July 25

Discipleship thoughts on St James’ day

The lectionary I use for my daily prayer served up Jeremiah 45 and as I read vv.4-5 I had a sense of connection which relates, for me at least, to the challenge of discipleship in changing climate and in the face of the environmental crises.

Thus you shall say to him, ‘Thus says the Lord: I am going to break down what I have built, and pluck up what I have planted—that is, the whole land. 5 And you, do you seek great things for yourself? Do not seek them; for I am going to bring disaster upon all flesh, says the Lord; but I will give you your life as a prize of war in every place to which you may go.’

Jeremiah 45:4-5 NRSV

I reflected that this came over to me as a kind of ‘type’ of Christians in the coming decades: “don’t seek great things for yourselves (churches etc) rather recognise there is disaster for all flesh, but you can survive”.

I’m not necessarily saying that God is directly bringing disaster upon us, I merely take it at the level of ‘some measure of disaster is inevitable’. At this point I’m not wanting to go into theologies of providence and divine action.

I felt too that the ‘seeking great things for yourself’ could speak into the propensity of many churches to inflate their own egos or seek to ‘be heard’ and to allow such things to drive them into imperialistic mindsets and actions rather than to humbly serve the common good and commend Christ with gentleness and attentiveness to the hurts and wounds of others.

I happened to read this because it was among the readings for the feast day of James the Apostle. And in terms of the previous paragraph I ended up thinking about the gospel reading for the day too, particularly the words:

26It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, 27and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; 28just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.

Matthew 20:26-28 NRSV

I presume the lectionary creators chose the Jeremiah passage to support the gospel reading on this day precisely for that echo of the ‘not greatness but service’ theme. It serves in climate emergency, though, to remind us that our role, our churches’ roles, are to serve and give life for many.

God’s mission in what is happening now and will continue to happen increasingly forcefully, is in broad terms easy to understand and deduce from what we know already of God and God’s ways. Our role is to discern more particularly the parts we have to play in God’s mission.

God will continue to work towards justice, peace and the integrity of creation and to invite us, in various ways, to play our roles in that. God will continue to move for the feeding of the hungry, the healing of the sick, the liberty of those imprisoned and the sharing of good news with the poor.

Those are givens and not really negotiable. We are called to join in appropriately. So the real question is about what it means to do those sorts of things in a climate-changed, ecologically-challenged, world? Also in the lections for St James’ day, is the Acts passage about Agabus predicting famine and the response of the churches to share from their means with those lacking1. It felt to me also that this is a model we should have in mind to be guiding our responses to the climate and ecological emergencies.

The purpose of the posts in this thread under the label of “climate discipleship” is to explore what kinds of action will be required of us and then to probe back behind that to consider what kind of discipleship that requires with a view to making sure that our disciple-making, our Christian nurture of new believers and of believers needing to re-orientate to the ‘new’ conditions of life will be fit for those purposes.

  1. 29The disciples determined that according to their ability, each would send relief to the believers living in Judea -Acts 11) ↩
Category: climate discipleship | LEAVE A COMMENT
May 17

Eco realism and Christian hope

Responding to a post on eco-realism -a conversation towards a day conference later this year, I wrote to the convenor…

Hi again Lowell

I hope it’s okay to respond to you about this. I’m really appreciative that you are doing this reflection and calling a conference together (even if it’s not practical for me and others I know to attend). I’m also encouraged because it seems to parallel and re-inforce some of the conversations that we’re having on this side of the Atlantic.

The reason for commenting more directly at this point is to add into your consideration, perhaps, something that we’ve been finding in conversations in the Borrowed Time project (https://borrowedtime.earth/) of Green Christian (https://greenchristian.org.uk/). In Borrowed Time our aim is to consider how to Christianly face the polycrisis that is unfolding driven by climate change and environmental degradation.

