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'Ecclesianarchy': Excursions Into Deconstructive Church ecclesial practices 5 (2018) 121-137 brill.com/ep ‘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 contempo- rary culture in support of a mission strategy focused on presentational innovations and limited structural adjustments, without allowing the implications radically to chal- lenge 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 © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/22144471-00502002Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 11:30:49AM via free access <UN> 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 re- ligious 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 founda- tions of theology and ecclesiology untouched.3 The proposal in this article, drawing on the work of Caputo, is that the call- ing 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 intention- ally through experiments in ecclesial deconstruction and involuntarily through situations of ecclesial minimalism. The ‘intentional experiments’ are risky in- novations 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, west- ern Christian tradition including its colonial expressions. For a broad overview of the ‘emer- gence’ 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 rela- tively 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. ecclesial Downloadedpractices from 5Brill.com09/28/2021 (2018) 121-137 11:30:49AM via free access <UN> ‘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 ecclesianar- chy 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 distinc- tive about the theological resources that the church holds, embodies and en- acts. 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. ecclesial practices 5 (2018) 121-137 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 11:30:49AM via free access <UN> 124 Williams An institution modelled after deconstruction would be auto-deconstruc- tive, 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 an- archy, 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
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