'Ecclesianarchy': Excursions Into Deconstructive Church

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‘Ecclesianarchy’: Excursions into Deconstructive Church

John A. Williams York St John University, uk [email protected]

Abstract

The author has previously argued that in recent times the mainstream churches in the uk have tended to co-opt elements of a postmodern analysis of contemporary culture in support of a mission strategy focused on presentational innovations and limited structural adjustments, without allowing the implications radically to challenge ecclesiological or theological foundations. This article conducts an experiment in pursuing the logic of a postmodern discourse about the Church to bring its more radical implications into view: it begins to sketch out an alternative view of church as an 'ecclesianarchy', the distinctive purpose of which is to become a socio-cultural site for the symbolisation and enactment of the impossible. The proposal is explored with reference to examples of contemporary innovations in ecclesial praxis, and attention is drawn to critical questions such churches will need to attend to in the interests of furthering their evolution in a time of instability and change.

Keywords ecclesiality – deconstruction – anarchy – impossible – worship – leadership – mission

Introduction

In the past, the church has often enjoyed influence, prestige and control through its reliance on models of power, authority and social organization derived from the institutional and political structures of the society within

122 Williams which it has been set.1 Today, insofar as such arrangements persist in the secu- larized western world, they retain only a vestigial semblance of control that renders them subject to being regarded only with ironic detachment.2 I have proposed the term ecclesianarchy to denote the emergent modes of church that seek to grasp the contemporary challenge to forsake outmoded imperial models and respond to the call to Christian discipleship in a deconstructive religious world. The re-negotiation of church in terms of an ecclesianarchy con- stitutes a more radical engagement with postmodernity than those initiatives that seek to make church more culturally accessible while leaving the foundations of theology and ecclesiology untouched.3 The proposal in this article, drawing on the work of Caputo, is that the calling of the church as an ecclesianarchy under the conditions of contemporary western culture is to become a site, symbol and expression of the impossibility of Christianity. The church signifies and enacts the impossible, both intentionally through experiments in ecclesial deconstruction and involuntarily through situations of ecclesial minimalism. The ‘intentional experiments’ are risky innovations launched in recognition that it has always only been a delusion that conventional church is ‘in control’. The ‘involuntary situations’ are contexts of social and cultural pressure that render conventional church impracticable. For ecclesiality is not about control, but about compassion, companionship and communion; ‘at the end of its tether’, attempting the impossible, is the only place for church ever to be.

1 The historical-political dimensions of church and their implications for a radical re- envisioning of church for today have been extensively treated by Roger Haydon Mitchell, Church, Gospel and Empire: How the Politics of Sovereignty Impregnated the West (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 2011) and The Fall of the Church (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 2013). 2 The reading here is through the historical lens of the mainstream of the Europeanised, western Christian tradition including its colonial expressions. For a broad overview of the ‘emergence’ of new forms of church in this setting, see Phyllis Tickle, The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 2008). In a global context there are alternative trajectories of church, often very flourishing, that are still relatively new in relation to this historical sweep: see for example the astute analyses in David Martin, The Future of Christianity: Reflections on Violence and Democracy, Religion and Secu- larization (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 3 See John Williams, ‘Ecclesial Reconstruction, Theological Conservation: The Strange Exclu- sion of Critical Theological Reflection from Popular Strategies for the Renewal of the Church in Britain’, Ecclesiology 11 (2015), pp. 289–305 and ‘In Search of ‘Fresh Expressions of Believing’ for a Mission-shaped Church’, Ecclesiology 12 (2016), pp. 279–297.

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‘ecclesianarchy’: Excursions Into Deconstructive Church 123

For Caputo, the church has to be perpetually deconstructed, for the sake of the kingdom of God.4 In the next section, I develop the notion of ecclesianarchy as an alternative model of church more appropriate to the conditions of late modernity. The following section draws on the work of Caputo to argue for a deconstructive approach to the renewed expression of what is distinctive about the theological resources that the church holds, embodies and enacts. The third part turns to the literature of the new and emerging churches to develop an analysis of key characteristics of the deconstructive church as an ecclesianarchy. The concluding section sets out some areas of potentially fruit- ful self-criticism that could be undertaken by the new churches.

