a crust where love is

Constructing a theology of place: an experiment in theological method.

ANDY:   I've been reading John Inge's A Christian Theology of Place (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).  I'll be honest, it's not light reading.  But it's enthused me about places, their significance, and the need for the emerging church to think about this.  Hence a set of posts, of which this is the first.

Inge begins by pointing out the way that modernism has tended to downgrade 'place' as a category.  By maps,

'Space is rationalised as homogenous and divided into identical units.' (p7)

thus 'this devaluation of space has prevailed for generations.  Space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile.  Time, on the other hand, was richness, fecundity, life.' (p11, quoting Foucauld). 

Thus we naturally think of our 'generation' as being crucial in influencing our worldview, ('she would think like that, she's a boomer'), and don't tend to see our place as equally important.

But in almost all areas of discourse, place is coming back into fashion.  Feminism has questioned the assumption that places can be 'objectified' and dominated by 'Man', where the map is king and the itinerary has been displaced.  Foucault has pointed out that the powerful have a vested interest in devaluing the local and glorifying the imperial.  Heidegger calls us back to the discipline of 'just being there', 'dwelling', and denounces 'this uniformity in which everything is neither far nor near... in uniform distancelessness'.  David Harvey and Edward Soja (author of a book called Thirdspace) call for an economics where priority is given to the local, while Margaret Rodman is making place central to ethnography. 

'People like [the phenomenologist Edward] Casey are enabling us to see that modernism has had inherent in it from the beginning a universalism which... is most starkly evident in the search for ideas, labelled essences, that obtain everywhere and for which a given somewhere is presumably irrelevant.' (p14)  

Even a British government white paper in 2000 called for more attention to 'place' in architecture, social planning and community relations.

Meanwhile, the church is one step behind the dance, still buying into modernism's devaluing of place.  This is true, as Inge points out, of evangelicalism.  When 'formulae' from Willow Creek (or wherever) are imposed on communities with entirely different dynamics; when churches are founded whose members travel past the doors of twenty other places of worship before arriving at the church of their choice, which is far removed from the place they inhabit or work in; when cyberchurches imply that geography is entirely irrelevant to community; when evangelicals deliberately make their places of worship as unevocative as possible - place has been downplayed.  But Inge blames Roman Catholicism for a similar de-valuing of the local, both because so many 'norms' are passed down from the centre and because Vatican II ushered in a devaluing of 'sacred space'.

Are you still reading?  If so, three questions may arise in your mind: how does this fit with the biblical witness?  How, in practice, can we re-value our space?  And what does all this have to do with emerging church?  I'll try and answer in future posts. 

GEMMA: I so agree! I've thought for a long time that when alternative worship people say things like 'now let's make sacred space here at the front', they're doing something a lot more significant than they think. We may meet in homes and schools and rooms over shops, but that doesn't mean we can't make something special and different - it's not just a matter of having a few candles and icons around, it's about the attitude we hold to the place where we worship.

JIM:  gemma, i agree, but the thing that really gets me is the evangelicals who meet in this 800 year old building and try to act as if it was a room over a shop. wierd!

MIKE: Now I'm confused. Gemma and Jim seem to be taking your post to mean that we should reinstate churches/shrines/etc as holy places, thin places, or what-have-you. I thought you (and Mr Inge) were talking more about creating real local theologies that emerge from the locality - like slime-mould, I imagine you'd say. Which is it? Or (thinking as I write), is it both? Maybe the value of making one 'sacred space' in the centre of a community is that it makes it possible for the whole community to see itself as holy?

ANDY: So modernism has devalued places; postmodernism tends to re-value the local; the church hasn't caught on to this yet.  But how does the bible fit with this picture?  One easy answer would be to say that the Old Testament does indeed value 'special places' - the Land, the Temple, Bethel, and so on - but that the New Testament universalizes.  Think of 1 Peter: it's addressed to 'exiles scattered across Asia'; it describes Christians as aliens and strangers; surely it implies that there are no holy places any more, only a holy God and holy people?

