Down the Rabbit Hole

 

Hey, thanks for visiting. I appreciate it. I'm not someone who enjoys pursuing knowledge for its own sake, I get the most pleasure from sharing what I've learned, in the hope that it will help you see the world differently. Plus, I'm an external processor so it's my habit to share half-baked ideas with anyone who might help me improve the recipe. 

This is the third of my reflections and I haven't really explained what I'm trying to do. Part of that is because five weeks into my sabbatical I've already realised I can't do what I set out to do. And part is because of a quirk of my personality - I like to go down the rabbit hole.

By that I mean that I am like that kid who always asks why. In my church life, I have a tendency to believe that if we can get the foundations right, the details (y'know, like what we actually do) will sort themselves out. If you are a more pragmatically minded person, I'm a bit of a pain in the ass. I will certainly never tell you what to do, but rather point you in the direction of learning that I think will enable you to work it out for yourself. I might object if you do the right thing for the wrong reason. A reflection on an event might suddenly include references to Kierkegaard. To everyone I've ever line managed: I apologise.

And I owe you an apology too, dear Reader. Because of all of the above, this post will be a bit longer than the other two. I'm not just in the rabbit hole, I'm heading for the bottom.

The reason I'm studying is because I want to prove that, all other things being equal, more relational forms of community (specifically church) are more likely to result in transformation than more event/attendance forms of community. For me, transformation is personal (being about the character and life of the individual), communal (being about our immediate relationships with family, friends, neighbours, colleagues) and social/global (being about neighbourhoods, towns, cities, nations, ecologies). 

Assuming that you believe that the Christian faith should result in transformation (not all Christians do), my argument is important because the institutional churches of the UK are haemorraging both cash and people and looking for ways to ensure their survival. At the moment, most denominational bureaucracies are leaning towards investment in large congregations (which have a higher proportion of event/attendance members and a lower proportion of committed/relational members). For many reasons, some of which will play out in this blog over the next several years, I don't think we will find the future of the church through this approach. (If you want to go down that particular rabbit hole, I wrote an article a few years ago which expresses my nascent views here.)

It was my intention to take an off-the-shelf measure of transformation and use it to compare how different kinds of churches affect the lives (and environments, and communities) of their members. Essentially, I wanted to find out whether churches really do 'make a difference'. Imagine if, alongside attendance and financial income, we could measure whether people are growing or declining in their discipleship? (I realise that some of you are feeling sick at the very thought of this. My argument in favour is this: at the moment, denominations measure income, attendance and/or membership. Wouldn't it be an improvement if they could measure 'impact' as well, however you might define that?)

Anyway, it turns out that there is no off-the-shelf test that I can use. The off-the-shelf tests I've found (over 50 and counting) are either designed by non-religious psychologists who want to impose their own definitions of mature spirituality (basically: privatised and harmless), or are equally biased from a Christian perspective. A survey from an evangelical church that 'proves' that the answer to every faith development question is to read more of the Bible? Pardon me if I am a little suspicious...

And I found out that none of these frameworks addresses my question about transformation, concerning themselves primarily with the 'inner life' of belief and spirituality. Of course I think that a growing, healthy Christian should have a deep spiritual connection with God and others. Of course I think that a growing, healthy Christian should have worked out what they believe and committed to it in a sustainble way. However, I also think that a growing, healthy Christian should display some signs of their faith outside their own private world.

In short, and I'll come back to these over and over again, I think there are 3 others things we should look for: firstly, a person's character should change and grow and become more like the 'Fruit of the Spirit' mentioned in Galations 5. Secondly, there should be an increasing integrity between what a Christian believes and how they live their lives. Thirdly, there should be a decentering of the self and a greater openness to being part of the networks, ecologies and communities of our environment. All of these go way beyond whether a person prays or believes in the existence of God, which is what most surveys seek to measure.

Not only is there no off-the-shelf measurement tool, there is no satisfactory ideological model of human growth and maturity that I could 'operationalise' into a measurement tool. At this point, I'm already down the rabbit hole. It turns out that the itch I was scratching last week - that our definitions of a person are very static when I want to centre Human Becoming rather than Human Being - is an itch that the world of philosophy is scratching at this very moment in time. And it's in the dialogue between philosophy and science that the really effective scratching is taking place.

Maybe I'll leave that metaphor for now.

Traditional philosophy says you are who you are because of what stays the same. I know I'm the same me as yesterday because of all physical and psychological continuities with that person. Biology replies by saying that 'being the same' is a really bad idea, because the only way for you to stay the same is for you to be dead. Change and growth and transformation are the basis of what makes us who we are, what keeps 'I' alive. I am me precisely because I have changed from who I was yesterday. I'm a collection of processes held together in a similar form to the form I had yesterday. 

Yeah, I know, I'm still working it out. Maybe I'll never work it out.

However, here's the thought I'm playing with. What if Human Becoming is more than just a slogan I've plucked out of the air, what's if it's an accurate description of who we are? That means that change isn't an option. It's not even 'an inevitability', as if it's something that happens to us. It's who we are. That means that our second question of the day (after, 'What's for breakfast?') should be, 'What am I becoming today?' There are many natural and 'external' processes that shape our answer to that question, over which we have limited influence, but somewhere in the midst of it we have agency, guaranteed by the Spirit of God. Instead of asking ourselves if we want to change, we need to acknowledge that we are changing - constantly - and work in partnership with God and our environment to - sorry everyone - be the change we want to see in the world.

As soon as that quote comes to mind, I feel as though I am in cat poster meme land. Nonetheless, it's important to me that if I'm thinking and writing about change, that change goes 'all the way down'. Process ontology asserts this: processes are more fundamental than things. This is something that physicists are trying to explain to us, however haltingly.

So this week I'm reaching the bottom of the rabbit hole, exploring the nature of reality. It's not where I expected to get to when I started thinking about what kinds of church make Christlike people. It only took me five weeks to get here. I have six years to get out. Pray for me.

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