Anarchy as a Model for a Deconstructive Ecclesiology

One of the most radical expressions of the type of post-modern ecclesiality being explored here is the work of Peter Rollins, the founder of the Belfast- based alternative church collective Ikon.5 Rollins describes it as ‘apocalyptic, heretical, emerging and failing’.6 He depicts the ‘spaces’ in which this radical ecclesial practice is brought to birth:

… passionate, provocative gatherings, operating on the fringes of religious life, that offer anarchic [emphasis mine] experiments in theodrama that re-imagine the distinction between Christian and non-Christian, priest and prophet, doubt and certainty, the sacred and the secular- gatherings that employ a rich cocktail of music, poetry, prose, imagery, soundscapes, theatre, ritual, and reflection: gatherings that provide a place that is open to all, is colonized by none, and that celebrates diversity.7

This is not so much ‘a church’ as an experiment in ‘ecclesiality’; it is ‘church’ deconstructed into a never-twice-alike ‘Happening’.8 As Caputo puts it:

4 John Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2007). 5 For a detailed analysis of Rollins’ work in the context of the thought of Caputo and Žižek see Katharine Sarah Moody, Radical Theology and Emerging Christianity: Deconstruction, Materi- alism and Religious Practice (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016). 6 Biographical detail at the front of Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God (London: spck, 2006). 7 Peter Rollins, The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief (London: spck, 2008), p. 176. 8 Rollins, The Fidelity of Betrayal, p. 184.

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124 Williams

An institution modelled after deconstruction would be auto-deconstructive, self-correcting, removed as far as possible from the power games and rigid inflexibility of institutional life, where a minimal institutional archi- tecture pushes to some optimal point, near but not all the way to anarchy [emphasis mine], some point of creative ‘chaosmos’.9

The particular relevance of these passages here is that both Rollins and Caputo utilise the concept of ‘anarchy’ in relation to church. Far from embracing anarchy, Christian orthodoxy has had a strong investment in a theology of order through the notion of the apxή, the fundamental source and origin, the basic governing principle of all things: as Cupitt has argued, ‘western theology … affirms One God, one Lord, and therefore one principle of authority and chain of command’.10 Christian faith is treated as the guarantor of the orderliness and rationality of the creation: cosmos not chaos; and for the church to re- flect this, hierarchy becomes the defence against anarchy.11 But Caputo offers instead chaosmos: a typically postmodern piece of word-play that insists on putting the opposites together.12 Historically, anarchy as a political movement tended to be atheistic. The Rus- sian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) despised Christianity as the most absolute manifestation of religion as apxή in the sense of rule, governance and authority. He castigated the church as the instrument of institutional main- tenance of Christian domination, culpable of tyranny and oppression, of stifling human flourishing and keeping people in dependent infancy through its assertion of Lordship.13 However, traditions of Christian anarchism grew up alongside the atheistic movements, most notably perhaps in the work of Tolstoy (1828–1910). Christian anarchism sees in the teachings of Jesus the seeds

9 Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? p. 137. In the pages preceding this quote, Caputo has used Rollins’ work in the Ikon community as a case study. 10 Don Cupitt, Radicals and the Future of the Church (London: scm Press, 1989), p. 23. See also Cupitt, The Meaning of the West: an Apologia for Secular Christianity (London: scm Press, 2008). 11 Efforts have been made in contemporary theology to tackle this issue by rehabilitating the doctrine of the Trinity against a hierarchical reading, see for example Janet Martin Soskice, ‘Trinity and the “Feminine Other”’ in The Kindness of God (Oxford: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 2007). For an application of this approach to ecclesiology specifically within an emerging church context see Ian Mobsby, God Unknown: The Trinity in Contemporary Spirituality and Mission (Norwich, the Canterbury Press, 2012). 12 This is in contradistinction to the tendency of popular usage to equate ‘anarchy’ with ‘chaos’. 13 D. Guérin, No Gods, No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism (Edinburgh: ak Press, 2005).

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‘ecclesianarchy’: Excursions Into Deconstructive Church 125 of an anarchist stance in the Christian faith, that is, a rejection of all earthly governments in favour of the radical new order of the Kingdom of God.14 Not surprisingly, it largely rejected the church as an authoritarian corruption of the original message of Jesus.15 In the emerging postmodern environment, the conditions are more hos- pitable to a new rapprochement between anarchism and the church. Troxell names numerous historical examples of Christian movements that manifest elements of the anarchist spirit:

… the voluntary poverty of the early Franciscans, the uncompromising witness of the Radical Reformation, the labour resistance of the Catholic Worker movement, the social criticism of Thomas Merton, the revolu- tionary fervour of liberation theology, the peace protests of the Berrigan brothers … the role of Christian theology in the Civil Rights Movement.16

However, Christoyannopoulos argues that Christian anarchism is fundamentally ecclesial rather than political: ‘However much they criticize the state, Christian anarchists do not favour any overthrow of the government … simply living in … a decentralized community is a political statement in itself. That is, the very existence of the church is, in itself, a political statement’.17 It is this ecclesial focus that supplies the link between the historico-political traditions of Christian anarchism and the post-modern expressions of church this article will go on to address. But first it is necessary to establish the basis for the dis- tinctiveness of the ecclesial community that might come to expression within the framework of ecclesianarchy, and for this I want to draw on the deconstructive theology of John Caputo.

