) ended up being about ‘community’. Barth is very big on a Christian being called into a community. He pretty much says we can’t be Christians on our own. But more than that he has much to say about the fractured community that is the church catholic. The issue explored in the essay was whether Emerging Church adds to the fractured-ness or whether it exists within the church in the broad sense.

Anyway, the point was that it headed in a direction which I hadn’t really intended taking (I was originally more interested in the actual ‘theology’ employed by EC) and so it left me with a bit of a dilemma. Did I continue looking at the broad picture of EC or focus in on their theology. Given that defining Emerging Church is a bit like trying to nail jelly to a wall, the thought of trying to get to grips with theological issues was not a particularly enthralling one.

So I was kind of stuck on which direction to go – until I had a chat with my supervisor, that is. I was keen to keep my interests in a local context and not get dragged too much into the US-centric view of EC, so the plan is now as follows:

Book review: Emerging Churches, Gibbs & Bolger. This gives a good overview of what EC is in the US and UK. Lots of background material.

Essay 2: Having looked at one of the creedal marks of church (‘one’) in the first essay, I wanted to look at ‘holy’ in my next essay. Holy means ‘distinctiveness’ and in the church context is about the distinction between the sacred and the profane. In the context of EC, it raises questions about whether EC simply regurgitates popular culture or whether it ‘sacrilises’ it somehow.

Essay 3: The Church of Scotland have been keen to gather momentum in getting to grips with EC, particularly the idea of ‘mixed economy’ church as expressed in Fresh Expressions. But not all expressions of EC sit comfortably within the CofS, especially its presbyterianism. Many ECs seem to veer heavily towards the congregational model or even attempt to remain ‘structureless’. This essay looks at which expressions of EC fit within the CofS polity.

Dissertation: Pick an EC project currently underway within the CofS and examine its ‘mission statement’ or project proposal in light of the creedal marks of ‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic’ church. (If nothing else, it gives me a clear structural  outline for the work.) To that end I also have a meeting with the CofS EC co-ordinator. Hopefully I will be able to get pointed to a usable project.

Just got to sit down and write all that now.

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Ultimately, of course, this is all to my benefit. It’s the ‘real’ part of of ministry preparation. But I still have the academic stuff to do, although, technically speaking, I am as qualified as I need to be. Once again it’s not a lack of interest in the academic that’s a problem. I love studying theology. For me it’s the underpinning of who I am as a ‘minister’. It goes hand-in-hand with Biblical interpretation and it’s the dialogue between the two that defines my faith and its outworkings. For me, pastoral/practical theology is a result of these two things rather than being a more intimate part of the loop. Of course the pastoral and practical have to inform, or at least question, the Bible/theology ‘loop’, but it it those two which define whether our works are specifically Christian or simply philanthropic (although it’s an interesting argument over the distinction, especially if one is a Christian).

Anyway, this placement has, as placements do, brought the pastoral/practical to the fore and I’ve been busier with these than in any of my previous placements. And the encouraging thing is that as I engage more and more in these, I become more and more interested and excited and committed to them. I suppose that if you take a step back and have a more objective view, you could say that the third placement is the time of moving away from the academic and is the preparation for moving into probation and, ultimately, full-time ministry. So I guess it’s no surprise that this should be happening.

In a sense this gives the lie to the blog post title. Progress is being made in a particularly crucial aspect of my preparation for ministry. It’s just not happening in the area that I am obliged to do as well. Maybe in that there is a greater metaphor for ministry. There will be aspects of it that will excite and enthuse and these are the areas we will naturally wish to focus our energy and attention on. However, there will be areas of ‘obligation’, and they may even be areas we are interested in, but that simply don’t hold our attention as they should. Finding the motivation to do them is important to stop them piling up – they will need done sometime.

If anyone has found the answer to this, I (and the rest of the world, I suspect) would love to hear it.

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I’ve been looking at Fresh Expressions – the Church of England/Methodist project into finding, strangely enough, fresh ways for people to express or explore their faith. In many respects it’s the background to much of what is happening within the Church of Scotland. What’s been interesting is that Emerging Church in its guises as ‘alternative worship’ or ‘seeker-sensitive’ or whatever other label one might care to apply is actually a subset of the overall strategy. By broadening out what ‘church’ is, in the sense of how to be a worshipping community, then the unity of the church is maintained. However, this opening out and creating space within the structure of ‘organised religion’ is not universally accepted as ‘a good thing’. How can one be a radical voice or a ‘fresh expression’ when one is still part of the ‘established’ church? The very fact that a group is still within the structures of the ‘parent’ denomination means that it can only ever be emerging and never really emerge.

In the book Evaluating Fresh Expressions, an article by Dr Peter Rollins, co-ordinator of the emerging church movement Ikon in Belfast, is pretty hard-hitting when it comes to this subject. He questions whether maintaining the close connection with the structures of ‘traditional’ church allows an emergent expression of church to find its real voice. He goes so far as to suggest that maintaining such a connection is a “restriction, misrepresentation and even perversion of the very message that they offer to both those outside and those within the church” (p84).

