i have enthused about and reviewed practising passion by kenda creasy dean before. i think it is a wonderful book. i am a member of the IASYM (international association for the study of youth ministry) and the latest journal had an extensive review of kenda’s book by pete ward which asked some tough questions, along with an extensive response to pete by kenda. it’s on the IASYM web site but in a members only section. anyway kenda and pete and the editor of the journal have kindly given me permission to put the collaborative review on the blog. it’s pretty long (as is the book) and i realise that blogs don’t lend themselves to lengthy pieces – you surf and get a few headlines in a spare few minutes. but there is something very important contained in this debate…

so get a glass of wine, belgian beer or coffee (depending on time of day and taste) and download the review (pdf). it will help of course if you’ve read the book…

dean critiques mainline denominations quite strongly in the book as passionless and suggests that the route to recovering passion is to engage in the ancient christian practices that will help us practice passion (the self giving love ultimately shown in christ’s death on the cross). there are a lot of people (myself included) who instinctively feel that the tradition has much more depth than the contemporary modernising expressions of worship that are so prevalent in churches, so the idea that this tradition can live again rather than be left behind is a very attractive notion. the bit of the debate i found the most interesting concerns culture and mission. pete highlights a potential negativity about culture undergirding some of kenda’s language which raises a fear that if that negativity about culture is bought into, the practices may just end up focusing on a church life too separated from mission. in response kenda pretty passionately defends that the practices are or should be missional:

In this view, the church represents a compass point, an origin, a home base for God’s work in the world, not a fence for dividing those who are “in” from those who are “out.”  To conceive of mission as bringing people from the “outside in” reinforces the “sacred is in here, profane is out there” stereotype (which Ward himself says he wants to eliminate).  It also risks focusing on justification at the expense of sanctification—or, practically speaking, making young people “targets” of mission instead of participants in it.

But God’s mission is much, much larger than this.  The mission of God is the Passion of Christ, which accomplished the salvation of the world–and whenever we practice passion, we participate in that mission.  The rescue, in other words, has already been accomplished by God.  Our job is not to save teenagers from child-eating gods but to expose these gods as frauds, to laugh at their pretence, to unmask the feeble power of self-fulfilment with a single life-changing act of self-giving love.

i love that definition of mission – wow! and i think like kenda i am much more sceptical than pete about consumer culture and want to disarm its gods as well as play with its toys!

there is a tension here that i have felt many times though. my most recent thinking about it has been in the distinctive emphases of alt worship which i have grown up in and love and the exciting development of missional communities especially being pioneered in australia. i think that alt worship is like kenda’s voice – reinvigorating and playing with the liturgies and traditions of the church to give it an incarnational engagement with culture and to make connections between worship and church and the real world. in my own experience this fuels mission – sends me out. but missional communities are like pete’s voice – moving out because of a new context and developing very different forms of church life. the guys i have met from australia meet in a pub or someone’s home but the emphasis isn’t really on the practices of the church. it’s on incarnational presence amongst different communities who are unlikely to come near the church. i love what these communities do as well! and there is the tension for me. if i’m honest i fear that the missional communties need and maybe will seek to find more engagement with practices because our mission will only be sustained if it does enable us to reconnect with the passion of Christ. how is that happening? but equally alt worship has found itself too much caught on the inside of the church and needs a kick up the missional backside that the likes of hirsch and ward have helped give in their own ways…

no conclusions for me in this. i sort of think it’s both and… or is that a cop out?! anyway big thanks to kenda and pete for hanging out their thoughts in public. and if you are in youth ministry and not a member of IASYM then join…

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