Return of the Killer Pews

 

These pews were made for sitting and not the Charismatic Dub Step!

In 1995 I wrote a short essay entitled "Killer Pews". It was a response to a pattern of behaviour I had seen frequently in church life (and continue to see), a pattern where we find some Christians agitating for a spiritual revolution that supercharges what they regard as the rather humdrum, mediocre & unempowered work of a target church. The proposed remedy is that individuals must proactively seek an experience of "the Baptism of the Spirit". Given that many people in the church may already lay claim to having had the Baptism of the Spirit, sometimes more generic and vague terms such as the touch of God, an encounter with God or an infilling may be used. However, when one analyses what is actually being promoted one finds that it has less to do with spiritual experience per se than it has in trying to cast spiritual renewal into a quasi-gnostic philosophical mold by asserting a sharp distinction between the initiates and non-initiates of  some kind of inner spiritual light. As is so often the case when the target church fails to respond to the revivalist challenge it is then put down to "resisting the Spirit".

I must caution at this point that I am in no way presuming to put an unqualified denial on anyone's personal Christian experience or any epiphany they may have which takes them to a new level (which they may rightly or wrongly call the Baptism of the Spirit), anymore than I would expect them to cast doubt on my own very proprietary experience; rather my criticisms are about how such experiences are being interpreted and used to promote a philosophy which perceives Christian life in dualisms: "head vs heart", "intellect vs intuition",  "reason vs faith", initiates vs non-initiates and the like.  

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I'm currently following an online service where the challenge of moving onto a whole different plane of super-spirituality & blessing is being promulgated by the speakers of the latest sermon series. At the time of writing Killer Pews in 1995 I was seeing, and had seen, Christian experience being cast into a very similar dualist mold of initiates vs non-initiates. This philosophy can lead to a lot of hard feeling not least because the logic of its aficionados has maneuvered them into such a position that they can only see criticism as a form of resistance to the very Spirit of God. They therefore can do little but consider any challenge to their views as a very grave matter indeed. 

I have of course written a lot more on this subject since 1995, some of which can be found in the links below. Possibly at the end of this latest episode I may say something about this particular foray into "gnostic" renewal. But let me hazard what I think will be the likely outcome of this latest sermon series: By and large the preachers will hear positive noises from the people they are preaching too, but because these preachers find difficulty taking onboard the variety, broadness and depths of the human personalities they are dealing with and moreover, the variety, broadness and depths of God's work, the outcome will fall short of the new dawn they are looking for. We might end up with some very disappointed promoters who will feel as though they have been punching at very soft foam rubber. It's happened before.

http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/search/label/Dualism

http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/search/label/Fideism

http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/search/label/Mythos%20vs%20Logos

http://norwichcentralbaptistchurch.blogspot.com/search/label/Logos%20vs%20Pneuma

http://norwichcentralbaptistchurch.blogspot.com/search/label/mythos%20vs%20logos

ADDENDUM 13/02/21

More details about the underlying philosophy of the sermon series commented on above can be found here:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2021/02/head-vs-heart-intellect-vs-feeling.html

ADDENDUM 

20/04/21: I post here my detailed comments on the online sermon series I refer to above: 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OWIjP8FdaVrRYbhBJL0M9bVR3gM2kOGd/view

The Eternal Wall of Answered prayer

Unanswered prayer is conspicuous by its absence!

The Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer

I was recently in discussion with someone about the building of the above huge 51 metre high monument costing £9.3m and called "The Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer". This is what the Guardian says of it: 

An enormous Christian monument, more than twice the size of the Angel of the North, is to be built on the outskirts of Birmingham, fulfilling a vision its instigator says came from God.

The Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer will be constructed using a million bricks, each representing a prayer from a member of the public and its outcome. The aim is to “encourage and inspire people going through the storms of life”, said Richard Gamble, the project’s chief executive and a former chaplain of Leicester City football club.

The monument, which has been granted planning permission with work to begin next year, has three goals: to “preserve the Christian heritage of the nation”; encourage prayer; and “proclaim Jesus for the country”.

More information can be found here: 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-coventry-warwickshire-54123035

My friend, although a Christian, was clearly troubled by the thought that the money to build this monument could be more usefully spent elsewhere. (The money, according to the Guardian, is being donated by Lord Edmiston, a billionaire businessman, Conservative party donor and evangelical Christian). Although I was quite fascinated by the idea of a monumental Mobius strip my first reaction was surprise at the go ahead by North Warwickshire borough council’s planning committee who unanimously endorsed the scheme; after all, the UK appears to be a relatively secularised country, so how well does this huge Christian monument express British civic values? Below I present part of our conversation (I've called my friend "Bert"):

***

ME: At first sight it sounds a good idea to me. Love the symbolism of a giant mobius strip. Perhaps the country is not as secularised as I thought (Covid 19 anything to do with it?). However, weighing the incommensurables of the benefits of heritage (e.g. the moon landings) against more consumable benefits is not a straightforward comparison.

A good post though Bert: Got me thinking about balancing the monumental, which often serves community, kudos and status quo values, group identification and even hubris (e.g. Avebury, Silbury, Cathedrals etc...), against the more basic needs of just living satisfactorily. But I'm still puzzled and gob smacked that this project has got the go-ahead (unless it's a provocative troll article?). What's happening out there?

BERT:  I’m actually shocked it went ahead. Shouldn’t we give our money to the poor? Think of amount of meals that could feed those in poverty?

ME: Well yes, dire need should trump flights of monumental vanity, but when you've got a big economic surplus, human beings start to go monumental as we see in history. I assume your shock is about misplaced resources. My grasp of the economics here isn't great enough to contradict that, but I'm also shocked that what is basically a huge celebration of theism should get the go-ahead in the secularised UK. What in God's name is going on?

BERT:  Reminds me of Super/mega churches

ME: Not too keen on those myself! Shades of Nuremberg where you become one small cell in a frighteningly large organism run amok. Perhaps the funds are better spent on food banks and even covid19 research. But trying to put the balancing act here aside, as a monument I quite like the mobius strip. Although somebody did raise the question of "What about all those unanswered prayers?" Like all monuments it makes you reflect!

***

So, what about all those unanswered prayers then? How big a mobius strip would that require? Are there even enough bricks? Well, a few days later, independently and in an entirely different Christian connection, another Christian friend (whom I shall call "Josh") opened up a short email correspondence with me. The following is based on the first two email shots of that correspondence:

JOSH: I had a thought I wanted to run by you. It’s to do with prayer and when we request things – a bit of healing, a repair job, a decision going our way, a job interview, etc – it’s clear to me that although all our good prayers are answered by God at a general level in terms of our Christian progression, in terms of prayer requests for day to day things, the pattern of hits and misses often appears to me to be no more prominent in favour of hits than a random coin toss pattern.

What are your thoughts on this from a mathematician’s perspective?

ME: I think you may be talking about confirmation bias here? That is, is the concept of answered prayer just a myth which arises out of a natural human confirmation bias?

