Jason Clark

Research is always better when addressing a problem, at least that’s what people good at research tell me.

At each supervision I have a fear that I will be unmasked as an idiot with ideas above my station (maybe that explains the dreams preceding my supervisions where I arrive naked and hope my supervisor won’t notice? :-).

So after my last supervision, fully clothed, I came away and tweaked my research method problem and question. In other words what am trying to address and why?

For the few of you who need some sleep aids, the outline for that follows (I wrote a less academic version here):
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So my theme for my time in Germany, of Deep Church, comes from my PhD research, and my association with Kings College London (see www.deepchurch.org.uk).

I’m particularly keen to help connect academics with the concrete reality of church, and to help church leaders interact with the reflective and theological aspects that arise from the notions of ‘Deep Church’.

In this post I want to suggest some aspects of what Deep Church means for me. Rather than reducing deep church to one way of being church I see it is about setting out principles that lie within the spirit of deep church. So below are a number of these principles in no particular order.

Deep Church as…

1. Pathological & Wellness: Whilst we need to address the problems and shortfalls of church, we need to do so by moving away from pathological descriptions, based on ill health, to ones of ‘wellness’.

Deep church for me is a way of us finding the best of church through out history, to take us forward into the future. We need to do so without a blind naive sentimentalism of the past but also avoiding the fostering of a negative and bilious cynicism that invalidates everything that has gone before us? (I’ve written on this before here).

What will we have as our measure of church? We will continue to pass judgement on their form or whether in the variety of their context/function they bring others to know and follow Jesus as a way of life with others?
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One key theme I explored with the MA students this past week at George Fox, has been something I have posted about here before, of ‘blue print ecclesiology’.

We experience something about church that isn’t working, so we think, read, talk, discuss, idealise, blog and suggest endlessly what church should be, and give our new dream forms of chuch names, and categorise them, and then get stuck in them ever taking form as a concrete reality.

Anyhow, Brett Jordan (who has a most interesting blog, trust me, visit and you’ll see what I mean), sent me this qoute which I thought captured the essence of what I have been trying to teach, much more succinctly.
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I am going to run a series of posts on ‘Practical Theology’. The main purpose is the outline the method and background to my PhD research, which is based upon practical theology, and in particular theological reflection. So as I try to locate my own research methods and practices, this will help sift my thoughts and maybe provide something of interest to others.

Practical theology is usually associated with ‘applied theology’, whereby once the serious work of biblical theology, systematic theology, and historical theology has been done, we ‘apply’ that to a practical context. More usually ‘practical theology’ has been about pastoral care, and christian education, and less to do with theology, as usually understood.
The separation between beliefs and practice, came over time reaching its zenith in modernity.

Whereas there was once a direct connection between what we believed (and reflection on that belief) with what was a ‘moral/ethical life’, and a life forming process, we have the almost complete separation between what we believe, and who we are and what we do.

Or at least, in practice we ‘think’ and conceive first, whilst taking action around those beliefs comes second in terms of method. It’s one of the ongoing problems of how we try to deal with church, we keep trying to think of new and better ways of doing church, focusing on ideals, that never lead to practice (I’ve blogged on this problem here).

So how did we get to here?
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We live in a disposable culture, where we often throw away something when we have finished with it. My parents had their first washing machine for nearly two decades; now we think we have done well if it lasts 8 years, before we discard that last one, to buy the latest version. So it is with computers, cars, MP3 players, and almost everything else we possess. So have we created God in our image? Have we made Him act in ways that we act?

For long time I have always envisioned God bringing his mighty hands to bear on our earth at the end of time, to wrap it up as one does with the empty paper from Fish n’ Chips (for UK readers) or a MacDonald’s Burger (for US readers) and toss it into the bin. And then, of course, there is the hope of brand new creations, a New Earth & New Heavens: this time with no sin, death, pain or suffering.
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Following on from this post on ‘blueprint church’, I thought I’d post some more thoughts about this issue. In particular paraphasing the ideas of Nicholas Healy, who has explored this issue in some depth. (Warning long post, with some theological reflection, and audio version is here)

Healy sees a 5 stage process that has happened in church history as people have tried to respond to their context with new forms of church. I have use it in outline, trying to apply it with my own words to the context we are in today.

1. Metaphor: We pick one word, or a phrase that ecapsulates the model/idea of church we are trying to conceive of, and in church history this might have been, ‘people of God’, ‘communion’, ‘herald’, ’servant’, and more recently we might add, ‘cell’, ‘networked’, ‘emerging’, ‘fresh expressions’ etc. As we seek to describe church we reach for these metaphors. Whilst these metaphors help us think about what church should be, and could be, it can so easily lead us to something unhelpful, the idealisation of church.

2. Idealisation: We begin to think of the church as existing int two parts/essences (bi-partite), there is the empirical church (the church we can see around us), then there is the better, truer church that we have conceived of (whether it exists or not, as yet). The dreams and aspirations we have for church can help us see the sinfulness of church, where it is failing to respond to our context, but this process can quickly lead us into a vision for church that is unable to deal with the realities of everday life. To do anything concrete immediately undermines the dream for the church. As soon as it connect with real people, the vision is polluted, corrupted, and we withdraw, or move onto the next conception of church.
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It seems to be the tendancy of the modern world to explore things from a rational point of view. We start with a theory and then try to translate that into practice. When something is not working we theorise about it, and then come up with a great theoretical model and try to put it into action.

We see this I think all to often with church. We experience something about church that isn’t working, so we think, read, talk, discuss, idealise, blog and suggest endlessly what church should be, and give our new dream forms of chuch names, and categorise them, and then get stuck in them ever taking form as a concrete reality.

Having an ideal model for church allows us to talk about the possibilities of church, and conceptualise it. We can propose a new model of church for our situation, we can suggest refoms of church that would address the problems of existing church. But then day to day church remains a hope and reality that seems to fail to materialise in the real world.
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