Q&A session

Relationships aren’t the means to an end, they are the end. How can community be the Good News we seek to be – both digitally and not digitally?
Simon: Online activity rehearses face-to-face and celebrates the real face-to-face contact. It can’t be the Good News.

But surely a technological child will only be partly fulfilled and need online community.
Sylvie: Real church but where it lets you down you use online community. Heidi Campbell’s research shows that the pastoral care of the ill etc., can’t be linked to digital ministry.

Did she feel real riding is better than digital riding?
Simon: Yes, being fully present, e.g. the smell of the manure! Similarly with the full community presence of one to another. Some very significant issues that the digital world can’t make real or realise. Can digital spaces re-connect people up to face-to-face contact.

John: Generationally there is a difference in how we use digital media. The Christian community delivering pastoral care and cookies when ill won’t happen as the Church is so dysfunctional. When in hospital had 400 people via text, twitter, facebook saying care for you, pray for you etc.

There are two sides of the same coin – it isn’t less real, less pastoral, more corrupted, more abusive – it is just different.

Have any of the panel had experience of the digital mourning of a young person online and the stopping of that online?
Simon: Haven’t had that experience, but interesting issue around the finiteness of physical world and the endlessness of the digital world.

Sylvie: The spiritual question they were interested in dealing with but not willing to let go. But also the difficulties people experience when closing the estate of an online presence.

Simon: People want to know everything about you and so they sell the information about you.

John: The rise of shrines in the street is similar but not connected to the digital rise. Is this not a missional opportunity to have this conversation and to investigate realistic views of death in the light of the church.

Issue of peer pressure feeling like now need to say something otherwise I’m not a good friend.

Sometimes social media is like a plug-in drug, how can we help people with this?
Simon: Addicted not to friendship but to the result of that.

Check out CODEC and Bex Lewis’ thoughts at Durham Uni.

How do we bring the end of the church or do we persevere with the church?
John: What does redemption look like when trapped in a structure which you knew is falling down around your ears. What does the future of discipleship look like for those people. Hang in for the time being as people are looking to resolve this, partly because when the thing collapses and the dust settles we need to have creative people to reshape the 2,000 years of history. No sympathy with Alan Hirsch who say don’t get involved with the institution of the church as it is what we have. Huge numbers of people who have become Christians and if it was completely useless we wouldn’t have these people in the churches.

What does church need to look like for the 90% who don’t connect with church. Church House Westminster is not the centre of the church, they are in the global South doing church in different ways. We are still centred on Christendom and that the church is in our hands, but ecclesiologically it isn’t in our hands, and theologically it is in God’s hands so we need to recognise our place.

Sylvie: We need to keep the tradition and the community of church so don’t see the demise of the church as a good thing that we want tomorrow.

What would each of the panelists like us to take away from today to encourage us in our work?
John: The prophetic need is to identify the right way to ask the questions rather than always knowing the answers.

Sylvie: A point of encouragement from research the faith-based youth work was appreciated by non-Christians and Christians as they provided a non-judgemental community space and allow young people to talk about faith in a way that they couldn’t in their local church.

Simon: A keenly developed sense of what it means to be in community and to form and shape activities in whatever shape. The need for community, to be real and present, to be able to handle the complexities of life is needed more.

Digital Community – Simon Davies

No one really knows what community is, or what digital necessarily is. Come at it as a human being, a parent, someone who has worked extensively with young people, been involved in education, but not as an expert.

Act 1: Scene 1
Imagine the scene, Friday afternoon on the school run, get to outside classroom door, 8 yr old daughter waiting, ask “How was your day?”, she asks “Have you got the car?”, “yes”, “Great I want to get on StarStable with Sarah”. Head home, she flicks on computer, loads up site, hops on her horse and gallops off into her 3D world. Her and Sarah go riding together, but she calls out “Where are you, come follow me” even though no microphone. They then groom virtual ponies and buy outfits for it. Wanders off and hears “I can’t wait to see Sarah on Monday and talk about this”.