14 A. Christoyannopoulos, Christian Anarchism: a Political Commentary on the Gospel (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2010). 15 See Jennifer Buck, Reframing the House: Constructive Feminist Ecclesiology for the Western Evangelical Church (Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2016), p. 8, citing Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000): ‘Hardt and Negri … point out that early Christians were generally an anti-imperial force and created a movement to oppose or escape from power’. 16 Troxell, T. P. The Subversive Kernel: Anarchism and The Politics of Jesus In Postsecular Theol- ogy (PhD Thesis, Michigan State University, 2012), p. 5. 17 Christoyannopoulos, Christian Anarchism, pp. 207, 225.

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126 Williams

Church as Site of the Impossible

Caputo’s work on Derrida is the essential starting point for understanding his theology.18 He characterizes Derrida’s religion as a form of madness in which ‘we cannot know but only believe’, in the ever-decreasing pattern of the French words, sans savoir, sans avoir, sans voir (‘without knowing, without having, without seeing’).19 In the first chapter of his little book On Religion,20 he pur- sues the Derridean motifs of impossibility and madness. Religion longs for a future: not the ‘relative future’ we all have to make prudential plans for from day to day, but the ‘absolute future’ with which ‘we are pushed to the limits of the possible, fully extended, at our wits’ end’.21 There are biblical precedents: the disciples asking Jesus who can be saved, and Jesus replying that ‘for mortals this is impossible’;22 St Paul telling the Corinthians that he is writing about ‘something … that has never entered into the mind of human beings’.23 For Caputo, ‘the impossible is a defining religious category’.24 The embrace of the impossible signals that religion (specifically, Christi- anity) is a form of madness.25 The Aristotelian virtues are the so-called ‘car- dinal’ virtues, from the Latin for ‘hinge’, because all the other virtues hinge upon them. Accordingly, Caputo concludes that with the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity we become ‘unhinged’: we fall into the madness of impossible things, like loving our enemies,26 ‘unfolding the power of the possible, the power of the impossible beyond the possible’.27 The titles of Caputo’s self-declared works of theology bring the point home. The Weakness of God28

18 See especially The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloom- ington: Indiana University Press, 1997). 19 Prayers and Tears, pp. xxi. 20 John Caputo, On Religion (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). 21 On Religion, p. 8. 22 Mark 10:27. 23 1 Corinthians 2:9. 24 On Religion, p. 10. 25 Derrida’s words: ‘Christianity is the only mad religion; which is perhaps, the explanation for its survival. It deconstructs itself and survives by deconstructing itself’ appear as a sub-heading to the introductory chapter in Gerardo Marti and Gladys Ganiel’s groundbreaking study, The Deconstructed Church: Understanding Emerging Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2014). 26 On Religion, pp. 13–14. 27 On Religion, p. 15. 28 John Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana Univer- sity Press, 2006).

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‘ecclesianarchy’: Excursions Into Deconstructive Church 127 promotes the desirability of a ‘weak theology’ over one predicated upon certainty and unchangingness. In a weak theology, the name ‘God’ denotes ‘a call rather than a causality’, and names ‘an event transpiring in being’s rest- less heart’.29 The Insistence of God30 substitutes ‘insistence’ for ‘existence’ and celebrates the domain of ‘perhaps’ as the launch-pad for the madness of the impossible. While ‘strong theology’ insists on bipolar ‘categories of theism and atheism, belief and unbelief, existence and non-existence’, ‘weak theology’ ‘is content with a little adverb like “perhaps” … introducing modalities, conditions, degrees, and exceptions’. In another typical play on words, the ‘might’ in ‘God Almighty’ ‘turns out to be the subjunctive might of “maybe” or “might be”, whose reach extends all the way to the impossible’.31 In What Would Jesus Deconstruct? Caputo entitles his main exposition of this approach to Christian theology ‘A Prayer for the Impossible’.32 He argues that theological language is always vocative in style: an address is made to a person, a call that invites a response that is not a calculative one but an act of faith. Theological language is like this: there can never be cast-iron certainty that it is God who is calling,33 but when Christian theology speaks of God’s justice, or of the gift of grace, or of forgiveness, or hospitality, or love, it is con- stitutive of a call to the hearer to engage and perform the acts of faith that will usher the things signified into being. It is, as Caputo puts it, the ‘affirmation of the impossible’: to step defiantly into radical uncertainty in the pursuit of a vision of what might be, in which God is not ‘a massive ontological power line that provides power to the world’ but rather ‘provides a provocation to the world that is otherwise than power’.34 These ‘provocations’ occur in the form of acts and attitudes that character- ize ecclesiality as the site of the impossible: for example, ideas of gift (grace), forgiveness, and radical hospitality. Derrida argues for the impossibility of the ‘gift’ because the recipient of the gift incurs a ‘debt of gratitude’, whereas the giver experiences a sense of satisfaction: thus the giving ‘adds value’ to the giver but impoverishes the recipient. But when the giver is God, the gift

29 The Weakness of God, pp. 8–9. 30 John Caputo, The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (Bloomington: Indiana Univer- sity Press, 2013). 31 The Insistence of God, p. 9. 32 What Would Jesus Deconstruct? The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2007), chapter 3. 33 In characteristically playful manner the elusiveness of this is captured in the title of a collection responding to a keynote essay by Caputo, It Spooks: Living in response to an unheard call (Rapid City, South Dakota: Shelter50 Publishing Collective, 2015). 34 Caputo, The Weakness of God, p. 13.