We have found ourselves thinking much about the issue of hope and the question of what Christian hope might be. Some have found themselves saying things like ‘Hope is hopeless’. And of course, this then invites consideration of what we mean by ‘hope’. The danger that some are concerned about is that some versions of ‘hope’ are actually disabling: a sense of “it’ll be fine, so we don’t need to do anything” (because God …). That’s been a literally incredible kind of hope for us: we do not find it in us to believe or rely on the idea that God will somehow rescue us by taking it all away or intervening so disjunctively. We do believe that we are called to respond and that “hope” should be something that supports constructive response.

So, what about constructive response and what about hope?

Most of us take utterly seriously that change is upon us. It’s not ‘if’ but ‘when’ and ‘how’ things change, recognising that changes have already begun and are catastrophically altering lives, livelihoods all over the planet to varying degrees, and not just human. We do not hope for that to change supernaturally.

Some of us have also been discovering that the hope we had was actually fairly shot-through with the myth of modernist progress. This ‘hope’ was founded on the idea that “thing can only get better”. To discover that we mostly operated not in a Godly hope but from a hope that was based on a merely human optimism and self-belief has precipitated its own disenchantment and sense of grief -a mourning for a future we no longer have ‘faith’ in and which has dissolved in a disturbing bath of climatology or been smashed by a hockey stick! A mourning on discovering that rather than things getting better, we’ve actually been making many things considerably worse and in ways that undermine the prospects for recovery.

So what kinds of ‘hope’ do we find? -Hope that gives us courage and fortitude to begin and to continue to love neighbour and to serve and guard the earth is what we need. Hope to keep us from giving up in despair and letting the worst happen. We can still strive to make things less bad, to try to save lives and livelihoods (and not just human ones). We can still work to enable something beautiful to emerge from the destruction and chaos -even if we don’t know what that is.

We do know that ends are vitally shaped by means and so if we pursue loving means, we create conditions for loving ends to grow and emerge. We need some kind of hope to support us in directing our efforts to loving actions here and now.

This results in a hope that is somehow both smaller and yet more grounded. It is a hope that ‘our work in the Lord is not in vain’, that what we do, even the small stuff, if it is for God, is not insignificant but is valuable, eternally for it is grounded in the everlasting. It is a hope that because God is at work and that we are seeking that work and to join with it, it will be well, even if we cannot see or predict how it will work out, or even whether in human terms it will be ‘successful’, God sees, God knows, God values and, yes, God weaves it into a meaningful beautiful tapestry. All in the end is harvest, somehow.

In this hope we are able to befriend unknowing.

This is, of course, my own ‘take’ on the Borrowed Time processes, particular in relation to my own participation in the Cloud and Fire retreat in daily life. It is possible that some of my fellow-travellers might wish to say things differently or even dissent from aspects of what I try to express above. However, I do hope it may encourage you and perhaps add something useful to the ongoing reflections.

Category: climate discipleship | LEAVE A COMMENT
February 19

Future, discipleship, climate

Introduction

This is a paper I wrote for a recent gathering of people involved in thinking about spiritual accompaniment in our region.

Reading Jane Shaw’s volume, I was struck what a different world it addresses. Not only is my class background not really represented (it’s all seems quite middle/upper class). I was largely left feeling that this is spiritual practice that seems quite detached from much of the lived reality of the nation that I read recently about in The People [The Rise and Fall ofthe Working Class 1910-2010]. The exception is to some extent is Percy Dearmer. These are people also who lived and worked in a world also where CO2 was below 350ppm (it’s now 420+) and the climate was still the relatively stable holocene we came to know and mostly love (yes, even in Britain!)

