collective language
Posted on September 21, 2007 by Matt Stanford
Filed Under Church, Emerging Questions
Prompted by my LifeGroup: what does the language of a corporate experience of God look like?
I think it’s quite a poorly developed area of communication for us.
In my experience, when we talk about what God’s doing, we talk about it from a first-person perspective: “something I’ve learned this week…”, “God told me…”, “my experience this week has shown me…”; I’m really not sure our 3rd-persons language is familiar or well developed: trying to describe what God is doing with the upper or lower case C church seems to result in us pulling specific instances.
At the very least, it’s not something we spend much time talking about.
This, to me, contrasts against the things I read about when God spoke about Israel, his people, as a singular entity: we don’t seem to think of ourselves in the same way today as much, instead focusing on the individual or the intimate church group. Is that a result of post modernism, and is it what God wants from us? If we’re called to be other-centred, doesn’t that mean collective language should be our primary language type?
What’s God doing with us as a people? How does Jesus feel about his bride right now? What’s my role as part of that as an individual, a church member, a Church member? A hand, or a foot? Or a cell IN a hand or foot?
About Matt Stanford
Matt is just a guy who’s passionate about his faith, and the community of church. He’s 32, husband of Jacqui and dad for Toby, and is part of Riverside Church in Montmorency, Melbourne. No formal theological training, but full of opinions/thoughts/feelings. Sadly afflicted with Richmond supportership since 1982. It’s been a long time.
Matt's site: http://polyresin.stanford.id.au/
Comments
8 Responses to “collective language”
Leave a Reply
I think that a massive part of the struggle to describe the church as a collective entity is that we’ve lost the ability to talk collectively about anything. I’m not sure that I could answer questions like “How’s your family going?” or “How’s Melbourne going?” any better than I could answer “How’s your church going?”
I think in lots of ways, our individual-centred culture has stripped away our ability to think about wellbeing and health of any community without thinking on an individual level.
@Geoff Matheson:
I’d also suggest that we don’t answer those question, like we don’t speak of the church as a corporate, because we think that by doing so we lessen the experience of other individuals. We fear we speak for them or, worse, over them.
If I were to say “The Church concentrates too much on Foo and not enough on Bar,” I’m making a definitive statement. But I know that this is only my opinion. Therefore, with a (possibly inflated) feeling of maturity, I won’t say it. Instead I will say “I wish …” or “I feel …”.
Interesting.
I think in part this is fostered by our culture, but I know that it can be broken out of. The distinction that you make Matt between lowercase and uppercase c may, while useful in theological discussion, actually be less helpful as it reinforces a distinction. Maybe it would be better to talk about Riverside as a congregation, and a bunch of congregations, of various denominations or locations, meet in Melbourne and Australia, that all are “the church”.
With regard to speaking for someone - there are people I know who can speak about shifts they see amongst the congregations in Melbourne. They usually have been a part of a number of different denominations and congregations in their lives and interact with people from congregations other than their own.
Which I think is part of the issue - we tend to be fairly isolated in our relationships and experiences and see a very limited part of “the Church”
It’s one thing to be OK with it, but another to be actually doing the talking thing.
I think what you’re beginning to brush up against there Ro is the interchurch, interdenominational let’s-all-be-of-one-accord-about-something thing: the place I best see that?
Hillsong conference. Once a year, in Sydney.
Not good enough.
And with all due respect to Hillsong: there’s still enormous chunks of the ecclesiological (or if you’re not trying to be clever: church) spectrum that wouldn’t be at Hillsong. In a funny kind of way, the recent Australian Christian Lobby election thingy was almost getting close to that feel (as much as some particular AT readers might not like me admitting to that). There was certainly a broad spectrum of Christians represented
I’d hesitate to use the word represented Geoff, if only for the sake of not having people think the ACL actually represents me. Present, maybe, personally I think the ACL is doing more harm than good. I might attend their stuff to lobby them.
There’s a certain mandate to seek out those who won’t speak for themselves, and ask their opinions before we can say we have any idea how ‘the rest of the church’ is doing.
How is the church doing in Australia? Andrew Denton seems to have a better persepective than most on the inside… maybe we should ask him.
Politicised, brainwashed, tired, overstructured and under loved. Fat, dumb, and happy-clappy.
Possibly emerging from the fog… but maybe just fringing.
I’m not sure any one persons (esspecially mine here) perspective is very useful, as has been stated already. If we all agreed on what “hearing from God” is, let alone what God is saying about the church, I have a sneaking suspicion it wouldn’t be a definition or description that many of us would be comfortable with… more likely it would be one presented by those with the loudest voices.
In asian cultures where collectivism is more prevelant than individualism, I get the impression there’s often a high level of dissent and frustration that is unvoiced. It is for these reasons that they are so easily corrupted by western individualism which gives voice and expression to personal goals.
That’s not to say some of them haven’t done what we need to do, and find a collectivism that doesn’t negate individualism.
I’m not sure that our western definition that dichotomises the two is a useful construct for understanding this. Those who want great individual gain actually understand their need to be part of alliances and so forth…
The question then is one of motivation: for selfish gain, or for communal gain. This leads to another question: is nationalism a good thing or a bad thing? Is the only kind of communalism left viable against selfishness, that of global community?
Basically my premise is that a communalism that serves a small community potentially at the expense of others, is no more Godly than individualism… its just a bigger individual.
Oddly enough this links rather well to Gerry’s discussion of the parable of the Talents, if we consider the idea that everything belongs to God, and we are merely stewards of it.
The concept of enlightened self interest allows us to consider being selfish by being generous… to give to the whole in order to improve out collective quality of life. Even monkeys understand this ((better than they do on wall street?)
Somewhere along the line we have to find a way to validate individual pursuits, persepctives, and personalities, at the same time as having a collective stewardship.
As long as we continue to think of Unity as ‘resolving’ differences, this will never occur. There’s only one concept that allows true unity:
UNITY = DIVERSITY
Conservatives will find it easier than liberals to decide what they don’t want to be united with… but possibly to their detriment. If liberals are ever able to reach a decision about drawing some vague lines to distinguish where unity ends… we might have a viable national church movement.
Sometimes I wonder whether the Vineyard movement dislikes the Hillsong movement because we get our music somewhere else. There’s certainly a fair bit of competition between CCC and Hills along the same lines. Like football teams, they respect eachother on the field. Its the fans who turn over cars and mug people out of ‘loyalty’.
Basically tho, I think it comes down to dialogue. So I’m going to update my formula a little:
DIVERSITY + DIALOGUE = UNITY
If we actually have relationships with eachother maybe we can claim to be some kind of united thingy.
Its a pretty messy working model… but hopefully I’ve added something to the conversation.
Tim, I take your point (and realised it was going to spark a response from you :)), but my comment was just about the spectrum of church denominations who were spotted in the Press club for the event (across the Catholic/Protestant/Orthodox divide) as well as the huge number of congregations who put on something for the event itself. I think that probably a huge number of people in that room feel similarly about some of the positions the ACL takes, but regardless, the event itself represented had a very wide range of people.
I like lots of what you’re saying otherwise though: although a slightly briefer response (perhaps with a link to a longer blog post) might be more conducive to conversation on here.
yeah, I was kinda embarrssed when i realised how long it was. Ooops. Its coz I have a widescreen so things look less long when I write them… but then the blog screen is narrow.
will keep in mind.