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128 Williams cannot be anything other than sheer gratuity, and the response cannot be one of increased indebtedness because in respect to God we are already always indebted to an impossible degree. Forgiveness too is an impossibility in a calculative context, which is the way of the world: as Caputo points out, ‘banks do not make gifts, and when they do, we know they are up to something, try- ing to sell us some new service they have come up with. Nor do they forgive anything. They are business people and strict in their accounting’.35 But the forgiveness of God cannot be a matter of squaring the accounts but is reck- lessly extravagant because it signals a new order, a summons or call to a new being. If this were not so, then the response of the elder brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son would be commended for its prudence. Prudential considerations likewise fail to capture the meaning of the theological concept of radical hospitality: Caputo points out that because the Latin word hostis means ‘stranger’, the stranger can be seen as either the ‘guest’ in the care of the ‘host’, or the (hostile) ‘alien’ who threatens to be seen as the enemy. The Christian tradition calls people towards the unreasonableness of the inclusive, embracing meaning of hospitality, the welcome for the unloved, the outcast and those who are subject to suspicion. I will explore some post-modern expressions of church that embody elements of this deconstructive pattern of ‘ecclesianarchy’, symbolizing and enacting the madness of the impossible. Some such churches are intentionally created or re-designed as ecclesial ‘experiments’ or ‘happenings’, or as ‘liquid church’:36 church deconstructed into event, experience and evocation of the impossible. Others come about less by design and more by force of circum- stance, by their struggle in contexts of ecclesial impossibility where a surplus of ‘official ecclesiology’ would be a burden too far. In line with Rollins’ notion of ‘the fidelity of betrayal’, ecclesial authenticity may require ecclesiological denial.37 In what follows I will analyse church as ‘ecclesianarchy’ under four characteristics: dispersed leadership, decentred worship, dispossessive institutions, and dis-illusioned ecclesiality.

35 Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? p. 73. 36 Pete Ward, Liquid Church (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2002) and Participation and Media- tion: A Practical Theology for the Liquid Church (London: scm Press, 2008). 37 ‘As we attempt to understand our faith, we will develop ideas and practices that help us. Yet the point is that we must always be ready to critique these ideas and practices, for they are forever provisional. To display our fidelity to them we must always be ready to betray them’ (The Fidelity of Betrayal, p. 133).

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‘ecclesianarchy’: Excursions Into Deconstructive Church 129

Excursions into Deconstructive Church

Dispersed Leadership In conversation with the late American commentator on ‘emerging church’, Phyllis Tickle, Peter Rollins advocates a ‘doughnut’ model: church with a ‘hole’ at the centre, constituted by a form of leadership that ‘refuses to be a leader’.38 With typical provocation he asserts that the responsibility of leadership in his community is to say, ‘we don’t care about you’. Where the church is a non-hierarchical community, people are to care for each other: there is no option of running to the leadership with the cry, ‘you must care for me’. Cupitt similarly envisages a community in which ‘there will be no career religious leaders with spiritual power and sacramental rank. There will be no rulers and no shepherds. All will be priests to each, and each to all’. Spiritual power will be distributed ‘so that each layperson gains the courage to be creative and to be different’.39 In the deconstructive church, ideas of distribution and difference will thwart the accrual of power to ordained persons viewed as uniquely representative of ecclesial tradition, character and continuity.40 Gibbs and Bolger argue that secular modernity produced a disproportionate emphasis on the concept of control in the church, as ‘linearity, order and systematization were the means through which one properly worshipped God’.41 By contrast, what is needed is church as ecclesianarchy:

For the church to resemble the kingdom of God, current notions of church power must be drastically altered. The church needs to operate as a consensual process in which all have a say in influencing outcomes. The church should resemble God’s beauty as it displays a peaceable community through the nonhierarchy of the priesthood of all believers.42

Whereas Rollins insists that leadership in the Ikon community consists in the refusal to be the leader, Gibbs and Bolger offer a more positive account

38 Part 1-Phyllis Tickle and Peter Rollins discuss Emergence Christianity, https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=9sRsOhy_WWA, accessed 20 December 2017. 39 Cupitt, Radicals and the Future of the Church, p. 171. 40 Although Cupitt pre-dates the emerging churches and has roots in the very different environment of academic Anglican liberalism, I consider that Radicals and the Future of the Church is an interesting precursor of many of the themes now being articulated by a new generation of architects of a postmodern ecclesiality. 41 Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger, Emerging Churches: creating Christian community in postmodern cultures (London: spck, 2006), p. 68. 42 Gibbs and Bolger, Emerging Churches, pp. 192–3.

