Northumbria Community

Man, it's been a long time since I blogged here. Anybody out there still reading?

I just spent a week at the Northumbria Community in England. About a dozen people at my church are following the daily prayer pattern from there, so I wanted to go and see what it was like.

I haven't got space to describe this Community, so the best way to get oriented is to go to www.northumbriacommunity.org.

People have been saying, "So, how was it? What did you do? What did you learn?" And to be honest, it's hard to describe. This is a community of people that consists of about 7 or 8 who live full time in a 15th century manor house in the English countryside, and who build their days around four times of prayer -- and 250 or so "companions" scattered throughout the UK, plus a few in the US.

But I grasped a couple of things relevant to this blog about the "untied church." These folks are really untied. They don't travel anywhere to worship. They don't hold "church services" at the house. Sundays are days like every other, structured around morning, midday, evening and nighttime offices.

Which seems to be a growing phenomenon in Britain. My impression is that lots of people are living lives of disciplined Christian spirituality, prayer and service, but are not connected to congregations in traditional ways. I also suspect that they're flying completely under the radar of the statisticians who tell us that Christianity is dying in Britain because only 5% of British bottoms are in British pews on a given Sunday morning.

I also met a young woman who's part of a home-based church plant in Leeds consisting of families who gather on Sunday for a shared meal, and a selection of Scripture reading, prayer, discussion, personal reflection and whatever else comes up.

The point made to me by several people is that the whole weight of the Christian life is not loaded onto a 10:30 a.m. worship service and a busy round of church activities.

There's a definite downside to this. It felt a little bit loosey-goosey to me, and I wondered how much staying power some of these "fresh expressions" are going to have -- whether they will be able to nurture a faith that is more than ephemeral. Like it or not, we have institutions so that we won't have to be continually reinventing the wheel. It remains to be seen whether some post modern expressions of Christianity will be around long enough even to evolve.

But, the Northumbria Community is in its fourth decade and shows no signs of doing anything other than attracting more and more people to its brand of prayer-based spiritual life, focused on the two values of "availability and vulnerability." And, home based Christian communities are the original form of the church.

I'm interested in what's going on in England because I see it as a bit of glimpse into the future for us in Canada -- a couple of generations down the road of church decline and secularism. My wife and I are going back in June as part of a sabbatical to experience more deeply some of the ferment that is happening there, and to add to our reflections about a church that is increasingly "untied" from modern denominationally based structures.

What's missing?

(If you're maybe just tuning into this blog for the first time, it started as a follow-up to a research project I did in 2007 on church "affiliates" -- people who remain connected to the church, even if they're not all that active. )

On my survey, I asked people about two different kinds of reasons that they didn't go to church more often. One had to do with the church -- you know, boring, out-of-date, unwelcoming, bad music. And there was no clear-cut, #1 reason, at least not from the group that answered my survey. Nothing that stood out.

The other set of questions had to do with personal lifestyle issues -- and the results here were clearer. People are working on Sunday, or they go like crazy all week and Sunday morning is their "Sabbath" -- their break -- which includes break from going to church.

But I wonder to what extent people are really turned off by what goes on in your typical church -- or at least not turned on. I wonder how much people's perceptions of churches are closed, judgmental, or irrelevant is the main disincentive to being there. People who answered my survey weren't hostile to the church. They had pretty good feelings about the church.

But I keep running up against genuine hungers that people have, and which the church ought to be really good at addressing -- hungers for community, forgiveness, meaning and purpose, etc.

So, what's missing?

Vision

Last night I showed a DVD at my church called "Celebrating What's Right with the World." It's by Dewitt Jones, an award-winning photographer who has done a lot of work for National Geographic. It was made for corporate training sessions, but really has a lot of parallels to the church.

Because what he's talking about is vision and how we see things. He starts off saying that he used to think he had to see something to believe it, but now he knows that he has to believe before he can see it.

And I think that's one of the problems we've got in the church today. We've lost our vision and our imagination. All we see is decline and irrelevance. Ironically, though, being fixated on what's wrong prevents us from creatively addressing it because we lose the vision of what we should be.

"When vision is clear, then the passion and creativity are there as well." I really wonder in my own church and certainly my own denomination if the dearth of passion and creativity is connected to a loss of vision -- vision of what God can and wants to do through the church.

Sometimes it takes a voice from outside to tell us what we need to hear. And I'm well aware that "Celebrating What's Right With The World" is chock full of all kinds of motivational cliches that get thrown around in the business world.

But what he says is true. We have to believe it to see it. And the problem with many churches today is that they don't really believe in themselves -- in who they are, what they have to offer, and what God wants of them.

