Postkiwi Duncan Macleod

Sallie McFague on Metaphor and Theology

Sallie McFague’s seminal approach to narrative theology was laid out in 1975 in her book, “Speaking in Parables: A Study in Metaphor and Theology“, published by Fortress Press, and has been republished by SCM Press in 2002.

McFague was until very recently Dean of the Divinity School and the Carpenter Professor of Theology at Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville, Tennessee. Although she’s retired, she’s become Distinguished Theologian in Residence at Vancouver School of Theology.

In “Speaking in Parables”, McFague lays out an approach for intermediary or parabolic theology: theology which relies on various literary forms - parables, stories, poems, confessions - as a way from religious experience to systematic theology. McFague brings a commitment to bringing the Word to life for ordinary people, grounded in a existential, personal and sensuous reflection on life.

McFague refers often to poetry (Gerard Manley Hopkins), stories (Tolkien) and parables (such as those written by Kavka).

McFague reminds the theologian that metaphor and symbol should be used as food for thought - contemplated, probed, reflected upon, rather than manipulated, translated and reduced. Theologians, she says, need to learn to express insights in autobiography as much as in systematic propositions.

Speaking in Parables has recently been republished by SCM, 2002, but the 1975 version is also available online at Religion Online:
Speaking in Parables: A Study in Metaphor and Theology: Online

McFague’s later books include: The Body of God: An Ecological Theology (1993), and Super, Natural Christians: How we should love nature (1997). Her most recent book is Life Abundant: Rethinking Theology and Economy for a Planet in Peril (2000)

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Congregational Paradigm for Theological Reflection

When you hear the phrase “theological reflection” it is usually applied to to theological students in the context of field education. Yet most people writing about theological reflection expect that the predominant context will be groups of people in congregational settings working together to make sense of their lives. So why do we expect the professional theologians to talk theology while everyone else just ‘does it’?

James Hopewell, before his death in 1984, challenged his peers in theological education circles to think beyond clericalism. Seminaries needed to think beyond the formation and equipping of ordained ministers. When working through the stories, symbols and meanings of ministry experience, groups should be considering not just individuals, but whole congregations.

Hopewell distributed the draft of an essay to his colleagues in 1983 - proposing that the new paradigm of theological education should be the development of the life and faith of the congregation. His research was published in more detail after his death in the book “Congregations: Stories and Structures“, edited by Barbara Wheeler in 1987. The essay was responded to by his colleagues in another book, “Beyond Clericalism: The Congregation as a Focus for Theological Education“, edited by Barbara Wheeler and Joseph Hough in 1988. Barbara Wheeler and Edward Farley continued the conversation in the collation of essays: “Shifting Boundaries: Contextual Approaches to the Structure of Theological Education“, in 1991.

Much of Hopewell’s thesis comes from the experience of beginning a new church plant with a team of lay members, each of whom helped shape the culture of a thriving church over four years. He saw the impact of narrative - shared stories - on the culture and ethos of this congregation in the same way he’d seen earlier in African villages. Context was not just something to be considered when entering strange cultures - it was a factor in the local American congregation. Also a factor in the American seminary.

The implications of Hopewell’s thesis have deepened as theologians have learnt to take the congregation seriously. Nancy Ammerman’s congregational studies are now standard texts. Alban Institute’s work on the local congregation has become a core part of our learning. Don Browning, still the academic, encourages his readers and fellow scholars to take congregational theology seriously. Theological reflection is the domain of local teams of mission agents who may or may not include ordained clergy.

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Five New Paradigms for Emerging Church from Loren Mead

I’m on a discussion list for the Uniting Church in Australia, Queensland Synod. Tomorrow morning we’re beginning our Synod meeting on the Sunshine Coast. I’m responsible for the 51 small groups. On the agenda will be theological education. A task group have written a report outlining the importance of theological education happening in evangelism, equipping lay ministry, and in resourcing those equip congregations.

I wrote the following to the list in response to this queston:

“I hear a great deal about a new paradigm or a paradigm shift in relation to being church. I have not yet seen any attempt to frame this description in theological terms and I am at a loss to understand what people are seeking to describe when they refer to this paradigm change or new paradigm.”

Re emerging paradigms in relation to being church, I think we can see some emerging trends. I’d like to start the ball rolling with some provocation from Loren Mead, author of Once and Future Church.

Loren Mead in his book Five Challenges for the Once and Future Church outlines five emerging paradigm shifts.