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130 Williams of dispersed leadership, drawing on the thinking of Ian Mobsby of London’s ‘Moot’ community.43 More orthodox than Rollins, Mobsby is quoted on the theological foundations of his position:

It starts with an understanding of the Trinity … There is no hierarchy. We are attempting to model this Trinitarian understanding by having an active community approach that empowers all to have a voice, to help make decisions, and also a fluid community that people are free to leave or join. I … have a role to advise decisions and to raise theological and other considerations. But it is the group that makes decisions.44

The manner in which such a model problematizes leadership is a necessary move for an ecclesiality that seeks to escape its captivity to rationalistic and political templates. Elsewhere, Karen Ward of the Church of the Apostles in Seattle explains that ‘for the most part, we have no up-front leader, no stage, no presiding priest, no big pastor’; rather, she likens her role to that of ‘a curator in a museum in contrast to the moderator of an assembly’.45 The concept of leader as ‘curator’ finds its best expression in the context of worship, to which we now turn.

Decentred Worship In the deconstructive church, worship is ‘curated’ rather than ‘led’: hence Jon- ny Baker of London’s Grace Community entitles his book Curating Worship.46 ‘Curating’ is the term most usually applied to the work of gathering and realis- ing an artistic exhibition or event, and ‘if the work is done well, the curator disappears behind it’.47 The comparison between worship and the curating of an artistic event is extended:

If it has been done well, it is a space that can be navigated seamlessly and visitors can immerse themselves in it without giving a second thought to the curator. As the art is encountered there are moments of epiphany,

43 Ian Mobsby, Emerging and Fresh Expressions of Church: How Are They Authentically Church and Anglican? (London: Moot Community Publishing, 2007). 44 Cit. Gibbs and Bolger, Emerging Churches, p. 137. See also Mobsby, God Unknown: The Trin- ity in Contemporary Spirituality (Norwich: The Canterbury Press, 2012). 45 Cit. Gibbs and Bolger, Emerging Churches, pp. 165–166. 46 Jonny Baker, Curating Worship (London: spck, 2010). See also Mark Pierson, The Art of Curating Worship (Norwich: The Canterbury Press, 2012). 47 Baker, Curating Worship, p. xiii.

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‘ecclesianarchy’: Excursions Into Deconstructive Church 131

delight, provocation, questions are evoked … it can linger in the imagina- tion … A worship curator makes a context and a frame for worship, ar- ranging elements in it. The content is provided by other people.48

The ‘curator’ model retains a role for an individual person in the overall fa- cilitation of the design and delivery of worship. At the same time, it is vital to recognize that such a role is to be sharply distinguished from any notions of hierarchy, seniority or privilege. As a contributor from the same church as Baker told Gibbs and Bolger:

Alternative worship is more about radical power structures than radical presentation styles. Groups work as teams of equals, whether or not there are ordained persons involved. There are no fixed hierarchies or predeter- mined roles; no one is pastor for this or that. The team isn’t an elite group, delivering expertise to the congregation, but a representative group, creating something on behalf of the congregation.49

Another way in which worship can be ‘decentred’ is through removal from intentionally structured contexts designed around fixed liturgical requirements. Pete Ward describes some examples in the ‘liquid church’50 that demonstrate affinities with Baker’s model: a labyrinth in St Paul’s Cathedral, a multi-activity act of worship at Greenbelt, an experience of Greek Orthodox worship while on holiday. Ward envisages a decentralized ‘network’ church where individu- als and groups will experience multiple foci and levels of interaction: acts of worship but also forms of social action, social media communications, special interest groups and creative activities. There may be no single all-embracing ‘congregation’ that is expected to gather them all in one place at the same time. For Rollins, the decentring of worship is intended to be a more radically disorienting experience than for either Baker or Ward: ‘We must endeavour to form spaces that make sense to nobody’.51 His view is that religious activities have been too readily seen as being concerned with supplying a framework of understanding, another indicator of the influence of the apxή of power, structure and control. By contrast, the experience of worship should be one of at least a temporary dislocation or alienation that disrupts such securities of meaning for the participant: ‘we need to form a space that takes this away, even

48 Baker, Curating Worship, pp. xiii–xiv. 49 Steve Collins in Gibbs and Bolger, Emerging Churches, p. 166. 50 Ward, Liquid Church, chapter 10. 51 Rollins, The Fidelity of Betrayal, p. 174.