A few days ago I was discussing The Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer with someone else. I don't think I'm the first to remark: "What about all those unanswered prayers?" So the question is: Do the answered vs unanswered statistics give us a result that is statistically significant in favour of "answered"? Trouble is, stats doesn't work here.

The question of answered prayer is reminiscent of the statistical research into telepathy & precognition: Telepathy and precognition guesses which yield simple and clear cut "yes" or "no" answers can be mathematically checked for statistical significance but when the message received is composed of highly complex pictures & relationships, judgements about whether telepathy and precognition work are much more difficult to evaluate. With these complex revelations it is very difficult if not impossible to define clear cut and precisely defined mathematical probability spaces of cases (prob of event = cases favourable to the event divided by all cases). Answers to prayer are often more akin to these complex precognition and telepathy models; they are like the intermittent transmissions received by a radio receiver: That receiver may only occasionally splutter into life and deliver a clear cut message for a short while: But just a single event like that is so improbable as a spontaneous random event that you just can't help the feeling that this single remarkable event wouldn't happen by chance! Clear messages very seldom emerge from a sea of random noise.

I'm not a great prayer warrior myself although we do pray briefly for the family every night. I can only make sense of this area using the metaphor of the parent-child relation: The child asks for things and the parent responds either affirmatively or negatively within that relationship and according to the boundless wisdom (and love) of the parent (boundless as far as a young child is concerned!). Given the parent's much wider perspective the child is simply not going to understand why some petitions are answered and others aren't. In fact the parent may say "no" more often than "yes"! But let's remember this: A radio need only crackle into life once or twice on your desert island for you know that someone is out there!

***

Epistemic Note

Our epistemology works best with regular, highly ordered, stable, accessible and relatively simple objects: If there are aspects of reality that don't conform to this pattern then our epistemic endeavors start to struggle; witness sociology, evolutionary psychology, economics, history and UFOs. 

If epistemically speaking we are going to be bowled the curve balls of an erratic and complex reality then don't expect authoritative certainty to emerge and instead differing opinions will have to be tolerated; interpretation of these difficult to evaluate connections will be very (cultural) context dependent. (Meaning = text + context!). Here epistemic humility is advised. It is likely that the subject of answered prayer and the paranormal in general will fall into this category. Prejudiced dogmaticism either way is unjustified; but really, given the polarisation and passion that pervades some of these more debatable epistemic connections I suppose that's just too much to hope! See below for some of my links on the subject of epistemology. 

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2018/04/forget-epistemic-demarcation-problem.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2018/03/evolutionary-psychology-under-fire.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/evidence-not-proof.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/yes-its-all-science-larry-but-not-as.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/epistemic-notes.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/its-science-larry-but-not-as-you-know-it.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/evidence-guide-lines-but-not-tram-lines.html

ADDENDUM 7/11/20

An article very relevant to the above material can be found in the September 2020 edition of Christianity magazine. In the article, which is entitled Triumphalism, prayer warrior Pete Greig, initiator & leader of the 24-7 prayer movement talks about..... 

...the embarrassing swagger of my early faith.....Throughout the first year or so of the 24-7 prayer movement we were probably pretty unbearable....[we] genuinely thought we had found the big red switch called 'Revival'.....If everyone would just pray the way we were praying, Jesus would be back by breakfast time on Thursday...I'm ashamed to admit that I was often inconsiderate and uncompassionate towards those who were finding life really tough. 

But then,

Sammy [Greig's wife] got sick. I watched her slip into seizure after seizure, and no matter how much I cried out to God to make them stop - even claiming the scriptures - it simply didn't work.  I went from believing my prayers could save the world to questioning whether they could save my wife. 

Greig's attitude has improved no-end:

I still believe in miracles. I continue to pray for revival. But as C S Lewis said, miracles must almost by definition be rare. The creator is not a cosmic slot machine.... I hope I'm more compassionate these days. I'm certainly more comfortable with the sovereignty of God and the many paradoxes of life.

Greig puts a lot of his initial triumphalism down to his youth. But youth doesn't always explain it. 

Analysing UK Church Statistics: Logos vs Pneuma

From https://faithsurvey.co.uk/uk-christianity.html

(click to enlarge)

The above chart shows how church attendance in the UK, for a variety of denominations, has changed in 35 years since 1980. The general trend is obviously downwards, although it will be noted that the Pentecostal denominations and what are termed "New Churches" have increased their numbers as have the Eastern Orthodox church. Some of these church groupings may be clusters  of church cultures with only marginal commonalities: For example, "Baptist" covers churches affiliated with the Baptist Union and also the Strict and Particular Baptists. "Independents" may cover Brethren,  FIEC and various independent evangelical and reformed leaning "Free churches" (Indeed "Brethren" itself breaks down into further sub-groupings). The so-called "New Churches" probably cover various "charismatic" leaning churches such as New Frontiers, Hillsong, Vineyard, Calvary Chapel, Bethel, Potters House, Jesus Army etc.

On a couple of occasions now I have heard some church goers lauding the "New Churches" as perhaps having found the holy grail of church life, namely the spiritual secret of church growth, in so far as they seem to have bucked the trend of decaying church population. But in the absence of more information this is a long shot.  Let me explain:

 If one of the components effecting church population is an exponential decay then we will have:

Rate of decay = a constant x church population

This means that the bigger a church population is the faster it decays. If this is one of the components at work it would explain the huge drop in the large traditional church populations of Anglican, Catholic and Methodists and the relatively smaller drop in other smaller traditional churches like baptists and evangelical independents.

However, exponential decay is clearly not the only component involved: Pentecostal churches, which are of a similar size to Baptists, have increased their population whereas Baptists have dropped. Also, the "New Churches" have increased. This might suggest that they've cracked the problem of church growth were it not for the fact that they are relatively small and therefore more resilient to decay; they only need a small "trickle-in" component to more than cancel their slow rate of decay. For example, if just some people coming out of the jaded traditional churches are looking for a new exciting church scene and in consequence turn to the lower end population New Churches that may explain the growth among these churches; after all these churches tend to address today's Christian existential crises by offering the security of "spiritual intimacy" and personal epiphany, not to mention the simplicity and certainties found in their style. But even so the New Church growth is not spectacular: It's taken 35 years for this relatively small population to grow by over 100% to 160k - that's  about 2.6k per year..

It's worth noting that the tiny orthodox church (and therefore with a small decay rate) doesn't need much input from the Eastern European immigrants to buck the trend and grow by 160% in 35 years. (that equates to a mere 0.5k per year growth!)

The Pentecostals have grown by 36%; that is, by about 2.2k per year; that's lower than the per yearly growth of the New Churches. That may be a bad sign: Pentecostal traditionality may be part of the reason, but the Pentecostals are quite a bit bigger than the New Churches and so their lower growth rate may, ominously, be evidence that their greater size means that they are starting to show the underlying exponential decay component at work. If this is correct and the decay component is actually there all along in both the Pentecostal & New Churches and that they are actually partly being fed by the decay of traditional church it follows that their growth will slow down as their populations get bigger and become more vulnerable to the decay component.

