if you were bedazzled by ikon’s service at greenbelt and found it incomprehensible then that was the point… according to pete
this may not be everyone’s cup of tea but one of the big postmodern debates is around truth and interpretation. i have mentioned churchandpomo before that is having a series of engagements with jamie smith’s whose afraid of postmodernism. the last engagement is by pete rollins and along with the conversation in the comments takes a bit of chewing over but is really getting at some interesting issues… (if you like a bit of philosophy)
I’m sure it’s just me, but my brain always kerns pomo as porno. Such an unhelpful word 😉
It was an interesting service, no doubt. One of the thoughts that kept turning over for me was the balance between public and private acts of worship. What one can do at a ‘home game’ is perhaps different to what goes on ‘away’ at an event like Greenbelt. And ‘bedazzlement’ may turn to ‘befuddlement’ or, worse, a complete opposition if people don’t understand your vector – the direction of your movement. I’m not sure iKon got this wrong – to have played it so my parents were bedazzled would have meant others were bored senseless – but I’m not sure it was quite right either. I’m totally with Pete’s concept of bedazzlement, but I think this shock needs a context too.
Hey Jonny and Kester. I think you may be right Kester in what you are saying and a lot of this needs teased out. There is too much to go into here about the run up to the service and the post reflections however I will say that one thing we would like to have done, in retrospect would be to have created a space for discussion and interegation afterwards. Indeed, if Ikon happens next year we would like to have a space afterwards for precisly this.
… And funnily enough, that’s exactly what your seminar did brilliantly. So you’re right – a time for discussion could work really well.
The other issue is my constant need to try to exorcise the word ‘service’ and all its unhelpful connotations. We all need excusing for using it in the above! As theodrama, I personally thought it worked brilliantly, but I was aware of those around me who didn’t know ikon’s vector. In some ways, there’s little you could do about that (like the guy next to me who had no idea who Paisley was), but in others there are things we can may be do to prepare people for bedazzlement.
This may be something that needs looking into for the GB worship programme overall. The term ‘service’ does bring with it certain expectations, so may be we need to change the language on that. And though there’s not room in the programme for more full backgrounds, there may be some other ways we could help people to get into the know a bit about things before they come along?
i had read pete’s comments on the ‘ikon service’ as soon as they were posted in august and after reading his ‘explianation’ still felt a little confused….and still do.
i would agree with kester in his public/private statement, i am sure that ikon had ‘worked through’ the elements of the ‘service’ on their home turf, to ‘let us have it’ as a presentation was a litle bedazzling…but there were some great points that were addressed and the whole ‘service’ was VERY thought provoking.
i had seen (experienced) the ‘queer’ service the year before at GB and was prepared to be challenged, but i am sure that there were others (not in the know) who would have been comletely mistified by it all…..
another good point, made by kester, was that of ‘GB services’ i also went to the burn service (vineyard) which was also very good (again this was more of a presentation) but not (how can i say this without digging a big hole for myself) a traditional front of house lead service that i think many people had been expecting.!…perhaps this is something that GB could look at for next year.
I found the ikon worship to be the place i felt safest and most at home for the whole of greenbelt. Maybe we just have to accept that what makes some people uncomfortable is what is home for others, and that part of Greenbelt being a gracious and generous community is to deliberately create a whole variety of spaces where those differences might be encountered and honoured.
Having a space for discussion and ‘interrogation’ would really make me nervous that we would begin to intellectualise what was bedazzling… (but i guess i could just choose not to be part of it!)
i’m with cheryl on this one… i have led things before and then been exposed to critique/discussion straight after – a truly awful prospect. spare yourselves ikon – keep the mystery alive.
i agree with Cheryl and Jonny here. Keep the mystery alive Pete! – there is probably more debate going on now about the service than there would be had you ‘explained’ what it was all about afterwards at greenbelt. I see your role as opening up thought, not closing it down.
Speaking as someone who was part of another service at greenbelt (the garden) we attempted something similar (but no where nearly as effectively as Ikon!) to be making a provocative point through the medium of a worship service. One guy who gave some feedback on the greenbelt website forum suggested that what we had done wasn’t worship – and i guess this is actually about the expectations that we come with when we go to such services. What things we rule in and out as an ‘act of worship’ or rather as opening a door into a profound encounter with something divine and unexplainable.
