Or both?
Part of my dissertation reading has been Zygmunt Bauman’s book, Consuming Life, which describes and explores some of the implications of living in a consumerist society.
Bauman very quickly makes the connection from a society oriented around consuming products to a society which also finds itself consuming each other:
How does the image of mission as healing affect the way we understand the mission of God?
So, after a long sabbatical it’s time to resume our Missional Viewpoints series. I almost let this series go, but I still think it’s something worth continuing so it’s time to revisit it and press on further. Just to jog your memory, here’s what I wrote as the brief for this series last Summer:
In his video for The Nines, Rick Warren talks about the need for a process of discipleship in a lot of the churches he is aware of. The question a lot of church leaders are asking is ‘how do we move people along from a needy attitude towards faith to a more committed “what can I give?” attitude?’
Is the problem that this is the wrong question? Instead, perhaps we should be asking questions about the way we market our faith in the first place?
How does the image of mission as liberation help us in understanding how God is at work in the world around us, and how we can get stuck in alongside him?
The story about a teenage intern at Morgan Stanley who wrote some notes of teenagers’ technology usage is quickly becoming a bit of a legend. This is really interesting – I wonder whether companies had actually considered using teenagers to gather research before?
If you haven’t seen this yet, you can catch up with this story from the Guardian.
Here’s a full copy of the research notes which have caused the stir. From my own experience of young people, it certainly seems to ring true.
Over July and August, on the blog I’ll be going through a series looking at our definition of mission, and particularly some specific keywords that inform our understanding.
With university work finally out of the way after the final push to get everything finished, and with The Lab beginning to quieten down for the summer, I thought it was about time to get back into blogging. So, in order to become more focused, and to get myself “back into shape” in terms of blogging, I thought it’d be good to work through a fairly simple, but quite interesting summer series.
I’ve been thinking recently, inspired by some stuff from a recent lecture at CYM, about the whole biblical meta-narrative – and in particular this idea of the story beginning with the garden and ending in the city. Beginning with Eden and ending with the new Jerusalem. I think I’ve read a few authors who have pointed this out and tried to draw observations from it – in particular recently Rob Bell’s new book and NT Wright’s Surprised by Hope.
It’s really interesting to see how we can play around with the interaction between this little bit of theology and all kinds of ideas about the way society and culture develops.
With the new year well under way I thought it was about time I threw out a bit of a life update. As I’m writing its a beautiful sunny, Spring-esque day outside the Lab house – an awesome day for my housemate Dan’s birthday. We had a party on Wednesday and are having a bit of a dinner party tonight to celebrate.
As always there’s so much going on at the moment – so many experiments and little projects, as well as developing ones – and that’s what I love about pioneering and working for The Lab: everything’s changing and growing and developing all the time.
So I thought I’d try and through out some quick bullet points of the different things that are going on for me.
So had my first day back at CYM last Wednesday – and began the Culture, Society and Mission module. Here are two quotes and thoughts I had:
“Aesthetics are the postmodern currency of power.”
That probably needs further unpacking in a future post. And:
“Critiquing a modern faith from within modernity is like describing a box from the inside.”
Today began to sketch out the concept of culture, beginning by looking at a theology of culture – from the garden to the city. Then we went on to take a detailed look at modernity – it’s origins, vague characteristics, and then onto a critique – as well as looking at the church in the light of modernity.
We also went through the opening chapter of H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture - which I had my first look through in the first year during a theology module. Really good, classic, go-to book.
I’m currently working my way through Mark Sayers‘ book The Trouble about Paris (well worth reading), which has been causing me to think a lot about this concept of hyperreality and the effect it has on our lives and our spirituality.
Hyper-reality is this idea that our culture is constantly causing us to buy into a “larger than” life – the dream life which we see epitomised by our images of celebrity and success, and ultimately happiness. This hyperreality claims to provide us with happiness and fulfilment, but leaves us living in a kind-of denial of the actual reality we live in.
The main, most obvious way we can see the effects of this “larger than” life is in consumerism and the effect it has had on our culture and our spirituality. The hyperreal myth that “just one more” will bring happiness leads us to become both material and spiritual consumers. Hence the Church finds itself having to attract and cater for a generation of Christian consumers – who are after maximum result (perceived value) for minimum investment (cost), and are always looking for the best deal.
Welcome to the blog of James Henley. I'm a young church leader / youth worker and student based in Newport, South Wales.
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