(First in a series based on the book "Christianity for the Rest of Us", by Diana Butler Bass)
As a child, my earliest strong memory of “church” was about the time we moved to Prince Albert, in Saskatchewan. My father had been called to Wesley United Church, and was involved heavily in the building of a new imposing structure, complete with Casavant pipe organ. It was just 1950 - the heyday of churches, and Wesley United was clearly in the vanguard of ths heyday. Prince Albert was not large, but like most settlements in North America, the Protestant churches had presence and power. The fifties and sixties, following the war, were a time of great growth in churches. The economy was booming, almost everyone was Christian, and churches went up everywhere.
But look a little closer at the history of Prince Albert. The Cree natives called it kistahpinanihk, the “sitting pretty place”, or “great meeting place”. The first farmer, on the site where the current city is, was an Anglo-Metis named James Isbister, an employee of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Chinese immigrants who worked the railroad also settled in Prince Albert - even in 1950 there were established businesses run by Chinese. Prince Albert, like Canada, was not founded or settled by Christians alone - our history is much more complex than that. By 1950, of course, the Cree natives who were the original inhabitants had been relegated to a reserve, across the river from the town, and the Chinese and Jewish populations were only visible if you really went looking.
Prince Albert isn’t gone, it is growing of course, and if I go back now, Wesley United is still there. But it isn’t the same any more. The town of Prince Albert in which I grew up simply isn’t there.
In her book “Christianity for the Rest of Us”, Diana Butler Bass talks about growing up in a part of Baltimore, Maryland, called Hamilton. She says “I grew up in a village that has vanished. .... Although Hamilton exists on the map, my childhood universe - an urban village of the 1960's - is gone. It’s almost as if it never existed at all. The names may be the same, but there are no maps, no freeway exits, back to the place that once was.” This is a story played out across all of North America. The landscape has changed dramatically, and it isn’t going to go back again.
Both Noah and Jesus had experience of dramatic change in their lives. In the case of Noah, the village he knew, and everything in it, disappeared. There was no way to return, even if he could have found the right landmarks. He had to beach the ark on an unknown piece of land, and start all over again. He did have his family with him, and some animals - and that was about it. The path of his life was altered irrevocably when he entered into relationship with God.
Jesus had a similar experience, and I struggle with whether or not it was intentional. I choose to believe it wasn’t. Jesus also entered into a relationship with God, and his life was irrevocably changed. Mark’s Gospel has offered us the bare bones of the story. Jesus was baptised, and Mark says that the Spirit sent him into the desert, and he was with the wild animals, but tended by angels. Mark says that when John was put in prison, Jesus began preaching about the coming realm. So Jesus began preaching about change when you enter into relationship with God.
Both Noah and Jesus, in their own way, had to go into the wilderness. They had to let go of everything they were familiar with, and trust God. They had to allow their entire lives to be changed by their faith, and by their exercise of that faith. Noah and his family lived on the ark with wild animals, and then got off the ark - somewhere. The story tells us God was with them. Jesus lived in the wilderness with wild animals, in a place unfamiliar to him, and on his own. But the story lets us know God was with him there too.
What does it mean for us to be in the wilderness? When are the times we feel we are the only ones facing uncertain futures? What makes us fearful? Do we want to circle the wagons and shut things out, hoping just to survive? Being in a wilderness means confronting our deepest longings and needs, and exposes us to danger - whether real or not. Neither Noah nor Jesus was actually harmed - so perhaps the wild animals in both places are a metaphor for those things in life which make us fearful.
Diana Butler Bass says “All over the planet, villages are vanishing. We know that everything is changing, that some sort of new world is emerging. Everywhere. And we have no idea what it is becoming.”
The book, “Christianity for the Rest of Us” , examines fifty congregations across the United States where new things are happening, from six denominations considered mainline churches, which are now considered to be in the minority in the Christian landscape. It is noted in the book that there is a myth around that only evangelical churches can grow, mainline churches can’t. Of these fifty churches, ten are studied in-depth. They are all mainline churches, not evangelical. Hence the title of the book - while the common perspective is that only evangelical or conservative churches are growing, the rest of us Christians are working away quietly and also growing and having an impact.
Of course the church is in the throes of this massive shift happening throughout our cultures. From being in a place where everyone else was like us, and we all did pretty much the same things - we are now dealing with congregants born post-1965 who don’t relate to that at all. In a sense, they are already more comfortable in the wilderness, and with the emerging world.
What if the time in the wilderness is where real vision of the peaceable realm of God comes? What if the time in the wilderness gave Jesus the insight and hope to begin preaching and teaching and healing and loving - wherever he was?
Diana Butler Bass says there are a couple of different sorts of Christians today. “There are those who prefer to build walled villages and do not want to see, and those who take risks in the wilderness and are willing to open their eyes.” The people who are willing to go into the wilderness are seekers on a faith journey, learning again what it means to live as a Christian and be a Christian in a rapidly changing world. They are forming a new kind of village, as a “pilgrim community”, rediscovering Christianity. She notes that the churches she visited were certainly not perfect, but they embodied courage, creativity, imagination, and risk. They were looking for new language to express their ideals, recreating their structures in a way which emphasised spirituality. They were experimenting with new forms of worship and living in community. It is sometimes called transformational church, but a term I like better is the re-remergent church.
The wisdom of this renewed, re-emergent church is, not surprisingly, based in a solid biblical model. “You preach the gospel, offer hospitality, and pay attention to worship and people’s spiritual lives. Frankly, you take Christianity seriously as a way of life.”
At the end of the story of Noah, God makes a promise. “It is a hard thing, to believe in a promise with no power to make it come true. Everything is in the future tense - the land.....the blessing. Everything will happen, by and by, but in the meantime what is there to live on now?
And yet. What better way to live than in the grip of a promise, and a divine one at that? Who in her right mind would give that back? To wake every morning to the possibility that today might be the day - to take nothing for granted. Or to take everything as granted, although not yet grasped....
To live like that is to discover that the blessing is not future but now. The promise may not be fully in hand. It may still be on the way, but to live reverently, deliberately, and fully awake - that is what it means to live in the promise, where the wait itself is just as rich as the end. All it takes are some regular reminders, because as long as the promise is renewed, the promise is alive, as vivid as a rainbow, as real as the million stars overhead.”
Sources:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Albert,_Saskatchewan
2. Diana Butler Bass, “Christianity for the Rest of Us”. HarperSanFrancisco, 2006.
3. Diana Butler Bass
4. Diana Butler Bass
5. Barbara Brown Taylor, from the sermon The Late Bloomer in Gospel Medicine, Cowley Publications, 1995.
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