Two conclusions
The in-game representation was as real and present as in real life
Part of a continuum of relationship – school, on the virtual world, face-to-face at school

Being with technology
Have anxieties and moral panics as a parent around digital technology. What happens to literacy, social interaction, brain development, range of skills and capacities developed, make representations when they move into a parallel world and make themselves up. Carl Mitchum identifies 3 distinct ways of being with technology:
Ancient skepticism: draws on the idea that technology is bad but necessary or necessary but dangerous. Linked to ancient myths – stealing fire in order to facilitate human progress, or the Tower of Babel – humanity being prevented to achieving what they want to achieve.
Enlightenment optimism: Francis Bacon – technology is God-given and can be used to alleviate suffering and problems – moral questions are the problem – the technology is just a tool – the way we use it is the problem not the tool itself; and Immanuel Kant – what we make with our hands makes us happy and this can be applied through technology.
Romantic Uneasiness: We can’t hold on to skepticism as we use medical technology etc., and enlightenment optimism can’t be held as Roussell says machine creates an alienation of the affections.

Being with others
Is there somehing specifically different about being online in relationships – is it a separate style of relationship. What makes digital technology different to fridges, cars, hammers, chainsaws etc.

The language that surrounded the birth of the Internet when it became widely available in the early 1990s the most exciting image that could be conjured up was to “surf” the Internet. Edgy, risky sport being in tune with your environment. The Internet is nearly the direct opposite! The Microsoft tagline “where do you want to go today?” the concept of leaving your boring life, and going to the most exciting and terrifying life. Something fundamentally deceitful about what we are told will happen and does happen – how it doesn’t deliver something full and real.

Marketing technology is about fostering an emotional connection to your mobile device. Zuckerberg is trying to launch the Facebook phone and said “The Facebook phone will change your relationship with your phone” interestingly not your family, friends and community.

Put yourself here – write yourself into this space, realise yourself here. This is a very powerful message. Modernity was marked by education and the printing press with broader skills on literacy etc. Adam Nicholson on The Story that Wrote Itself – modernity as an age of self-discoveration. Online spaces are about writing yourself, you can be who you want to be, in a very exciting space, highly personalised and carrying around in the way you want. This is very aspirational technology.

Different kinds of writing (avatars, twitter, facebook, video etc.)
For personal expression – how do I feel right now – but momentary sense of self is preserved.
Spreading ideas – especially political ideas
Social relatedness – through association and network
Push oneself up the social scale – trying to increase status
Making oneself up – profiling

Acts 1: Scene 2
Keep dialogue open with daughter ask which do you prefer “online or real”, she says “both even thought they’re different”.”But StarStable is just a game,”, “It is just a game but does it become real when someone is being mean and my bestie becomes a good friend in the game. Sticking up for me if other people are being mean”.

The virtual world can stimulate real emotions and feelings
Being a good friend in the game means exactly the same thing as being a good friend out of the game

If this is the case that real emotional responses can be generated, fostered, real sense of connectivity can be fostered, why not simply dispense with geographic time and space, and invest all our attempts of community building into the virtual world? We have the means and the technology – we don’t have to worry about connecting and being in community with those who aren’t immediately comfortable.

What does it mean to view the world as technologically mind-framed
We need to have a matrix to discern the space of digital places. Digital community depends on what we think community is about, what should community be trying to become, and who are the people we’re trying to engage and where are they?

 
The world revealed technologically
Every human context is a place where content is being generated from. Significant impact on the ways in which communication and transactions happen. Technology becomes invisible – becoming part of who we are forgetting the mode of operation and the impact in how we engage. We recognise it is integral and need to critically challenge it.

Community – Dr. Sylvia Collins-Mayo

1982 TV series Cheers started. Might remember some of the characters and the theme tune, which was a good opening to the show but also to the sociological debates happening around community and what it means.

