MetaCatholic

I’ve been meaning to comment this week on a slightly odd story reported in the Sunday Telegraph. As reported:

A police community support officer ordered two Christian preachers to stop handing out gospel leaflets in a predominantly Muslim area of Birmingham.

The evangelists say they were threatened with arrest for committing a “hate crime” and were told they risked being beaten up if they returned. The incident will fuel fears that “no-go areas” for Christians are emerging in British towns and cities, as the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, claimed in The Sunday Telegraph this year.

Arthur Cunningham, 48, and Joseph Abraham, 65, both full-time evangelical ministers, have launched legal action against West Midlands Police, claiming the officer infringed their right to profess their religion.

…

West Midlands Police, who refused to apologise, said the incident had been “fully investigated” and the officer would be given training in understanding hate crime and communication.

For those who aren’t familiar with the UK scene, a “police community support officer” is sort of equivalent to a teaching assistant in a classroom. 

I want to offer a few observations:

This story seems to have sunk from view like a stone. That makes me think there may be rather more to it than reported, and that journalists investigating further decided it was less news-worthy than they thought. The “evangelists” concerned seem to be seriously fundamentalist. Of the Bible they believe that “Every Word of the original manuscript [sic] is inspired”, but they are also keen to state:

What We are Not
We are not ecumenical, Charismatic, Arminians, Calvinists or denominational.

That doesn’t seem to leave a lot of room for manoeuvre.

A large part of this story’s power comes from the bigger immigration narrative. Without wanting to downplay any of the issues involved, I want to highlight what I see as the biggest danger for the way some people want to enlist Christians to their aid on immigration. The implicit subtext is that Christians are white and native, and if you’re foreign and black you must be Muslim or some other religion. (Something similar seems to have happened in the US in the way some people regard Obama as Muslim.) This is not only politically dangerous, but, from a Christian viewpoint, profoundly heretical.

Churches that don’t evangelise ought to be seen as a contradiction in terms. Mission more generally is of the essence of the church. There are, however, good and bad ways to do it, and (as far as I can tell) what these particular preachers were doing is such a bad way of doing it it’s doubtful that it can be seen as evangelism at all. It looks rather more like an aggressive act of religious and racial hostility, than a generous sharing of the love of God. The preachers’ readiness to pose for a photo and take their story to the paper to tell a story of Muslim no-go areas for Christians encourages me in that suspicion.

It is interesting that nowadays the cases that may most test “freedom of speech” are religious ones. Christians probably need to remember that historically, they have approved of this no more than many Muslims today would, and that effectively it evolved more to protect those outside or against the churches from Christian totalitarianism. Its transformation into a basic Western value that Christians now appeal to both against the secular state and in favour of the freedom to evangelise, is deeply ironic.

I think we will see more and more of this sort of story, and we will need to be very careful about how we read them. They raise quite complex questions of civic polity as well as inter-faith relationships, dialogue and mission. They also suggest that there’s room for far more theological reflection on methods of evangelism that are appropriate to gospel and culture in the early 21st century West. How much power does the method used have to stop it being good news at all?

Eddie has a go at exploring the metaphor of software localization as a way of exploring what happens in cross-cultural mission, and where it might differ from translation. It’s all worth reading, but here is his conclusion:

After all, in Translation, the language changes, but the core message does not change. However, I think that the localisation concept is more helpful in that it highlights the difference between the unchanging core code and the translated interface, capturing some of the complexity of what happens when the Gospel moves into a new home.

I’m going to take some time pondering this, but I find myself with some big questions. Having recently made the switch from Windows to a Mac, I’ve become acutely aware of just how different, for example, Word is on another platform. There are some features it’s Windows counterpart can do that Word for Mac can’t, most noticeably the handling of right-to-left text. This suggests to me that under some apparent similarity, there are significant differences in the code base, and even when they look alike, and share the same format, some serous underlying differences still exist. Then again, the Mac version has publishing and notebook layouts, and Mac Powerpoint has 3D transitions like the cube effect completely lacking from it’s Windows counterpart. These changes may be enabled by the OS, and they have certainly been encouraged by the lively competition of iWork. The different platform has encouraged different abilities and developments, not all of which could have been forseen, or perhaps even been likely if Word only existed on Windows.

