Simply Simon

Global mission in a local context

Today I’m off to spend a week with the Anglicans in the Diocese of Newcastle. They have graciously asked a Baptist (and a southerner, what’s more!) to talk about local mission in a multicultural society.

In preparation, it has struck me again that the call to mission is a call to live at the rather chaotic intersection between the global and the local. Our eyes and minds must move constantly between the distant and the immediate, the big picture and the detail, the horizon and what’s right in front of our noses. In my own experience, local mission that does not operate out of an awareness of its global context can fail to appreciate the complexity of its own backyard. Then again, global engagement that is not grounded in the messiness of the local ends up sounding like so much hollow rhetoric.

In his book Urban Christianity and the Global Order, the Anglican Andrew Davey writes:

“The strengths of the Church must lie in its ability to hold the local and global in its own dynamic tension, as it seeks the practice of human freedom in the presence of God in whatever human arrangements it encounters at local, national, regional and global levels. The Church need to understand and realize its potential as it connects and affirms the communities and individuals in the margins of the global city, communities which comprise significant numbers of women, minorities and migrants—those who really do live on the fault lines and in the back alleys of the new global order. While challenging the reshaping of the geography of power, the Christian faith is lived through presence(s), through communities that include, strengthen and give integrity to those at the margins. Local pastoral praxis becomes simultaneously global political praxis."

Davey concludes with the warning: "We must not fall captive to the simplistic analysis that rejects the global solely for the local—our world is just not like that (and neither is our faith)."

Andrew Davey, Urban Christianity and the Global Order: Theological Resources for an Urban Future, London: SPCK, 2001, 39.

a prayer for a cold morning

Dear God,
let us prepare for winter.
The sun has turned away from us
and the nest of summer hangs broken in a tree.
Life slips through our fingers
and, as darkness gathers, our hands grow cold.
It is time to go inside.
It is time for reflection and resonance.
It is time for contemplation.
Let us go inside.
Amen

Michael Leunig, A Common Prayer, Collins Dove, 1990.

coughs and tickles

"Meister Eckhart believed that 'God is like a person who clears his throat while hiding and so gives himself away.' The challenge to the churches at the moment is to unveil whether there might be a divine presence in so much contemporary darkness, and to encourage the energy that is still there in people's lives to listen out for the divine coughs and tickles."

Mark Oakley, "Reclaiming Faith," in Spirituality in the City, edited by Andrew Walker, 1-14. London: SPCK, 2005.

Being church

The last month or so, I’ve hung out with a small congregation in the northern suburbs of Melbourne. After a difficult year and the painful loss of its pastor, this little community is struggling. My brief has been to fill the pulpit for a while, to be a sensitive presence. While I’m not entirely sure just what help I’ve been, I depart each Sunday encouraged, my own faith prodded into life.

When I meet with communities like this one, it strikes me afresh just how much is good about the local church. Here in this little wooden building sitting ingloriously on a bland suburban corner, Sunday by Sunday there gathers a community of people committed to each other and to God. They meet to worship, to pray, to confess their faith and dependence, to receive and offer encouragement along the way. They like each other—that’s easy to tell—but they’re weary and not especially self-confident. Still, they keep believing, they keep longing, they keep working at following Jesus… together.

There is no end of reasons why a little church like this one is ‘failing’. There’s a veritable library of books written every year documenting all that it’s getting wrong and all that it’s missing. There’s no end of conferences and experts to help these weary ones arrest their misfortunes and ‘emerge’ into something new and improved.

No doubt there is truth in all of this. But as I drive away from that little wooden building, I cannot help but feel grateful for all that is good about this place and its people. I can’t help but feel God’s delight in who they are, not just in who they might become someday. I cannot help but sense God’s pleasure in a community of faith and mission that plods along, sometimes skipping, sometimes missing a step and falling ungraciously, but then dusting itself off and continuing on regardless. The local church really is an incredible thing, not for all that it gets right, but for its extraordinary persistence as a community of faith in an ordinary place.

Dinnertime

A while back I reflected on the challenges of dinnertime at our house, the constant struggle to maintain the family table as sacred space.

Recently, I came across a newspaper article in which the reporter asked a group of 14-year-olds, “What is dinnertime like in your home?” The answers are telling.

“I eat dinner with my mum, dad and dog. During dinner we don’t talk a lot, because we are too busy watching the soap opera that was recorded that day. It’s a pretty laid-back time for the family, because we all sit down in the lounge room and watch something we all like.” (Karen)

“I usually eat by myself. My parents are either not at home or they are upstairs playing on the computer. So obviously I rarely talk during dinner. But I like it that way.” (Matthew)

“We never eat together. I eat about 5pm, always something different from what the rest of the family eats, because I am picky and hate a lot of stuff. While I’m eating I talk to my mum. Usually our conversation turns into an argument, which then fades and we watch the Simpsons. My mother and brother eat at about 6.30pm and watch Neighbours. Finally, my dad comes home at about 8.30 and eats whatever mum made and tells me about his day.” (Sasha)

