Friday 23 May 2008

Treating church as a fetish




No this isn't about Gothic dungeons! - but if you were searching for religious porn and found this site - welcome!

Really its a V Interesting piece by Pete Rollins that I found really challenging (as he intended i think - see the follow up comments) and a good/difficult question about staying or going when it comes to trying to find a place/people to live out ones faith in. Well worth a read. If I ain't really engaging with 'church' - what am I doing?



I just ordered his newest book - The Fidelity of Betrayal - “In this work I make the claim that, in order to remain faithful to Christianity, we must be courageous enough to betray the bible (section 1), God (section 2) and the church (section 3). Why? Do I think that we must abandon them as redundant relics of a by-gone era? Do I think that they have served their purpose? Or do I feel that they prevent the world coming of age? By no means! Here I argue for a betrayal that remains faithful to these very words by helping us to re-discover the truly untamed, white-hot, life-transforming reality that they house.” Now that sounds like post provoking material if ever there was any - watch this space.




2 comments:

rache said...

i read the pete/rollins post you referred to and you're right, it is provocative. got me thinking again about church - what's it all about?, the stay or go thing.
i always come back to 2 questions/comments when I think about this:
1. when do ideas/beliefs/unbeliefs/differences in beliefs become more important than maintaining relationships by staying in a church? i guess this is different for each individual and will reflect their values.
2. there is surely value in being church together with people coming from very different perspectives if only all can cope with the differences and learn from each other - however in reality that seems very difficult to do :(

anyway then i read the subsequent post on his blog in which he talks of the necessity to escape the 'linguistic structures' of (traditional, evangelical) church in order to be faithful to God's vision. (this is my paraphrase and I'm not sure i necessarily understand what he's on about, but let's pretend that i do!) this seems broader in scope than perhaps what i understood by the previous post.
what i wondered was, if the linguistic structure in which i operate has changed over time is this what creates internal discomfort and makes me ask 'should i stay or should i go? – because I feel like I’m kind of talking a different language.
Who knows? – not me, that’s for sure!

I would like to read his book that you mentioned, am interested if p’rhaps a little sceptical . . . .

DS said...

Thanks Rach for your comment. I know I have devloped a different way of talking about things. In fact I remember a conversation on the way back from greenbelt with you in prob 97/98 that was about the sametime that I started to shift although that has accelerated in the last 3-5 yrs. It does make it difficult but hopefully not impossible but I take your point about it being an individual thing as I need to workout what I/my family can cope with working through in often messy ways. Re the relationships and all the above I think, again , you make some great points. I commented on Pete's latest piece and will include his bit and my comment in a post on engage now as I think this is a useful ongoing conversation - please carry on chipping in