In some ways it captures the nature of community in the bar, and the nostalgia and yearning that is evident from politicians, pundits, media and marketers mourning the loss of community – whatever it is that we conceive it to be. It contrasts the bar place wherever knows you with the problems of the world and dislocation in identity and finances etc.

Anxiety of community was a key point of concern for early sociologists watching the aftermath of industrial revolution, e.g. Emile Durkheim in the Division of Labour (1893) moving from social community to interdependence characteristic of the urban life where home and work specialised, and labour separated into specialised groups. Mechanical solidarity to organic solidarity.

This paved the way for a very individualised society. Writing just before Ferdinand Tonnies wrote Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1897) with groups connected around emotional ties, e.g. the rural village seen as community. Community has value for its own sake, it has meaning and value for those who belong to it. Other groups have been consciously formed by individuals to help meet particular goals – these are known as society or associations – it doesn’t necessarily have value of itself but by what they can achieve, based through rational will.

What is community
Definitions of communities have been really hard to pin down, and at times sociologists felt it was too dangerous to pin down in an empirical way. Digital technology has renewed interest in community.

Technically together, Michelle Wilson, considers how community shifts as notions of time and geography shift due to technology. Outlines some non-defining characteristics but present and overlapping in all communities:
Bonding – Emotional Attachment: in community people are connected together which has an emotional aspect. “People know your name and are glad you came”. An experience of membership which is socially and personally valued – people belong to a community. Sense of belonging is most present in face-to-face interaction but Anderson says even when everyone doesn’t know your name as the community is too large you can still feel a part of it, e.g. London 2012 Olympics. We can welcome strangers when we feel they are part of one of us – a Christian from abroad on holiday is welcomed as part of the church family.
Reciprocity – Participation and Obligation – to be in community is to communicate (a reciprocal act) and have responsibilities to one another – helping each other out in difficult times. The notion of helping goes beyond one-to-one scratching each others back, instead a reasonable expectation that the community cares for each other with trust and loyalty. The promise of safety and security in the face of difficulties, e.g. discussion in social capital highlights the discussion of reciprocality.
Commonality – characteristics and events, shared values and norms: shared characteristics allowing us to experience empathy – race, language, place, religion, gender, class etc. are all characteristics that can be held in value. Times of shared crisis can also realise commonality with the community coming together after the 2011 riots, and the Woolwich murder recently coming together – sometimes different types of communities coming together. One thing we all share in common is that we are all born and all die – in society where death is pushed back we lose the sense of our common vulnerability. More broadly commonality suggests shared values and norms – e.g. hard work, punctuality – these often don’t need thinking about. Values and norms are articulated and tested through events. Social chat, gossip, every day actions as well as formal rules and discipline maintain a way of being together.
Identity – we belong to a community and community identity informs our own personal identity. It helps us to understand where we do and don’t fit. It is where some of the less desirable aspects of community can be felt – community can be a place of exclusion as well as inclusion, individuals can be shunned, and communities can be pitted against each other – e.g. the political discourse of immigration with the foreigner being pitted against the home person. It places a framework to see our own identity. We can be marginalised if we have the wrong sexuality, gender, ethnicity etc. if it goes against the community norms. This is particularly important for young people who din’t fit into their community.

We belong to many small communities in their own right. Cheers is one such small community with the patrons going off to different communities beyond the bar. Diversity in communities is facilitated by technology allowing us to condense space and time. This allows us to create new communities that weren’t possible a few years ago.

Networks and Digital Communities
Networks focus on choice and individual choice, radiating out from the individual, whereas community embraces the individual. Day notes that dense networks are similar to communities, but networks are more flexible and require less commitment. We can choose to be a part of community and choose to leave them. We can choose to belong to more than one church and have less bonding with one particular community.