Not so, says Inge, as he turns to examine the New Testament in what is, to me, the most significant section of his book.  Certainly it is true that the blessing of God is no long tied to the land of Israel, or to the Temple.  But this does not mean that place becomes irrelevant.  How could it, when the hope for new heaven and new earth is central to the New Testament?  How could it, when Christ became both incarnate and in-placed?   As has often been said, the incarnation re-values the body and the material; but it also re-values the particular and the local.   In O'Donovan's words,

The transitory promises of particular election, upon which Old Testament faith is based, are not abolished by Christian faith into pure universality, but... they become the matrix for the forms in which God universally meets humankind.  It is still true that human beings meet God within relations of particular belonging; for this reason the church has always to be structured as a local church; yet God is not tied to any one particular other than the name of Jesus, but can make himself known through many and through all...' (Inge p54)

To me, this is exciting and important.  Places have not lost their significance; now, every place is significant!  1 Peter is a case in point (and now I rely on commentaries, particularly Pheme Perkins, more than on Inge).  I got to know a little Greek at college (he ran a kebab shop on Headington Hill), so here are some Greek terms:

oikia - a house

oikos - a household, home - a key term in 1 Peter

paroikos - 'alien', someone from another home.  Here the controversy begins.  Should it be translated 'refugee'?  It's often used to translate the Henrew ger, an exile, and the image is certainly alive in 1 Peter.  Or should it be translated 'colonist', to refer to someone who came voluntarily to Asia Minor to 'romanise' it?   Some recent scholarship refuses to choose between the two, and suggests that the function of 1 Peter is exactly to change the worldview of the readers so that they no longer see themselves as exiles, displaced persons who because of their minority religious status 'didn't fit in' with Asia Minor society, but instead empbrace a destiny as colonists - colonists, as it were, of the New World.  Their vocation was to fit into, transform and lead their society into God's future.

paroikia - a collection of resident aliens, a colony.  This is the word that gives us the English terms 'parish' and 'parochial'.  To be parochial is to be concerned with your locale - understanding it, blessing it, etc. - and yet to be distinct from it for the sake of the other kingdom.

Every place matters!  And here the emerging church, potentially, steps into its own. 

JOEL: ...and yet the postmodern world is not divided any longer into parishes and neighborhoods. my community includes cyberfriends i've never met and people in different countries, it doesn't include practically any of the people who live near me. maybe you think this is a bad thing, but it's the way i live, and i wouldn't be attracted to a church that said it was for the lower north side or whatever.

ANDY:  The story so far: Modernism has tended to devalue place, and the church (by undervaluing both 'sacred space' and the local in theology and worship) has followed it.  The Old Testament gives great emphasis to places, and the New Testament, far from abolishing 'special places', opens the possibility that any space can be special.  It's a bit of a digression, but I thought the following piece, which draws shamelessly on Mike Starkey's Restoring the Wonder (London: Triangle, 1999), would illustrate something of what I mean.  I wrote it for our parish magazine, so there are lots of local references, but that's kind of the point.

GALLEYWOOD PARISH MAGAZINE:  Have you met Mr Shoulderman at a party recently? For a few seconds he chats with you as if you mattered - but before long he is looking over your shoulder, surveying the room. You realize he is looking for someone more interesting, influential or attractive than you are. You end up feeling dull and second rate. Yet the way Mr Shoulderman treats us is so often the way I treat Galleywood.

Don't get me wrong, I like it here.  But sometimes I don't make much effort to develop a sense of belonging.  Some people fantasise about escape; or we withdraw into our own semidetached planet (or even into our own head).  Or onto the web, of course!  Until Mr Shoulderman learns to give the guest before him his undivided attention, he will never find anyone in the room who is interesting. The key to restoring the wonder of place is to learn to see Galleywood with new eyes, to discover how to stop taking our neighbourhood for granted.

A day to restore your wonder

Take a day to encouter Galleywood afresh. Walk around the streets, looking more intently than you ever have before: at buildings, plants, people, etc.   Find out about the history of the area. Learn to celebrate and be grateful for the distinctiveness of the village.