My fear is that to continue to think along the same trajectory as these mid-20th century pioneers would be to isolate Christian spirituality from the most important and momentous features of what is now underway. Gaia Vince puts that into perspective as she asks:

“Where are you at with your five stages of grief for the Holocene? That’s the geological epoch we were living in for the past 11,700 years – the period of time when humans invented agriculture, built cities, invented writing, became “modern”, essentially. All of history took place in this epoch, marked by its congenial, relatively predictable climate, in which ice sheets retreated from Europe and North America, and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were high enough to enable the flourishing of grains, like rice and wheat.” Now we’ve left those Holocene conditions for the uncharted Anthropocene, an age brought about by human activities and characterised by global climate chaos and ecological degradation…  find myself experiencing all stages simultaneously. Anger that my children won’t get to snorkel the wondrous coral reefs of my Australian childhood; pain and guilt over the millions of Indian villagers displaced by floodwaters, losing their homes, livelihoods, even their lives. Depression over the scale of loss: of wildlife, of glaciers, of verdant landscapes, of safe, reliable weather. It is the last two stages we need to reach – acceptance and reconstruction – if we are to build a livable Anthropocene.”  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/18/heatwave-floods-save-planet-children

Gaia Vince

 So it does seem important to me to parallel the recent COP28 Global Stocktake with a  taking stock of what lies ahead and what it will mean for churches and Christians to respond well in order to understand, coram Deo, the kinds of communities and people we need to be; with our glocal neighbours and recognising we are [part of] the ecosystems that we rely on for sustenance.

“We must try to understand the meaning of the age in which we are called to bear witness. We must accept the fact that this is an age in which the cloth is being unwoven. It is therefore no good trying to patch. We must, rather, set up the loom on which coming generations may weave new cloth according to the pattern God provides.”

Mother Mary Clare SLG

Where the climate crisis is causing distress and eco-anxiety, we have the opportunity to ground ourselves in a theology of a God intimately involved in creation – the God who created us, dwells in us (‘us’ including the natural world), and will meet us at our end. -JR Hollins: https://joannahollins.wordpress.com/2023/07/18/the-vicar-or-the-ground-source-heater/

J R Hollins

What lies ahead?

It now seems we cannot avoid a minimum of 1.5°C for several decades. This will shift ecological zones, expand deserts, melt large amounts of polar ice, raise sea levels by metres not just the few centimeters we’ve seen so far. It will result in fiercer rain and storms. In turn this will imperil food security. These things will increase tensions in human society, promote migration, there will be wars and rumours of war. The darker angels of our nature will find greater opportunity to ride forth.

We are already seeing the emergence of the conditions of and for a neo-feudalism and a rentier basis for economies being laid down by TNCs and their billionaire owners.

We are already seeing the rise of the political reflexes of that economic shift.

While not inevitable, this path is likely. What we do now in the next 5-10 years is of deadly importance -I use that adverb with forethought!

………………………………………………………………………………

TAKE A BREATH -notice our own reactions, hold them before God …

This is a vital part of the work of God right now.

———————————————————————-

The time for declaring emergency and working for sustainability was 40 years ago. Now our sector [conservation] must focus on being collapse-aware, to aim for ruggedisation and to build a regenerative culture. …. This means anticipating, facing and responding to the linked crises of ecological and climate breakdown, pandemics, rising inequalities, displacement, famines & conflict. … Earth crisis, for short. … Where society is competitive, where there is a lack of shared responsibility, and where heritage isn’t cherished as a commons, collapse is more likely to lead to conflict and displacement. … From <https://bridgetmckenzie.uk/sustainability-is-in-the-past>

Bridget McKenzie

Meeting what lies ahead

I suggest that Christians and churches will need to consider upping our game and preparing for action in these missional responses.

Churches *should* have a vital role in the short to medium terms:

·       helping to build community resilience;

·       offering help  for people to learn new skills;

·        providing pastoral care to the anguished, shocked and regretful;

·       truth seeking and telling in the face of disinformation and denial;

·       offering spiritual accompaniment as people re-orient lives around sustainable practices;

·       making known and exemplifying the riches of spiritual practice to support simple lifestyles and neighbourliness. (And be learning and re-learning all of that ourselves)[i].

These feel somehow monastic. It is also vital and necessary. There are movements afoot already to promote and foment these things. Christians should surely be among them.

What spiritual perspectives support these ‘missions’?

Grounding in natural world: we know that there are strands of Christian spirituality that value and rejoice in creation; we need to lean into them but in a way that doesn’t denigrate the urban per se. We should also widen our thinking about incarnation to more thoroughly incorporate (!) understanding that the flesh is matter, imbricated in ecosystems. (We might note and theologise about the way being in nature supports good mental health.)