This foregoing analysis is rather precarious. After all, it's a case of looking at the data and attempting to resolve out a superposition of growth/decay components in a background of a lot of random noise. But then to my mind this is no less precarious an analysis than those who look at the data and conclude that the New Churches have cracked the problem of church growth by waiting on the "spiritual revolution" and therefore the traditional churches only need drum up the same enthusiasm for this new dawn to solve their population problem. Moreover, I think we need to factor in here the pattern often shown when the church feels culturally marginalised; namely, that it tends to become more spiritually internalized and shifts from an emphasis on the articulations of "logos" to the intimacy of "pneuma"! Sometimes the latter starts to skirt the boundaries of fideism and gnositicism

My best guess is that the real problem is what that background component of exponential decay really means; that's likely to be societally systemic and there is not much we can do about it. The nub of the problem is in the culture beyond, in society at large: The spiritual revolution needs to grab the outside culture (and not just the church) and turn its nihilistic malaise on its head! When that happens churches of all sorts may be left wondering why at one time it all seemed so hard!

Bible Study: The Trinity

My Bible study on the subject can be found here.

At the heart of the Christian faith is a metaphor. The Greek word for "fish" (In Latin text, IXTHUS) has been used down the ages as an acrostic for the Greek version of "Jesus Christ, God, Son, Saviour.". The word "Son" here alludes to Jesus, the Son of God. Of course that can't be literally true any more than the claim that God is Father is literally true: In fact it would be blasphemous to suggest that God has begotten a Son in the literal sense; the incarnation must have been a very a different process to human procreation.   "Jesus is the Son of God" is a metaphorical expression about the relationship between Jesus the "Son" and God the "Father" and how far one can take this metaphor is subject to theological debate; much theology is less about claims to propositional truth than it is a debate about how far metaphors can be unpacked for their connotative content.

The metaphorical nature of much "propositional" theology is easy to overlook and when being used metaphorically for their connotative value theological statements may inadvertently be treated literally as if they are notational propositions. All metaphors have their limits but if metaphorical expression is the only means one has of expressing the otherwise inexpressible, taking the metaphor too far or too literally is always a danger. Therefore, it may be best to use a cluster of metaphors, realizing that no-one metaphor completely captures the otherwise incomprehensible. Theologians might like to ponder on the fact that theirs is not an exact science whose terms are precise enough to strain out a gnat. Theology provides guidelines rather than tram lines.

There have been many attempts to bring the concept of the Trinity into sharper focus by using crisp notational terms, but these attempts have so often come to grief in their explanation of how the human and divine come together in the Trinity that there is now a theological health warning hanging over the whole subject: See the heresy hunting Reachout Trust's list of "heresies" as an example. There may be some merit in what has otherwise been declared to be heretical provided it is treated metaphorically (although perhaps a bad metaphor). However, all too often the purveyors of these metaphors treat them literally and use them as doctrinal shibboleths in order to set themselves up as the one and only true understanding of the Godhead; that's when it becomes hard core heresy.

The Biblically sanctioned metaphor of Father and Son is undoubtedly the safest metaphor, a metaphor which focuses on the exclusively special relationship of "Father" and "Son" in the Godhead. But in the light of the adoption spoken of in Romans 8:14-19 (another use of metaphor) Christians can also claim to have a secondary Father/offspring relationship with the Divine. Perhaps using this metaphor, we can infer that as with young children we often have wrong ideas about the exact nature of our parent and yet that doesn't necessarily make void the adoptive relationship that that parent fosters with love. There is probably more leeway for the foibles of human idiocy and bigotry about the nature of the Godhead than doctrinal heresy hunters allow for; after all, the latter have to work with metaphors too.

The Four to Six Mix and the Feminisation of Church Culture

Some years ago on this blog I did a series of posts that resulted of some head counting I did at my church; my aim was to get an idea of the ratio of males to females. This little exercise was carried out on and off for about three years. I was surprised at the approximate constancy of the ratio over the period. The ratio turned out to be about 40% males to 60% females, hence I termed it the "four to six mix". The project was linked to an another theme and that I referred to as the feminisation (in the stereotypical sense of the word) of the Western church in its spiritual attitudes and culture; in particular the move to a more emotional, intuitive and  passion based church along with a drift toward an almost gnostic interpretation of the faith. (This is not true, however, of the kind of evangelicalism which strongly identifies with the reformation and majors in doctrine and "Truth" - such churches tend to eschew the emotional and experience based excesses of churches influenced by "Charismatic" culture. They also tend to be more "masculinised" in their ethos)

Anyway, the sequence of posts between June 2007 and January 2011 on this subject can be accessed using this link:

http://norwichcentralbaptistchurch.blogspot.com/search/label/FourToSixMix

Now here's what I want to come to. Recently the 4:6 mix has surfaced again in two independent connections: The first connection is the "iknow" church management software my own church uses. The iknow software generates this  monthly report:

The 4:6 statistic here is, I assume, taken from membership numbers rather than the rota population expressed by the bar chart. This 4:6 ratio has been static for at least a year if I recall correctly. 

I now turn to the June edition of Premier Christianity magazine where we find an article entitled  Your Church Needs More Men. This article includes the statistical schematic below:

Yes, that's right, up pops the 4:6 mix again, this time presumably based on extensive church surveys. The fact that my small sample reflects this survey is,  as I have put it before, statistical "magic" which would have made Arthur Koestler proud (See "The Roots of Coincidence" Pages  26-27 and see also my book Disorder and Randomness)

One of the concerns (and this has long been a concern of mine too) of the Christianity article is the obvious implication of the statistical imbalance: Namely, that unless young church women are prepared to stay single many will not find a male partner within the confines of the Church and will have to find husbands outside the church. In fact given that a large percentage of the more senior church population have successfully paired off it follows that the gender imbalance among young people will be even more skewed than 4:6. 

Looking through my "4:6 Mix" posts I notice that Christianity magazine has published articles on the gender imbalance and the related feminisation of the church on at least six occasions: There was a spate of articles and book reviews in 2007 & 2008: Viz: July & September 2007,  February, and March 2008 and two articles in May 2008.

In my previous posts I toyed with idea that a factor strongly related to the 4:6 mix was the "feminisation" of church; that is, a cultural skew entailing a move away from stereotypically male traits and this is evidenced in the feminisation of worship. For example, quoting from my post of Feb 22nd 2008 where I quote a church leader called Carl Beech....

As for the state of worship in church with its male alienating ‘Swoon for Jesus love ins’ Beech seems to understand this as well: “Our terminology is that Jesus is our lover – press yourselves into his arms and let him embrace you”. Beech goes onto to say: “I’m very grateful for the charismatic movement, but I think we need to recast the terminology. Some of the songs which emerged in the 90s were very cathartic.” It was a lot worse than that Carl: the mid nineties was the heyday of the Toronto Blessing when, if you didn't want to be accused of resisting the Spirit, you emulated those 'in the Spirit' and got down on all fours and barked!

