Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Did churches start reducing programming in the summer because people take a break from church and head for the pool, or do people take a break from church because churches reduce programming?
Mike Breen's 3DM Semi-Circle
Probably the answer is: Yes.
However, there is another way to think about sabbath and renewal other than as a "break." Mike Breen, whose life shapes I find useful for discipleship conversations, uses a semi-circle image to illustrate the balance between abiding and fruitfulness, resting and working.
In Breen's model, a congregation might reduce programs for a season in order to abide and rest. But one thing that would not lessen through that season would be regular worship, because worship is an integral part of abiding in God.
Reducing programs allows one type of movement illustrated on the semi-circle, the movement of pruning. Participants in faith communities can prune away some parts of their church life that have become overly hectic, less fruitful than they had hoped.
The pruning then allows space for the growth and nurture of more fruitful activity.
To me, this would be renewed focus on "right" worship. More time to read Scripture. More time devoted to prayer as preparation for communal worship.
It could also mean rested space in order to nurture faith relationships in other ways outside of programmed activities. There might not be Sunday school, but there is now time to meet at the park with friends, and as part of play at the park, huddle briefly for prayer. There might not be a mid-week Wednesday event, but instead a group of families cooks casserole and brings it over to a neighbor in need.
Not to mention the fact that if churchgoing Christians are going to have even half a chance of fulfilling the Great Commission and make disciples of all nations, they're going to have to be less busy at church so they can actually spend time among "the nations."
If I could "prescribe" a pattern for the summer in our own faith community, it would look like: Commit to weekly worship and daily prayer... don't miss worship; visit friends and neighbors and strengthen them, making sure especially that those at risk of being neglected or left out are included; give some time over to study, and some time over to advocating for justice. Use the abiding time to reframe all your non-church time as still abiding in God time.
The Dude Lives, in his unperturbable
state of dudeness, somewhere.
Sometimes there is no better way to abide than to rest in God among people new to you. Worshipping away from home and gathered with others gives perspective.
Even if you can't find a church, abiding in these summer months can mean designing your own family worship. You can even worship on the road. Our family has sung camp songs, read Scripture, and prayed while driving.
The main thing is, to abide, rather than just break. What does it means to rest in God?
For myself, as a pastor, it means discovering that I don't just worship when I have to. Over time, I have learned how much abiding happens when I worship while on vacation. It's the time I "get to" be in worship. I don't not worship as a break from my work. Instead, I worship as part of my resting from work.
The lectionary text for this Sunday includes Jesus' proclamation: As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love (John 15:9).
But the word abide isn't much in use today, other than in The Big Lebowski. It is in need of recovery, because it is such a beautiful word. To abide is to stay, to continue in place, to rest, to dwell, to sojourn, to pause, to wait, to continue, to wait for, to be prepared for, to endure, sustain, submit, to bear with, to even stand the consequences of...
Abiding is not dead passivity, but rather active anticipation. To abide through these summer months is to actively prune to make space for what is coming, what's next. To abide in God is to rest during the pruning, trusting in God to provide, trusting that God is the very anticipated, God is both in our anticipation and the anticipated One.
If we approach summer "break" as time to abide, it will "break" open a whole new way for worship and life together.
This summer in our congregational life we anticipate space to breathe, to reflect on
our spring Journeying Together Faithfully
study (an intentional conversation our congregation has hosted around matters of human sexuality and faith), and to begin implementation of recommendations from Healthier Church,
and simply to rest in God's creation, enjoying summer.
We also know many of us feel called and inspired by God to
continue conversations around matters of importance. So we invite you to join a
core team for a summer long conversation on issues of race, community violence,
and criminal justice. As our nation and culture struggles mightily with these
issues, our goal is to nurture a fall congregational and community space to host a
civil conversation for faith-based reflection leading to advocacy and action.
During the summer months, our core team will read
background articles and blogs and books, perhaps do some field trips or
interview community leaders, and share insights. This team will
"practice" what we will then host in the fall. If you're interested
in helping design publicity, lead small group discussions in the fall, or more,
please gather with us for our first conversation Sunday May 31st during the 10
a.m. education hour. Feel free also to adapt this model for your own congregational context.
XIII. How can we do more than just talk? (communally)
The "how can we do more than just talk?" sessions will be an integral part of this study process, so that collectively we develop strategies for working for peace and justice in God's world, thereby fulfilling the promises made in our baptism.
I just finished reading Kim Gordon's fantastic new book, Girl in a Band: A Memoir. Gordon and Thurston Moore, two of my rock heroes, fronted Sonic Youth for over a 30 year stretch, and have become without a doubt one of our more iconic bands. They are so seminal in the world of rock & roll that, in a way, they ARE a genre rather than easily pigeon-holed into a genre. They had their start in the No Wave movement in New York City, a movement that attempted, in punk subculture fashion, to fight against commercialization and another movement of music of the period, New Wave, the most famous band of which was the Talking Heads (which is a whole other story, because David Byrne, also a New Yorker, frontman for the Talking Heads, is as much a creative hero of mine as Kim Gordon).
Gordon is a heroine of rock for many reasons, including, as she recognizes in the title of her memoir, that in that early period of punk and rock history, it was simply remarkable (unfortunately) for a woman to be on stage singing and playing bass.
But here is what is intriguing about Kim Gordon--she wasn't a musician, really didn't even think of herself as a musician. Like Arcade Fire and other big name bands, she kind of fell into the band scene out of a more general interest in performance art.
It's worth reading the memoir for this part of her story. She offers a short version of it in her interview on NPR with Terry Gross:
GROSS: You've always loved music, but you didn't know how to play. And you write you've never considered yourself a musician. So what inspired you to actually start playing?
