Relationships

“Our people, our songs.”

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Just read a review of an interesting book for pastors, worship leaders, and community developers trying to sort out the common lingua questions of music in worship.  Gerardo Marti busts some of our assumptions about community connectedness and music.

Emerson notes that we often assume everybody has to have “their kind” of music to feel like they are a part of the community.

What does this have to do with the problem of the musical-buffet style? Marti finds that this style actually “essentializes” racial groups and draws on narrow stereotypes. Want white people in your church?  Play Vineyard, contemporary Christian music (or for the older crowd, play European-origin hymns). Want black people in your church?  Play gospel music. Want Hispanics in your church?  Play salsa music. Want Asians in your church?  Play, ah . . . well, play white music.

The end result? Instead of bringing people together and transcending racial boundaries, this approach reinforces boundaries—boundaries built on gross, oversimplified stereotypes. It unwittingly even assumes that somehow we have inborn preferences for certain styles of music, rather than tendencies to prefer the type of music we most often hear those around us enjoying. Fact is, musical preferences are learned.

So what did Marti discover?  I love this statement:  “what matters is the network of relationships.”

What “succeeds” musically in multiracial churches is not a certain type of music or how well it is performed. Rather, it is: (a) people of various backgrounds all practicing together, spending time together, singing together, worshiping together; and (b) the fact that it is “our choir, our people.”

To get downright sociological, it is the transcendent experience in which worship becomes at the same time a celebration of the group itself and of God who has brought the group together. At its essence, then, what matters is the network of relationships of the people in the congregation, not the type or even the quality of the music.

What matters is “the network of relationships.”

Read the whole review of Worship Across the Racial Divide: Religious Music and the Multiracial Congregation.

How to talk about religion… at school.

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Teaching about the world religions made the news in Canada a few months ago as the Supreme Court upheld the Quebec public school system’s requirements for its students to take an ethics and world religion course.  I like the concept and idea and believe that we should continue to develop a curriculum that encourages public discourse in our schools of religious ideals and ethics.  The pluralistic nature of our urban communities and universities guarantees a growing need to equip students with skills for understanding another person’s worldview–even if its a religiously informed view.

My friend Mark Chancey posted Robert Kunzman’s article, “How to Talk About Religion.”  He calls for “civic multilingualism” to be nurtured within public schools:

In recent years, the call has increased for U.S. students to study foreign languages. In an interconnected, global society, the argument goes, Americans must be able to communicate effectively with a diversity of peoples and cultures, whether for purposes of commerce, research, or national security. But given the prevalence of religion talk in today’s world, another form of fluency is increasingly needed: Civic multilingualism is the ability to converse across different religious and ethical perspectives in search of understanding, compromise, and common ground. At home and abroad, this may represent the greatest social challenge of the 21st century.

To meet this challenge, public schools cannot sidestep the influence of religion in society. Nor should they cultivate a model of citizenship that avoids religion talk altogether.

My experience in Vancouver is that we have difficulty with this vision of civic responsibility in part because of our virtue of “tolerance” based on ignorance.  Kunzman believes that  “tolerance” without “knowledge” actually creates citizens who lack “respect.”  He writes,

Public schools often see their role as promoting tolerance of diversity, and this is certainly important. But tolerance can be entirely ignorant—students don’t have to know anything about other beliefs or ways of life to tolerate them. Respect, however, requires an appreciation for why religious adherents believe or live the way they do. Students who have this understanding of their fellow citizens’ religious commitments will be better equipped to thoughtfully discuss those commitments, especially when conflicts arise in the public square.

half-naked skateboarders and university professors

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This past weekend one of my kids turned thirteen.  My stressor was how to turn a UBC campus scavenger hunt into an epic event for thirteen year old boys.  Turns out the weather took care of that for me.  It poured!  We scavenged.

Along the way, my son says they ran into a skateboarder making his way across the campus with his shirt in hand.  As he sailed past them he cried out, “Hey young ones, what are you doing out here?”  An appropriate question.

Its the question that university professors should be asking.  “Hey young ones, what are you doing out here?”

Buried within the text of David Suzuki’s 1989 publication, Inventing the Future, is an article entitled, “Prostituting Academia.”  His concerns voiced 22 years ago are just as relevant today.  The article raises a question for me:  Are tenured professors meant to be the voice of conscience for the university?

Are tenured professors uniquely positioned to be able to ask us all, “Hey young ones, what are you doing out here?”  To do so, though, in an age of competitive funding from business, industry and government may cause them to loose their shirts.  Are they willing to loose  their shirts and call out to us, “Hey what you are you doing out here?”

