inspiral blog

At some point you have to nail your colours to the mast. At some point you have to commit to a way of understanding the world (assuming it’s different to the default one).

Well, you don’t have to, but it’s certainly desirable if that’s what you told people you’d do and they come expecting you to do it. Hence my night was both challenging and rewarding and encouraging all at the same time. While the story I told was told through a lens, and was different to anything I’ve ever heard before, I think (and hope) it was useful, particularly for those who had heard the traditional one as I had. Sure, it reflected a lot of my biases (reactionary ones mostly), but it also redressed a lot of imbalances, and restored some seriously important emphases in the gospel.

The idea was to keep it interactive, not only in terms of discussion, but in terms of engagement with the inner world; hence some stories and times of reflection. It’ll be interesting to talk over the next few weeks with people to see how they went.

It wasn’t complete (is it ever?), and at times it was messy, or too formal, and all inadequate, but it was also the story of a community working it out together; discovering where it was inadequate and what rang true and what didn’t, and making connections that haven’t been made in our minds before. And that’s what we are, and I’m becoming increasingly comfortable – no, not just comfortable, proud – of that.

It was also great to be called to account over my biases – some of them unconscious, some of them conscious, and forced to reckon with whether they should be there or not, and how to account for their absence. Shows me that I live out of the “left side” of the paradigm (reflecting selfishness, desire for control) sometimes, even in the way I express my faith. Reminds me to remain humble in my experience of Christianity, that not only do I not have it all together yet, but I’m still on the journey myself, working through it. What’s amazing to me, and is further evidence of God’s grace, is that it’s an ok place to be in a community like this, and that makes me feel like the luckiest pastor in the world. Seriously, I make a living out of being a part of this. Coolest. Thing. Ever.

It’s all good news.

First, apparently I had more than two lines: it was more like 5 or something, albeit all in the same scene. Nonetheless, I felt a little better about my bit part. I was also surprised that for a play that I was involved in 16 years ago, I remembered the first half almost word for word.

But this is not about me.

The cast and crew did an absolutely magnificent job of this production. I had actually forgotten how much fun it is, what a great story and how good it looks when it’s well put together. I even heard the songs in tune for the first time ever, which was rather refreshing I must say (oh, you have no idea of the torture of “an english teacher” sung flatter than roadkill on the Newell Highway).

Apologies to Thom too, who had a huge acting part which I didn’t realize when I posted initially…but what a magnificent Harry McAfee. Seriously, Paul Lynde, eat your heart out. Had the audience in stitches, and capped off the performance with an impressive singing voice (note: those comments are unrelated). Henceforth shall he be known as “Stick Boy”.

Jo…Jo Clare! The accent was impeccable, the acting spot on. A great character played perfectly.

The music was fantastic too, you could really hear how good these musicians were. Little fills and frills.

A huge congratulations go to Tara too, on her choreography. The dances were extremely effective visually, but not so ambitious they detracted from the singing or were too difficult to pull off. Not having been involved in choreography before, I imagine that’s a difficult balance to strike. Not only that, but it appeared to be flawless in its execution, which for such a large cast is no mean feat.

I’m totally not just blowing smoke here, the whole thing was just a ball of fun, and we came away genuinely impressed with everyone involved. So well done to everyone, and I hope the other two nights were as good as the one we enjoyed!

We’re all going to the Whitley and Ridley Theatre Society (WARTS) production of Bye Bye Birdie tonight, and I must say I’m looking forward to it. Not only because many of my friends are in it, but also because it will be a fun, albeit slightly weird and uncomfortable, trip down memory lane for me. Not weird and uncomfortable because I think it will be bad, but weird and uncomfortable because I was in a high school production of Bye Bye Birdie, the only time I’ve ever ‘trod beneath the proscenium arch’* in my life.