The jury is out on whether or not networks constitute communities – digital community is testing community definitions. Some people see greater egalitarianism and democracy through the digital communities. “Electronic networks tend to be almost exclusively from the standpoint of the individual, the emphasis naturally falls on what it feels like to take part, rather than on what it achieves” (Day, 2006, p 228).

Young People
Day in Believing in Belonging asked what people believed in – they believed in their friends, partners and relationships. That echoes the results of Making Sense of Generation Y and The Faith of Generation Y with the views of family and friends. Friends and families are disembodied from community especially with blended families.

Technology extended networks, but what is more interesting is that it intensifies relationships. Young people can hold multiple relationships at once, e.g. sitting at meal table but still texting. What is more dangerous is that young people are expected to be digital. Relationships are held up to the public gaze and judgement digitally.

Young people recognise the need for others but also to provide support for friends and families. 2011 census data says 170k children and young people are carers for parents, siblings and family members. The Children’s Society put the figure to be closer to 700k. There is a broader element, e.g. Street Pastors of older generation engaging clubbing generation, it is noticeable that young people ensure drunk friends gets home, friends would wrap other drunk and abusive friends home to prevent trouble etc., but also if they see a vulnerable stranger they would stay and hep them until expert help arrives.

Young people’s neighbourly activities is not seen by community or themselves and yet Smith et al in 2010 saw many random Acts of Kindness, volunteering etc., but not necessarily registering it. But on the other hand many young people feel isolated, Princes Trust show 1 in 5 young people feel isolated most of the time and 1 in 10 feel like an outcast and a third feel that they don’t have a future in their area, and rarely spoke to people over the age of 40, and two-thirds never speak to someone over the age of 60, and half felt ignored by older people and as though the older people were scared of them.

There can be less perceived hostility e.g. through seeing Steer Pastors as grandparents. The Street Pastors get respect as they are perceived and known for helping, for being on the young people’s side.

Young people perceive community as friends and family but also organisational settings – schools, clubs, churches. Moral communities where young people see it as an important place to be. Some young people wouldn’t allow their friends to join and muck up the community for them and their other friends. Pilgrimage has been examined in France with World Youth Day where young people found the journey in community being the highlight not the mass with the Pope.

The idea of networks takes us into lifestyle communities. We used to speak about sub-cultures, now focus on lifestyle networks. Environment groups, protest groups – people coming together around shared values and purpose. Is church a lifestyle group – opting in a more associational and consumeristic way? Social media sites reinforce these lifestyle networks.

Unlike network friendships, gang membership is more like pre-modern communities very geographically located cultures, with demarcated community, and have rules that are often in conflict with wider society. Young people join because of the perceived need to protect themselves, giving them a sense of safety whilst demanding loyalty etc.

In many respects young people’s experience of community is based on neo-kingship groups and structures. That is up against network groups and affiliations which take second place for the communities. Technology can extend community but more importantly intensify it. In the face-to-face it is understood and therefore valued by young people.

Q&A
We focus too much on programme instead of creating community and enabling them to feel that they belong and are part of it. We will find community somewhere as we are social beings. What communities do we want young people to find? How long does clean up from riots help us to form community or does it finish straight after? Residential does this in a sense creating bonds for young people.

When asking young people about community perceptions they reflect on each other. They don’t see themselves doing things wrong as that isn’t their community? The community of which you are a part defines your norms, values and expectations.

The church can be containing the dark-side of community – encouraging young people to dialogue around what does God want community to become?

What is church – John Drane

Usual tact is to go to computer making a powerpoint with lots of bells and whistles and then work out what to say with this. This time started writing, wrote 22 pages, and thought let’s do a conventional lecture!

Something weird and ironic about being in Church House and asking the question what is the church? Surely they know after 500 years of practicing. Let’s all go to Westminster Abbey next door and discover things.