Council Meeting

Update on our new Council format. I took Chuck Olsen's suggestion and together with my ministerial colleague Jeff Maissan and our Council Chair Dan Plunkett, we structured our last agenda on the same format as Sunday worship. We started off with the Christ candle and prayer, reviewed the past (minutes, correspondence, etc.), did some biblical reflection on Acts 6: 1-7 (the Word) and then used the committee and team reports as the Offering. In my mind, it made a huge difference. Our finance team presented a draft budget with a huge projected shortfall. In the past, the entire meeting would have been taken over with not very productive chattering about what we could do. The presentation was surrounded by prayer and, even though everyone grasped the enormity of it, the usual degree of anxiety was absent, I felt, from the room. Something to build on.

Spiritual Leaders

Back from a week-long course on transitional ministry. One of the things I picked up that was most helpful is some ways of turning church boards or councils into communities of spiritual leaders. (That's the title of a book by CHarles M. Olsen, from the Alban Institute.) Churches share some characteristics in common with businesses, but they're fundamentally different and require different leadership models. I know our monthly Council meeting is often a big YAWN -- most of the time spent on rehashing stuff that has already happened, or, if you took two steps back and looked at it, isn't really all that important. Olsen describes a church that patterns their meeting agendas after their Sunday worship -- with time for thanksgiving and confession, story telling and biblical reflection. The "offering" comes when the committees place their reports on the table as an act of offering, and the follow-up is in the form of prayerful reflection. This doesn't have anything to do directly with affiliates, but if congregations were more intentional about leadership formation, I know it would have an impact on the way we appear to those on the outside, or on the margins.

The Spirituality of Church "Jobs"

I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to engage more people in spiritual practices. It's a tough row to hoe. As my study confirms, people are pathologically busy. One symptom of that is the withdrawal from involvement. It's getting harder and harder to mobilize enough people to do all the things that a busy congregation is used to doing. But people express a longing for transcendence and for the experience of God.
One of the men in my church grew up Roman Catholic. He used to take responsbility for preparing the elements for the eucharist -- communion. Then, I guess somebody decided he was too busy and helpfully relieved him of that task.
He told me that he really misses it, because the time spent preparing the bread and the wine (juice actually) for communion was an intensely devotional time for him. He reflected on the meaning of Jesus' self offering when he cut the bread and filled the cups.
Maybe we contribute to the problem by the way we ask people to be involved. We either say, "Look, it's really tough to get enough volunteers, will you pretty please do this?" (appealing to guilt), or we say, "It won't take hardly any time" -- in other words, it's not very important.
Maybe what we should be doing is offering people opportunities to draw closer to God -- and teaching them how simple things like preparing or serving communion, working in the nursery or taking up and counting the offering can be windows open to the presence of God.

Soul Food

We all know, don't we, that people today make a pretty sharp distinction between "religion" and "spirituality." Religion means "organized religion" -- church, doctrine, do this, don't do that. (Personally, I prefer disorganized religion.) "Spirituality" on the other hand means getting in touch with the deep-down inner things that lead to God.

Now, just as an interesting aside, I did my Ph. D. dissertation on a theologian who lived in the early 20th century, and back then, "religion" was the good word. It meant personal experience as opposed to "dogma" or "theology," which was all the head stuff. So, it's interesting how things change.

In my survey I wanted to probe some of the respondents' views about spirituality.

Which of the following things help you to be more in touch with your spirituality?

And there were 12 options:

Coming to Church on Sunday
My relationships with family and friends.
Sharing my experiences with someone who understands.
Prayer and meditation.
Observing important occasions or familiar rituals.
Music.
The arts (film, visual arts, poetry)
Being out in nature.
Exercising or working out.
Science fiction or fantasy.
Reading.
Other.

And the top 6 choices were:

Being out in nature (55%)
Relationships with family and friends (55%)
Observing important occasions and familiar rituals (47%)
Music. (47%)
Prayer and meditation (39%)
Coming to Church on Sunday. (39%)

What are the implications of these findings for the way we do church? Part of the problem I am wrestling with is that the church can't with integrity simply say, "OK, that's what these people say they want, so we'll do it" and start planning Sunday morning nature walks instead of worship services. The yearning for nature, just to take an example, is right in line with a biblical view of what it means to be human, but it can never be allowed to become a kind of nature worship or nature mysticism. So how do our churches help people to connect their spiritual experience of nature with the Christian message?

A couple of things that surprised me was the large number of those who responded to "Observing important occasions or familiar rituals." Now that's something we ought to be able to sink our teeth into. I think churches should be able to help people use ritual and celebration to deepen their spiritual lives. That in turn resonates well with the Church's long tradition of using repeated, meaningful events to draw people into the life of God.

I'm also gratified that, even though it finished tied for 5th place, 4 out of 10 people still think that coming to church on Sunday is an important element of their spirituality. Remember, these are people, the majority of whom by their own admission show up in church anywhere from sporadically to never. So, that's an encouraging sign.

But one of our great challenges is to develop ways of tapping into the much ballyhooed "spiritual hunger" of postmodern people in such a way that they gain access to the riches of Christian tradition and experience.

I know people are reading this blog because they tell me. If you're reading, why not post a comment? I'd love to get some feedback, especially on this topic.