yesterday i was given a grove booklet – the road to growth less travelled by david runcorn. tim dakin, general secretary of cms was giving them away as he thought it was so good. tim is always enthusing about books and i've found several gems through his recommendations. the subtitle is spiritual paths in a missionary church. and yes it is a gem.
it's a real surprise, almost a relief, to find a book on the spirituality of mission that doesn't exhaust you in its ehthusiasm and hype. he suggests that the sea changes in culture have left the church bewildered and that the language and theme of exile might give some clues in the quest for a sustaining spirituality. how do we find depth when the temptation is for quick fixes or relevance? i loved this quote he writes from henri nouwen – i am deeply convinced that the christian leader of the future is called to be completely irelevant.
his five marks of spiritual growing are:
a way of loss
a way of darkness
a way of not knowing
a way of waiting
a way of the least
that gets real. he then draws on the work of mark yaconelli (whose work i have enthused about at length before) to suggest a contemplative way will help us recover a deep love for the world in which we live which is at the heart of mission.
that' a hasty sketch. i was struck last week by a conversation i had with a friend who is retired – he is in his sixties. he is a loyal, committed, faithful, evangelical (and fairly conservative at that), church going christian and has been for decades. he is the kind of person who is a backbone of a local church. he told me he was bored with church and quite a few of his friends were too. we're more at sea than we admit. i'll lend him this book. it may offer some clues…
if you haven't come across them grove books are shortish booklets (around 8000 words) turned round pretty quick on theology in a number of themed series – bible, ethics, spirituality, worship, evangelism, pastoral, renewal, youth.
Jonny, I am currently obsessed by ‘lines’, of all species (path, tao, trajectory, chain etc). In particularly, the power of lines to produce and generate forms. I’m thinking the ‘way’ part of the formula is important too. Time to rediscover our nomadic, mobile and itinerant traditions. Become ‘restless’ wanderers.
This is fasciating.
In i-church we’ve been working out how to become a missional online community over the last year, and it seems to have a lot to do with creating space and support for people need to explore their own spiritual journeys.
This has made our forums a lot less busy. The natural way to gauge ‘success’ online is by post count, so it’s a bit scary, but if you can get past that there’s a completely different rhythm to what goes on between people – the shared space becomes an opportunity rather than an obligation, a way of serving each other rather than a way of sharpening up our debating skills.
i want a copy!
henri nouwen – “i am deeply convinced that the christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant.” Really? What’s the context of the quote? On that thought, is there ever a time that context (=relevance) doesn’t matter? Just trying to understand.
this sounds brilliant – and i don’t think i’ve thought that about a christian book for a very long time!
David Runcorn’s a provocative writer and thinker – I loved his book ‘Choice, Desire and the Will of God’ as well. I wish they’d invite him to speak at Greenbelt.
Thank you, thank you for drawing attention to the quote by Henri Nouwen.
It has seemed to me for several years that not only church leaders, but the church itself, are called to irrelevancy.
The sense that we are called to be the slack in the rope, not the rope itself, grants the whole of humanity an expansiveness, as it grows, that gives space for new and radical thinking.
And it can be constructive too: a church’s irrelevancy can become its greatest strength, as, because in ultimate terms it doesn’t matter what it does, it has the freedom to try anything, and becomes an inspiration to those who then choose to see what it is up to.
Bravo, therefore – you, and Nouwen, and Runcorn!