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132 Williams if just for a few moments, so that something else can take place’.52 The arena of worship is characterized as ‘an immersive, theodramatic space’ within which a collective encounter can take place outside the boundaries of ‘political, religious, and social identities’, offering instead ‘creative, ritualistic acts that invite, affirm, recall, and relate the event housed within the religion without religion that is Christianity’.53 This deconstructive moment echoes Caputo’s commendation of the ‘uncontainable event’ of the ‘call’ that is the only me- dium in which the language of theology has legitimacy: ‘to engage the gears of deconstructive thought and practice is not to reduce our beliefs and practices to ruins … but to entrust oneself to the uncontainable event they contain.’54

Dispossessive Institutions Churches are complex institutions in which interlocking and sometimes tangled strands of more or less ritualized groupings, practices and functions combine to create a distinct identity that newcomers may take some consider- able time to comprehend, or indeed to break into. In particular among these institutional features, meetings can be key factors in establishing ecclesial character: the church council, the Bible study group, the social committee, the choir or worship group, and so on. Such institutions can be deeply ‘possessive’, guarding the particular identities that conserve important loci of power and the way it is exercised. Gibbs and Bolger argue that emerging churches aim to challenge the hegemony of meetings:

Yes, there are meetings, but they do not define church. The meetings are scheduled to support the life of the community or to flow out of the community, but they do not create the community … Many of the groups that started recently are meetingless in this sense. They have moved away from a central gathering. They are relational, organic and flowing.55

‘Dispossessive’ institutions operate a centrifugal rather than centripetal force- field, scattering the power away from themselves through the refusal to cen- tralize and bureaucratize: ‘meetings’ are ad hoc, not rigidly diarized according to a routine timetable, nor institutionally prescriptive as to their ‘membership

52 Rollins, The Fidelity of Betrayal, p. 174. The implications of this disorienting experience of ‘suspended space’ are discussed in detail in Moody, Radical Theology and Emerging Christianity, chapter 11. 53 Rollins, The Fidelity of Betrayal, p. 176. 54 Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? p. 138. 55 Gibbs and Bolger, Emerging Churches, p. 102.

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‘ecclesianarchy’: Excursions Into Deconstructive Church 133 criteria’. The emergent properties of groupings are fluid and adaptive, as Gibbs and Coffey note:

Networking churches consist of a range of self-organising ministry teams. The range will be in constant flux as some teams disband when they are no longer needed, while others are formed around people who have iden- tified a fresh need … they are formed by invitation or by calling for volun- teers with specific skills and experience.56

Stuart Murray argues that the Christendom paradigm has bequeathed to the church a legacy of deeply ingrained, inherited and institutionalized patterns of thinking and practice that have now become profoundly problematic. At the very least, this means simplification: ‘The transition from institution to movement, from the centre to the margins, means discarding baggage and retaining only what we need to sustain worshipping missionary communities’.57 Murray wants to see little companies of disciples of Jesus, often acting as communities of resistance, peacemakers and reconcilers, breaking bread informally around the common table, listening and conversing across boundaries of faiths and unbelief. This church will be a ‘safe place to take risks’,58 travelling light enough to be able to cope with experiments that don’t succeed, and the facility to change tack at short notice. It will rejoice in marginality and in being relieved of the burden of unrealistic social expectations and deadly cultural projections. And if there is a touchstone for authenticity or even ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘orthopraxis’ it will be simple: just Jesus.59

Dis-illusioned Ecclesiality This fourth dimension of ecclesianarchy is more a product of the unwilled socio-cultural decay of traditional church life than an intentional strategy. Caputo illustrates this from the Diary of a City Priest by Catholic priest John McNamee, ministering in a run-down area of Philadelphia. Both the neigh- bourhood itself and the condition of McNamee’s life within it are repeatedly described as ‘impossible’. Ministry there is almost devoid of the trappings of ‘conventional’ church, even down to the absence of any viable Catholic congregation. McNamee sees a grotesque disconnect between much of what ‘church’

56 Eddie Gibbs and Ian Coffey, Church Next: Quantum Changes in Christian Ministry (Down- ers Grove, Illinois: ivp, 2001), p. 90. 57 Murray, Post-Christendom, p. 275. 58 Murray, Post-Christendom, p. 280. 59 Murray, Post-Christendom, pp. 308–310.

