As It Was in the Beginning (of the Jesus Way) Part 1
Ian Harris offers a reflection on the path that the Ephesus group in Wellington has taken and could take in the future..
Walking forward looking back . . .
Maori have a proverb Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua: Muri, backward; mua, forward. So "I walk backwards into the future, with my eyes fixed on the past." For Maori, past, present and future are intertwined, so you look to the wisdom of the past as you move into new situations and challenges.
Ideally that’s what should also be true of the churches, looking back to gain inspiration to move forwards. But all too often in their institutional life they look back and get stuck there. And they’re all too sluggish in recognising that while they are faithfully preserving their institutional traditions the world has changed around them. In the past 400 years a huge expansion of knowledge in physics, geology, astronomy, biology, anthropology, psychology – our whole basic understanding of nature and of life itself – demands a wholesale rethinking of faith and its place in the life of the world.
For 35 years Ephesus has been opening up some of those questions for us to explore, and taken cumulatively it’s done a pretty useful job in terms of our left-brain approach – that’s the level of rational thought, intellectual analysis and logic. We haven’t resolved every question, but we’ve been open, honest and for most of the time focused in doing what we set out to do at the beginning, which is:
“to explore new ways of understanding and expressing Christian faith in the increasingly secular world of New Zealand in the new millennium.”
In other words, our question is basically the same as the Jewish exiles asked in Babylon back in the 500s BCE: “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in this new and strange land?”
But let’s always remember that each of us operates within two thought worlds. There’s the world where that rational thinking, intellectual analysis and logic are exactly what we need (loosely summarised as left-brain thinking). But there’s also the unpindownable world of the imagination, creativity, literature, music, art, what we sense as the spiritual, an elusive fifth force beyond the four fundamental forces of physics. That’s the world loosely summarised as right-brain thinking.
Those worlds are not identical. Neither can do the work of the other. But they come together and have equal value in the functioning of our single brain. One tells us heaps about the world as it is, the other stimulates us to think of the world as it could be, as it ought to be. In our journey towards a fuller and more rounded life, we need to engage both.
… right back, after Jesus but before Christianity.
To be continued in the next issue…