Preferential option for the poor. Hopefully I don’t need to say more about this?!

Joy in enough, simplification (new Franciscanism?) and rejoining our lives and life-systems to the circular economies of nature. Yes, let’s consider the lilies and the birds how they are supported and support life around them.

Learning the insights of protest movements especially: undoing hierarchy; valuing each; self and other care; listening; (cf Quaker decision making);

It is important that we help the development of a Missio Dei perspective -implied spiritual disciplines of (corporate) attention, discernment and reflection; together and individually. We can use the Five marks of mission to help draw our attention to where to look for God at work.

We have been seeing the way that money buys social perception filters and narrative hegemony. Ctr “You shall know the truth and it will set you free” -rediscovering intellectual humility and valuing truth-seeking -disciplines of study, valuing not bearing false witness, courage in challenging untruths, half-truths and evasions, telling truth to power.

 One of the tests of actual faith, as opposed to bad religion, is whether it stops you ignoring things. Faith is most fully itself and most fully life-giving when it opens your eyes and uncovers for you a world larger than you thought – and of course, therefore, a world that’s a bit more alarming than you ever thought. The test of true faith is how much it lets you see, and how much it stops you denying, resisting, ignoring aspects of what is real.   

Rowan Williams, in Mark Oakley, A Splash of Words.

 Humility in mission: it is God’s mission, God’s agenda we seek. Too often in the past the churches have tried to own and badge efforts for justice and reform. Too often we have been rivalrous with others. But it is God’s work, we can be content with doing right and good things even if it doesn’t have ‘Brought to you by the CofE’ in the corner. Too often we have been arrogant and failed to listen and so we’ve missed the Spirit blowing gently and unexpectedly in the lives and circumstances of others -the sheep not of this fold.

 Courage:

 “In a time of overlapping global crises, it’s clear that radical courage will be required of us as individuals and as a society – in our communities and institutions at local and national levels, and not least among those in public life – if we are to make decisive progress on our interconnected economic, environmental and social challenges, and create truly just and flourishing futures … That will require at least two things: the willingness to step out of our comfort zones and into the storms and waves, to protect the poor, the vulnerable and nature itself, and a clear sense of where to find the resources beyond ourselves to discover that courage.”

Justin Welby

 Re-learning hope: not as optimism or wishful thinking or escapist eschatology. We can no longer work for a better world, only a less-worse one (accompanying people in bereavement from modernist progressive optimism). Hope as a humble sustaining of work with God in the world and among God’s people, simply knowing /trusting that “our work in the Lord is not in vain”

Finding spiritual perspectives that help us to deal with complicity. BLM and the current climate/enviro crises remind us how we are deeply formed and held in life-patterns and attitudes that do not serve wider human flourishing. Understanding corporate sin and our participation in it in ways that help us to live wisely ourselves and to minister to others, is vitally important. I personally believe that this is where conversations about sin and atonement ought to be circling. Not to mention liturgy and theological formation.

What does “holy and righteous life” look like in these conditions?

As well as regular attentive reflection on the world around us -human and more-than-human; as well as discernment of God’s mission and our own vocations within it; as well as meeting together for mutual encouragement and upbuilding … we will need to consider some marks of a holy and righteous life that we have not paid so much attention to over the last century (or maybe I’m wrong?)

·       Resilience through facing despair, complicity and world-view bereavement with gentleness, truthfulness and Godly neighbour love.

·       Peacemaking

·       Community building /Mutual aid to try to nurture resilience against the threats of divisive rhetoric and selfish responding to crisis. It will also enable the kind of working together that will actually save lives and enable human and ecological flourishing

·       Casting down the mighty and lifting up the lowly

·       Bearing witness to truth

·       Dealing wisely with complicity

·       NVDA, Civil disobedience

·       21st century alms-giving that recognises structural dimensions of alleviating want.