Like a Dickensian novel, I have to say it was the best of times, it was the worst of times…as a hideously introverted, and rather dorky year 7 kid, I was not well suited to the public eye (which, let’s face it, is a fairly necessary part of theatre). Mainly I wanted people to like me, and I had some vague notion that perhaps if I were to become a famous actor, or at least prove myself fairly skillful in this area, or at least put in a passable performance, it might help along the way.

But a number of factors were working against me besides the two already mentioned (dorkiness and introversion). One, I can’t act. Two, I was in Year 7, and this was a whole school play. Three, I ended up with two awful, obscure bit parts.

It really doesn’t matter how well you play a bit part, it’s still a bit part, and it’s awfully hard to become famous by playing them. But I was determined to do the best job of it I possibly could, and so I practised my two lines (yes, I had a speaking part!) over and over and over. Like George, Jerry, Kramer and Elaine with the pretzel line (still one of the funniest Seinfeld episodes ever), I tried saying it every way I knew how.

But still I held onto that faint glimmer of hope that I would somehow stand out from the crowd. That perhaps something in the play would go wrong and I would save the scene, or adlib something hilarious on the spur of the moment, or one of the leads would get sick and I would be asked to play their part. And I clung tenaciously to that hope the whole excruciating time.

This story does not have a happy ending by most people’s standards; I delivered a passable performance as a reporter and part of the chorus and life went on with little changing. I remember the feeling of being part of something bigger than just me, part of a team that was proud of all of its parts that worked together to create something, and that was great. But I guess the enduring memory of Bye Bye Birdie for me is that of an awkward, geeky kid in his early teens trying to work out how to get people to like him, and failing miserably.

*As Llewelyn Sinclair said in the Simpsons’ episode “A Streetcar Named Marge”.

“Perhaps we are all a little crazy, we who don the cap and bells and tread beneath the proscenium arch. But tonight, you will be transformed from dead-eyed suburbanites into white-hot greasefires of pure entertainment!

Except you (points to Otto), you’re not working out, I’ll be playing your part.”

In the immortal words of Adam Duritz: “When everybody loves me…I will never be lonely.”

I wish all the WARTSians the very best for tonight.

For a while now I’ve been mulling over how to do catechesis (what has variously been called “Christian education”, or “Christianity Explained”, something like what Nicky Gumbel’s “Alpha” is intended to do; basically to teach or communicate the fundamental truths of Christianity to a person) in the context of inspiral and I’ve felt myself being pulled in a number of different directions.

Initially we expected to have a bunch of refugees from the church who had been so solidly grounded in the teaching of their (usually strongly conservative, traditional) church that they were reacting against it in the strongest way possible. Thus we were expecting to need to do a lot of re-education, and in some cases de-education, to purge these people both of the damaging and misguided learning they’d done (that sounds awfully arrogant, but I don’t mean it to) but also of the emotional and spiritual pain and baggage it had caused. That would have been followed of course by some re-constructive work on a more healthy, balanced, authentic theology, which would be worked towards over time.

But then, as we realised that (mercifully) we didn’t have such people at all, but rather a group of people mostly fresh to Christianity, with little (church) baggage, or at worst, whose (church) baggage they were already able to leave behind them, we were faced with a new challenge. Little or no background to draw from, no basics on which to build. Of course, it’s not like I think people who don’t hold to Christian faith are a blank slate; indeed, everyone has a faith, a value system, a way of making sense of the world, whether they would phrase it in those words or not; therefore there is always some deconstruction and reconstruction involved in Christian discipleship. But it’s kind of cool to be able to tell the story, start to finish, to someone who hasn’t heard it before.

Now let me say that this is a situation I am grateful to be faced with. Not that there isn’t an important role in these kinds of groups (in a sense I think we stand well outside the ‘emerging church’ movement; but the reasons for that another time) for the healing and restoration of those seeking refuge from the church, but it is a distinct privilege and joy to have the opportunity of bringing the gospel freshly to a person; the “good news” of Jesus Christ delivered fresh has a kind of power that never ceases to amaze me.

