Wednesday, March 02, 2005
[25.1] CHURCHES NEED APOLOGETICS AND PASTORAL CARE, SAYS REPORT
A report commissioned by a group called the Ecumenical Research Committee (which carried out a church survey in 2003, but is not formally linked to any of Britain and Ireland's recognised ecumenical bodies), says that the decline in church attendance in these islands is linked to two major factors. One is the reduction in effective pastoral care being offered by clergy, in particular. The other is the decline in effective Christian apologetics - the attempt to explain the nature of Christian faith and its plausibility for people in a post-Christian culture.
The findings, reported in this week's Church of England Newspaper, are derived from a yearlong £20,000 survey which attracted 14,000 respondents to a tick-box survey. Some 73 per cent of respondents either explicitly or implicitly referred to a lack of explanation for belief as a reason for the decline in church numbers and interest in Christianity.
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Posted by: Simon Barrow/Anne Richards 3/2/2005 07:00:00 AM
Thursday, January 20, 2005
[20.1] SPRINGER ROW RAISES GOSPEL AND CULTURE QUESTIONS
The massive protests against BBC2's decision to show Jerry Springer - The Opera on late night TV, especially from Christian groups, raises a mass of questions about faith and culture. The show, which is a stage production that transferred from the fringe to London's West End last year, portrays the sad world of the legendary chat show host's guests. The humour is in combining high art music with 'trailer trash' stories, humour and bad language.
At the end of the first half, Springer is shot by someone who is furious about the humiliation inflicted on one of his guests. In the second half, hallucinating on the brink of death, he imagines the "greatest ever Jerry Springer show" in hell, where biblical figures (including God, the devil, Jesus, mary and Adam and Eve) have a stand up row about whose fault it is that the world is in such a mess. Springer's conclusion is that "there's no right and wrong, everything is holy": a larger parody of his actually "be good to yourselves and each other" closing remarks.
Christian groups have said that the show is obscene and blasphemous, though many of the protests have come from people who have not seen it or refuse to watch it. Ironically, a number of Christians have been involved in the production, and they take a very different view.
A sympathetic review of the issues the show raises is contained in Simon Barrow's article, Jerry Springer - A Post-Christendom Opera? He points to the cultural gulf between many Christians and those who work in the media and entertainment business, the difficulties of handling religious offence, and the theological questions about what Christians are witnessing to in an age where dominant Christian assumptions no longer reign.
Ekklesia's Jonathan Bartley also says that Christians have missed the opportunity for a serious discussion about the meaning of the Gospel by getting hung up about bad language and portrayals of God and Jesus which dissent from cherished Christian understandings. We can't control what others say about us, he says. But we can make a positive contribution ourselves.
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Posted by: Simon Barrow/Anne Richards 1/20/2005 06:09:00 AM
Friday, December 24, 2004
***CHRISTMASTIDE AND NEW YEAR GREETINGS***
See you in 2005...
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Posted by: Simon Barrow/Anne Richards 12/24/2004 04:32:18 PM
Thursday, November 11, 2004
[19.1] REVIEWS OF McGRATH
A number of review comments from leading scientists about Alister McGrath's new critique of Richard Dawkins (see yesterday's post) have appeared at the Blackwell site. Several of them are also Christians. But Francis Collins, Director of the National Human Genome Research Project is not. Google's cache on the book is here. Dawkins has yet to reply. It should be a lively debate, following on from the biologist's public encounters with Keith Ward, formerly Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, in the late '90s.
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Posted by: Simon Barrow/Anne Richards 11/11/2004 07:20:43 AM
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
[18.1] GENES, MEMES AND GOD
Bishop David Atkinson, the Anglican co-chair of MTAG (and a former scientist himself) recommends that we read the new book by Alister McGrath: Dawkins' God: Genes, Memes and the Meaning of Life (Blackwell, Oxford, 22 October 2004, £9.99).
The author writes about this project as follows:
'Is atheism losing its appeal? At first sight, this might seem an absurd question. After all, leading atheist Richard Dawkins recently topped Prospect magazine's poll of public intellectuals, while Jonathan Miller's heavily promoted BBC4 series A Brief History of Disbelief started its run last week, proclaiming that atheism is the wisdom of our age. Only fools and charlatans, it seems, would dare to disagree.
'We have heard all this before, of course. For more than a century, leading sociologists, anthropologists and psychologists have declared that their children - or surely their grandchildren - would live to see the dawn of a new era in which the illusions of religion would be outgrown. Yet there are ominous straws in the wind suggesting that now it is atheism that is in trouble.
'Atheism, once seen as Western culture's hot date with the future, is losing its appeal. Its confident predictions of the demise of religion seem hopelessly out of place.
'Celebrity preoccupation with the kabbalah or New Age beliefs is easily dismissed as superficial - yet it is a telling sign of our times. It reflects a deep-seated conviction that there is more to life than what we see around us.
'Surging interest in spirituality and growing impatience with the intellectual arrogance and intolerance of media atheists is leaving atheism stranded on a modernist sandbank.
Furthermore, its intellectual credentials are under fire. Dawkins, atheism's most articulate and influential proponent, argues that we will - or ought to - abandon religious ideas as children abandon their innocent and naive belief in Santa Claus.
'It is time for us to grow up, he tells us, "leave the crybaby phase, and finally come of age".
'Yet Dawkins' arguments simply do not lead to that conclusion. Nor do they stand up to critical examination. Dawkins' rhetoric implies that the natural sciences constitute an intellectual superhighway to atheism; but his logic fails to deliver on this promise.
'He seems to have made the gradual transition from a scientific populariser to a dogmatic anti-religious propagandist more suited to the 19th than the 21st century.
