The Way Ahead – Week 3: Talk about Culture

I love the band Dream Theater - I saw them in Manchester the other week and they were amazing, but I have also seen them play many times in London, Leeds and on one occasion I travelled to New York to see them playing with Yes at Jones Beach – I was one of 40,000 people watching them in a concert with waves lapping the stage – it was way cool. On one occasion I was at one of their concerts in London with another Methodist Minister and I was suddenly struck by the type of people that made up their audience. It was almost exclusively male, white and with the same balding head and goaty beard I had. They were also about my age, and from the conversation I had had with the people in front of me, and other friends I knew were going, I knew there was a large percentage of IT professionals present, put simply, I was in an audience of people like me who shared my musical taste. To use street talk, I was with “my people”.

I then suddenly found myself asking a question; if I could tell all these people about Jesus, and they all wanted to know more about him, where would they all go to church? We had all gathered to listen to enjoy an evening of the sort of progressive thrash metal that Dream Theater play – how would these people feel if they turned up at one of our churches only to be given a copy of Hymns and Psalms and asked to sing hymns from 150 or 200 years ago in a service that was structured in a way that they may not understand, and which would almost certainly use words that they would not understand, such as salvation, justification, redemption, and Trinity - the list goes on and and on. I suspect that were this unlikely scenario ever to happen, in reality the reaction would be mixed, and it is all hypothetical anyway, but is interesting to ask what the culture is that the church believes it is fulfilling the needs of – and whether this is the predominant culture of the community within which we are placed. I am afraid that I have always nursed the suspicion that in reality we are a small community reaching out to a few people who are just like us, and no one else – but I would be happy to be proved wrong.

In the tradition of the St. Thomas Christians, the Christians who come from Kerala in Southern India, they have adopted the Hindu Caste system within their Christian faith. You may wonder how they can do this, and when I was talking with my friend Father Abraham Thomas, a Priest of the Indian Orthodox church who is of this tradition, I asked him this question. He smiled and said that everyone was welcome in their churches, but that they “only evangelised within their caste”. Just about every person I have told this story to has started by getting annoyed at it, until the follow up question is asked, “so what is the caste that our church only evangelises within?”. At which point a great deal of “hmmm”ing and thinking goes on – as they realise that this is pretty much what we do as well.

Even if I leave out issues of ethnicity, sexuality, and a number of other things that should not divide us, but which often do; there are much more basic things that can get in the way. How many events in the life of our church are arranged for parents with children? How many of you reading this blog are doing so because work prevents you from getting to one of the groups? How do you give time to your faith, your family, and your career? At Royston we had two groups entitled “Guys in a pub” and “Girls in a pub” – they were set up for Dad’s to go out in one night and the Mum’s on a different night. But behind these groups was a group of older ladies within the church who would come and babysit or help out to enable these groups to go ahead. These groups were trying to reflect a culture of young families within the church for whom there was pretty much no other way they could be involved – but they were supported by others in the church who saw the importance of this work of working with a part of the community that they themselves were not a part of.

Now let me further complicate the mix further. I think I can comfortably argue that there is a spirit in our age that means that we are all trying to do more and more, and feeling that life is evermore getting more complicated – again I would argue that these things can be linked, with the sense of not wanting to fall behind making us do more to stay ahead, which means that we have to balance even more our schedules, which makes feel even more out of touch, and so on. Most of us work hard at what we do, and very often it is our families that suffer that it all gets too much. To people for whom this is the culture that they come from, church can seem like a waste of valuable time – time they could be doing something else, or precious time to be with family. If this is true, how does the church reach out into this culture as well?

Pause for a moment and think about these first set of questions from the material:

1.       Many people feel stressed and lacking in time. It has been suggested that our culture has “a distorted relationship with time”. How do you respond to this idea?

2.       How would you describe your relationship to money?

3.       Where is the space for God in your life?

4.       What kind of self do you feel is being fostered within your working life or retirement?

Our material this week invites us to think about how we can speak to our modern culture in a way that is relevant, real and yet where we seek to put forward different ways of viewing the world. This is a path that is strewn with problems; how do we engage with a British Culture where people are used to being able to choose what they want? How do we offer hospitality to a culture that is used to paying for everything and where they assume that if they are paying, they have a right to say how things are? (You may call it the offertory, but you would be surprised how many people think they are paying the minister’s salary and that they therefore have the right to tell the minister what to do!!) It is an issue that we encounter regularly at funerals where sometimes non-church people want to re-write the liturgy to say what they want it to say – because they are paying the minister!! I had this myself only a few weeks ago.

The material asks:

1)      What traditions do you think you can learn from?

2)      Are there spiritualties it is dangerous to get involved with?

3)      Are there dangers in our own way of believing?

Finally, and at the risk of being controversial, the church loves to think that we are counter-cultural and about the business of changing the world. I would argue that history shows us that in fact the church tends to be driven by the values of society and is often behind the curve. I think the slow adoption of change in relation to attitudes towards women and sexuality amongst other things are perfect examples of where the church should have given a lead, but in fact is actually dragging its feet. Those who oppose this point of view very often see the church as the bastion of “old fashioned morality” but I am afraid that I simply can’t see this in so many cases. In our desire to engage with cultures that are different from our own we need to always be open to seeing that God is in that culture ahead of us and challenging us to accept things that we may feel uncomfortable with. Don’t get me wrong, I am not arguing that everything is negotiable, clearly it isn’t, but I do think that we need to be clear on what is “up for grabs” and what is not. To me at least, changing the music that we use to reflect the cultures that surround us is totally acceptable, and part of how we bridge the gap between “us” and “them” – but something like changing my belief in the uniqueness of Jesus Christ is something that is not on the table. I really would like to have worship that Dream Theater fans would feel at home in, but if I have to remove the Gospel to achieve this then I, for one, am not interested, and likewise if by doing this I drive everyone else away, likewise what does that achieve? We need to have a way of engaging with the many cultures that we are a part of, but also of working in partnership with others to ensure that between us the needs of all people are met; we are not called to be all things to all people; but we are called to be what God wants us to be, to those people that he sends us to be alongside.

Some final questions to think about:

1)      What are the principles on which you base your personal morality?

2)      How can different generations share perceptions?

3)      Why are issues about sexuality the ones that divide us?

4)      How exactly should the Bible guide our decisions?