Googled the single word “church” has lots of adjectives and adverbs – vibrant and growing, vibrant and growing and multicultural, bible based, Christ centred. Clicked on some of the websites but none answered the question in any significant sense beyond locker-room humour of my church is bigger, better, more linked to the original church. Part of the consumeristic 21st century – proving they are better than the church down the road – all defined around what we believe – but really we believe something different from the other churches down the road as we are … .

Don’t want to focus on what is the church as not enlightening or a pretty site. But what could church be and become. Chosen very carefully as for many people the word church is actually a turnoff, the word Christian is a turnoff, for growing numbers the word God is a turnoff. Our terminology is important for missional opportunities. With non-churchy people use a few key expressions:
Christian faith community
follower of Jesus
disciple
ecclesial community if speaking to Christians

To talk about what the church might become, not semantics to talk about where we go from here, but what are we becoming as Christians is at the heart of the gospel. Jesus doesn’t rake over the ashes of the past, we always seem to go into auto-pilot mode criticising all the bad decisions and bad people; but the gospel has an eschatological dimension – inviting us not to focus on the past but to ask God who might we become and what might we become as disciples of Jesus. We make a mistake when we rake over the past – we need to know where we come from – but to be stuck there or even in the past rather than dreaming the dreams of God we have made a mistake. Knowing and understanding roots is important.

What was the church – Acts 2 – the original intention behind the disciples
If we look at the word “ecclesia”, the Greek word, historically translated as church, but that word when the early Christians looked around and chose “ecclesia” they were using a word in common use. Identifying that context helps them to understand what they thought they were.

What is the church today
However much we wish we were we are not inventing the church, there are 2,000 years o Christians before us who must have learnt somethings in their experience. Too often we stay let’s start with a blank sheet but this reality of 2,000 years of heritage has positives and negatives. There are lots of people who have learned a thing or two about following Jesus, and that is foundational because everyone is a Christian because of the accumulated wisdom from those people – we should expect to be inspired by those insights. Negatively we are also implicated in their excesses and mistakes – crusades, imperialism of Christendom, abuse of women and children and much more. In popular culture we are all linked to this, e.g. women in leadership, child abuse – all Christians are misogynists and paeadophiles – we have to live with these historical consequences. The buck has to stop somewhere – so whilst personally and individually no one was responsible for the Inquisition there are times and places where it is important to acknowledge that they got it wrong, and if we had been back there in the Middle Ages etc., we probably would have been doing the same thing they did as living as part of the Christian culture then. Happy to apologise to become leaders of redemptive change organisations.

Working with Raymond Fung in the 1980s at an event in Australia with lots of the majority world, and the Western Christians were smitten with apologising. Raymond Fung said get over it as the missionaries also gave health care and education so in the midst of bad things it was the church as a corporate organisation that enabled Raymond to get out of the existing barriers.

What might the church become under God’s future
The Church of Scotland will be completely bankrupt by 3 years time, cashing in £1mm per month to keep the denomination going. Many mainline denominations have similar issues. The Scottish Episcopal Church is in no better shape but has been struggling for a while so understands struggle and hardship more. Church is asking does each church need to re-imagine church for their generation.

Church is not a noun not a verb – it is about doing, being, creating etc. The word was used in the world of Roman where ecclesia had an honourable history in Greek city structures, and the word features in the Old Testament when read in Greek.

The first word was The Way, Disciples, Christians, but calling themselves ecclesia soon enough, and the very early bits e.g. Galatians or Thessalonians at 50CE Paul could use that word without needing to explain it – suggesting that it was in common use by then. If a citizen of Ancient Athens the ecclesia was a town hall gathering in USA terms, people coming together to engage in town life. Ecclesia is composed of Ecc – out of – caliou – together. City Council was used as a separate word, whereas Ecclesia was only when people actually get together. Given two or three different words, it is interesting that the choose them coming together rather than being a body or institution – they saw themselves not as an organisation but an organism – something that was living. They were steeped in the Hebrew Scriptures seeing themselves as part of that story. In 2-3 centuries before the OT was translated into Greek as the Septuagint, with Ecclesia being translated for kahol which is more complicated. Kahol could be translated Ecclesia or the word for the synagogue. When the gathering was static they used synagogue but when a lively gathering it would be ecclesia.

