Back in 2021 I wrote a report reviewing Quartz activities for the vestry at St Johns in Dumfries. I used the diagram (Pioneer Spectrum) that is the key image for this post to help give a structure for the report.
Another vision of the pioneer spectrum…
A new version of the diagram has been released and the changes made to it are described here. Following that and for the last two years we have been trying things out and seeing what works. As we reach the end of the summer in Scotland, this post is the start of a time of reflection. We can gather in the harvest, and think about what to let go of in autumn, incubate over the winter and plant in spring.
If you like to start with what is happening now, rather than reading the background first, ignor the links and start with this video which introduces the newly updated Pioneer spectrum toolkit.
There is a whole toolbox to help shape discussions and provide some theoretical framework.
How can we…
enable a mixed ecology of church?
create churches that meet different people groups wherever they are at?
help pioneers and church planters discern their vocation?
create mission strategies that are adapted to each and every context?
The pioneer spectrum tool is designed to help explore all of these questions…
Gill Swales handed in some resources about this organisation. The map in the picture charts where it is most dangerous to practice Christianity openly.
“Our very mission is called ‘Open Doors’ because we believe that any door is open, anytime and anywhere. I literally believe that. Every door is open to go in and proclaim Christ, as long as you are willing to go and are not worried about coming back.”
How aware are we of the experience of being persecuted?
What are the differences between the experience of disagreement with opinions or beliefs which we hold, and rejection of and opposition to the continued practicing of being who we are?
As well as campaigning and supplying resources intercessory prayer is also a way to support people. In wee small rooms it is possible to change ourselves and change the world.
In some parts of the world absolute poverty is obvious, you see it on the streets as you walk. In Scotland poverty is a complicated issue, and not always visible.
This organisation lives out it’s faith through helping people overcome poverty related issues. An important first step is to become aware of what is actually happening.
It makes me smile when I think that one of the things which early Christians in these isles are remembered for is illuminated manuscripts. The grin gets broader when I compare the ready appreciation of this art with the slowness with which “youthwork for adults” has been accepted in many worshiping communities. The Manga gospels seem to be tolerated to try and ‘hook’ the youth and draw them in, but the acceptance of contemporary arts is slow.
Excerpt from “Cat’s Mirror” Simon Lidwell 2022
Even in those congregations where the arts are an integral part of Sunday worship this tends to gravitate towards a particular congregation and their niche culture. Something has driven a wedge between the Church and the wider community and this has been driven deeper during my lifetime. To some I suspect this feels like the country (or union of countries!) is slipping away from church control into paganism. To many in my generation however we watch as despite our best efforts the institution seems slow to adapt and to cling to the mindset that underlies colonialism as well as economics that de-humanise people and will consume our environment.
Why is this relevant to the arts? Those who positively identify with the term pagan are often the leaders in environmental action. Back in the 80’s and 90’s they were building car henges. Drawing on the deep prehistoric past to express ethical idignation through contemporary art with the prophetic style of an old testament prophet. Not everyone is called to participate in such works of prophetic art, but has innovation been relegated to youthwork with the false expectation that people will grow out of it when they become adults?
Whilst a wild meadow of flourishing spirituality is blooming in many small gestures of artistic expression outside church meetings, inside we have a culture struggling to come to terms with digital projector screens let alone the theological implications of shifting from a clockwork understanding of spacetime to one which involves quantum uncertainty and the ‘spooky effect’.
So, I grin when someone thinks that a manga gospel is a new idea. They were too little, too late, and inexpertly executed, but a valuable attempt. After all, the shape that the light of the gospel took for centuries before printing presses was in the glorious colours of illuminated manuscripts. Experimenting with the best technology available, to variable levels of achievement. The church can provide #SensingSpirituality and #sensingmeaningfulness but it will need to escape the vice of the recent past to inherit awareness of the dynamic eternal truth. Like all living organisms it will need to seek out and undergo change in order to preserve its substance.
If we can do this in our Christian communities, and can embrace creative acts like the fusion of illumination from the late iron age combined with manga, then we make the way smooth and open new paths for exploration. Not using art functionally as a hook to lure the unwashed in, but as a celebration of the Way flourishing in fields we did not sow. Then perhaps the wedge will disappear, although what our gatherings will look like is unknown. In the C8th monasteries what did they imagine worship would look like now?
Those interested in pioneer ministry will hopefully be recognise many common ways of working in this article (and perhaps even identify glimmers of micro-gospels). The article is about creative placemaking, and a phrase which stood out to me is:
“The common thread amongst various definitions, however, is that it is a process that helps to generate places where people want to be.”
A Quartz Outerweave at Kirkcudbright Art and Crafts Trail
Thought becomes a woven banner.
We will be #SensingSpirituality in Kirkcudbright during the last weekend of July 2022. The trail is open from 11am to 5pm on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. You can find more info here
We were last there in 2017, and are looking forward to returning. This year we will have three main activities to help people use art and crafts to become aware of, explore and express the invisible things which make humans more than just their physical elements.
The theme for the trail this year is “Cats” in memory of one of the trails founders. We have taken this and then approached it through a poem called “Pangur Ban” The poem compares a monks search for meanings in texts to the quest of his pet cat trying to catch mice.
Either writing freestyle, or by arranging from a selection of words people will be encouraged to reflect on their environment and make an observation. Traditionally this type of poetry is 17 syllables in a 5,7,5 pattern. The poems will be fleeting glimpses of meaningfulness, but they can be photographed and then tagged #SensingSpirituality to be found online as long as the internet lasts…
Weaving
Continuing our practice of collaborative artwork, individuals can record their reflections on ribbons of cloth or paper. These are then woven into a tapestry using a warp weighted loom. Fragments of thoughts will be visible in the final banner, but each is anonymous as part of the whole.