Here’s an excerpt from David Suzuki’s article:

I don’t deny a role for university faculty in the application of new ideas.  Our top-notch people are Canada’s eyes and ears to the world’s research, and good people will have ideas that can eventually be exploited.  But the deliberate and urgent push to economic payoff distorts scholarship within the university and subverts its thrust to the will of those who have the money.  Profit and destruction are the major reasons for the application of science today, while environmental and social costs are seldom seriously addressed.  That’s why we need scholars who are detached from those applications.

I remain a faculty member of UBC and because I care so much for the university I am compelled to speak out in criticism.  Tenure confers the obligation to do so.

I don’t condone but can understand why university scientists, who have been underfunded for so long, are welcoming the Faustian bargain with private industry.  But I fail to comprehend why philosophers, historians and sociologists who should know better are acquiescing so easily.

The headlong rush to industrialize the university signals the implicit acceptance of many assumptions that have in the past been questioned by academics themselves.  For example, free enterprise, like most economic systems is based on the unquestioned necessity for steady growth–growth in GNP, consumption and consumer goods.

Steady incremental growth within a given interval is called “exponential growth,” and any scientist knows that nothing in the universe grows exponentially indefinitely.  Yet economists, business people and politicians assume the explosive increase in income, consumer goods and GNP (and inflation) of the past decades must be maintained to sustain our quality of life.  Historians know that this growth is an aberration, a blip that must inevitably stop and reverse itself.  But how can the fallacy of maintainable exponential growth be seriously challenged when the university is busy selling the myth that it can maintain such growth?

Scholars in universities represent tiny islands of thought in society.  They are sufficiently detached from the priorities of various interest groups like business, government and the military to point out flaws in our current social truths.  But by focussing on issues that are socially relevant or economically profitable, we lose sight of the broader context within which that activity falls; we forget history; we become blind to the environmental and social costs of our innovations.”  p. 75-76

Do we all need a gift-economy network?

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More than once Richard Heinberg’s book The End of Growth left me feeling like the sky is falling.  However, any survey of markets over the last four years seems to show the trend of no or little growth.  He argues that sustainable networks of economic interaction will have to be built on something other than debt and raiding of natural and human wealth.

I keep finding myself returning to his “economic history in ten minutes” and his reflections on the transition from gift economies to trade economies.

“With more and more of our daily human interactions based on exchange rather than gifting, we have developed polite ways of being around each other on a daily basis while maintaining an exchange-mediated social distance.  This is particularly the case in large cities, where anonymity is fostered also by the practical formalities and psychological impacts that go along with the need to interact with large numbers of strangers, day in and day out.  In the best instances, we still take care of one another–often through government programs and private charities.  We still enjoy some of the benefits of the old gift economy in our families and churches.  But increasingly, the market rules our lives.  Our apparent destination in this relentless trajectory toward expansion of trade is a world in which everything is for sale, and all human activities are measured by and for their monetary value.

Humanity has benefited in many obvious ways from this economic evolution:  the gift economy really only worked when we lived in small bands and had almost no possessions to speak of.  So letting go of the gift economy was a trade-off for houses, cities, cars, iPhones, and all the rest.  Still, saying goodbye to community-as-family was painful, and there have been various attempts throughout history to try to revisit it.”   The End of Growth, p. 29-30.

Do we all need a gift-economy network?  I think so.  We’ve renamed it social capital.  But there’s still a rub even there.  Relationships won’t last under the weight of what people take from them.  Vibrant and resilient relationships are build on what we willingly give to them.

Vancouver is abuzz with the longing for the community-as-family life.  (See the Vancouver Foundations most recent study.)  However, its our conditioning in the trade-economy that keeps us from the generosity and sacrificial approach required to include others in our circle of friends of family.

We all need a gift-economy network.  Perhaps the best way to get one… is to start giving.

Consistency — its about the “who” and not the furniture

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Three weeks ago we finished cocooning with our newest daughter and have now been out in the “real” world with great regularity.  The intent of cocooning was to establish consistency and attachment for Mica in our family.  The family becomes a referent point for her engagement with the world.

So here’s the real world for our church experience at Origin: for the last three weeks we’ve gathered in a different location every Sunday.  Different address.  Different set up.  Different washrooms.  Different children’s space.  Different lighting.  Different feel.  So much for consistency!

Its made me think a lot about her experience of the church.  Who reaches out?  Who prays for her?  Who creates safe space for her to be her, to explore, and to hear again that God loves her?  Who celebrates what God is doing in her life?  Who affirms her growth?  Who challenges her to explore again Jesus’ grace?

Who?

See its all about the people & the Gospel, not the furniture.

But its not just about her.  My hope is that our gathering and life together is a referent point for many students and the UBC community in their walk with Jesus.  Origin, church, wherever, and whenever we gather, is a community that acts as a reference point for people to encourage them to keep going with Jesus and His Gospel.