(Published in The Inquirer, 2 June 2018)
It is Sunday morning
and I am not in church. This is still a new experience for me. And a
strange experience. Instead of being in church I am in the streets,
with a litter-picker in one hand and a bin bag in the other. I have
joined a local litter-picking group supported by Keep Wales Tidy and
I am meeting other people who don't go to church, but who gladly give
up their Sunday mornings to make where they live a better place.
My job as a pioneer
minister is to be with these people. My job is to build relationships
with the "unchurched" populations of this city, to be a
citizen where I live, demonstrating my faith by committing to love
where I live.
But what is the point
of it? Am I trying to grow our church in Cardiff? Am I inviting
people to come along to our afternoon service? Well, no. I am not
trying to grow our church. I am not trying to fill up pews. I am not
trying to get people to come to services. I am not trying to get
people to come to events, to coffee mornings, meditation or
discussion groups.
I'm not trying to grow
the church. Why not? Because in not trying to grow a church I am
forced to get to the naked, vulnerable heart of the matter. I am
forced to be out in the world spiritually naked, without any of the
usual clothings of ministry.
In not trying to grow
the church I have to discover what my faith is, what our faith is,
what our good news is, because that is all I have. All I have is
faith. And I have to start with faith, rather than starting with
church.
For the next two or
three years we are running an experiment in evangelism: what happens
when all you have is faith? When all you have is good news? What
happens when you take that faith, that good news into the mystery,
mess, wonder, and chaos of a large modern city?
What is that faith?
What is it that I actually think I'm trying to do? As a pioneer
minister I do need to be able to answer that question. All I have is
faith, and if I don't have that, I can't do my job. I have found that
as a pioneer minister my first priority has to be prayer. I need to
be deeply rooted in a rhythm of prayer that roots my life and work.
For me, being a pioneer minister is an act of complete trust in God.
I find the job before me too big. I know I can't do it by myself. I
can only do it trusting in the power of God. I can only do it if I
believe that faith is in fact what the world needs most urgently. And
I do.
As Paul Rasor at the
Annual Meetings told us, we live in a neoliberal society. This means
a society that believes that competition is the defining
characteristic of human relationships; that society is a market, not
a community; that we are consumers, not citizens, and not children of
God. It is a society based on the values of extreme individualism,
greed, and competitiveness.
This ideology, that has
come to dominate us since the 1980s, is killing us. It ultimately
makes us dissatisfied, miserable, and isolated from each other. It
asks us to put more and more trust in our possessions and less and
less in each other. And it creates an epidemic of loneliness and bad
mental health.
Not only that, it is
destroying our natural environment as constant consumption drives the
wheels of a system that spews out carbon dioxide and is leading us
into a climate catastrophe.
The global problem of
the twenty-first century is climate change: an urgent and massive
problem that nevertheless develops slowly enough for us to be able to
ignore it. But if we ignore it until it's really noticeable in an
everyday sense, it will be too late. Human activity, pushed on by the
ideology of neoliberalism, is creating massive shifts in the climate
that will cause untold misery and death to billions of people and
millions of other species on earth. Right now we are living through a
mass extinction event equivalent to the one that killed the
dinosaurs.
Scientists keep telling
us about this, but there's only so much scientists can do. Gus Speth,
environmental lawyer, has said, "I used to think the top
environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and
climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science we could
address those problems. But I was wrong. The top environmental
problems are selfishness, greed and apathy... and to deal with those
we need a spiritual and cultural transformation - and we scientists
don't know how to do that."
Scientists don't know
how to do that. But guess who does know how to do that? Religion
does. Faith does.
This idea has been
taken up by American Unitarian Universalist minister Ian White Maher.
He has argued convincingly that the climate crisis is ultimately a
spiritual crisis. It's not a problem that can be solved by more and
better technology - that is the kind of thinking that caused the
problem in the first place. Rather it is a problem that must be
addressed by a kind of a Twelve Step approach.