This is not to say that a "feminine" style of worship is wrong in itself: Also there is no necessary inference to be drawn which stereotypes genetic "males" and genetic "females" into particular roles. Some males may prefer the feminised worship and some females may prefer more masculine styles. The statistical clustering of genetic males and females around what are conventionally thought of as feminine and masculine traits is going to be a cloudy affair subject to many exceptions. The problem, however, arises when there is an imbalance of culture  that alienates a section of the congregation.

To be frank the premium placed on a soppy "swoon for Jesus" gnosticism in some Christian quarters alienates me as it does other males. There have been some gallant moves in an attempt to create events that cater for a more male orientated "laddish" culture (such as the 4M movement). This is good and gets full marks as a nice try but what little I've seen of these events suggest to me that the epiphanies of "Jesus gnosis" are still regarded as the acme of Christian experience. While this situation persists the statistics will remain the same. 

It is probably not as simple as a trend toward a uniform feminisation; rather it may actually be a  polarisation between hyper-feminisation and hyper-masculinisation with the latter evidenced by a dominating male leadership which on occasion can be a mix of patriarchary, authoritarianism, and bullying, all of which chimes well with fundamentalism and is a complementary fit with a feminised, obedient and compliant church membership.  My current guess is that such is the reaction of church communities to cultural stress and marginalisation in a changing world. 

STOP PRESS:

Talking about bullying leaders: The abrasive and domineering Mark Driscoll is back according to a Premier Christianity web article entitled Mark Driscoll is back but he hasn't learned his lessons.   See here. But I wonder if it's not just Driscoll who has to do some learning but also a fundagelical culture which is inclined to give such characters a free ride on its back. 

https://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-mark-driscoll-affair.html

https://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-mark-driscoll-affair-part-ii.html

Views of Norwich From a Roof Top

A year or two ago I took some photographs of Norwich from the roof of Norwich Central Baptist Church. These photos can be seen in  this PDF.  Below I have reproduced the introduction:

***

The pictures in this album show Norwich City landscape from the vantage point of the roof of Norwich Central Baptist Church. Over the years new build has made this area increasingly residential reversing the 20^th century English trend to escape the inner city. But as per most churches today, NCBC has a widely spread congregation with a catchment radius that perhaps extends up to ten miles and overlaps with the catchment areas of other church congregations. Modern changes, not least waning church attendance and modern transport, have meant that today’s churches seldom serve their local “community”.  This has lead contemporary church attenders to select a church less on the basis of vicinity than on the basis of the church culture and where they feel they can settle down and connect.

The pictures were taken about two years ago and actually capture a view that is no longer available as a consequence of the construction of flats adjacent to NCBC (The empty demolition site just prior to building can be seen in the photos).  These photographs, therefore, were taken just in time to provide evidence of a remarkable historical transition that has taken place over the centuries. They show how difficult it is to snap a general view of Norwich without including several old mediaeval churches in the frame. The density of these gothic edifices is evidence that in those days churches really were “local community” churches in the sense that they served a public that was within a stone’s throw.

I remember doing this guided tour for a group which included Americans and Australians. As they did the tour they were astonished that one only had to walk a few yards before yet another medieval church came into view. Modern conditions, however, have changed what “community” means and this presents challenges to people who are still inclined to think of community in purely geographical and parochial terms.

Bible Study: The Royal Law

Picture from: https://refreshingmanna.org/the-royal-law/

The Golden Rule of gregarious living is quoted on Wikipedia as:

The Golden Rule is the principle of treating others as one's self would wish to be treated. It is a maxim that is found in many religions and cultures.

The Biblical version of the Golden Rule, The Royal Law, is in fact more general: "Love your neighbour as yourself". This more general form doesn't impose any interpretation on just how love is to be expressed; after all, there are often big cultural & understanding differences between people and this can render just how love is to be actioned problematical. But given these differences  between people what common inter-human content can be conferred on the concept of "love"?  It might seem that what is love to one culture is, in fact, not love to another culture and vice versa. So unless there is some kind of intercultural universal which we can identify as "love" then any claim to the universality of the concept of "love" would seem to be hopelessly lost in subjective and intercultural translation.

But there is such a thing as a common humanity, independent of culture. For me the universal concept of love must be based on the commonality of conscious cognition; that is, a recognition that human cognition is accompanied by conscious feelings; e.g. joys, pleasures, pains sufferings etc. Our common humanity gives us the potential to carry out an empathetic projection which provides insight into the feelings of other people and hopefully a deep care for them; that is what universal love means.

This realisation of the common human link of conscious sentience doesn't, however, remove the fraught practical question of how love is best actioned in a world of epistemic challenges, unpredictability, cultural differences and very partial understandings of what actions best serve the long terms interests of our fellow human beings. The Royal Law doesn't directly address these practical challenges it; it is a guide line rather than a tram line. But the Royal Law is the ultimate high level command to all humanity: Love one another as I have loved you, but it is your responsibility to work out in practice exactly what that means in a social context. This is a huge challenge for beings who have issues with selfishness and epistemology. We therefore thank God that a divine plan of salvation was rolled out! Don't we need it!

As is so obviously evidenced by the numerous contrarian Christian sects and divisions, all loudly accusing one another of not following the clear commands of the Word of God to the letter ("clear" only to them, of course), the Bible is not unambiguous. The Bible does not provide a full suite of rules and regulations covering all eventualities; instead we get guide lines rather than tram lines: That, I suspect, is exactly the challenge it puts before humanity. Epistemically insecure Christian sects seek an unambiguous and narrow deterministic shape to belief and practice. This determinism does not exist in Scripture.

In any case we must never forget that the Spirit of the Law is not to be found in codes, programs and rules - these are just the outward (often transient) expressions of something which goes much deeper (See the book of Galatians). In fact there are dangers in prioritising the rule of the law over the Spirit of the Law.

My Bible study on the Royal Law can be found here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/15KXki3SHKD7dHPlEKLHZsVdrUNhwXTaM/view?usp=sharing

Roman-Saxon-Norman Norwich and St Julian.

Click to enlarge this view of Norwich as seen from the east. (North is right and south is left)

I recently spent an inspiring Saturday morning on a history walk in Norwich's King street area. The guide was Alan Gidney of Norwich Central Baptist Church. We also had with us a guide who was going to tell us about the world famous St Julian of Norwich, an anchorite whose cell is attached  to St Julian's church, a church within a stone's throw of  King street's Dragon hall; the latter being our assembly point.

Alan linked King street with the Roman road running from the northgate of Caistor Roman town  (Venta Icenorum), a fortified settlement about four miles to the south of Norwich. On the 3D Norwich map at the top of this post (Courtesy of Google) Caistor is off to the left. It is not known, said Alan, whether King street is on the line of the actual Roman road or whether it followed the line of Ber street, a street which runs roughly parallel to King street and is a little further up the Wensum valley side. Ber street and King street are both marked on my map. But in any case neither road has a good alignment with the road running from the north gate of Caistor Roman town, so presumably the road from Caistor had a kink in it at some point. Hazarding a guess: The Roman road from Caistor may have run along the east side of the River Yare until it arrived at a cross-roads near Trowse, whereupon a north west connection from the cross roads ran either to Ber Street or King street.