The Cats mirror
Interested?
Come along and see for yourself what we are up to! Quartz takes the challenge of leaving our spiritual comfort zone to find “The face of God in friend and stranger” seriously. We will be setting up in Kirkcudbright to learn as well as help. We contribute from our own traditions and the experience of walking the paths we have made, and we hope to receive from the discussions this inspires. If you would like to get involved in helping do this, then talk with us and we can work out how to help each other.
Studio and Cluaran
Hair clasp by Kirsten Milliken
As well as the Quartz project being on display, we are inviting people to glimpse a travelling version of the Wordsmith Crafts Studio . We will have a workshop set up where we will be experimenting with Iron Age crafts. Making rings and broaches. Some of these will be replicas, some “in the style of” and some will be contemporary creations.
Iron age fibula broaches
We run 10 and 20 minute craft workshops. In these people can drop in and make something, and then take it away with them. We provide the skills and learning for free, but anything made in the workshop has a value and a trade needs to be made in order to take things away!
We will also have a shop front where the artists involved with Wordsmith Crafts can exhibit and sell their work.
There is an importance in places. I sometimes wonder what it is like to grow up in the digitally connected world. It is quite possible that many who are now in their 30’s have never been in a place where it wasn’t possible to pick up a device and phone, or latterly video message, a family member and get an instant response.
Homesickness was a part of the whole experience of going to organised summer camps in my childhood. Camping meant heading into the hills for a weekend, or week, with all that you needed and no contact with home. Scotland is small so even then you were usually only at most a day’s walk from a house or a payphone, but still the experience of being disconnected from home started a process of being at home with yourself and companions (if you travelled with some).
When Jesus passed through death the recorded stories describe him meeting his friends in the rooms where they ate together. They met on the beaches of the sea where they had often eaten fish and he had talked to the crowds. I wonder if Jesus walked in the hills, meeting other people in ways that are not recorded. Did Jesus go home to the places of his formative years, and experience them with new eyes?
These stories are part of our creation/alienation/reconciliation story of good news. Feelings of homesickness are real experiences which require us to develop resilience (in many diverse ways!). Feelings of dissonance between our experience of places and our ideas of what they could be or have been can be like losing a limb, or falling physically ill.
When Jesus calls out for his father on the cross this experience of alienation is set in the foreground of the story of the good news. However, perhaps in stories when Jesus is eating fish with his friends on the beach or walking down a dusty road having a chat, we can glimpse the feeling of home which the aching chaos of absence is pregnant with.
Is this why people go on pilgrimage? We don’t seek out suffering, but by placing ourselves in a position of adventure we can heighten our ability for #SensingSpirituality. In leaving home we can develop skills in making ‘place’. In entering the experience of absence, and encountering doubt we can grow in Faith.
… but as friends of Jesus. Not as servants driven by a need to impress a master whos purpose we cannot guess.
A place to make a “sitting place” on the Crichton estate?
There is a story told of an estate owner. He managed his land by letting it out to tenants. Each one held a plot, and they had freedom to develop it as they saw fit. The story doesn’t say how much help each of them got in establishing themselves, but other stories let us assume that the owner was generous. They knew they were tenants, and that the owner would one day decide to collect the return on his investment.
However, when the owner sent other servants to claim the rent, the tenants had changed. Some had sublet the property, others had automated production. All of them had forgotten the owner of the land. the servants were abused and sent back empty handed.
The estate owner sent out more servants to remind the tenants and collect the rent. This time the tenants abused the servants and filled social media with posts to sway public opinion. The servants’ reputations were attacked and they were portrayed as foolish idealists.
So, the estate owner sent his son and heir. The reckoning was that this would remind the tenants of how it had been in the beginning, and give them one last chance. Like going himself, but leaving an opening to show leniency.
Even then, however, the tenants closed their minds to the reality of the situation. They killed the child and claimed that the land was their freehold. Confident in their control of the narrative they edited the owner out of the story, and sought to continue their lifestyles in comfort for perpetuity.
How do you think the landowner acted?
Of course he kicked the tenants out, their anguish and frustration was epic. They were in the wrong though, and once this came into the light no amount of PR or spin could cover up their treachery.
This is the way it is with all political and religious leaders who forget where authority lies. This is the message of Saturnalia, or the baptism of John and something Dickens tried to tell his readers. Those who seek to gain the world will lose it, but those who are willing to be broken will find life. It is a story for those who are in positions of privilege, may all of us be given the grace to see ourselves as we really are.
There is another story though. This is a story for those who are broken, all who seek, and everyone who wanders with their eyes open.
Even in the mirk there is light. This light has always been here, and it distinguishes those who have their eyes open from those who choose the wrong pill. This light is a seed at the beginning of time. It is God herself pregnant with creation. The quantum of solace that links heaven and earth. Not everyone recognises it, and those you might expect to get it, are often the ones who find it hardest to adapt their lives to this deep old magic in the present moment.
For those that can though, it is the baby’s cry at the birth of Love itself. It is the light from a star formed by the conjunction of heavenly bodies becoming visible in the humblest of places. With even just the smallest amount of humanity shared in a relationship, many frustrations can be worked through. This story is the good news that God shares humanity with creation, and has placed the seed potential to become children of God within the womb of time. The most ordinary thing we know of can become divine.
So today is an invitation to co-create. Follow the star, and see where it leads.