Essayist Annie Dillard learned how to do it. Listen to Dillard on Tinker Creek:

'The sun in the west illuminates the ground, the mountains, and especially the bare branches of trees, so that everywhere silver trees cut into the black sky like a photographer's negative of a landscape... Fifteen minutes later, another darkness is coming overhead fron the northwest; and it's here. Everything is drained of its light as though sucked.'

Well, I'm not Annie Dillard, but here are my thoughts on Galleywood:

-there's a path running east-west, just north of the Margaretting road and parallel to it.  Today I walked west along it further than I ever had before, and saw bullrushes as tall as my head before emerging into a clearing with high purple flowers.  A fox was lying only two metres away and sprang to his feet when I approached.

-there are 29 gnomes or similar ornaments in one small front garden on Brasiers Close.

-the church was built in the middle of a race course to bring the Gospel into the midst of sin.  Well, now the race course is in ruins, and the church stands tall - but the sin, of course, has morphed, not departed.

-I live on a road called Roughtons, named after Rev Roughton, a Vicar of Galleywood.  He once got pelted with rotten vegetables for bringing candles into the church and for introducing manual actions (not as scandalous as it sounds, it just means he lifted up the bread during the communion prayer).  Then his successor-but-one removed the candlesticks (apparently fencing them and pocketing the proceeds).

-As you read this, Galleywood is officially 130 years and one week old, even if most of our houses were erected in the 1970s.  -There's a plaque inside the church in memory of those who dies in the services.  Which always wants to make me ask 'evening services or morning services?' 

Your list of special things about Galleywood will be different from mine.  The point is - Galleywood is ours, and it needs us to value it.  GK Chesterton writes of Pimlico, an unfashionable residential area in 1908:

'If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would arise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles... If a man loved Pimlico as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is theirs, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence... Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.'

From wonder to praise

And what does all this have to do with the church?  Well, two things, really.  First, your sense of place (whether or not you're a churchgoer) can help us as we try to work out what kind of church we should be; we don't want to follow a formula from somewhere else, like a McDonalds franchise, we want to be right for Galleywood.   So please tell us what sort of church you think the village needs.  And second, when you spend your day noticing Galleywood, a sense of wonder will grow within you which will need to be expressed as praise.  That's one of the things our services are there for - to give you an opportunity to praise.   The spire points you upwards towards God - who thinks Galleywood, like every place, is special, too.

JOEL: i started checking out emergent church because it seems like it could be a way to have church without all the religion. i think a lot of people would find that beautiful. the first christians didn't have special places, they met in houses and caves and at the gate, and they fixed their eyes on things above, not on things nearby. sure, they loved their neighborhood, but i do'nt think they saw it as more special than other people's neighborhoods.

i'd love your thoughts on this because a lot of what you say about church vision coming from the people not the hierarchy fits so well with the way i think.

God gives all men all earth to love,
But, since man's heart is small,
Ordains for each one spot shall prove
Beloved over all.
                                Rudyard Kipling, Sussex

Joel, are you sure you're not just trying to avoid writing that piece about the lower north side?

To be an american is to move on, as if we could outrun change. To attach oneself to place is to surrender to it, and suffer with it.
                               Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk


CAROLINE: Joel, I have not looked into it carefully, but I wonder whether or not the early Christians did meet soley in caves, outside etc. Seeing as they were largely Jewish, would they not have met in the Temple? In which case there would have been many traditions and rites that formed part of their worship, as well as hierarchy. Does anyone know anymore about this?
Also, they fixed their attention on the things above, but also on the things below. Otherwise they would have missed out on all that sharing out of possessions like at pentecost, or healing the sick and feeding the poor.
Does anyone else ever feel that we spend so much time looking up at heaven that we forget that we're meant to be bringing it to earth? Wouldn't that be really loving our neighbourhood?
I'd be interested to hear comments.
Night all. It's late here in Le Perreux.