King Street, looking south. The front of Dragon hall can be seen in the centre distance.

The uncertainty about whether Ber street or King street is the original Roman road is expressed  in the following passage taken from this web site.

Although there is no substantial evidence of a Roman town within Norwich city walls, Venta Icenorum - Caistor St Edmund, just south of Norwich - was the focus for Roman settlement, selected for its fertile soil and good communications.

The area of modern Norwich was crossed by two major Roman roads suggesting that it was important, but not as a settlement. Evidence suggests that Holmstrete Way ran east west (modern Bishopsgate/St Benedicts) and a further Roman road ran north south along King Street or and Ber Street and then up Oak Street.

So, Oak street is also thought to be on the line of the Roman road. On my map I have marked Oak Street and also Charing Cross. Charing Cross may have been the place where the road from Venta Icenorum crossed Holmstrete.  If my map is anything to go by then Ber street has, apparently, a much better alignment with Oak Street and Charring cross than does King street. (However, Roman roads sometimes incorporated kinks in order to avoid difficult terrain, so this is no proof that Ber street is our Roman). King Street, on the other hand, has a reasonable alignment with Fye bridge (marked) to the north. In Saxon times Fye bridge was actually a ford and it therefore seems not an unreasonable conjecture that King street was, in fact, a Saxon deviation from the Roman road which made for the ford; presumably the well engineered Roman bridge that crossed the Wensum had long since decayed and fording the river was the cheapest Saxon alternative.

King street gets its name from the Saxon village of "Conesford" or "King's ford". Conesford was a village lying immediately to the south of the ford and was clustered around the point where King street was crossed by Holmestrete  On the other side of the ford lay the fortified Saxon town of Norwik (From which we get "Norwich"). Magdalen Street (marked) ran down the centre of this town, a town with a ditch and bank rampart and probably topped by a wooden palisade; it was in effect the "New Caistor".  As a fortified town Norwik had burgh status and was therefore permitted by the Saxon king to mint coins.

After the Norman conquest the centre of gravity of Norwich moved south, up and out of the Wensum valley toward the Ber Street ridge on which the Norman castle was built overlooking and dominating the Saxon villages in the Wensum valley. It may be at this point in history that King Street became the bustling inland "Port of Norwich", second only to the inland "Port of London". Although Norwich completely lost its second city status after the industrial revolution, I have early memories of it as a port for (small) sea going cargo ships, although today it is just a quay for Broad's pleasure boats.

St Julian's church is a short walk along St Julian's alley, an alley which intersects with King Street just outside the famous Dragon Hall. Dragon Hall was constructed in 1427 by the wealthy merchant Robert Toppes who made his money buying and selling with continental Europe. The feudal system introduced by the Normans had run about 300 years when St Julian was born in 1342 (She died sometime after 1416). But in the latter half of the fourteenth century the feudal order was under the hammer as history was in the process of making a transition. In consequence St Julian's life covers some significant times and dates. Viz:

* The Black death 1349 (England)
* The Peasant's revolt 1381
* The mid 14th century rise of John Wycliffe's Lollard's many of who were burnt at Lollard's pit a short way upstream at from Dragon hall. They were in effect pre-reformation reformers and were considered a danger by Roman Catholic authorities.
* The Canterbury tales 1387 - 1400
* The rise of the middle classes: e.g. Robert Toppes 1400-1467 who built Dragon hall in 1427

It is a reasonable conjecture that all the dates I have listed after 1349 have their roots in the effects of the Black Death, the plague which resulted in a 40% reduction in the population and consequently left many feudal agricultural strips unfarmed. Peasant tenants moved into the fallow land and started to make a profit and eventually bought cheap land to farm; they became the land owners often referred to as yeoman farmers, eventually to become contiguous with the gentry. They were the beginnings of the up and coming middle classes who in due course became rich and influential. English social mobility had arrived. An example are the Paston family who even moved into Caister Castle on the coast north of Gt.Yarmouth (not to be confused with Caistor Roman Town). Ever since those times the rich middle classes have had a tendency to ape the English aristocracy if they could.

The power of the feudal aristocracy whose wealth lay in their unquestioned ownership of farm land (the source of medieval wealth) was weakened by the Black death. The Black death lead to a lack of peasants to till the land and this in turn made land a buyer's market. But the feudal aristocracy continued to rule as if nothing had happened. The peasantry and early middle classes weren't wearing it and revolted. But this revolt was premature; the aristocracy were still very powerful and it took at least another three centuries before, in stages, the middle classes successfully took their place in the corridors of power. In the meantime the middle classes put their heads down and got on with the business of making money, Robert Toppes being an example.

Another connected factor in the peasants revolt may have been a subtle change in social ethos after the Black death. Evidence of this might be apparent in the Canterbury tales where it is clear that Chaucer was pondering carefully the meaning of social class. After all, the Black death was no respecter of persons; it was proof that all humanity was equal under God, although it should have been noticed that this equality was implicit in scripture from day one. Just before his execution in 1649 Charles I declared his belief in the royal blood line's divine right to rule. Charles I's execution is therefore symbolic of the death of the concept of an  aristocracy with a God given right to sovereignty.

The entrance to Julian's cell.: A Norman arch. It therefore pre-dates St Julian by at least 200 years. Her original cell probably did not include this entrance. She may have been bricked in with openings left for communication, food, hygiene and other basic needs. 

Into this mix comes the mystic St Julian. Today King street comes over as a sleepy residential area but our guide told us that in St Julian's day it would been a busy inland port area with people coming and going. Our guide also hinted that St Julian may have chosen this area because she felt that it was where she was most needed. After all, ports don't have a reputation for being particularly moral. Moreover, if the Canterbury tales are anything to go by we can imagine that street level culture here was pretty raw! (as it always has been I suppose!) So St Julian had her work cut out! Unlike the Lollards, however, St Julian didn't see herself as challenging the Roman Catholic church; a church that was in actual fact in much need of reform and challenge. But St Julian's theology was not entirely in keeping with that church. One of her doctrinal novelties was her stress on the motherly feminine aspect of God and Christ, a role reserved in Catholic thought for the Virgin Mary. But St Julian didn't go out of her way to rock the boat and in those days she was still a relatively small fish and could be safely be ignored. As for the Lollard's, at first the secular authorities tolerated and even protected them, but when they became linked to the peasant's revolt they lost this protection and many were burnt at the stake. Like the peasant's revolt the Lollard movement was premature; times were not yet ripe for a big change.