“Usually my mum will call from work and ask me what I want to eat. If I’m in a hurry, which I usually am, I’ll tell her McDonalds or Hungry Jacks. She will bring it home and set it on the coffee table in front of the TV. Mum usually doesn’t bother having anything so she goes and does something else. Within 10 minutes I am finished and ready to get back to my schedule.” (Jeremy)

“When I was younger, my mum insisted that we all sit down to a nice family dinner, and we could talk about how our day went. Every now and then my sister could weasel her way into the living room to watch the TV, but my mum said we needed to spend quality family time together … not with the TV. But lately it has become pretty rare for us to sit down together and eat a home cooked meal. My father is working long hours and my sister has gone off to Uni, so mostly it’s just my mum and me. Mum doesn’t want to cook a big meal just for the two of us, so we usually have leftovers or take-away.” (Lindsey)

“I eat dinner with my oldest brother Manuel, my sister-in-law Dara, my niece Lucy and my baby nephew Jordan. I like dinnertime, because we first say our prayers, then we eat and talk about our day and things. My niece always makes us do this little thing where we clink our glasses together and say, ‘To the open road!’ She got it from a Goofy movie.” (Daniel)

Have you loved beauty?

"From time to time I ask myself what God's final questions of me will be. They keep changing. At this moment I have a hunch that they may be these: Have you lived passionately, made music, given freely, prayed extravagantly, labored in prayer for the suffering, created useless beauty, attempted spontaneous kindness, pondered deeply, shaped gently what you touched--and let yourself go, deliriously, becoming lost in Me? That is, Paul, have you loved beauty?"

W. Paul Jones. A Table in the Desert: Making Space Holy, Brewster: Paraclete Press, 2001, 224.

Graduation day ... or night

Time as Gift

It’s been a while. Life has been full. The beginning of the academic year is always demanding. This year has been no different.

During especially busy periods like these, I am prone to view the persistent movement of the clock as the enemy, or the calendar as an unforgiving master. Time is that sparse commodity rationed out in ever-smaller increments—time is tyranny.

Then, as I did on the weekend, I watch an elderly woman tending roses in her front garden, or a parent playing hide-and-seek with a giggling infant in the park, and I remember that, before it is anything else, time is gift. Every moment is grace.

In her delightful book, Pip, Pip: A Sideways Look at Time, Jay Griffiths tells the story of Albert Dürer (1471—1528) who made an engraving of the ‘Artist Drawing a Nude through a Gridded Screen’:

“The nude (an entirely sensual woman) reclines away from him, smiling a very knowing smile and—if he looked—he would see her left hand is teasingly, playfully, almost touching herself. What of the ‘Gridded Screen’? He has set it between himself and the nude, so he can accurately plot her measurements and proportions. So rigidly preoccupied is the artist with the grid, that on the paper before him is no woman at all, no knowing smile, no thigh and no moist finger, just the straight lines on the page, the frets of a grid. Looking at this once, it occurred to me that this is how modernity sees time; that we are so preoccupied with our gridded, subdivided constructions of numbered measurements we lose sight of the gorgeous, lifeful thing itself. Modernity knows the strut and the fret. But not the hour.”

Time to celebrate

She’s done it! My wonderfully intelligent spouse has just learned that her PhD dissertation has passed with flying colours. One examiner described it as "one of the best dissertations I have read," and the other as "original in its focus, ambitious in its scope, deeply ethical, reflexive and engaging."

I’m proud!

Goals, hopes & aspirations

Andrew made some comments today that struck a chord with some things I’ve wondered about this past month. He talks about the awkward, perhaps strained relationship between our honourable bent to planning and goal-setting and the disquieting fact that so much of life lies beyond our control.

This resonates on two levels. Firstly, I have long been in the practice of setting out on paper my aspirations for the year ahead. The consequent ‘annual manifesto’ often verges on the side of grand and comprehensive. This year, feeling just a little weary of the grand, I summarized my aspirations simply as these: get healthy, be a good neighbour, and write a book. As goals go, they’re not terribly noble, encapsulating, or even especially ‘spiritual’. Still, each represents a choice that is, to a large extent, one I need to make and re-make in my daily routine. Beyond that: ‘Go easy on yourself!’ was the sage advice of a friend late last year. I’m trying.

Secondly, as a new academic year approaches and I map out course plans, learning objectives and prepare lectures, there is only so much that I can plan with any degree of confidence. In a sense, all I can do is provide the bones to a good and challenging unit for my students. Adding the ‘flesh’ is beyond me. Will they engage? Will they read? Will they be changed in some small or significant way? I don’t know. I can only hope so.

Howard Thurman’s words are reassuring:

“There are many forces over which the individual can exercise no control whatsoever. A man plants a seed in the ground and the seed sprouts and grows. The weather, the winds, the elements, cannot be controlled by the farmer. The result is never a sure thing. So what does the farmer do? He plants. Always he plants. Again and again he works at it—the ultimate confidence and assurance that even though his seed does not grow to fruition, seeds do grow and they do come to fruition.

The task of those who work for the Kingdom of God is to work for the Kingdom of God. The result beyond this demand is not in their hands. He who keeps his eyes on results cannot give himself wholeheartedly to his task, however simple or complex that task may be.”

______________________________

Howard Thurman, For The Inward Journey, Friends United Press, 1984.