Now, like Eddie, I’m well aware of the limitations of this metaphor, but taking it this one stage further suggest ways in which new contexts not only reframe the core, but may contribute to the core’s development. For example, there are many evangelicals (at least) who would argue that some form of substitutionary atonement is part of the “core” of the gospel. Yet, without Anselm reflecting on the gospel in the light of European feudal culture and developing his theory of satisfaction, could substitutionary atonement ever have got going? There are other examples, equally core, like the homoousion that one could tease out.

This suggest to me, at least, that the interplay between gospel and culture is always complex, and each will influence the other. I am uncertain just how much, if any, core code there actually is.

Sometimes I wonder at a certain Christian mentality. The often stimulating After Existentialism, Light, for once, I think, gets it wrong in this post on why people leave the Church.

InsideCatholic recently did an interesting survey of the reasons Catholics (and, for that matter, Christians in general) leave the Church by asking several prominent Catholics (bishops, professors, lay authors, etc.) for their opinion on the reasons and solutions.

Kevin is far from alone in what I see as the main mistake here, rather I often hear many others doing precisely the same thing. But what distinguished Christians think might be beside the point. The problem is, the bishop he quotes gives a Christian and theological explanation. It shows no sign that the bishop has actually asked anyone who has left the church why they have done so, or that, if he has asked them, he has listened to them. Yet surely, asking leavers is the first and most obvious step towards an answer. There might then be room for some very interesting sociological and theological reflections on why people do so, that is not simply taking their answers at face value, but does involve accounting for those face value answers coherently and honestly. Empirical research is not heretical, although its rarity might make you think it was.

My own experience of asking that question suggests that the answers are quite diverse, sometimes profound, and often very mundane and practical. “I moved house” seems to influence both those coming back to church and those leaving it. Individualist conceptions of faith and cultural patterns of habitual behaviour means that they often don’t see that leaving church as any loss of faith, and that, catholic orthodoxy aside, it genuinely may not. Sometimes faith has comparatively little to do with church attendance, and conversely, leaving church has little to do with loss of faith.

Then again, I can think of some who might leave church because they simply can’t relate to a church which has bishops who actually talk about “modern man”.

I have noted before that I expect my next computer to be a Mac. I think that’s probably the most rational decision for me. But one of the things that has slightly held me back from making the decision earlier has been some of the swivel-eyed enthusiasm evinced by some diehard fanbois. Despite this, most Mac users have been (or at least seemed) quite normal people.

Yet it has been impossible to speak to even a normal Mac user without them trying to persuade you of the benefits that will accrue if you, too, get a Mac. As far as I can see this is nearly universally true. Mac owners can’t seem to stop themselves evangelising for their technology, both its style and substance. In a technological world where fashion and style are also prized, this may sometimes come over as a bit overbearing, or even over-boring, but it hardly ever (fanboi zealots partially excluded) comes over as unnatural.

Compare this to efforts Christians make for evangelism properly so called. By comparison there seems to be something studied about it. The language is often borrowed and artificial, the ideas seem to be someone else’s, the phrases are often hackneyed and inexplicable. Moreover, people quickly learn to avoid the enthusiast for God. Now, no doubt, some of this is due to the fact that God is more demanding than a Mac. But it seems to me also to point to a certain way in which God-talk has become unnatural and often uncomfortable in our society. Evangelism for God needs programmes, encouragement, mission plans and college training.

Intriguingly, it seems to me that I can detect that same dichotomy in clergy and layperson alike. If they are Mac owners their enthusing about their computers is always more spontaneous and natural than their enthusing for God. And it nearly always begins with “Did you know you can do …?” or “Have you seen this?”

I suspect that sort of practical, results-oriented amazement was part and parcel of natural Christian evangelism in the first few centuries, aided (as Mac owners are today) by the sense of being something of a beleaguered minority. It was then, as it is today in many cultures, as appropriate and natural as Mac evangelism is in ours, even if most people remained pagans (or Windows users today).

None of this is intended to point a finger at any particular theological or technological stance. But it does leave me wondering whether the difficulties most Western Christians have with evangelism owes far more to the cultural waters we swim in, than to any theological weakness, or enthusiasm bypass in today’s churches.