1. Transfer the ownership of the Church

Mead here is responding to the fact up to now the church has been owned by the clergy. That is one huge factor in the way we train ministers. We may say we believe in the priesthood of all believers, but what really counts, in the mainstream paradigm of the Uniting Church, is the equipping of ordained preachers and pastors. What we see happening around the world is a growing sense of collaboration with a wide variety of local leaders. Specified ministries are being redefined as collaborative ministries rather than the practices of sole practitioners.

2. Find new structures to carry our faith

This one’s directly related to the report of the Mission and Service Fund Task Group. Mead points out that in many cases congregations and their leaders are fulfilling what used to be the role of denominations. We see the development of teaching and resourcing congregations such as Hillsong, Saddleback and Willow Creek. We have our own examples with Redcliffe, Robina and Logan. Mead reminds us of the growing distrust in centralised institutional structures. And of course we can’t afford the complexity of overheads we’ve had in the past. We’re at an institutional dead end. Mead encourages us as a denomination to learn from the small struggling ‘threshold’ congregations who are leading the way in thriving with fewer resources.

3. Discover a passionate spirituality

Mead calls for the mainline churches to integrate the gifts of the ordered, structured approach to spirituality with the those of the vital, enthusiastic Spirit-filled approach. “Because we cannot begin to imagine the challenges that will face those who will live in the twenty first century, the spirituality we have - traditional or charismatic - will not suffice.”

4. Feed the world’s need for community

Mead suggests that local congregations (particularly in cities) need to rediscover the power of being a Christian community founded in the Biblical grounds of our being. He says our congregations also have the function of being a generator of community that offers intimacy in house-church and small group settings.

5. Become an apostolic people (not just an apostolic church)

Mead says we’ve fallen into the trap of treating the ordinary member of the church as ‘client of the clergy’. We need to rediscover the sense of each member being a mission agent in their context. “Instead of maintaining a theology of the academy, we need an emerging theology born in the people’s engagement with God’s mission in the world.”

Five Challenges For The Future Church at Amazon.com

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Pohly on Supervision and Theological Reflection

Ken Pohly’s first book, Pastoral Supervision, came out in 1977. It was at the time a groundbreaking text for Christian leaders and educators considering the practice of professional supervision.

In his latest book, Pohly provided a theological foundation for supervision while helping his readers learn the development of supervision in a broad range of disciplines. He picks up on the strong contributions of narrative theology and applies them to professional supervision for ministers.

Transforming the Rough Places: The Ministry of Supervision, 2001, is an updated version of Pastoral Supervision. He provides an overview of the writing in several fields relating to supervision and provides an excellent series of bibliographical appendices.

Kenneth established the Pohly Center for Supervision and Leadership Formation at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio. He’s from a United Methodist context.

Ken Pohly - United Theological Seminary, Dayton, Ohio

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Hello from Picasa

www.blogger.com have done a great job of upgrading the services this last week. They’ve added the capacity for personal profiles, quadrupled the number of templates - and made editing these pages much much easier.

Now… I’ve discovered how to add graphics to pages with Hello from picasa. This Google-sponsored software site hosts the graphics, make them the right size, and places them on the blog of my choice. Nice one. Check it out at www.hello.com

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Stephen Bevans on Contextual Theology Models

Stephen Bevans published the first version of Models of Contextual Theology in 1992. In it he outlined the need for theology to take context seriously. He wrote carefully and compellingly about the interaction between gospel and culture.

Five models were used in 1992:
1. Translation (Hesselgrave & John Paul II)
2. Anthropological (Robert E. Hood & Vincent J. Donovan),
3. Praxis (Douglas John Hall & Asian Feminist theologians),
4. Synthetic (Kosuke Koyama & Jose M. De Mesa), and
5. Transcendental (Sallie McFague & Justo L. Gonzalez).

In 2002 Bevans added the countercultural model as proposed by the Gospel and Our Culture Network (Lesslie Newbigin & Darrell Guder) & Michael J. Baxter.

I like the consistent organic analogies used by Bevans all the way through. Translation’s about bringing seeds to plant in native ground. Anthropological is about watering the seeds already in the ground so they’ll sprout. Praxis is about constantly weeding the garden, learning to be a better gardener. Synthetic’s about cross-pollination. Transcendental is about cultivating my own garden in the hope that another will be inspired to cultivate his or hers. The Countercultural’s about weeding and fertilizing the soil so the seeds can be planted.