GORDON: It began with this artist friend of mine, Dan Graham, who had a performance piece. And he wanted to do the piece with an all-girl band. So he asked me if I wanted to participate. And that was kind of how it started. But, you know, the whole atmosphere of - this was like post-punk era, in a sense - 1981. But something about punk rock - I was just talking with someone about this - how it kind of set people off on this course, and you didn't know where it was going. And it wasn't about being a musician. It was just kind of this almost social phenomena that was happening. But it was happening through music, whereas everything had been fairly staid in mainstream music and also the culture. And so it kind of almost, like, set up this context where anyone could kind of participate. So it was this whole other avenue that was opened up. And it kind of pulled you along with it.
GROSS: Do you have a lot more technique now than you did then?
GORDON: (Laughter) I suppose I do, but it's hard to describe. Like, I have a vocabulary of sound and, you know, I have a pretty good sense of space (laughter) and rhythm. But, you know, again, now I play mostly improv music. And, you know, it's not really about playing conventional chords, and it never was in Sonic Youth. It was - the guitars were always tuned in different tunings. The base was tuned in regular - a regular tuning. So we didn't really talk in terms of chords so much and, you know, I almost felt like I had to work against learning how to play, because there was kind of a skill in that, really.
I find one sentence in there mind-blowing. "I almost felt like I had to work against learning how to play, because there was a kind of skill in that, really." Now, to get a sense of what she means by that, I'd suggest you watch this video of a live performance.
After you watch that one, then watch Gordon perform with Sonic Youth on the David Letterman show when she was 8.5 months pregnant, an event she describes with some poignancy in her book:
Towards Sonic Preaching
Here's what I ponder... do more of us allow ourselves to be open to creativity that is beyond constricted creativity? Do we allow our assumptions about how things should be to keep us from creating what is? Gordon didn't let her lack of traditional musical knowledge keep her from singing and playing bass. Instead, she actually cultivated it as its own kind of skill.
I think, for example, of the art of preaching. So many preachers preach the way they think somebody should preach. It becomes a kind of constraining and trapping and derivative performance. So what if preachers could tap into the kind of punk framing Gordon clearly taps into for her sonic explorations?
Here, watch one more video if you have time. This one is a song Gordon wrote after reading William Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition, about Cayce Pollard, a "cool hunter":
I am not here arguing for mediocrity in our creative pursuits. There is far too much of that. But true creativity is killed as much by goals and guidelines as it is by middling dullness.
Okay, if you've been willing to go this far down the rabbit hole with me, will you go one step further. Pause in your reading of this blog post, and go read this post about Videogames As Broken Toys. It's a fascinating meditation on gaming and design theory, not unrelated to a couple of chapters in my book Mediating Faith.
Burgun defines the terms this way:
Here's a quick primer on my four prescriptive interactive forms (read more here): the base interactive system with no goals is a "toy". Add an objective/solution and you get a puzzle. Add measurement and you get a contest. Obfuscate game information (allowing for decisions to exist), and you get a game (a contest of decision-making).)
A fully functional lego turntable
More and more of our toys have been given goals, and so they are increasingly broken. A prime example of this are Legos. Legos used to be interactive with no goals, like the big starter set I played with as a kid. Now, increasingly Legos are only issued with a specific design to build. Of course you can build other things, and so ignore the goals, but the fact that kits are designed for specific stories, looks, and brands "breaks" them to an extension.
Many games are breaking not because they fail at obfuscating game information, but because they are too goal-oriented. This is Burgun's complaint about many video games. Some video games are incredibly open, and so achieve something much closer to a no goal environment (one of the more famous recent games of this type was Elderscrolls V: Skyrim), but to be a true toy in Burgun's sense means a certain kind of purity that most video games, with the exception of perhaps Minecraft and Burgun's own Auro, lack.
All of this seems like an opportunity for Christians in particular to consider a greater level of open creativity and confidence in all of our crafts. If we consider much of Christian art, from Christian novels to Christian music, the general insipidity that characterizes much of it is, I believe, connected either to a failure of confidence in the way Kim Gordon confidently transcends the very art she performs, or a narrowing of art by the application of overly constraining goals.
Very few Christian musicians or artists have found a way to transcend these constraints, and when they do, they are typically ostracized from the "guild." Think, for example, of Sufjan Stevens.
Takeaways
First, learn to go punk without going punk. The point of punk isn't to be punk. The point of punk is the discovery of the creative that resides within deconstruction. Nobody can discover a new (spirit-led) direction if they are simply striving harder and harder to perfect the given order. Yes, you can learn how to sing by learning how to sing. But you can also learn to sing by learning how not to sing.
There's a version of this rule made famous by Thom Yorke of Radiohead. Yorke, mid-career, started wondering whether he should learn to read music. Jonny Greenwood, his handmade, basically said, no way! Don't learn to read music now, it will suck out all your creativity. Once you learn how to do something, it is hard to unlearn it. Unlearnedness is a gift.
Then consider gaming. Perhaps we are less aware than we should be of how much of our life is actually an RPG. Joseph Laycock's recent book illustrates this point well. "the claims of the moral entrepreneurs [a coalition against the rise of RPGs in the 80s], in which they presented themselves as heroes battling a dark conspiracy, often resembled the very games of imagination they condemned as evil. By attacking the imagination, they preserved the taken-for-granted status of their own socially constructed reality. Interpreted in this way, the panic over fantasy-role playing games yields new insights about how humans play and together construct and maintain meaningful worlds."
In all of this, there is an invitation to get back to the sandbox, to deconstruct some of the rules and goals that have accreted over the particular sandbox we inhabit, and to live in the open space a true sandbox offers. Anything can be built, and it is all there, given, as a gift. Just don't try to make the sand castle durable, as if waves don't come along with the rising tide.
by Amy Levad