So I’m trying to construct a way of telling the story that will give us an idea, indeed, a common idea, of what this whole Jesus thing is about. And in doing so, I’ve come up with a number of different ways to do that.

First, maybe discipleship (or catechesis) simply happens in the context of life. This was my initial plan of attack when I realised the group we are faced with. Surely the best way to teach is to lead by example? Not that we’re the perfect examples, but maybe if we set the structures up for inspiral to live out whole-of-life Christian faith, inspirallers would learn by doing. After all, that would make the most authentic life example; if we were already living it. That’s why we’ve chosen to move to the four week cycle of justice, life story, jesus spirituality and party; because those four sum up (albeit imperfectly) the gospel. But is that really explicit enough? Do people really know why we’re doing things the way we’re doing them, or are we just going through the motions, and wondering what on earth this is all for?

Then there’s deliberate, explicit discipleship classes. One of the reasons I favour the idea of ‘discipleship’ over catechesis is because it’s not just about head knowledge; it’s about action and reflection, experience and truth, and how they intertwine. But discipleship takes time; more than that, it takes a deliberate and intentional commitment to being a disciple. And the reality is that most of our number haven’t made that commitment; what is more, with four weeks between each Jesus spirituality night, it’s difficult to get a sense of continuity. We need a roadmap of where we’re going; we need to stand back and look at the whole picture, and maybe even see whether this is the picture for us or not. I mean, it is for me, but maybe not for everyone who’s a part of inspiral. And that’s another issue for me: the whole exclusive claims of Christianity. I don’t want to alienate anyone; frankly, whether or not they choose to be lifelong disciples of Christ, I want them to be part of this community. But there must come a time when that decision is presented to them first (because it won’t be the only time) – and it is a decision. Ideally it would be a decision that we make as a community – but I don’t know whether that’s possible in our individualistic culture, particularly with so many divided loyalties.

Or maybe there’s no place for catechesis at all? My Christian upbringing was so highbrow, so intelligence and logic based, so wordy and informationally shaped that it was almost always divorced from the beauty and cruddiness of experience (it was also full of some wonderful things that have given me reason to hold on to it). Have we reduced “legitimate” evangelism to the uncorrupted download of information, and Christian faith to the mental assent to a list of so-called factual statements? At the risk of getting all vague and philosophical, maybe to try to verbalize or sum up in words what is necessarily intangible, is to do it an injustice, or at least to get it horribly wrong. After all, if my meaning system differs from yours, won’t it lose accuracy in the translation anyway? And why are we so concerned about the accurate facsimile of truth or meaning from one person to another, as if faith amounts to the correct, uncorrupted download of information?

Or maybe I’m overthinking it.

Understand, I’m not saying accuracy isn’t important; quite the opposite in many ways. My Christian learning was almost entirely about personal morality, personal relationship with God, and substitutional atonement, concepts I would say now are tenuous in themselves, let alone as the complete story. In some ways, the difficulty lies in trying to be as accurate as possible, because goodness knows there’s no way to tell the whole story in a lifetime, let alone a few hours. Plus, to get the whole story it must be lived, not merely communicated.

And so at the moment I’m trying to write (or act, or understand, or communicate) a catechesis for inspiral. I guess in doing so, I’m not only trying to work out what to say, but what I’m actually doing in the first place, and why.

And that’s probably a good place to start.

