The Labyrinth, Postmodernity and Ritual

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Alternative Worship, Popular Culture and Tricksters

Alternative worship is an inculturation of the Christian faith in postmodern times. Ritual, popular culture, 'wholespeak', and the resources of the Christian tradition are used to negotiate change and imagine new worlds. A comparison can be made with the roles of prophets, artists and tricksters.

Inculturation

Contextualisation, incarnational mission and inculturation have all become buzz words in mission studies. Inculturation is 'the totality of a religion integrating with the totality of a culture'. There has been an increased recognition that the history of mission has been something of a mixed blessing. Often the sharing of the gospel overseas was wrapped up with the sharing of Western culture.

Whilst there are inspiring stories of missionaries who took the task of contextualisation seriously and introduced many people to the risen Christ communicated in the language and symbols of their culture, there are equally stories of the gospel being shared hand in hand with an imperialism whose legacy still lives on today. Hopefully churches and mission agencies today have learned the lessons from the past. The Anglican Communion has certainly considered these issues both in relation to mission and to worship and liturgy. The 1988 Lambeth Bishops' conference passed two resolutions as follows:

1. Christ and Culture: This conference a) recognises that culture is the context in which people find their identity; b) affirms that ..the gospel challenges some aspects of the culture while endorsing others; c) urges the church everywhere to work at expressing the unchanging gospel of Christ in words, actions, names, customs, liturgies which communicate relevantly in each society.

2. Liturgical Freedom: This conference resolves that each Province should be free... to seek that expression of worship which is appropriate to the Christian people in their cultural context.

Beginning from these two resolutions the York Statement was then prepared for the whole Anglican Communion on liturgical inculturation. The following are some quotes from the statement:

'Liturgy to serve the church should be truly inculturated'

'Just as language forms change from one place or time to another, so the whole cultural appropriateness of styles and expressions of worship should be ready to vary similarly'

'Inculturation must therefore affect the whole ethos of corporate worship, not only the texts but also for example, the use of buildings, furnishings, art, music, and ceremonial'

'True inculturation...implies a willingness in worship to listen to culture.. it has to make contact with the deep feelings of people. It can only be achieved through an openness to innovation and experimentation, an encouragement of local creativity, and a readiness to reflect critically at every stage of the process, a process which in principle is never ending.'

'We long to see... well equipped imaginative liturgists'

'Our lack of inculturation has fostered both the alienation of some Christians and an over ready willingness of others to live in two different cultures, one of their religion and the other of their everyday life. Other Christians again have left our churches because of this cultural insensitivity. Similarly non-Christians have found the foreignness of the church a great barrier to faith'

I quote from it at length because it is so insightful. The encouragement for innovation and creativity, the need for connection with peoples feelings, the scope of change required, and the awareness of the way the church has alienated people by its lack of inculturation is astonishing to read in such an official document. These insights were written to help the Anglican churches round the world develop their own authentic expressions of faith.

But if the analysis outlined above is correct and the forms of institutional church life in the UK are wedded to modernity, the same insights need to be applied on our own doorstep to inculturate the faith in postmodern times. Sadly there is very little evidence that the Anglican Church is aware of this or doing anything about it. Riddell recognises the problem when he writes 'Inculturation, people movements, development, syncretism, contextualisation; these have all become familiar subjects of theological investigation in relation to foreign mission. Unfortunately few of the resulting insights have made much impact on home base. The one massive gap in the church's expertise is how to do mission in the post-Christian West'.