'In part, my reason for writing Dawkins' God - the first book-length study of how he moves from his scientific presuppositions to atheist conclusions - was concern about the quality of his engagement with religious issues.
'For example, he ignores the awkward fact that the history and philosophy of science raise the most serious doubts about whether any worldview - atheist or religious - can be constructed on scientific grounds.
'Dawkins' approach simply airbrushes away problems, such as the philosophical difficulties raised by moving from observation to theory or deciding on the "best explanation" of what is observed.
'If the great debate about God is to be determined solely on scientific grounds, the outcome can only be agnosticism - a principled, scrupulous insistence that the evidence is insufficient to allow a safe verdict to be reached. Either a decision cannot be reached at all or it must be reached on other, non-scientific grounds.
'As the late Stephen Jay Gould, America's leading evolutionary biologist, insisted, the natural sciences simply cannot adjudicate on the God question. If the sciences are used as the basis of either atheism or religious beliefs, they are misused. So need atheism worry about its future? Miller and Dawkins clearly think not. But I wonder.
'Maybe it was once brave and intellectually sophisticated to dismiss those who believe in God as deluded, unthinking fools. Now it just seems outdated, arrogant and intolerant.
'I hope we can move beyond shopworn rhetoric and have a serious discussion about the evidential basis for atheism and its future.
'As a former atheist myself, though, I wonder how much longer it can rely on recycling the weary and increasingly unconvincing cliches of yesteryear while overlooking the shocking legacy of institutional atheism in the 20th century.'
Alister McGrath is professor of historical theology at Oxford University.
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Posted by: Simon Barrow/Anne Richards 11/10/2004 07:34:18 AM
Wednesday, October 20, 2004
[17.1] INTO THE LABYRINTH - MTAG LATEST
Anne Richards writes:
Imagine entering a labyrinth and traversing its paths. You encounter a heap of wreckage and twisted metal, scrapped cars, all the junk of human waste. What does this mean? What are you supposed to think? A little further on and you encounter a huge cross, hung with wine bottles, pouring with water and shot through with brilliant light. What is this? What is this water and poured out wine? Even further on and you are blasted with the heat of flaming boulders, the earth caught fire. What is this encounter? Is it God?
This story of a Labyrinth experience set the scene for our last meeting and underlines the method we are now using for our work. Our material is not about interpreting people’s experiences, re-reading them and re-presenting them as Christian discourse, but enabling people to have experiences and helping them to name for themselves the God who is disturbing them, calling them, urging them to live fully as they are intended to do.
If we prescribe what we will say and think and feel before we enter the labyrinth, if we’ve already got the interpretation lined up, then we are denying to ourselves the element of awe and wonder, of being surprised by the God of surprises, of being shocked or overwhelmed. David Ford reminds us in The Shape of Living about the importance of being overwhelmed by the power and presence of the living God and this overwhelming is something that our work on the experience of our senses offers.
Central to our discussion at this meeting was the sense of taste: taste and see the Lord your God is good. In our rich western society, eating is largely divorced from the experience of being hungry. We live in the time of the celebrity chef, the chic ambience of restaurants, the pleasure (?) of receiving a coin sized roundel of meat calling hopelessly to the elegant green leaf on the farther shore of a delicate china plate. We go on diets, we binge and fast. We worry endlessly about foods that are ‘good’ for us, foods that are ‘bad’ for us. We are greedy and wasteful. We get fat. We die.
And elsewhere of course, people do not get fat. They have little or nothing to eat. And they die.
The Son of Man came eating and drinking. But who did the cooking and the washing up? The risen Lord cooked breakfast, offered hospitality and the sharing of food. The risen life offers this physical reality and sense experience: taste and see.
So in reaching out to people outside the church, we shouldn’t be telling them about food but starting with real ingredients: taste and see. It’s no good telling them about God and expecting them to believe our experiences offered to them as dream food, beyond their ken. We have forgotten that God’s command is to live. George Herbert knew it:
You must sit down sayes Love and taste my meat
And I did sit and eat.
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Posted by: Simon Barrow/Anne Richards 10/20/2004 05:21:57 AM
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
[16.1] NEW VIDEOS EXPLORE LEADERSHIP FOR GOSPEL COMMUNICATION
Developing Shared Leadership and Leadership Stories – two videos (November 2004) £8.99 each or £14.99 for the set.
Exclusive footage from the 2003-4 ‘Future Church Conference’ of Building Bridges of Hope, the leading ecumenical project supporting missional church.
BBH explores the practicalities of mission accompaniment and communicating the Gospel effectively today.
In the first video (55 minutes) eight church initiatives across Britain and Ireland share their insights. The second video (89 minutes) looks at the ‘how and why’ of empowering church leadership with vision and values.
Containing a group study leaflet, these videos are hands-on rather than ‘made for TV’. The official publication date is 15 November 2004. Email here for further information
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Posted by: Simon Barrow/Anne Richards 10/19/2004 08:09:50 AM
Saturday, October 16, 2004
[15.1] ENGAGING THE BIBLE
Many people in contemporary society assume that the Bible has nothing to say to the ordinary world of work, leisure, lifestyle, innovation and the political vision for the well-being of society. One of MTAG's consultants, David Spriggs, works for Bible Society, which is currently working in four sectors concerned with making just such a connection: education, politics, the arts and the media.
"We are trying to demonstrate how the biblical narrative can provide an alternative vision for public life. Public theology in public engagement is a project seeking to make the Bible heard in cultural and public life, while a vision for the renewal of public life is an initiative in the Bristol area that aims to put the Bible back into community life and public debate."
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