A few hundred thousand years ago, humans didn’t think about the meaning of material and spiritual wealth. Why would they? A few stone tools were about their only possessions! Humans didn’t ponder the nature of confession, because they didn’t speak yet! They also didn’t debate the importance of community, since everyone lived in one anyway. I mention this because, to all intents and purposes, their brains were identical to ours.
For at least 100,000 years they have been completely identical.
So…
Even the most recent parts of our brains emerged in an environment where we lived in small, nomadic, relatively stable communities, mostly isolated from other communities, with few possessions, immersed in the ecosystem in which we happened to find ourselves. An environment where consequences very quickly followed actions. Puberty wasn’t a time of agonising over relationships with the other sex whilst parents tried to get you to focus on study which wouldn’t pay off until your twenties: it was a time of having relationships with the other sex, having babies and parenting them as a group. Because when I say, "lived" I don't mean we lived very long!
The astounding plasticity of our brains is demonstrated in that they enable us to function at all in this modern western capitalist society we call Australia. The limits of their plasticity are seen in the prevalence of depression, violence, addiction and so on.
So although the earliest humans didn’t talk about wealth or confession or community, we find ourselves talking about it a lot. Even two thousand years ago, human societies were different enough from our ancestral ones to make these themes major topics of Christian reflection.
Whatever community we have now, it is rarely anything like the community our brains evolved to thrive in. (By "we" I don't mean all humans, but if you have access to a computer and are literate enough to read what’s on the screen, I probably do mean you).
It certainly applies to me, a well educated anglo-Australian bloke (though not a very blokey bloke it must be said), who has lived in three states and uncountable houses over my lifetime. In common with many others (especially blokes), I have few childhood friends in my life now, little contact with my extended family, and I know my current employment will soon cease and I’ll be looking for work elsewhere.
So the sense of friends, or family, or work as being community in the way my ancestors had community is basically non-existent for me.
Since becoming a Christian I’ve worshipped in six churches in sixteen years, so religious “communities” are really more like a temporary gathering of acquaintances.
Even finding an appropriate temporary gathering is tricky. For example, whilst doing my PhD on the implications of evolution for the Christian story, I was free to pew sit again. But finding a religious community that was theologically, geographically, sociologically and stylistically close enough to make it nurturing and yet challenging was some task. Add to that the desire to find a congregation with small children, which I also trusted to educate my child about God, and it's really tricky!
One community I found was out at Murray Bridge where, to my surprise I confess, I stumbled across a congregation where God was called mother as a matter of course. The whole sexuality thing was also a bit of a non event there.
God was, though, still human, something which my PhD study made increasingly hard to swallow.
After a move to the city, graduation, and a re-entry into ministry, I had the chance to ask the question, “what sort of faith community would I really like to be part of?” I didn’t care much about style, but content. What kind of community would help me confess God as a God of all life, not just humans, and help me continue to work out where Jesus fits into the four-billion-years-old story of God and life on Earth?
With encouragement from Judith Haines, who was doing her PhD on the spirituality of environmentalists at the time, I got brave enough as part of my ecofaith ministry at Scots Church to put on a six week “biocentric worshipping event," to see if anyone would come.
Every aspect of the format was scrutinised, not to appeal to people, or to match a particular style, but to see if it would help or hinder what we decided the event was about:
Humans gathering as part of life, not the centre of it, to worship the God of this evolving life: ancient, personal but not human, as much female as male. The God who is beyond us, became one with us, remains within and amongst us.
To worship the God of life, of course, we thought it best to immerse ourselves in life as much as possible, so we met outdoors in botanic park. Not exactly the “bush,” but central and accessible by public transport and bike.
And come they did, about seventy curiosity seekers over the six weeks, out of which a core of twelve or so mostly ex-church goers of various ages remained (read their comments here). So we moved from being an event to a community. A year and half later we are still meeting, though there are usually more like 18–20 on a Sunday.
It’s become home to many of us: community. A community where we have all been challenged about our relationship with the rest of life, and the God of life. The ways of telling the story about God, life, us and Jesus, differs markedly. But we all agree that the rest of life is part of the story, and that this will make for some significant challenges to the dominant, traditionally human-centred, Christian story. For me personally, the group has challenged, shaped and encouraged me in my wider ecofaith ministry work. For example, much of the recent "Evoution, Ecology, Environment meets God, Spirit, Faith" weekend was road tested in reflections offered at the ecofaith group.
In our community the traditional Christian story is challenged, and bits rejected, but we are not rejecting the existing Christian community itself. Being a cult is the antithesis of our aim. Through the many visitors we have, and the links many of us have elsewhere, we remain part of the broader church community, human community, and life community. Our hope is that we therefore offer a unique and useful contribution back to those communities.
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