Nice to come back to some good debate though. I just wanted to write a final post in the series (may be) to respond to some comments and clarify a few things.

Firstly, of course Jonny is right: ‘no strategy’ is a strategy of some sort. But we also mustn’t be bound by these apparent linguistic traps. They are not as binding as our tongues would have us believe…

I had to choose a word, and strategy is the one I picked. What I meant by it was the competitive spirit, the desire to have a ‘winning formula’. As I’ve said, I think this is something that Paul never quite exorcises, and this has then infected the Evangelical church, which has always seemed to me to exalt Paul’s letters above all else. This has perhaps had two effects:

1. Evangelicalism has always been competitive. It wants to win. It hates losing. And thus white men have grasped hold of it and led it with more and more programmes.
2. Many, many people have been very turned off this. The Paul that is preached seems so different from the Jesus they thought they were following. It is perhaps not too much to say that people leave Evangelicalism for the emerging movement to get away from Paul and get back to Christ.

In Peter, on the other hand, we see an emphasis on love. And it is this that I would want to see hallmark the emerging movement:

1. An emphasis on quality of relationships, not quantities and numbers
2. An emphasis on distributed leadership that always shuns power and seeks to collaborate
3. A move away from credentials.
4. An emphasis on taking part, not winning.

Strategy is always about the self. It is about celebrity. And I would want to suggest that no Emerging Church project should ever need a publicist, ever need a media event.

Malcolm’s comment really resonated with me. The institutional church wants to be able to strategise this new movement. It needs to. It needs the money. And ever since Constantine’s patronage, it been enmeshed in finance. Abjectly poor people funding the building of ever-more elaborate cathedrals for power-hungry bishops… Same old.

This is not what we see in the incarnation. What we see there is the viral, powerless, bottom-up Christianity that I tried to describe in the book. And it begins today on Good Friday, with the crucifixion of the Temple-bound, profiteering God, the end-game of the Babel-onian plot of human power against divine love… But love will not be played with. She appears to wither, and then spring again, eternal.

The powerful will play with our faith. But Easter reminds us that God slipped their trap to shower love for free. No rules. That’s grace.

Peace.

Technorati: Christ | Constantine | Politics | Power | Strategy |
href=”http://www.technorati.com/tag/Good%20Friday” rel=”tag”>Good Friday |
href=”http://www.technorati.com/tag/Evangelical” rel=”tag”>Evangelical |
href=”http://www.technorati.com/tag/Paul” rel=”tag”>Paul |
href=”http://www.technorati.com/tag/Via%20Crucis” rel=”tag”>Via Crucis

Through Game Theory we have been duped into thinking our best strategy is to not trust one another. But beyond that Christ’s death on the cross – a deliberate ‘loss’ – subverts the very idea of strategy at all.

At Golgotha, God declares the end of strategy.

God will not play our power games.

God is.

God loves.

There is no win or lose.

All too quickly the early church – mostly under the influence of Paul, I would argue – lost this message and began to make itself into a ‘strategic organization’. We don’t really know the effect of Paul’s journey to Rome, what we do know is that in 313CE Emperor Constantine declared himself a Christian. Why? Because he believed that the Christian God had given him victory in battle. Where did he get such a theology? Surely not from Christ. Constantine was a brilliant soldier, and an astute military strategist. Is is possible that there is a thread that leads from Paul’s strategy to evangelize Rome to Constantine’s conversion?

I’m clearly speculating. But what concerns me about Constantine is that from there on we see Christianity moving from a religion of the poor and the oppressed, to a religion held up by the rich and powerful as one which supports them.

This is a long way from the cross, and it seems a long way from us too. But I believe that if the church allows itself to be tied up in strategies, to ‘winning’ people for Christ, it will end be moving towards power-politics, towards support for wars, and away from genuine concern for ‘the other’.

To give oneself for ‘the other’ is to lose. It is to be engaged in transformative relationships, rather than tactical change. It is to love. To know grace. And grace and love have no strategy.

Thanks if you’ve got this far. Month old babies don’t make for clarity of thought, so apologies if it could all have been clearer

Peace over the Easter Weekend.

Technorati: Christ | Constantine | Politics | Power | Strategy | Via Crucis

I’m proposing that one of the reasons behind this is that in Paul we see a zealot, a keen enthusiast, driven to succeed in all he does. In short, he wants to win.

I think this rings true throughout all of his letters. Paul never quite manages to put to bed his competitive and strategic spirit, and it’s this role as strategist that I think sets him apart from Christ.

In the book (Signs of Emergence or The Complex Christ, depending on which side of the pond you are on) I propose that Judas’ ‘betrayal’ was perhaps in fact his well-meaning attempt to catalyze Jesus into action – to force his military hand and set in motion the revolution that would overthrow the Roman occupation. In other words, he, like Paul was a strategist.

With both of these figures, Paul and Judas, we see men of action. The other disciples likely thought the same about Jesus, and expected him to be a military figure, but did nothing about it. Judas refused to sit back and wait. Similarly, we don’t hear much about daring missionary journeys being made by other Apostles. Paul comes in later and immediately gets to the centre of the action, takes on a core role in the church and starts heading out on this amazing trips.

But they are both in contrast to the figure of Jesus, who appears to repeatedly confound all the strategists who gather round him. It’s this that makes me wonder whether Christ’s passion is in some way ‘the end of strategy’. And it’s to that that I want to turn in the next post.

Technorati: Judas | Strategy | Via Crucis

I have been teaching an introductory course on Christianity to Year 7 (11/12 years old) over the past few months, and recently we covered Jesus’ death and resurrection, and then the spread of Christianity.

While doing so the parallels between Paul and Jesus struck me for the first time.

In Acts 21 we see that ‘through the Spirit the disciples urged Paul not to go to Jerusalem’. Paul goes anyway, just as Jesus headed there, knowing there was danger. Both Jesus and Paul are arrested on blasphemy charges following disturbances at the Temple, and both are harassed by a large, whipped up crowd. Both are hauled before Roman and Jewish hearings.

But here the parallels end, and it is in the differences that follow that I was really struck. Jesus remains virtually silent before his accusers. He simply refuses to defend himself. Others make claims about him; he simply says that that is what they are claiming.

But Paul simply cannot shut up. He preaches to the crowds, to the hearings and very much makes ‘a defense’ as Acts 22 tells us. Not only that, but he repeated hammers home messages about his credentials. “I am a Jew… I was thoroughly trained in the law… I am a born Roman citizen… I am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee” (Acts 22/23) It seems that Paul is desperate to be all things to all people. He is seemingly in a temper – he insults the High Priest (Acts 23:4-5) without even knowing who he was.

Eventually, Paul is taken to another hearing in Caesarea, and it is then that he exercises his right to ‘appeal to Caesar’. He must be sent to Rome.

In these events, Paul and Jesus turn out to be very different characters. And what I think distinguishes them from one another is this:

Paul was a strategist. And Jesus was not.

It’s to the implications of that that I want to turn to in the next post.

Technorati: Acts | Jesus | Paul