Standing in St Julian's cell for me was reminiscent of my visit to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Old Jerusalem. In both locations little or nothing remains of their original aspect making it difficult to make an imaginative connection with the past. Moreover, in my particular case picking up holy vibes is simply not one of my strengths. This fairly plain, clean, smooth, minimalist white washed cell was not going introduce me to a meditative mindfulness; not that much else has a chance of doing that either! A commemorative board just outside the cell says "In this holy place we can almost hear St Julian saying...so & so." Well, I didn't hear her! None of this is to say, however, that many people don't meet with God in the midst of contemplative silence.


And now to modern times: The St Julian controversy

St Julian's teaching. Traditional reformists will hate it.  Needless to say after a quick search on the Web I found....!

In reformation England St Julian's writings were rescued and hidden; she was after all a Roman Catholic Saint. But her writings eventually resurfaced and became popular in the West, perhaps on the back of a resurgent Romanticism. However, traditional "logos" based protestant believers who strongly identify with the reformation will find her writings at best wanting and at worst heretical. For example the following typifies a heavily reformist reaction to St Julian:

.....nowhere in Scripture are we taught “the Trinity is our Mother,” or that Jesus—the unique Son of God—is our “true Mother,” and we’re certainly not taught, “All shall be well.” The late Dr. Walter Martin, a very well-respected evangelical apologist, was correct when he said: The vast majority of mankind; will not make it [to salvation], because they simply will not repent. And if you don’t think these people are lost; then why in the world are you even bothering to call yourself a Christian. Study mysticism, as I have, and you’ll see a common thread of universalism within it.

In closing this subject, for now, Julian of Norwich falls right in lock-step with classic mysticism of all stripes with its panentheism (all in God), pelagianism (true self, which is sinless), “a spark of the divine” where, in contradistinction to Scripture, God already dwells within all of mankind and concluding with Julian’s belief in a universal salvation.
(See http://apprising.org/2010/05/09/setting-the-record-straight-on-julian-of-norwich/)

With their tendency toward an unimaginative and stark factualism fundamentalists are often found arguing over metaphors that they interpret literally. It is certainly true that some metaphors are better than others, but if you are a literalist what should be a discussion on merit and appropriateness becomes a black vs. white battle of truth vs. falsehood, a fight between good and evil, thus releasing huge passions, emotions and acrimony. As they diligently search the Bible for "theological algorithms" which provide exact rules giving unambiguous guidance about belief and practice, it is no surprise that a book which often uses language connotationally should cause fundamentalists to fall out with one another very acrimoniously over issues which should be treated as a question of nuances of meaning. An example of such a fall-out is the council of Chalceden (451), a council attempting to settle the contention between Nestorius and Cyril over the nature of the Trinity. It represents a timeless theological fracas caused by inflexible literalist thought. Prime suspect as to the root of the cognitive dissonance at Chalceden is the concept of "hypostasis" or "substance", terms which are clearly metaphors derived from the material world and applied literally and uncritically to the Godhead. It is no surprise that the black vs white fundamentalist mind will instinctively recoil from the sometimes woolly & sloppy language used by the Christian mystic.

One can repent, believe in the Lord Jesus and receive the gift of adoption from the Father and yet in my experience what chiefly characterises fundamentalist believers is that in practice they understand "repentance" in terms of affiliating oneself to their culture's specific rendition of Christianity; all other contrary Christian cultures are likely regarded as simply unrepentant. Close approximations to the Gospel can be found among Jehovah's Witnesses and yet one knows that they too are likely to consider anyone who does not connect with their holy remnant as unrepentant and therefore non-christian, no matter how emphatic one is about receiving the Gospel. For one quickly finds that in the eyes of fundamentalist Christians of all types (and this includes JWs), salvation is practically conditional upon the acceptance of their subculture as exclusive. Keeping fundamentalists at arm's length (A policy I actually advocate) is, to the fundamentalist mind, tantamount to a ticket to hell; see here, here and here. Expressions of the acceptance of the Gospel outside their culture are all but worthless to them. But having said that I can no more defend fundamentalist reformers than I can Christian mystics who err on the side of gnosticism and like their strict reformist siblings also regard those beyond their "enlightened" culture as of an inferior spirituality. 

The reformation brought an end to the Roman Catholic monopoly on Latin Christianity. Subsequently, in the West God no longer had all his apples in one basket where they could all go bad together. But human nature remained the same and those Protestants too enamoured of the divine authority of their opinions, following medieval  Roman Catholicism, believed there remained only one basket - their's!*



Addendum 15/04/2019
https://www.networknorwich.co.uk/Articles/546301/Network_Norwich_and_Norfolk/Resources/Events/_Julian_of_Norwich_celebrated_with_weekend.aspx

Footnote:

*As has become so apparent in my Creation researches evangelical Protestants are very tempted by a dualist world view, a view where God's creative power is instinctively distinguished over and against the profane "hypostasis" of matter; shades of gnosticism haunt many dark corners of Christian culture. And yet it is the sovereign transcendent God who has created the cosmic miracle of space & time and whose omnipresent  immanence sustains it and continues to create.

Themed Bible Study: Chaoskampf.

In the above Babylonian relief we see Tiamat, the personification of chaos, being defeated by the god Marduk. Here an act of  creation is represented as a struggle against chaos or chaoskampf. According to Wiki:

In the second [part of the] Chaoskampf  [myth] Tiamat is considered the monstrous embodiment of primordial chaos. Some sources identify her with images of a sea serpent or dragon.

This Babylonian creation myth has points of contact with the Biblical themes of chaos, Satan and the serpent. In the Bible similar ideas of Divine creation vs the forces of anti-creation can be found. Human sin and Satan put the self first disrupting cooperation and harmony thereby contributing to the abyssal deep of chaos, the domain of the Leviathan. 

My recent Bible study on these themes can be found here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/19nI8TzUn6uNEtIWhu5KFmHbofM1ncH6C/view

Another church for my “beetle collection”.

Catalogue without boundaries: Some of the species of The Open Gospel

Recently I was asked by a friend if I would like to visit the Sunday service of a church in Norwich. He felt that this church needed some investigation. So, one Sunday he and another friend found ourselves at the morning service of “Servant’s Church”. The report of this visit (which I sent to both friends) can be found here.

Servant’s Church is part of the Calvary Chapel network of churches. This network has its origins in the Jesus Movement of the 1960s and the vision of charismatic leader Chuck Smith. It follows a pattern found among some other fellowships in Norwich: Viz; a single founding patriarch and a mentoring organisation with its centre of gravity in America. A similar pattern can be seen in the Potters House church, The Living Stream Ministry fellowships, Bethel Church, Vineyard, the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormons. All these brand-named versions of Christianity have at least one affiliated fellowship in Norwich. To these churches we can add a miscellany of sectarian fellowships with origins closer to home such as the Plymouth Brethren, Closed Brethren, Strict & Particular Baptists, the Jesus Army, Reformed churches and reformo-charismatic. All these groups tend to view themselves as distinct from and superior to the more traditional protestant groupings (e.g. the Church of England, Methodists, Baptist Union, Salvation Army, United Reformed, Assemblies of God, Elim, the FIEC, and the Open brethren) and also superior to the newer mainstream charismatic churches (e.g. New Frontiers, Hillsong and Alive church). However, traces of sectarianism and fundamentalism, to a greater or lesser extent, can even be found among mainstream churches.