The challenge of such a view (and this is the point of the essay) is that we then have to look beyond our own denomination and tradition and consider what it means to be part of the ‘church catholic’. Barth offers a similar challenge. Church, he suggests, is, at its most basic, a statement of faith, derived from the creedal statement – “We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church.” As such, it is not a matter of ‘knowing’ it is right, wrong or whatever, but believing that the church, the body of Christ, simply ‘is’. For Barth, that ‘being’ is marked by the work of the Spirit within and through the church. That calls into question our ideas of the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways of ‘doing’ church. But it also continues to call into question what it means to be church and what the purpose of church is. Barth is still, in a sense, tied to the institution of church. This, in large part, is to avoid the dangers of 0f individualistic experientialism; a danger I think some expressions of Emerging Church are at risk of slipping into. That, of course raises the question of whether it is indeed a danger. Barth’s big argument here is that we are called as a saved people, not as individuals as such. It was the nation of Israel God established, not a disparate group of individuals. But maybe that’s a subject for another essay.

In the meantime, when we consider/believe we are ‘one church’, how far are we prepared to go to count other expressions of church as still part of the body of Christ and therefore part of our Christian fellowship?

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Solidarity with the world means that those who are genuinely pious approach the children of the world as such, that those who are genuinely righteous are not ashamed to sit down with the unrighteous as friends, that those who are genuinely wise do not hesitate to seem to be fools among fools, and that those who are genuinely holy are not too good or irreproachable to go down “into hell” in a very secular fashion.

Barth CD IV/3, p774

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Today’s class was a starter on Barth’s ecclesiology and it focused on the creedal statement, “I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic church.” That was interesting enough and, in fact, inspired my likely essay for the course. But what was fascinating was a section on who was a ‘true’ Christian. There was the very thorough consideration of all the possible ‘marks’ of a true Christian and ultimately Barth’s deliberations seemed to come down to – “we don’t know”. And his advice? Get on with being a ‘true’ Christian yourself and just assume everyone else you’re concerned about is as well.

He had pretty much the same to say about church disunity. Having utterly savaged the ‘scandal’ of church division he concludes, pretty much, the same sort of thing. As a community of believers, get on with being just that and worry more about your witness to non-believers than trying to get other churches ‘back on track’.

Barth obviously used considerably more words to say that than I have, but it was his way of covering all the possible ‘get-out’ clauses and excuses. It’s fascinating to read a theologian who almost seems happy to stop at the ‘I don’t know’ place and to practically hear his thoughts as he struggles with the implications of where his ideas are going.

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The original plan was to follow up on the other areas of eschatology that I hadn’t done for my honours dissertation. That morphed slightly into seeing how the language of inaugurated eschatology might engage with Emerging Church (which seems, to me, to have a very strong ‘realised eschatology’ outlook). However that may have been fine for the dissertation but I was struggling to pull the three 5k-word essays out of the mire without them impinging too much on the main dissertation.

Then along came Barth and one of the 5k-word essays was sorted. Still keeping Emerging Church in the frame, I will be looking at ‘community’. This seems to be a major ‘thing’ with Emerging Church movements, so it seems reasonable to look at it and critique it using Barth. Not that Barth is necessarily the best theologian with which to engage EC on this subject, but it does allow me to meet the assessment criteria for the course and is vaguely relevant to the overall research project.

But what of the other two 5k-word essays? Well, a cunning plan ‘emerged’ during today’s discussion. I hope to audit the Scottish Theology course next semester and in the discussion today it was suggested that looking at, if possible, the traditional Scottish slant on Hell and Judgement would tie in nicely with the eschatology part of the research, but also provide a springboard to consider the direction that Scottish expressions of EC are taking on this subject. Are they truly emerging or starting from an entirely new perspective? How much is EC taking from its traditional roots? And so on. So, there’s essay number 2.

Essay 3 is the one that might be the most fascinating. Again, in discussion, I was asked what was actually happening in EC movements in Scotland and I had to confess to being aware of only a limited amount of work in the area – not that there isn’t a lot happening, just that my exposure to it has been limited. So it was suggested that the third assignment could be a quantative research project – actually find out who’s doing what and why. That’s a potentially huge amount of work, so it seemed logical to narrow the field somewhat and look particularly at what the Church of Scotland is doing. That might seem unnecessarily limiting, but I do have to keep it very manageable. That said, a lot of the gathered data could be used for the main dissertation, if I’m canny enough.

Which just leaves the main dissertation. There’s no reason why that can’t continue to be within the general remit of the original proposal, but I suspect that it also has a few more iterations to go through yet before the core of it emerges. It may well end up going down a very different path, but then isn’t that the whole purpose of research?

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