In Alcoholics Anonymous
and other Twelve Step programmes you have to admit you are powerless
over the problem - that your life has become unmanageable; and you
have to trust a Power greater than yourself to restore you to sanity. Similarly Ian White Maher says that in order to address the the spiritual
crisis that is causing the climate crisis, we must confess our need
for help from something greater:
"The first step
towards a solution is to admit that we are beyond the point of
avoiding calamitous climate change... The second step is admitting
that we need help. Specifically... humanity needs help from the
divine and creative life force that is greater than the selfish
interests of our individual egos. Anything shy of this confession
will leave us with the illusion that we will somehow, through our own
power and ingenuity, solve the problem. But we cannot solve a
spiritual problem with intellectual solutions."
We need nothing less
than confession and conversion. We need religion. We need more
religion, not less religion. Religion is the only thing with the
proven ability to cause massive cultural and spiritual shifts, to
transform human beings and their values, and we need nothing less
than this. We need to change how we live, how we think, what we
value. We need to find meaning and satisfaction in life in something
other than earning money and buying things and expensive experiences.
It's a challenging
idea, but I have become convinced of it.
I think this really
challenges us as Unitarians. I think, frankly, we no longer have the
luxury to be only about a wishy washy liberalism that says, "well
maybe this or maybe not, we don't know." We no longer have the
luxury to be about every person pursuing their individual
personalised spiritual journey. Indeed I increasingly see that kind
of approach as part of the problem, not the solution.
The great danger for
Unitarianism is that it simply becomes the church of neoliberalism. A
church that preaches individualism and makes spirituality into a
"product" personalised to our own whims and tastes to be
"consumed". The danger is Unitarianism becomes exactly the
kind of religion that re-enforces neoliberalism and climate change,
rather than fights against it.
But as Susan
Frederick-Gray, the new President of the Unitarian Universalist
Association in the US, has said: this is no time for casual faith.
This is no time for a
faith that just copies our consumerist, individualist culture; this
is no time for a faith that is casual, wishy-washy, or uncommitted.
Spiritual transformation cannot happen if we are just a watered-down
version of religion. We need more religion, not less. Religion that
addresses the spiritual crisis that is causing the climate crisis.
That spiritual crisis
is ultimately alienation. Neoliberalism makes us alienated, isolated,
cut off from each other, and from the source of life. Neoliberalism
makes us spiritually, psychologically, politically, economically, and
ecologically alienated.
But it's a lie! The
truth, the spiritual truth our tradition stands for, is that we are
deeply connected within an interdependent web of existence - but we
must awaken to this reality. We must restore a sacred relationship to
our planet and all that is.
In 1838 Ralph Waldo
Emerson addressed a class of newly qualified Unitarian ministers, and
he told them that their mission was to acquaint people first-hand
with Deity. That remains exactly what my pioneer ministry is about.
It is my mission to help people realise and to live as if the
fundamental reality of the universe is relationship, not isolation.
We are not alone, but
part of a mysterious reality, a Power greater than ourselves, that
holds us all together in a greater Oneness. And we can't save the
world, and we can't save ourselves, by going it alone, but we have to
feel and experience for ourselves this sacred relationship; to
realise through worship and prayer that we are part of a mystical
reality of Oneness, and that we are all held within an embrace of
Love. I call that reality God. God as both the One it is possible to
enter into relationship with, and the Relationship itself with all
that is. But this is not something to believe, but something to
experience.
My mission is not to
grow Unitarianism. My mission is to help people experience Sacred
Relationship, and to find fulfilment in relationship, in connection,
in community; not in competing, and consuming, individualism, and
isolation.
I believe religious
community is one of the places where this can happen. But I'm
starting with the mission, and seeing what community can grow out of
that mission, rather than starting with the community and trying to
get people to attend to ensure institutional survival.
I'm not concerned with
the institutional survival of Unitarianism. Ultimately I'm concerned
with the survival of the human race and the planet. And I'm concerned
with creating communities of resistance to our earth-destroying
culture. I'm concerned with making disciples committed to spiritual
practices that resist neoliberalism, and alienation, and create
deeper experiences of sacred relationship. I'm concerned with making
disciples of Love committed to sacred activism.
One of those practices,
for now, is simply picking up litter in my inner-city street. But
this is how it starts. Not (as Mother Teresa said) doing great
things, but doing small things with great love. That's how we build
the resistance.
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