Tuesday, September 4, 2007

"Signs of Emergence" by Kester Brewin

I just finished reading this amazing little book by Kester Brewin, a church planter who helped to found the the alternative worship group Vaux in England. Vaux is a group of artists and city lovers who use their gifts to create worship that is culturally relevant and meaningful to those in the community. After reading this book, I got the distinct impression that their worship style can be rather provocative. Good for them.
Brewin's understanding is that church has to happen on the "edge of chaos" where the rawness of life meets its own ability to self-organize and create some kind of order, meaning that the church should be formed from the bottom up, organically, naturally, without centralized power or leadership. It is a community formed out of the participation of all who are involved and it brings into that community the whole of these individuals' lives and joins them together in the body of Christ. As I read, there was one section in particular that stood out. It has to do with cities, gifts and dirt.
In regards to cities, Brewin points to the spirituality of these places, arguing that God is calling us to the cities and not from them; we are just as capable of finding God in the city as we are in 'nature.' He writes:

In building cities, human hands have taken divine materials and worked them to create new ones. Thus the very fabric of the city is testament to the cooperation between God and humanity. It is a co-creation, a partnership where God has provided the raw materials and we have worked them into fabulous architectural masterpieces full of light and space, allowing the free movement and congregation of people, exchanging ideas and technologies...soaring skycrapers cloaked in glass, brownstone apartment blocks and Manhattan townhouses, expansive docks and arching bridges...and slums and tenement blocks and concrete monstrosities and gluttonous penthouses and temples to money and mean streets. In our cities, life's rich tapestry is woven altogether, and it tells the full story of the triumphs and disasters of our urban project. We have built perfect testaments to the human situation: taking God's gifts and simultaneiously using and abusing them. Both our divine heritage and rebellious creativity are betrayed in our buildings.

This is a very long quote. Sorry all my non-readers, but for someone who came out of very rural Northern Michigian and who also lived for three years in New York City, what he has to say is astounding. For me, God was always in the trees, the sky, the earth--cities were those places that drowned out God with congestion and noise. After living in New York though, I discovered that it is true that God has not turned his back on the cities, in fact, he is there waiting for us to join in. There is so much life that happens in cities, so much beauty, so filled with ugliness as well.
I witnessed this life happening in Saginaw last Sunday night. It was a cool evening, there were soft lights illuminating the near-by narrow brick "bread-box" buildings' store fronts. People were wandering all around, there to watch Napoleon Dynamite from a parking lot along side one of these buildings. There was pizza to eat, people to meet, and life teeming all around Old Towne. This in a city that, from what I have been told, has pretty much been kicked while it was down (economically speaking)over the last several years. But here were all these people coming together in a community event; some were volunteers, there because they wanted to make a difference--because they cared about the once thriving city of Saginaw.

I want to do that too because I feel like God is already there, calling me and others to join in a kind of common life.

More on Gift and Dirt later!

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