Stephen Bevans is on the staff at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. Before joining the faculty in 1986, he spent nine years in the Philippines teaching theology at a diocesan seminary. From his website: “This experience has colored the way he does theology and has also influenced his theological interests. His teaching and research probe issues in faith and culture, issues of mission theology, (particularly its trinitarian roots), and issues in ecclesiology and ministry.”

Models of Contextual Theology Revised and Expanded Edition (2002)

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Mike Regele on Generational Change and Postmodernism

Mike Regele of Percept published Death of the Church in 1996. That’s eight years ago. Mike’s a Presbyterian minister living in Irvine, California, and serves as a consultant for churches for churches, regional & national denominational bodies helping them with community and congregational profiles and planning programs.

In his 1996 book, Mike explores changes in generational culture, church culture as well as broad shifts such as postmodernism. He says that we can die because of our hidebound resistance to change, or we can die in order to live.

Regele provides six commitments that would make the second option possible:

1. Understand dynamics of change at work today in our culture
2. Understand various faces of change emerging as we prepare to step into 21st century
3. Accept that traditional place of institutional church in our society is dying, and with it the institutional church itself
4. Let our traditional forms & structures that are the foundation of the institutional church die
5. Wrestle to forge new ways to proclaim Gospel in changing world
6. Revision the church for the 21st century, at all levels, from the local congregation to national denominational church office

.

Regele takes the work of Strauss and Howe on generational cycles and challenges the church to consider how current movements have responded to dynamics within emerging generations. The coming cycle, he contends, will need to focus on ‘doing faith’ - practical incarnational expressions that people can take part in. The charismatic renewal was just right for the inner spirituality of the boomers. Now we need to see the building of new movements and organisations that make an impact on society.

Having applied the generational cycle as almost a given, Regele goes on to introduce the unknown, chaotic force of postmodernity as sweeps through like a tidal wave. He says that changes of this order make future generational culture hard to predict.

Regele approaches modernity and postmodernity through the metaphor of ‘bombproof certainty’. This certainty is an issue for people in a modernist framework but not for postmoderns. He provides a useful continuum for understanding the breadth of postmodern thought in this area: the span between the postmodern constructivist - all reality merely a construction of the mind, and the postmodern objectivist - relative certainty without burden of absolute certitude).

The most stirring part of the book was Regele’s call for a new generation of moral-visionary leadership. He says that the church growth movement is often focusing leaders on technique in order to fill churches. Regele says we need people with an ability to think big and bold, with the courage to face a world antagonistic to the church. “We have taken Jesus’ model of servant leadership and reduced it to insipid peonage”. He asks if the church will let leaders lead, or drive them out? He warns, however, that some leaders appear to be visionary, but are driven more by consumptive ambition than moral passion.

Mike has also written Robust Church Development: A Vision for Mobilizing Regional Bodies in Support of Missional Congregations. He co-authored Crossing the Bridge: Church Leadership in a Time of Change, with Alan Roxburgh.

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Action Science and Theological Reflection in Community

How do we test our assumptions and convictions? When we come to critique our experience, our perception of our context, and our understanding of our tradition, what processes do we use to open up authentic dialogue?

Chris Argyris and Donald Schon have developed a learning discipline with several names: Action Science, action inquiry, action research, or organizational learning. A lot of their material can be found in their book, Theory in Practice. Peter Senge has run with the idea in his book, The Fifth Discipline, implementing the practice of learning organization in business circles.

Anita Farber Robertson, a Unitarian minister in Rockford, Massachussets, has written a book, Learning While Leading, Alban Institute, 2000, for churches wanting to apply action science to theological reflection. She says that the action science approach helps Christian communities identify gaps and inconsistencies in the theories that inform their practice. Instead of continuing to make the same mistakes again and again, local leaders can use action science disciplines to have a look at what really is going on.

Argyris talks about designed blindness - in which we collude with our culture to overlook certain realities. We are so bound up with cognitive dissonance, often because we believe it is shameful to be imperfect and growing. He says that because our mental models provide a framework for our action as individuals and communities, we should pay attention to how those mental models are formed.

When looking at the formation of our mental models Argyris suggests we should consciously use the “ladder of inference”. Start at the bottom of the ladder with directly observable data. Then notice which data you’re paying attention to. What cultural and personal meanings are we giving to what we observe? What assumptions are we making based on those meanings? What conclusions are we drawing? What beliefs about the world are we now forming? Now - what are the actions that result?