As I mention these things, I’m so often aware that there are precursors. Christians in past times of civilisational change and collapse have done many of these things in various ways. Often it has been monastic and mendicant orders who have been at the forefront….

Over to you….

[i]From < https://www.facebook.com/groups/2349278635285005/?multi_permalinks=3536698376543019&notif_id=1691680506613098&notif_t=group_activity&ref=notif

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December 14

Corporisations -facing climate change

In the spring earlier this year1, I led an online seminar for interested people in Christian Climate Action. What follows is a write up in long-form of the notes I used to present the opening section of the hour.

Abstract

This is a theological reflection arising from considering themes of justice, God’s immanence and the phrase that MLK popularised about the arc of the moral universe bending towards justice. Along with these considerations is an approach to co-creation that acknowledges the Powers that Be (taking, critically, as a starting point Walter Wink’s work). Rooted in an account of creation that weaves in the elohim/angels/council of gods and links them to the Powers, understands them as emergent beings -simultaneously spiritual and corporate. Then we move to co-creation in the framework of and understanding of creatio continua where some of what we continue to co-create is justice, peace etc -in big part through /with the elohim.

Presentation

This is an exploration and I’m hoping that conversation after the initial laying out of ideas will help to sharpen up the expression as well as indicate areas to be further developed.  This is not a polished thesis but a perspective in the process of development, gaining focus and scope.

Starting with considering creation, let’s note that there are social, communal and co-creative strands. And out of that social interactivity there is emergence. Emergence is a scientific concept (still being discussed, not accepted by all) which conceives that complex interaction tends to produce a new level or layer of being = eg cells making a body or brain, bee colony … individuals become part of a greater whole. A significant difference for humans is that we can be members of more than one collectivity (corporisation) and we can critique and depart…

I also want us to consider a notion of continuous creation, that creation is not finished but ongoing, God creates beings that create themselves, that we humans are called into a role involving co-creation with God meaning that there are things that are co-created through and in our efforts. Among that things that we co-create are corporisations (a neologism seeking to capture the idea of organisation but in an onging dynamic way which additionally includes the emergent characteristics). “Corporisations” encompasses : The Powers [that be]; principalities; social structures; institutions; organisations etc. In this perspective we hold together emergence and continuing creation: emergent from human interaction are ‘corporisations’. Emergence is a force for/of continuing creation.

Further, I’m taking as an implication of the above that justice, peace and the integrity of creation (JPIC) are supposed to be part of creation and that they are (or are not!) being created in the human (and more than human) world. This is part of God’s creation but a part in which humans have a particular responsibility to collaborate with each other and with God. The corporisations are meant to be characterised by JPIC as well as vehicles for them. Love /justice (which a number of theologians have suggested are paired with justice being the social form of love) can be seen as a prime dynamic ‘glue’, holding together corporised entities.

This, I think, is taking us beyond Walter Wink et al re ‘The Powers’. How? The concept of emergence and seeing these beings as dynamically co-created.

The Powers -corporisations- are made of us but exceed us. They have their own identities and callings but we provide the context, energy, make-up etc.They can be thought of a bit like, eg, bee colonies: the whole hive has an identity and a pattern of behaviour, even intentionality which exceeds the individual bees that comprise it. Yet those bees provide the energy, context underpinning for the existence of that colony as an entity. However, let’s note that we, as the component body-minds of corporisations, can belong to more than one which social insects cannot (this may be significant).

The vocation of the Powers, in Wink, is to serve human welfare (maybe we’d want to expand that to the flourishing of creation -a clear implication of Gn.2:15). They enable us to do collectively things that we cannot achieve singly or in small groups and these collective things are meant to be good for us and enable us and our ecosystems to flourish.

Council of the gods

This is an image that crops up a number of times in the Hebrew Bible. There is a fluidity of terminology: the word used is “elohim” and this word is translated at times as ‘angels’ as well as gods, can even sometimes refer to human rulers. This leads us to consider how to interpret the Council of the gods or the heavenly council.

