jeremyduncan.ca

This is About That

// May 7th, 2007 // 1 Comment » // church, collected thoughts, emergence, theology

I’ll admit I’m not a dancer. Now that may seem like an odd place to start but I feel it’s only fair to warn you. And though I have never seen an episode of dancing with the stars I do appreciate dance as an art form. In my community there are number of professional dancers. They dance for company called Corps Bera (from the Latin corps meaning body and the Hebrew bera meaning worship) which has been involved with our community since its inception. Last week I attended one of their performances.

I love live arts

One of the pieces was called “heart and killing”. Not a particularly cuddly title but it struck a chord with me. The dancers conveyed with such intensity the struggle to battle busyness and expectation in our lives. The drain of being pulled in every direction at every moment. Apparently the title of the piece comes from the Chinese character for busyness which is a combination of the two characters heart and killing. I don’t know my Chinese but it’s a poignant linguistic statement.
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Biblical Mythology

// April 5th, 2007 // 1 Comment » // collected thoughts

(This is an extended combination of two previous posts)

Go back to the beginning, to the story of Genesis. Where do we find ourselves in these stories? Are these factual events relevant only to historians and the individuals involved or are they more? Could they be more than just a historical account of the long dead? Could they point us towards truth that is beyond the limited experience of those involved as we find our place in the story?
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Prodigal Parable

// February 27th, 2007 // 2 Comments » // collected thoughts

I was reading through one of Jesus’ parables this morning. Here he is sitting with a bunch of outcasts. The Bible specifically calls them “tax collectors and sinners” which might seem like a palatable pairing but it doesn’t really hit us they same way it would have Jesus’ audience. In the context of first century Judaism, where the social etiquette was controlled by the religious establishment, sinner was not a particularly welcome designation. “Sinner” meant you were an outcast, shunned, a loser.
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In Our Image Pt.II

// February 13th, 2007 // No Comments » // church, collected thoughts, emergence

The implications of Jesus approach to truth telling are important. To acknowledge the truth of Jesus’ metaphors as ultimately more than our interpretations requires a complete reordering of our hierarchy of truth. No longer can metaphor and narrative be considered some kind of clue or code to discovering absolute truth, they instead become a mediator between the absolute truth that exists independent of our experience of the world and the relative truth that exists in our understanding and application of the story. It requires us to acknowledge that anything we can reduce down into a clear propositional statement is in fact a relative application of truth within time and space.
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In Our Image Pt.I

// February 1st, 2007 // 1 Comment » // collected thoughts

Think of some of the images in your mind that help you conceptualize God. One of the problems I have is that sometimes those images migrate from tools that help me understand God into filters that outline boundaries on my perception of him. In other words they become barriers that edit God into a smaller frame of reference, one that I have believed is relevant to my particular experience of the world?
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Modern Relevance Pt.III

// January 25th, 2007 // No Comments » // collected thoughts, emergence

continued from part II…

This is why image and metaphor become so central to our experience of spirituality; it is why myth is so important to the Christian narrative, because these are the ways we have to communicate truth that is bigger than our experience.

True speech about God is narrative in form. Theology is history. A divorce between the ‘Christ of faith’ and the ‘Jesus of history’ only arises if faith and history have first been separated. Christian theology has been so much dominated by pagan Greek metaphysics that it has lost the narrative character. The theology of the Gospels is typically in the form of parable – stories of concrete mundane realities in which the nature of God’s rule may be grasped by faith. The main tradition of Western theology has seen this as something merely illustrative of truth which must be properly stated in abstract and timeless propositions.
_Leslie Newbigen

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Modern Relevance Pt.II

// January 22nd, 2007 // 1 Comment » // collected thoughts

Some of those presuppositions that have held sway over our perspective of relevance are beginning to loosen their hold over society. The worldview that has defined relevance for us is beginning to creak. Maybe not crumble but it is beginning to shift. Our perspective of relevance is in flux.

We are living in confusing times. Many culture-watchers are convinced that our society is undergoing a transformation of broad proportions. This cultural shift goes by various designations. Some observers tell us we are in the throes of a transition from a Christian to a post-Christian era. Others declare that we are moving from a Constantinian to a post-Constantinian situation.
But the most widely used description suggests that we are witnessing the emergence of a “postmodern” society. Whatever may be the preferred nomenclature, the various voices are in agreement that the cultural shift now transpiring carries grave implications for the church.
Stanley J Grenz

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Modern Relevance Pt.I

// January 17th, 2007 // 4 Comments » // collected thoughts

Relevance is pretty big word. It’s a bigger idea. At times it seems beyond our limited ability to fully comprehend and express and yet it continues to be the holy grail of churches as they develop growth systems and strategies. Seriously I have read it a thousand times;

Make religion seem relevant.
Address the felt needs of your given target audience.
Connect with their experience of life.

It’s kind of like wanting to put your church on extreme makeover. A bit of liposuction here, straighten out that crooked nose there, fix those nasty teeth and of course get those breasts knocked up a couple cup sizes. If we could just make church sexier it would be just like the show where the ugly duckling woman is finally revealed to her waiting boyfriend or husband. He can hardly recognize her. She is beautiful. Whatever struggles they had in their marriage or relationship disappear into the ether melted away by the newfound lust he feels for his newly breathtaking woman.

All of this in the effort of bigger, better, church communities. A larger slice of the religious economy. It would seem at times the glorification of the lowest common denominator is the highest ideal we could possibly reach for. Of course this is all just as offensive and shallow as it is to imagine a boob job can fix a broken relationship.
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Reflecting on the beginning

// January 12th, 2007 // 1 Comment » // collected thoughts

It was two years ago that I ended up in Calgary Alberta, 4000 kilometers away from everyone I knew, back in a church to give this ministry gig one more shot. Eighteen months prior I had left my position as a youth pastor in a great church in Ontario to find something that was a better fit. 6 months at Best Buy selling televisions and 10 months of data entry for Hydro One here I was about to try again. Two years on I’m still here today, though everything has changed at least a couple times over. I find myself leading a community of people struggling to find an unedited spirituality. I find myself discovering my voice as a communicator. I find myself asking the same questions all over again but this time there is a difference. This time I’m comfortable with the ambiguity.

It’s not that ministry didn’t really work my first time through. In fact I really enjoyed a lot of what I did. My perception, however biased, was that the people I worked with and for seemed to enjoy my work as well but there were questions. Lingering doubts that I just couldn’t put out of my head long enough to settle into the role.

There was a time in my life when my greatest doubt was around my understanding of the universe. I was completely comfortable with the presupposition that God was up there, somewhere. I believed that beyond any shadow of doubt. Of course I had doubts but they revolved around my understanding of God. Was Christianity correct? Did I have my theology in order? Did I really believe the propositions of the denomination I was affiliated with? These were the extent of questions that bounced around in my head.
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