Using this ladder we can identify ‘leaps of abstraction’ in which we miss steps out and overlook important parts of the process. We can go back and re-explore phases that have been missed. We can identify points of dissonance. This links in with Whiteheads’ first step of attending. With one group, I used an actual step ladder to help people enact this in relation to a case study.

Another important contribution of action science is the concept of advocacy and inquiry being valued equally. “I can tell you what I believe and why (advocacy) while paying attention to what you believe and why (inquiry)”. This ties in strongly with Whiteheads’ second step of conversation or asserting.

I think this model of developing meaning and action is helpful in unpacking the theology and practice related to the everyday life of local christian communities. It helps people test the validity of their assumptions about what’s going on in conversations, interactions with each other.

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Art of Theological Reflection

“Art of Theological Reflection” is a popular title - John Shea (2003), Jane Kopas (1983) and Ronald Gariboldi (1987) have all used the phrase in the names of their books. In this post, however, I want to look at the work of Patricia O’Connell Killen and John De Beer in their book, published in 1994 by Crossroad Publishing Company.

Patricia O’Connell Killen is Professor of American Religious History, and chair of the Department of Religion at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington.

John De Beer was until very recently rector at St Martins in the Field Episcopal Church, in Severna, Maryland. He has moved to Massachussetts.

Patricia and John were both on the staff at University of the South where they developed their approach to theological reflection. Patricia has continued as part time professor with the Episcopal Diocese of Southeast Florida.

I found this book very helpful - developing an approach that draws insight and action from reflection on significant experience. Participants in this model are encouraged to share their stories, explore feelings, images, and insights that lead to action. Participants are then led to intentionally connect their lived narrative with the Christian tradition, being aware of their own convictions and the influence of their cultural environment.

Patricia and John have written this book with their model in mind. They’ve included images that evoke the sense of exploring experience. They’ve outlined their theories in graphic diagrams. One such diagram outlines the interplay between tradition and experience. Standing in tradition alone is described as a standpoint of certitide. Standing in experience alone is described as self-assurance. Healthy theological reflections calls one to stand in the crossover of the two spheres.

The authors provide nine templates or designs for theological reflection, starting with life situation, scripture (tradition), scripture and written meditation (tradition), essay (cultural text), collection of resources on one theme (cultural text), an issue or theme, personal positions, religious experiences, and another’s theological text.

I recently used the ‘experience to action’ phase at a multimedia conference in which participants were looking at developing cutting edge approaches to worship in the ‘emerging church’. I took the line that the freshest experience of emerging church is to be found in last week’s personal and corporate experience. Some were astounded at the level of insight that came from exploring an ‘ordinary human experience’. The challenge then came as we brought our narratives, feelings, images, insights and actions to engage with the Scriptures and the cultural forms in which we engaged with our peers.

Art of Theological Reflection at Amazon.com

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Thom Rainer on the Bridger Generation

Thom Rainer is dean of the Billy Graham School of Missions, Evangelism and Church Growth at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

In his book, The Bridger Generation, published in 1996, he describes the generation who have eclipsed the ‘Busters’. This generation, he writes, were born between 1977 and 1994 and are the largest generation in the United States.

My first reaction in reading this was a slight resentment that Generation X were being squeezed into a small time frame, thus discounting their significance for the future. Forget them, pay attention to the next generation. Not a helpful approach as far as I was concerned. I guess his readership in 1996 would have been Boomers who were concerned about their teenage kids.

There are some useful angles to Rainer’s material. At the end of each chapter he explores the response of the church to the realities faced by the Bridgers. He tackles the apathy expressed by many churches who think that young people are just too hard to work with.

Like many Evangelical Boomer authors, Rainer tends to paint the emerging culture in dark hues. I was disappointed in some of the responses suggested by Rainer - they seemed like more of the same ‘reach these young people with the Bible” without consideration of what form the Christian gospel might take if it was to be grown up in the emerging culture of Bridgers.

Rainer draws heavily on observations by Susan Mitchell’s Official Guide to Generations, American Demographics, Walt Mueller Understanding Youth Culture, Edward Cornish of Futurist Magazine and George Barna (Generation Next).

The link below will take you to a summary of the book from Thom Rainer’s consultant company, Rainer Group

The Rainer Group | Rainer Online

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