Excerpt from 'Going with the Flow - can faith communities flourish in non-institutional society?'
This is an excerpt from 'Going with the Flow - can faith communities flourish in non-institutional society?' by Revd Dr Christopher Baker, to be published in Political Theology.
Hybrid church
This model also emerges from reflecting on issues of empowerment and disempowerment in relation to regeneration and local civil society. Faith communities, like other parts of the CVS being encouraged to participate in public service provision by central government, have to work out where they stand in relation to prevailing ideologies and methodologies. As we have already seen, many faith groups feel disempowered by regeneration rhetoric and may be tempted to opt out altogether. Others may feel that for strategic and financial reasons they want to embrace wholeheartedly the regeneration and civil society agenda. I call this the Tendency to Collusion or Collision continuum. To inhabit either pole completely I believe is to be potentially disempowering from different perspectives. Collusion (that is a tendency to complete identification) will on the evidence of our research presented, lead to practices and adaptations of discourse which will ultimately disempower. Collision, in the form of a purist or undiluted prophetical denunciation of the regeneration that is being carried out, tends to resort to a simplistic binary analysis of what is now a multi-causal, multi-faceted problem. It will add to the ghetto mentality prevalent elsewhere within post-modern urban space but also exclude faith groups from the opportunity to affiliate and work with others.
What I am interested in is what emerges if you locate 'church' somewhere within these two poles. What emerges for me is a 'hybrid' church. Hybrid church as a concept comes from post-colonialist and post-modern discourses on literature, identity and newly contested urban spaces. (for example the writings of Bhabha, hooks, Sandercock, Appadarai) Hybridity results from a process of creation, not synthesis. It is committed to creating genuinely new identities and discourses out of the plurality and diversity engendered by global migrations of ideas, cultures and peoples which are now coalescing in cities like Manchester. In terms of listening to and engaging with discourses (especially those voices from the 'borderlands' of individuals and communities who live in the face of poverty, marginalisation, discrimination and diaspora), hybridity emerges in a way that attempts to listen carefully to experience and past narratives; in other words evolution not revolution. Politically and theologically, it takes seriously the potential and challenge of the post-modern world and is especially concerned with creating new spaces for social justice and more equal discourse. It aims to be flexible but also outcome-oriented and pragmatic in its goal of creating public, local spaces where diversity is welcomed and new commonalities are explored. It is not utopian in its theological assessment of human ability to resolve the ethical questions surrounding the growing juxtaposition of wealth and poverty in our urban spaces. But neither is it hopelessly pessimistic about the chances of achieving some measure of transformation through partnership and exploring new commonalities, especially at the local and micro-level. This it seems to me is a welcome change from previous ecclesiology and urban missiology which has been negative and defensive towards the post-modern world and still prefers to see things in simplistic binaries or at it worst, out narrate other narratives (for example, articulated in some Barthian or radical orthodoxy approaches to social theory and social ethics).
When it comes to a hybrid church I am not necessarily advocating a doctrinal hybridity (although faith communities might need to recognise that this may become a by-product of serious engagement with urban pluralism and diversity). I am however, certainly advocating a cultural hybridity (in other word a church that reflects in its worship, culture, symbols, stories and perspectives, the many voices now coming together in urban space). More importantly still, I am advocating a methodological hybridity, by which I mean the willingness of the church to engage in an interdisciplinary way that avoids simplistic binary analysis of the causes and outcomes of post-modern urbanisation, and is flexible enough to incorporate the various typologies of church (identified by the Foundation's research) within, if not a single organism, then perhaps a more formalised network of connected faith communities, a broad-based organisation or network that recognises the strengths and limitations of each typology. The simple assertion being made here is that there is no 'one size fits all' approach or typology. Instead what is required is an open, proactive and creative approach to seeing how the best of all these typologies can be brought to bear within local settings.
More work needs to be done in analyzing how different typologies of church engagement in regenerating local communities in cities like Manchester relate to non-institutional forms of civil society but this research area could be instrumental in helping churches and other faith communities create different ways of being that engage more effectively in a practical way with the complexities of poverty and marginalisation in our rapidly evolving and contested post-modern urban spaces.
What our research has shown thus far is that faith-based engagement , when done in partnership with others, needs to be done in full consciousness of how government rhetoric is shaping definitions of what local civil society 'is' and what faith communities 'are' and how they should operate in this new 'governance space.' In order to be empowered in their task, churches and other faith groups need to be proactive in defining both the nature of the space of local governance and the nature of the role and identity they should play within that space. Only when they are engaged in this performative theological and strategic task will they be able to flourish in non-institutional as well as institutional forms of civil society.