I don’t think Norwich is unusual in having such a bewildering array of protestant factions on top of its more mainstream groupings. Moreover, their number has been increased by the relatively recent appearance of several black (immigrant) churches. I have never attempted to formally catalogue all these fellowships/churches/groups/affiliations/congregations/assemblies. I have only succeeded in listing some of them simply because they have, for one reason or another, come to my attention; I haven't gone out looking for them, they have simply drifted into my line of sight. For example, I didn’t know about Servant’s church until my friend brought them to my attention. I have a feeling that I don’t know the half of it: Consider, for example, what I referred to as the “Car park” sect; they popped up out of the blue when they placed tracts on all the cars in the Norwich Central Baptist Church car park. Up until that moment they were completely unknown to me*¹. Cataloguing churches is like cataloguing beetles: Creating an exhaustive catalogue of these congregations along with pithy descriptions summing up what they are about would require more time than I am able to give. Many of them, needless to say, consider themselves as the one and only exclusive model to follow if you want to know how to do church properly!

During the service at Servants I spotted someone I had become acquainted to in another connection and this gave me the opportunity to catch up with him and find out what he thought of his chosen fellowship. To disguise his identity in my report I have called him “Charlie Neblus”.

Footnote

*1 I must be cautious though. New sects tend to disguise their sectarian agenda and shun any badging brand names, names which readily identify who they are and their origins (see my report for suggested reasons why). Therefore sometimes it is possible to think one has stumbled on a new sect when in fact it is a sect one is already familiar with.

Bible Study and The Mechanism of Mind.

The mechanism of mind: So complex that it's beyond self-understanding? See here

It's undoubtedly true to say that one best learns about the highways and byways of the Bible through thorough personal study and even more so if one is preparing to lead a Bible study group; the latter rightly requires the gathering of lot of back up and contextual information for potential reference. This information, although much of which will not be used in the study group, nevertheless helps resource one's mind, either to be boiled down to something significant or later used as a vital cognitive link at some stage. The mind, needless to say, is a complex mechanism, perhaps well beyond its own self understanding and its creative abilities probably result of its non-linearity which introduces all but unrepeatable sequences of thought. There is only one power that is sovereign over such complexity, and that is God himself. 

Recently I lead a house group studying the second half of John 1. My study notes can be picked up using the link below. In some ways this study adds to the backlog of my never-to-be-finished dream projects:This is what the start of a complete study of John's Gospel would look like if I ever had the time and privilege to do the full series on John's Gospel. But given a mix of intellectual pressures, absence of opportunity and today's existential-crisis oriented spiritual values which majors in the esoteric "encounter" as the linchpin of faith, I think that's a project which is not to be!

John 1 Study Link

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lD5BoEADwxG2xPnIbHi4RQOwtXmgD9pF/view?usp=sharing

Lessons from the Minor Prophets

I've being leading a Bible study series on the Minor Prophets and below I've published links to the study notes I have compiled. 

Core Christianity, when I eventually understood it, was a revelation; it was as if a mist had gone from my eyes. I experienced that turn-about face which many converts know; namely, that salvation isn't about us taking the initiative and winning our stripes but rather the initiative is on God's part: Here's Romans 8:15-17

15: The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba Father.” 16 The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. 17 Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.

The metaphor of adoption is a good one, particularly given the Roman culture pervading the Middle East at that time: Favoured slaves, on the behest of their masters, were sometimes adopted into their master's family thereby receiving all the rights of sons and daughters. Hence much of the connotational content  in the above passage is lost on us today.

Christianity is less something you do than it is something that is done to you on the initiative of God. For countless years the religious paradigm has been that the faithful must engage in the superstitious fetishes found in practice, belief and ritual in order to appease deity and make right the contract between God and (wo)man. But it's the other way round; it is primarily all about what God has done and not what (wo)man has done; all we need do is agree to partake of the new contract.  Wanting to become a Christian and wishing to lead a (re)new(ed) life under adoption is all that is needed to become a Christian. There then remains the question of our acceptance/adoption by God - but we know what the answer is to that. After that the details, the experiences, the formulaic doctrinal expressions and interpretations vary and are often arguable.

For many years humans have tried to fix the human-divine interface by means of tedious rule driven minutiae of practice, practice that amounts to a form of ritualistic magico-manipulation. But the interface remains broken until the psycho-spiritual engine which drives it is fixed and only God can do that. 

But let me add a circumspect rider at this point. I have met numerous Christians with a sectarian bent who will insist on imposing their proprietary facade of belief and practice on others. And if that facade doesn't graft those others are thought of as at best inferior Christians and at worst heretical blasphemers. I have to confess that there is more than one argument for the untruth of Christianity and these sectarian reactionaries are certainly one of them!

However, as one reads the minor prophets one realizes that the foregoing considerations are very old themes. These prophets understood that inner spirituality could not be fixed simply via better religious and magico-ritualistic window dressing and one of their main laments was that Judah and Israel did not understand this. Get the engine fixed and the interface will look after itself.

.

Introduction

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yeTWdWbndUcFlXZjQ/view

Amos

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yeX1RrU1hGMGsxUFk/view

Jonah

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yeeko3LU02eHNOaEU/view

Hosea

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yeRW82aXhqQzhIUUE/view

Micah

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yeRjRhZjlfNXQ5UWM/view

Nahum

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yeUVVRZkttRWVzb3M/view

Habakkuk
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yeYXFZSGpaN2I5RVU/view

Malachi
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1A0kl3-rQw_F_bRWv3XX-_Y3cH-TvWolW/view

Church, Social Networks and Community

The contemporary Western Church faces many challenges. One of them, frequently mentioned in my blogs, is its gradual cultural marginalization. Since the 1960s this marginalization has favoured a reactionary resurgence in Christian fundamentalism and gnosticism. But there is a more subtle challenge which impedes the formation of successful well integrated church communities, a challenge brought about by modern social conditions. I don't think I would have become aware of this problem without being a member of a Church and also being acutely aware of the fundamentalist and gnostic fanaticism dividing some parts of Christendom; the latter is in part a reaction to the problems of group identification as community ties have been weakened by modern conditions, thereby favouring extremist responses. (See also here)

A community, by definition, is a group of people who are networked together via mutual social relations; it is these relations which define "membership" of the community and convey a sense of belonging. A person who is well connected to one member of the group will also likely have social connections with other members of the group. A strong community is a concentrated network of these mutual social relations. But to form these mutual relationships people need get to know one another and relate to one another in ways that make a community a community. These relationships don't happen suddenly; they need to be worked at and built up. To do this requires a variety of resources such as time, human social aptitude and perhaps a knowledge of a shared history and shared explanatory narratives, all of which ultimately lead to group identification. Each link between people in a social network is an implicit investment in time and the expenditure of mental processing power dedicated toward building social relations. But human beings are finite entities and therefore human mental, sensory, contact opportunities and temporal resources are limited. The upshot is that each person in a social network can only support a certain number of social links before their finite temporal and mental resources maxes out. If the average strength of a social link is measured in terms of the effective resources it consumes and is represented by the quantity R and the number of links an average person maintains in a social network is represented by N then finite human resources will imply some kind of conservation law which limits human social potential. We might therefore conjecture a conservation relationship such as:

 R x N < some constant

Inequality 1

From a relationship of this type it becomes apparent that at the limit any one person can only increase his or her value of N at the expense of the strength of the social linkage, R. For example, a person who has mutual social connections with many, many people will concomitantly have a lower average linkage strength R. Conversely, a stronger average linkage implies fewer relationships.