I propose the following. Each nation is corporately-present at a “spiritual” /”heavenly” level. The elohim are the nations seen in pneuma-space -the space created by human social emergence (and I’d suggest that this subsumes things like culture, economics, politics, religion …). This would be the ‘heavenly’ correspondance to the ‘earthly’ personal/institutional realities we more readily recognise through our senses and more direct understanding.

Now, maybe we should consider that the gods-council also now has major corporations in it not just nations or city states…

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

From https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/11/15/arc-of-universe/

‘Moral’ (and so moral universe) is an anthropocentric term (arguably). So if we think that this quote has truth to it, it would be expressed through the ongoing co-creation of/through/in corporisations. Continuing creation includes making justice, love, human and planetary flourishing etc

I think that this relates to Logos in Jn.1:1ff. Underlying the created dis/order is a built in ‘force’ attracting creation towards loving, just, flourishing, relationships and activity. This ‘Word’ (Wisdom -even Algorithm?) is the attractive and inspiring Light for all and is meant to inform our building together, our co-creation. But we can (and do) refuse it or subvert it.

In a world replete with prideful and greedy powers, shaping the lives of people and planet -bring them to judgement, recall them to the common good and draw them into creation care. God fulfil your purpose for us: Send from heaven and save us [From <https://ourcommonprayer.org/2022/03/02/lent-in-climate-emergency/>]

IMPLICATIONS for us…

  • It helps us to appreciate and perhaps understand better how complicity works: the corporate becomes part of us through socialisation, enculturation and where that corporate is fallen, that becomes us all unwittingly and unconsented.
  • Corporisations are made of us: our collaboration, our tech, our ideas and values -and our ‘spiritualities’ as well as a feedback from them to us more individually -they in turn shape us.
  • Corporisations (which could be oil companies and governments) have God-given vocations and we need to find ways to help call them back to their vocations (which will be in the context of helping life to thrive and serving wellbeing -including human).
  • We need to find ways to communicate effectively with them. This is where protest, disruption etc can come in -but we should be asking each time: “How does this communicate, how does this help recall to vocation?”
  • The scriptures already tell us about this -but ‘hidden (to us)’ under the imagery of apocalyptic (it’s worth recalling that ‘apocalypse’ means revealing what is hidden) and prophetic and mythological. And also a different set of governance assumptions (eg not valuing democracy and social justice so much).

A point from the discussion

One participant raised a matter which had me thinking further about how to better communicate some of this (and this reflection has informed my further thinking reflecting somewhat inprevious posts under the ‘corporisations’ tag on this blog -for example developing the thoughts on the council of the gods). The question arose from the observation of the evil that oil companies are committing and a sense that to recognise them as in some way ‘good’ felt very wrong, that they are irredeemable.

My response in the meeting was along the lines that there could be a good purpose behind an oil corporation -to help people have energy and that our mission is to hold them accountable for the evil that they do.

Further reflection on my part is to note that this is twisted by the kind of legal and economic framework and the empowerment of their key actors greed and insouciance. I reflect also that the idea of having a company that is about helping humans to have power to live and to flourish is fair-enough, good even. What we are dealing with is a gross perversion of that mission. Our task is, in Walter Wink’s terms to call them (back) to the vocation of power supply and to reimagine themselves in ways that are not monumentally harmful. If it turned out that these powers were unrepentant and continued down the road of evil-doing, then they should be dismantled and taken out of existence. Their license to exist is that they serve human and planetary welfare, if they fail, their legitimations and life-support should be withdrawn or radically reformed.

I think that in one respect, we consider them as we might humans: their being rooted in good but being also fallen. I would not value them as highly as humans and the other-than-human material creation, and so would consider that they could and maybe sometimes should suffer a death penalty if unrepentant and irreformable.

  1. Video for Lent Series 2023, no.4 at https://christianclimateaction.org/get-involved/saturday-reflections/saturday-reflections-video-archive/ -what I outline below is a tidied-up version of the notes I used to steer the presentation. What I actually said was more detailed ↩
Category: climate discipleship, corporisations | LEAVE A COMMENT