[Oe List ...] Resurgent Christianity

Fri Feb 8 16:28:24 PST 2019

Zoe, I’m not sure you should be too harsh with your old congregation. The LCX was long ago, over a generation ago. As one who led a galaxy church I’m aware of the consequences of the ‘turn to the world’. The flip side of that was a ‘turn from the church’. When the Order moved forward corporally, it left cadres dependent upon the leadership their clergy could provide. Those clergy were disconnected from a centre that had kept it mobilized by means of assemblies each summer that provided both practice , morale, and vision. Where there is no longer new vision, the movement perishes. The morale went forward with you and there was nothing further  from the Order for the LCX.

Amazingly, almost 45 years along from the end of the LCX, our Mother still struggles on. Even today there is life pulsing through it and still there are hopes for renewal. Joe Slicker had the choice between Order wisdom and new authors. Those like me no longer had contact, let alone access, to Order wisdom. It had to be new authors for us. But new authors there have been. 

In the era of the LCX there was a hiatus or lacuna in our knowledge of the church/Jesus Movement. That is because there was lacuna in church history. We traced the story back through the centuries of what we thought was the next phase after Jesus and the NT were the creeds and the church fathers’. It is only in the last 25 years that the picture of those first two ‘lost’  centuries has been sketched out by N T scholars. You’ll have to go to my blog to get the details (  https://subversivechurch.blog/blogs/ ). My bibliography of what has been written since mostly 1990 shows extensive work done by, particularly two groups of scholars.

 The first of which have discovered the ‘voluntary associations’ of the early centuries, the weekly or monthly ‘supper clubs’ that were ubiquitous in the Graeco-Roman world. This was THE way groups gathered and nourished each other in the bleak oppressive Roman Empire. These banquets, collegia, symposiums started among the elite in the time of Plato and went on for 700 to 800 years. Everyone was in an association, even slaves had their own. Jesus followers adopted that social structure and these were the ‘cadres' of the movement from Paul until Constantine's ‘hostile’ take-over of this form of the ‘church’ and turned it into institution.

As the first group of scholars have explicated what occurred when the Jesus people met, so the second group of N T scholars give insights into the world outside. There has been an awareness first of all, that the Roman Empire was not the background of the N T and early followers. It was, in the words of New Zealand Methodist scholar Warren Carter, "This book recognizes that Rome’s empire does not disappear or go away when it is not explicitly mentioned. It is always there. It forms the pervasive context of New Testament writings.”

Besides the work of these two threads of N T scholarship, the ‘empire criticism’ group has had an ancillary group, religious and secular, who have made clear that when the N T was finished, empire did not go away. Voices like sociologist Michael Mann, philosopher Ronald Wright, and eco-warrior David Korten indicate to one extent or another that, like the poor, the dominators have always been with us. Civilisation and empire are almost synonymous and co-terminous- for the last 5000 years- from the Sumerians to the fossil fuel industry.

Now, I love my N T academics and their work. But they are academics. They have their new insights and then move on. They leave me bereft of parish practics as did the Order in the 1970s. You might have seen the emails I was sending out just before Christmas titled "Looking for persons interested in helping develop a Subversive Church “. Just one was sent to you. The rest were scattered upon the water in hopes of finding colleagues today for the renewal of the church. Only response back from the OE List was from Lynda Cock who wontedly input to the LCX data gathering. Sheesh!

Fortunately, I did get some feedback. Among them was a response from prolific author Brian McLaren who said we were traveling a similar road and reaching similar conclusions. He pointed me toward a book of his I had not seen, “Everything Must Change”. A voice of hope had come to my hermitage. At 86 I doubt I will see the New Heaven and New Earth of the church’s renewal. But I know it will come.

Bud Tillinghast

> On 8 Feb 2019, at 2:22 pm, Zoe Barley via OE <oe at lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:
> 
> I am truly grateful for our life together as Order: Ecumenical and our many and serious attempts to renew the local congregation. But these attempts failed. I find Gene Marshall's analysis most useful - "the institutions were old wineskins that could not hold the new wine."
> 
> As many of you know Gene was/is teaching an updated RS-1 called CR-21 Christian Resurgence for Century Twenty One.  Given the failure of church renewal, his call is for a Resurgent Christianity.  Bishop Jack Spong still hopes the current church can be radically reformed. More and more I find myself with Gene.
> 
> As I tried to write down stories from the two Galaxies I was part of it could not be done save the context of the attempt and its failure were clearly there so no one would be misled.
> 
> Upon returning as a member to the church whose cadre we once led I find no vestiges of the Galaxy efforts. No experimental worship, many mission efforts but none seriously challenging the social institutions, no experiments in Christian community.
> 
> Besides individual congregations here and there, are there efforts toward a Resurgent Christianity that should be known? Can they be replicated and become a movement? How are you all thinking about this?
> 
> Zoe Barley 
> 116 Jackson Street 
> Denver Colorado 80206 
> zbarley at earthlink.net <mailto:zbarley at earthlink.net> 
> 
> 720-318-1171 (mobile) 
> 303-388-9191 (land line)
> 
> 
> 
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