Yet we are now free to be what we want in isolation, and withdrawal. Maybe we need our freedom to be liberated!

I think you’re onto something. If ontology collapses into a being that takes place after death, eternal live insurance, then follow that to it’s logical conclusion, and what is the point of church?

We need an understanding that to become the people we were meant to be, that our formation in this life will last for eternity, takes place with others in the mission of Jesus in this world.

Most of the bricolaged faith in consumer west is outside the church, whilst that within is largely homogenized…I think.

I think the start for a liturgically and historically informed community, is the place of the local. I’m a believer in the Catholic notions of subsidiarity, and plurality of communities, and the solidarity that comes from those communities orientations towards God and others in the cosmological & teleological.

But, maybe we are disagreeing about how common this is – I’m not sure.

My experience is that the church, or at least the church in the consumer West, is seldom cosmopolitan or multicultural enough to reflect deep bricolage. Certainly I’ve seldom met pastors or church leaders who really welcome it. Rather, it seems that the options presented are either the “private god space” as you put it, or abstactly doctrinaire theology.

Liturgically and historically informed bricolage is often treated as a form of deviance.

Which comes back to my third point/question about cosmological community versus local community.

2 thoughts strike me:

i. what is the point of the church? As you say the move to agency means that individuals can have a life of faith outside the church. This particulary resonates where salvation is seen as crossing a line and then waiting around to die and go to heaven. Once the deal has been sealed so to speak why need church. Afterall once i have Jesus why do i need anyone/anything else..? church maybe is like breakdown cover/insurance, there in case anything goes seriously wrong and in most cases hopefully they can get me back on the road quick smart.

ii. what is the christian identity anyway – what is it about being a christian that makes me distinct from any other concerned citizen on planet earth? After all to do good, to care about the planet, or the poor, or justice i don’t need to be a christian so what difference does it make unless it means being connected to/part of something more than my own concerns/interests?

I think we need to deep our agency and thus bricolage. We need to reach deeper and further, than just a private god space church, of disembodied beliefs and practices that support what works for me.

It’s here that I think you see the recovery of tradition and liturgy helping people, as one possibility.

I would open that up by trying to explore three questions: First, is bricolage necessarily a bad and “random” thing (I don’t think it has to be)? Second, does pneumatology give us a way to talk about giveness that is neither traditio-specific or ecessively concrete? Third, should our starting point be community in some geo-specific sense (I’m a Baumanian about the problems of community), or should we be talking about witness across time?