The intention of Abraham’s journey wasn’t to create a new structure but to create an example of how to live in shalom. To create a just society, and the prophets told them to be intentional in sharing this with others and being inclusive in a way that the sociological norm didn’t stretch too.

Images of the Church in the Old Testament, 96 metaphors to describe the church, all of which are active images – not a structure or institution – but an interplay between humanity and divinity:
The people of God
The new creation
The fellowship in faith
The body of Christ
The fifth category he calls minor images of the church but are still active, e.g. nature with grapes, olives, figs, church as a wedding feast. “It invites us into a restoration of the Christian imagination”. Imagine and dream what church might become, let your creative juices flow as to where we guess God might be leading us in the 21st century.

4th century to the Nicene Creed council. In the Nicene Creed it has 4 adjectives: one, holy, catholic, apostolic. Initially it can seem that they are opposites of the biblical words. The Nicene Creed is created in an institutional structure where sociological changes were beginning to be large. What does that link with youth, culture – is it just jargon? It mirrors very closely the descriptions of the people of God in the OT:
They are holy, called by God – they misunderstood what God was doing and is about but they were called
One – gathered together to form a community
Catholic in its embrace of other people – to be centrifugal to embrace the whole world – to be a light to the Gentiles.
Being Apostolic – taking the missional task seriously. Apostolo means someone who is sent out – what it means to be sent out.

The Hard Questions lectures at Manchester Cathedral spawned by Fresh Expressions. We can see we are doing new missional things but what makes them church. Is this Nicene definition just another way of speaking about a church that is organic, spiritual, inclusive and lives within the big story that is God’s kingdom?

Church as Organic
Organic can be defined in many different ways. John Dunne said none of us is an island. We’ve realised we’re much more inter-dependent with each other, the environment and the wider cosmos. A key thing that the neo-pagan movement has hijacked from the Christian community and has now been forgotten in the Christian culture. Everything in the cosmos is inter-connected. When a butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo there is a Tsunami in Alaska! Our way, the white western rational, analytical way was seen as the best possible way. We saw ourselves as the best of God’s creation/evolution. That is no longer a credible way of living at peace with ourselves let alone other people. Spawned a whole set of social justice, environmental care, relationship restoration. Grandparents and beyond wouldn’t think in this way – they would be embarrassed by the conversation. A search for belonging is so deeply embedded in the human psyche. This is a key concern for young people.

Spiritual
Not all Christians agree, partly as some Christians operate on a very limited definition of spirituality. We restrict it to the use of explicit God language or Christian jargon. When people say there has to be something more than this is not just mid-life frustration but young people on a search experimenting with alcohol, drugs and even in suicide. We need to bring our experience of the divine and other people and say if our beliefs don’t stack up as to how God is now working we need to alter our thinking. Richard Passmore explores what it means for young people to be part of “the flow”. We see it in those who do extreme sports.

We talk about Missio Dei but God is doing lots of things that some Christians disapprove of. What happens when God does things that don’t fit our paradigms. So we need to listen to young and older people asking ourselves questions rather than starting from our own understanding. We need to listen and take it seriously. Constraining the spiritual limits not only our understanding of God but also the missional opportunities.

Inclusivity
If spirituality is a bad word then inclusivity can be even worse! It has been hijacked around gender and sex. Jesus was all about inclusivity, and the Early Churches do it with some intentionality – Paul was determined to include Jews and Gentiles, women and men and that is why he died. Including slaves and masters was difficult given the sociological context but he tried. The areas that were open to him, Paul did something about it but lost his life for it.