I echo Jonny on the interesting exchange between Pete and Jamie Smith – Pete calls Jamie’s book “an attempt to sell Radical Orthodoxy to the Emerging Church” which I find a rather misleading summary to say the least. As a fan of Jamie’s book I find it offers an important alternative reading of pomo/post-structuralist authors compared with Pete’s. While Pete (often) writes like an angel and the book is full of nuggets which delight – How not to – constantly feels like an attempt to not have your cake and eat it (actually sounds like a Rollinsism – or should it be to have your cake and not eat it or perhaps both..) and I think the debates with Jamie are opening up some important theological and philosophical sightlines into Pete’s work, which overall I am as unconvinced by as he is by Jamie’s..
thanks to your encouraement i’ve been tracking the churchandpomo discussions (i’d initally been dismissive). i really wanted to like smith’s book, partly because on the surface it looked like the sort of thing I would have tried to write. but it was pretty disappointing really, especially on foucault. has the theoloy and pomo debate moved that little in the past 4 years?
however, the comments have lead me to some good blogs though, so it’s good in a roundabout way.
Thanks for the comments about Ikon. On a different note I must confess that my comment about attempting to sell RO to the EC might seem a little blunt. Although, in my defence, it was in the context of a two line summery rather than a larger critique. I should perhaps drop the pejorative phrase ‘attempting to sell’ although I think that the comment may still be accurate – indeed I wonder if Jamie himself might agree to some extent. To me Jamie is bringing the abstract work of RO to the church, and he has judged that a place where this thinking may be embraced is within the emerging context.
I am very much enjoying the discussion around his book and feel that the comment section is allowing us to get into a more nuanced discussion.
Am reading on-line red letter version of New Testament. Seems that Jesus has a tendency to bring clarity rather than a sense of confusion
What does this post-modern stuff really mean to a simple man on the street in Bradford? NT says the common people heard him gladly, is this currently not in anyone’s thinking??? or is the new post-modern church just a new elitist kind of sub-culture???
Explanation is the wrong word… I wouldn’t want to advocate any demystifying, that’s for sure. But some kind of context can help ‘deepen’ the mystery, rather than push people away from it.
I was speaking with someone yesterday, not about this in particular, and they mentioned something they’d read by Ian Mobsby about those who experienced Hard Postmodernism (I’m not risking that diminutive Porno here 😉 being far more likely to fail to engage in any meaningful reconstruction of faith once they had deconstructed. In pop-speak, they ‘lost their faith.’
I know Pete mentioned that over the next year he felt iKon were going to have to engage in more reconstruction, and I wondered if this might simply mean ‘going soft’, if you get my drift. Though I’d not agree with the sentiments of the previous comment entirely (Jesus’ parables weren’t ‘clear’), I think there is a basic hospitality and welcome issue that needs to be paralleled carefully with bedazzlement. And what we found at Vaux is that we often failed to get that right: we had deep mystery and bedazzlement, but little face-to-face contact and eye-to-eye welcome. It’s one of my regrets.
I feel that such comments about the ‘simple man’ are a little patronising. I live in a working class estate and understand that people here face some very practical problems which prevent them from activities which I have been lucky enough to pursue. However they are not simple and don’t have more basic needs or desires than the people who call them that. Mystery, questioning, thinking and doubt all make sense to the ‘simple people’ as well.
And as to the bible bringing clarification. I admit that some version of the bible (like on-line ones, or the living bible) have an interpretive bias toward ironing out difficulties with the text to make it all sound very simple (that word again), but Jesus could hardly be understood in that way – saying some very obscure things like being born again etc. (my limited understanding is that a translation which approaches the Greek is generally more difficult to understand – just perhaps the point of parables is not so much to bring clarity in the listener as to evoke transformation in the listener).
I find it bizzare when people say that mystery, compexity and unknowing are for the elite only. My own experience as one without any qualifications or proper schooling was that it is not. It were these things that eventually got me, as an adult, into full-time education. But that was lucky chance. Regardless, being a ‘simple man’ I found I had quite a capacity for deep thoughts – like us all.