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134 Williams means as traditionally understood, and what actually goes on in his parish. There is the ‘big Church’ or the ‘bureaucratic Church, the hierarchy’; and there is his ‘working church’, making it up as it goes along, managing crises, picking up life’s rejects, enduring perpetual disappointment, confronting institutional inertia, salvaging urban wreckage. Many other stories are told of church in extremis, throwing the ecclesiological rule-book out of the window and improvising for the sake of the Kingdom. Nadia Bolz-Weber of the House for All Sinners and Saints Lutheran Church in Denver writes about ‘an ecclesiology that points to what it means to be church outside of just worship services and committees’: hanging around in coffee shops ready to talk with anyone who needs it, showing up at a local bar on Shrove Tuesday with doughnuts for people to ‘eat up and confess their sins’; washing the feet of junkies on Maundy Thursday and blessing bicycles with the local cycling community.60 She admits that ‘it’s been a lousy church growth strategy … Then, like so often when you are part of this whole death- and-resurrection thing called Christianity, I realized that I had been seeing it all wrong’.61 Juliet Kilpin reflects on the challenges of urban mission born of frustration that traditional ‘church planting’ was ‘not taking the opportunity to experiment with different ways of being church’, and seeking an ‘uncluttered church … committed to unconditional service, holistic ministry, bold procla- mation, prioritizing the poor and being a voice for the voiceless’.62 Caputo says that such ecclesialities give a special priority to the Feast of St Thomas the Doubter: ‘in a situation like this, faith is impossible, the impossible: one is called on to have faith in a world in which it is impossible to believe anything’.63 In this context a surplus of ‘official theology’ would be just too much to be expected to make oneself believe in. But within the default settings of doubt and desperation there remains an impossible love, a moral passion that generates awe; he sees it in the devotion of a little Irish nun in the slums, ‘the unspeakable, unintelligible cruelty of existence along with some pulsating event of love and mercy … What must be believed cannot be believed- that is the mystery we call God’.64

60 Nadia Bolz-Weber, ‘Operation: Turkey Sandwich’, in Graham Cray, Aaron Kennedy and Ian Mobsby eds. Fresh Expressions of Church and the Kingdom of God (Norwich: The Canter- bury Press, 2012), pp. 51–58. 61 Bolz-Weber in Fresh Expressions and the Kingdom of God, p. 58. 62 Juliet Kilpin, ‘Mission in an Urban Context’, in Roger Standing ed. As a Fire by Burning: Mission as the Life of the Local Congregation (London: scm Press, 2013), pp. 26–35. 63 Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? p. 121. 64 Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? p. 123.

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‘ecclesianarchy’: Excursions Into Deconstructive Church 135

Conclusion

As Caputo remarks, ‘the church is not the answer. The church is the question’65 and the questionable church, the church that embraces a risky and even threat- ening ecclesianarchy, cannot be ignored by the inherited church whose apxή is radically called into question by a world that increasingly rejects it. Having said this, the experiments in deconstructive church available for scrutiny so far suggest that the church that sees itself as the question rather the answer needs to pose a number of critical questions to itself if it is to face an uncertain future with resilience; to put it another way, the ecclesia in extremis option of ‘dis-illusioned ecclesiality’, towards which a church under pressure will tend, will not be sufficient on its own to establish the hope of survival. First, there is a risk that the depoliticisation of the core meaning of anarchy within the deconstructive church will lead ultimately to introspection and a form of sectarian quietism. Stuart Murray has commented with some acerbity, ‘Becoming peace churches, creating “learning communities”, practising mutual accountability and radical hospitality are more demanding than meeting in pubs, building labyrinths or mastering PowerPoint.’66 In his insightful treatment of emerging ecclesiology, Doug Gay names ‘a political-prophetic Church’ as one of his six essentials, acknowledging that many in the emerging church movement were ‘from evangelical backgrounds where individualistic understandings of sal- vation and sanctification had deprived the Gospel of its sharp political edges’.67 Insofar as ecclesianarchy denotes church in revolt against political models that replicate imperial order and control in a manner that fundamentally distorts the Gospel, a drift towards an apolitical stance would represent an abandonment of the cause of the kingdom of God. As Ellul puts it: ‘We have to eliminate two thousand years of accumulated Christian errors … for Christian anarchists, the goal of anarchy is “theonomy”, the rule, the ordering, the apxή of God’.68 Second, and this too is a legacy of the evangelical origins of many of those in the vanguard of experimental forms of church,69 there needs to be serious

65 Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? p. 34. 66 Murray, Post-Christendom, p. 275. The now dated reference to ‘mastering Powerpoint’ be- trays just how quickly things move on in a technologically-driven world. 67 Doug Gay, Remixing the Church: Towards an Emerging Ecclesiology (London: scm Press, 2011), p. 118. 68 Jacques Ellul, Anarchism and Christianity (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 2011), pp. 6–7, 78. 69 Marti and Ganiel note that ‘much of the conversation’ within the emerging church environment ‘still consists of stories of “de-conversion” from fundamentalist-tinged orienta- tions’ (The Deconstructed Church, p. 23).

