Christi-anarchy! (I've borrowed it)

Having just checked out an article on the ekklesia website, I'm reminded of the closeness between Christianity and anarchism, which Dave Andrews captured in the brilliantly titled "Christi-Anarchy: a radical spirituality of compassion." The closeness is because Jesus was a prophet against the powers - religious, social and political - just as anarchy means 'without rulers', so urging us to subvert and overcome the status quo. Again, it's radical, it's revolutionary, and even more surprising: it's biblical! After all, the Old Testament has different strands, monarchical and anti-monarchic, priestly and prophetic, and the New Testament too shows different tendencies, though Jesus seems surely to place himself in the anti-domination stream of the prophets - even Paul, often deemed 'conservative', is actually better understood as a critic of Empire. So, again, this begs questions of the church: how well do we practise this kind of faithfulness and discipleship, critiquing 'the Powers', walking the way of humility, empowerment, peace and compassion? Mmm ... the potential is always there ...

Spreading the word? (liberally)

It's a strange tension: the prospect of this "Jesus-movement" changing the world, of it being something truly radical and revolutionary for the sake of the oppressed and marginalised, can be genuinely exciting ... but I am hopeless when it comes to speaking to people who do not know much about it. In fact, my liberal sensibilities are such that I am very reticent, tending to be very wary of what people will make of it - after all, passion is a bit embarrassing, isn't it?! - and there are so many problems with the Church at large, that it is difficult to invite people to be a part of it ... and on the one hand, I don't lose any sleep about this, because I focus on working with the people already committed to the church, and kind of expect them to invite others! So how, if at all, should I set about becoming more able to say "this story is worth it", "this movement really can make a difference - trust me"? And how especially should I do this without being heard as saying "this movement is the best", because I know only too well that other agencies are making invaluable contributions, and other faiths must always be part of the conversations?

Kairos vs. Kyriarchy! (power to the people!)

The theologian Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza gives us the really helpful term "kyriarchy", literally meaning 'rule by lords'. But she means by it the very many ways in which some people 'lord it' over others - whether it is men over women, rich over poor, the West over the South, the bourgeois over the underclass, or whoever. What is shocking is the way in which Christians have so often allowed "Jesus as Lord" to be co-opted by the world's kyriarchical structures, even though the very point of Jesus' Lordship appears actually to have been the denunciation and subversion of kyriarchy. To put it another way, we read the Bible and exercise our faith as though all power-arrows ought to point towards Jesus, because he is exalted as our "ultimate Lord", whereas what he was about was dispersing the power-arrows, pointing them towards the relatively powerless. Power to the People! What is so shocking about this for Christians in churches is simply how radical it is: because it urges people to throw off dependency, to overcome our sense that changes are incremental, believing instead in the kairos - that the time for anti-kyriarchical discipleship is right now! Ouch! The New Community is at hand!

Anger Management?

On the day when World Trade Organisation talks have faltered, much to the concern of development agencies, an argument in our church's Bible Study comes to mind. Someone had complained that we're always being told how the world's poverty is "our fault" and we never seem to hear what we've done right ... Well, it's simple - it's because so much of the ongoing hardship of millions of people is because of the intransigence of countries which can afford to make changes but refuse to. So why was this person getting so worked up? It's because the miraculous story of the Feeding of 5000 people raised hard-hitting realisations: things can be done, Jesus expected them to be done, he got disciples involved in seeing them and in doing them, but still we don't like hearing it. I got angry in response - still aware that I don't do enough to follow through on the compassion that is evoked, but angry that such defensiveness can stand in the way of the need for a contemporary miracle. And what would the miracle be? Nothing but managing the anger so to direct it towards building a world in which hungry people are fed.

A new beginning, again!

It was a choice between "chaos theology" and "kairos theory", mixing two interesting ideas. Chaos theory (I think!) is that scientific hypothesis that apparently random events are underpinned by greater connections - for example, perhaps a butterfly flapping its delicate wings in one part of the world could contribute to a hurricane in another part of the world. So what if my or your apparently random acts (of kindness, or whatever) could contribute to much greater events further afield? Wouldn't that be crazy ... and amazing!? And kairos theology is the spin-off of South Africa's 'kairos document', which envisaged a new way of tackling apartheid in the 1980s - neither colluding with it, nor justifying it, nor reacting violently against it, but undermining it by prophetic commitment to justice and peace. The 'kairos' was upon the people of South Africa - the 'time for change', a specific kind of time, not consistent with what had gone before, and yet the eruption of what was hidden ... and so chaos and kairos come together: what if a butterfly flapping its delicate wings can contribute to the demise of apartheid? What if our humble contributions to the world can bring about social and political hurricanes damaging the existing world order? What if we can be part of a story of disruptive good news?