I’ve been researching stuff for next Friday’s Jesus spirituality night, and wanted to kick off with the Ivan Illich quote where he was asked whether “evolution or revolution” was the key to real, lasting social change, and he responded by saying, “Neither; you must tell a different story.” But in my travels, I came across this quote of his, which pretty much sums up a lot of what we’re trying to do with inspiral:

“Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge. I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship.” Ivan Illich

A lot of big words, to be sure…but essentially I think he’s saying truth is best explored and secured in the context of commitment to community. Probably combining those two quotes sums it up best: that meaning is best secured in the context of a commitment to a community of alternative story. At least, that’s the way I see Christianity. Particularly in our individualistic Western society, community is a bit of a buzzword that most people fail to grasp in its entirety; it can variously mean “that collective group of people out there who are not me” or “the people who happen to reside in my area” or any number of other vague platitudes. What I’m learning (against all my Christian upbringing) is that Christianity is not mere personal conversion to an individual relationship with God, it is commitment (and therefore loyalty) to an alternative (often radically) community that is collectively trying to live out the life of God in the world. It would have been a nonsense for anyone in the early church, to say nothing of the Jewish people, to conceive of individual faith (hence “households” were converted, not individuals); like the Masai tribes Vincent Donovan encountered, there is no decision an individual can make that does not affect those around them. Therefore conversion is done in the context of community, or it is not done at all. It is the “not done at all” part that we Westerners struggle with – surely it’s better to snag one than none? – and it will remain a tension. But it is commitment first of all to the pursuit of truth as a community; and indeed “the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship” that is the basis of meaningful Christian faith.

It’s the loyalty aspect as well that presents a difficulty, because while Jesus was inclusive, and radically so, the kingdom to which he pointed demands our loyalty above all else. To say that we are loyal to this new community is in many ways to shift our loyalties from those which we have already; friends, family, money, etc., and that is not easy. The tension there is incredibly difficult; on the one hand “no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news will fail to receive a hundredfold…and in the age to come eternal life”, and on the other, as was said of Jesus, “Look…a friend of tax collectors and sinners!”

These are the twin poles of what we work towards as inspiral.

thanks to em for sharing her life story on friday night. she shared not only the events of her life, but a great deal of who she is, something which was more than validated in the time of prayer at the end.

It was great to welcome Nic Capp to our gathering, and with him, three newcomers, Jo, Penny and Jen. They must’ve wondered what on earth they’d struck when I said we may not be having dinner, and we welcomed them in to sit on the cold, hard floor. yikes.

But we did have dinner (eventually!) and the night was informative and inspiring. In particular, I found Nic’s enthusiasm for the whole concept of OI inspiring – it’s really not just a job for him, which is refreshing.

Afterwards we talked about what we could do to raise the $10,000 for a full trust bank (an ambitious goal, and an admirable one), and threw around some ideas. Stay tuned over the next few weeks to see what we come up with.

“…the measure of civilization is not whether it puts a man on the moon, but rather how it treats its poor.” — Frederik Herzog, Justice Church, 1980.

…think alike. (see my July 8th post “Jesus and John Howard”)

“…and the award for most bizarre balderdash answer is…an illegitimate grandson!”

so we had a great night on Friday, with music, boardgames and some karaoke action.

I’ve decided I love balderdash, even though I suck at it. it’s not only fun, but educational too. try using these in a sentence:

rhinophonia: extreme nasal sound in one’s voice.
mammothrept: a spoilt child raised by its grandmother.
dandyprat: a midget.
deasil: to move in a clockwise direction.
nefandous: too awful to talk about.
squonk: a mythical wart-covered bird that is always feeling sorry for itself.
catalo: the offspring of a cow and a buffalo.
snickersnee: a knife fight.

not sure how often you’d want to go around describing midgets as dandyprats, or you might get into a snickersnee and that would be nefandous. But then, nothing’s as disturbing as the mental image of a cow mating with a buffalo. in case you’re wondering because you weren’t there, I came up with the definition of “an illegitimate grandson” for the word “snickersnee”. I know, I know, it doesn’t make any sense at all, but darn if it wasn’t funny to watch people try to work it out.

later anthony serenaded us with a stirring rendition of “feelin’ groovy”, which inspired tara and I to go into “round here” and the rest of us onto other songs…good fun.

P.S. I was reminded (by my mother, of all people) that I left Peter Garrett off my list of bald-headed rock stars. I was mortified, although not so much that I forgot Peter Garrett as that my mother had to remind me.