In today’s world inclusivity is seen around sharing food, Paul and Peter had a fight in Galatians, in 1 Corinthians they didn’t share the food properly. Hospitality was central to NT churches and comes natural to so many people today. Commissioned to do research for Church of Scotland on groups being funded, e.g. Hot Chocolate in Dundee working with marginalised young people. Hospitality was intuitive to the young people – they was always another young persons floor or sofa until they sorted themselves out. McDonaldisation of the church examines how we use sacrament of communion in the church – central to the New Testament but not much food in it now.

Big Story
20 years ago not many people went to the cinema as got all the VHS tapes and watch at your convenience. The cinema reinvented itself as a destination nothing to do itself with films, and also became a place where big story spirituality is put into films – allows us to see a bigger story where we can see ourselves in the world. People use language from movie, trying to live in it finding an opportunity to reinvent themselves.

When philosophers debate meta-narrative – people could be right or wrong – but either way people still look for a meta-narrative. Dan Brown’s gnostic search for a hidden meta-narrative.

Acts 2
Picture of the church with four statements, cf. Nicene Creed:
Apostles teaching
Fellowship
Breaking of Bread
Prayer
Not really a dichotomy between these and the ecclesia or the terms in the Nicene Creed.

Apostles Teaching
What was Jesus’ story they were repeating – big picture of the kingdom, renewal, opportunity and possibility – imaging what the world might be like and become – so come and hang out with us and let’s work it out together. By Mark 8, they are heretics by our creedal statements. The Apostle’s teaching focuses on this new way of being.

Fellowship
This is isn’t an individualist place to be. Shared community, building, food is fundamental to the ecclesia.

Breaking of Bread
Might refer to everday meals – certainly an outcome of being in community. But also the concept of the breaking of bread – happened in a meal – sharing the body of Jesus. The underlying intention is that they are a people called out.

Prayer
Unites us with the divine spirit through all times and all places. What the Nicene Creed speaks about Catholic. These are all active things that happen to recognise our oneness with humanity and the whole of creation.

Ended up turning it unexpectedly into a defence of the Nicene Creed etc., there is value in what has gone before not just for transition etc. but for the sake of the world today. What better message when contextualised as the people of God allow us to be affirmed and included in partnership with God and one another in time and space.

Where is the vision that is big enough that says this is worth giving your life for? Not sure there is such a dichotomy of Acts 2 and the beast we have today. It is impossible to recreate the 1st century, nor can we use just the 4th century creeds. “We should listen with the ears of God and speak the word of God” Bonhoeffer challenging us to look forward eschatologically. The word of God needs to be expressed afresh for each generation. How do we explain the whole Nicene Creed in 21st century language. So it invites us to work out what the church is for us today and tomorrow in the places where we minister. Maybe the question is better than many of our answers. In order to be prophetic as Christians to find the right way to formulate the questions and leave the answers to God!

Archbishop Rowan Williams says the church is a mixed economy – no one size fits all – but the values from OT, in Jesus’ vision of a world transformed, picked up in Acts, picked up by the Nicene Creed. That is our calling – how might we formulate the question in an appropriate way for the groups we work with in their own unique ways. Your Christian faith community might look different to what it looks like in my different circumstances.

Q&A
How do we develop communities?
Lesley Francis done a survey of over 60,000 church leaders, over 90% are ISTJs. In missional terms the government have an analysis of the UK population and reckon 10% are ISTJs – could it be we are doing as well as those who if they were going to follow Jesus they would do it that way! How do we do church for those who wouldn’t do it the way we do it!

The Church is institutional, how do we keep ourselves on the edge and asking those questions
Events like this, giving permission to think these are okay and good questions to ask from an institutional perspectives. All denominations are in melt down with none of them having a future. One day it will be like the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a trivial event of someone taking a brick off the top of the wall will trigger the collapse. People asking questions need to be positioned to pick up the pieces and create something new but equally trusted by the institutions. The Bishops know this, but the question is where do we go next. The whole Western Culture is in upheaval and church is a part of that. Which is why it is very exciting to be a part of this.