 |
The secular has not triumphed
Editor: Peter Cruchley-Jones Publisher: Peter Lang Price: £16.99 ISBN: 9783631574942
Whatever else might be said about the contemporary religious scene, it is messy, complex and difficult to read. This collection, largely composed of empirical research by four of our ministers, Gwen Collins, John Burgess, John Hall and Peter Cruchley-Jones, gives voice to those at “ground level”, ordinary people struggling to make sense of their lives. As they do so they make some telling discoveries. First, the secular has not triumphed. Gwen Collins finds that the 32 women academics she studied at Leeds University nearly all had “a sense of there being more than the material” and that, whether atheist, Christian or Buddhist, they used the language of the spirit to describe it. Martin Stringer’s sensitive attention to a variety of communities exposes what he terms “situational belief” - the use of sometimes contradictory religious doctrines by the battered and bruised as coping mechanisms to help them handle life’s adversities. This is not so much a flight from religion as its customisation.
It is a commonplace amongst some commentators that Christianity and spirituality have been forcibly divorced by post-modernism. John Burgess’s conclusions, from a study of one of our congregations in Birmingham, question that assumption. He argues rather that experience of God has shifted for many from the ritual to the personal, from the transcendent to the immanent. This congregation knows God’s presence. John Hall’s study of youth congregations provides more evidence. Here are self-consciously styled non-institutional “churches” where what he terms “primal spirituality” is expressed in robustly dogmatic Christian terms.
Peter Cruchley-Jones describes these papers as “a kind of theological prison art”, produced from the cells of a “self-centred” church obsessed by its own institutional decline; yet simultaneously failing to hear its God still speaking beyond its walls. There is no doubt that churches sometimes do stupid things, and sometimes they do sensible things that have unintended results - as Peter McGrail’s analysis of the Catholic church’s attempt to control first communion in three Liverpool parishes shows.
Yet the logic of these essays is not that the institutional church is dying, but rather that it is caught up in the complexity of messiness, shaping and being shaped by the profound forces of a religious revolution which we do not yet fully understand. Indeed, any institution which has nurtured such a creative coterie of missiologists is far from dead, either from the neck up or the feet down. Prison it might be, but at least it’s an open one. However, if you care about mission and contemporary spirituality, you shouldn’t miss this important book. David Cornick is David Cornick is general secretary of Churches Together in England
|
Title:
God at Ground Level