Of course, relationships will not all be of the same strength. Any one person will have layers of social links of varying strength. The first and strongest layer will probably be family followed by close friends, other friends and then acquaintances etc. At the periphery of a person's social network there will be relationships where people only know one another by sight. In effect a persons relationship cluster thins out until at the edges it fades all together. In a small socially well knit town everyone will at the very least recognize everyone else by sight. But resource limits on human mental, contact opportunities and temporal powers will no doubt mean that there is some threshold (perhaps a population of a few thousand) when the power of an individual to at least recognize everyone fades out to nothing. Anonymity starts to become a factor in town life and this will have a bearing on the social cohesion of the community

In the past there would have been a strong correlation of community networks with spatial relations; those people you knew best were likely to be closest to you spatially and as a rough rule the further you got from your locale the weaker your social links. Towns were much smaller than they are today and travel and communication were primitive. The people you networked with were by and large in your vicinity. Moreover, it is likely that your family, your work colleagues, your neighbors and your church were groups with considerable social overlap. Thus a group of people related by spatial vicinity were, to a good approximation, also a community - that is, they were socially related as well as spatially related. Consequently, the resource burden of getting to know church people was less than it is today because your church may well have contained many of the same people who were your work colleagues, family and neighbours; this would undoubtedly have helped reduce the networking resource burden of church fellowship.

But conditions today are likely to be very different. Changes in travel technology, communication, working conditions, social ethos, and the size of towns etc have brought an end to the old parallels between spatial and social networks. The community experience has been fragmented: Viz: The social networks of family, friends, work colleagues, churches and neighbors have little or no overlap and constitute separate communities. The break up of a local self-sufficient industry in favour of national and international industry and the consequent need to move to a place of work has meant that family members often live far apart and thus are disconnected with church, work and neighbourhood communities. Travel from dormitory towns to work has disconnected one's work community from one's neighborhood community. In big cities Christians travel several miles to the church with an ethos & culture which suites them. Consequently the so-called "local church" with its catchment area taken from a local community is no longer meaningful.

The one-time inter-connecting overlap between one's family, neighborhood, work community, and church is now largely absent, especially in large cities and conurbations. Thus, any one person will be a player in several otherwise disconnected community groups. Work colleagues, family, the neighborhood, hobby group and church will likely all be separate social networks with little or no connection. This lack of overlap, needless to say, will put a strain on those limited human resources needed for social networking. Church community life in particular suffers. Churches may only meet on Sundays with perhaps the odd mid-week meeting; this stresses those critical human resources which relationship-making necessarily consumes, especially time and contact opportunity. In fact church people may well form stronger social links with work colleagues than they do church members simply because they spend more time with the former. We must also add to the contemporary mix the addition of online communities - people now spend a lot of time in web forums and social media with people they don't meet face to face, This spreads those limited  human social networking resources even more thinly. Church communities thus face competing claims for social networking resources. Those competing claims have come to the fore in modern times. But it's not just church; go into a modern residential area and it is quite likely that it is no longer a community in the old fashioned sense. The social networking between neighbors which once existed are under stress because work, family, locality and church have much less overlap than they once did. Neighbors may well try to be spatial neighbors but they face the same challenges that churches face in trying to serve the competing demands of all those separate and disconnected social networks. Identification with one's "natural community" can become a problem.

The upshot of all this is that modern churches may be quite loose associations of people. Sectarian and cultic Christianity addresses this problem by maximizing the networking time between their members and instilling a strong sense of belonging, identity and obligation to the status quo using guilt and fear; one's standing before God is called into question if your social networking isn't up to scratch; if not you may be categorized as one or more of a compromiser, a heretic or an apostate. For example, the Watchtower organisation discourages its young people from attending colleges as that will detract from their time spent studying with other Jehovah's Witnesses in the local kingdom halls. Also, as a means of spiritual intimidation character defamation is practiced by the Watchtower on those who fall short of expectation.  This is a tactic common  to fundamentalists in general.

 Another sectarian solution to modern community challenges is to mystify the nature of church social networks. This is achieved via the gnostic gambit, a solution which claims that gnostic initiation is a rite of passage into a sacred network that can't be seen or managed visibly, but neither can it be revoked without threat of divine displeasure. However, observation of sectarian gnostic Christianity generally shows highly partisan and schismatic behavior between different gnostic sects; evidence that the gnostic mystification of human relations is a very human attempt to cajole a belief in the presence of a super-spiritual social cohesion, when in fact no real cohesion beyond that implicit in Inequality 1 is actually present. Further observations of gnostic fellowships shows that there is no gnostic short cut to human social networking and that the real cost of social networking is implicit in the same inequality.

Non-authoritarian, non-fundamentalist churches can't, by definition, enforce community upon their congregations. They therefore have few options but to be simply conscious of the fellowship stresses that modern life places on their community and cope with it as best they can. Getting to know people brings understanding of their motives, problems, and personalities thereby giving greater insight into their behavior. But as we've seen, the modern Sundays only church (with perhaps a mid week meeting or two thrown in) means that community is only going to build slowly. Blank spaces in one's knowledge about people are easy to interpolate wrongly; if there are two ways of taking something then trepidation and fear of the unknown means that it is all too easy and all too human to take it the wrong way.

What churches need do then is to become aware of the relationship misunderstandings that so easily result when relationships are underdeveloped. Baring the pressures of cultist, sectarian, fundamentalist and gnostic social environments, relationships in the free churches will, under modern conditions, be delicate flowers. If it's any consolation at all to the free churches then it may help to understand that the problems which arise out of the loosely networked church environment parallels the problems also found in the wider society whereby people have difficulty identifying with their community and cultivating a sense of belonging - see here. In short fostering an awareness of the pitfalls of the loosely networked fellowship will help church members from being deceived by false interpolations and thinking its all down to church failure when in fact it isn't  - it's a product of modern times. If free churches realise this then members of congregations will be apt to give one another more allowance and leeway, thus removing one barrier to fellowship; namely the suspicion, fear and paranoia that so easily breeds in the silences. Although we are unlikely to be able to wind back the clock it may at least be possible to optimize fellowship under the constraints of modern times.


Interesting Links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-Day_Saints
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/03/utah-fundamentalist-sect-latter-day-saints-end