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136 Williams attention to the persistent male dominance of positions of leadership. The notion of an an/archic ‘dispersed leadership’ was certainly not congenial to very many of the earlier pioneers of alternative ways of being church such as the ‘house church’ and Restorationist movements, in which the charismatic ‘alpha male’ upfront leader was more or less indispensable,70 and this has only slowly begun to change in the more recently emerging communities. The irony is that it has been precisely in the field of feminist theology that much of the most original and progressive thinking about re-imagining the church has been taking place over roughly the same period of time in which new, deconstructive expressions of church have been emerging, and yet writers in this field rarely draw on this seminal work.71 More recently has come the rising influence of Af- rican and Asian women theologians such as Mercy Amba Oduyoye and Kwok Pui-Lan: in her valuable study Jennifer Buck comments that ‘women’s imagery of church provides a vision of a Church in the Round, a sense of connectedness and solidarity’.72 The issue of engagement with groundbreaking work in feminist ecclesiology is one example of the third area for critical consideration, which is to beware of the tendency for anti-institutionalism and the quest for novelty to obscure the need for attention to the rich theological traditions that can actually help to underpin the concept of church as ‘ecclesianarchy’. A recent critique from a conservative evangelical perspective (ironically enough by a woman author) alleges theological unorthodoxy as the principal charge laid against the emerging churches.73 Against this, Rollins, for example, might justifiably want to maintain that ‘orthodoxy’ as an instrument of institutional control or a means of setting limits to theological exploration would not in any case be rel- evant to his project. However, the paucity of engagement with both historical

70 Marti and Ganiel comment wryly in a footnote that ‘for men, it may be speculated that the movement provides a male-oriented space that combines an opinionated bravado on spiritual matters with a nerdish vulnerability to doubt and uncertainty’ (The Decon- structed Church, p. 212, note 79). 71 For example: Rosemary Radford Ruether, Women-Church: Theology and Praxis of Femi- nist Liturgical Communities (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988); Elisabeth Schüssler -Fiorenza, Discipleship of Equals: a Critical Feminist Ekklesia-logy of Liberation (London: scm Press, 1993); Mary Grey, Beyond the Dark Night: a Way Forward for the Church (Lon- don: Cassell, 1997). See Natalie Watson, Introducing Feminist Ecclesiology (London: Shef- field Academic Press and Cleveland, Ohio: The Pilgrim Press, 2002). 72 Buck, Reframing the House, p. 92. This work would be of particular value for readers within the emerging churches owing to its evangelical provenance. 73 Hannah Steele, New World, New Church? The Theology of the Emerging Church Movement (London: scm Press, 2017).

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‘ecclesianarchy’: Excursions Into Deconstructive Church 137 theological traditions and contemporary academic sources in the output of most writers with a claim to be emergent church theologians74 is a weakness that will become more apparent over time, as a defiant anti-institutionalism and self-definition in opposition to inherited Christianity may encourage in the new churches a built-in impermanence, liability to schism and a resulting lack of influence.75 Notwithstanding these issues requiring attention, a deconstructive church modelled as ecclesianarchy lays down a challenge to the mainstream churches, liable as they are to a strange complacency in the face of dire demographics that predict a drastically reduced future, still often imprisoned in the silos of denominationalism and frequently dominated by the agendas, interests and preferences of their clergy. The commendation of deconstructive church as a site of the impossible, and the plethora of ecclesial experiments already in existence, may appear a recipe for anarchy in the sense of chaos. Marti and Ganiel’s judgment, however, is that emerging churches are ‘relatively coherent yet haphazardly organized’, and ‘deliberately messy’.76 Such a pattern arises because ‘emerging Christians want to create Christian communities that allow for a sustainable religious autonomy, ones where a broad scope of freedom in individual belief and religious convictions reign’.77 The very chaos of ecclesianarchy may well turn out to deliver the ‘creative chaosmos’ proposed by Caputo, and with it, a genuine hope.

74 See for example Tony Jones, The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008); Doug Pagitt, A Christianity Worth Believing (San Fran- cisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008). Moody, Radical Theology and Emerging Christianity is a very sub- stantial contribution to opening up the serious theological dialogue needed, engaging especially with the work of Peter Rollins and Kester Brewin. 75 Martyn Percy treats these weaknesses as symptoms of an overall lack of serious theological engagement and of the ‘ecclesial density’ enjoyed by traditional territorially embed- ded models of church (see e.g. Percy, ‘Fresh Expressions: a Critique of Consumerism’ in Shaping the Church: The Promise of Implicit Theology, Farnham: Ashgate, 2010, pp. 67–80). However, Moody warns against so easy a dismissal, discerning rather a ‘discursive milieu’ within emerging Christianity characterized by ‘a cluster of commitments’ that are gen- erating radical reinterpretations of church, community, institutions, mission and orthodoxy in a multiplicity of ways that often operate under the radar of more conventionally academic arenas of discourse (Moody, Radical Theology and Emerging Christianity, pp. 15–16 and footnotes 59 and 60). 76 Marti and Ganiel, The Deconstructed Church, p. 30; emphases in original. 77 Marti and Ganiel, The Deconstructed Church, p. 26.

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