Seminary
Various writings from my experiences in Seminary
Faith Formation Networks
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 10/14/2018 - 16:41One of the most exciting ideas I’ve come across so far in my studies at Church Divinity School of the Pacific (CDSP) is the Faith Formation Network. John Roberto, in chapter 3 of his book, Reimagining Faith Formation for the 21st Century presents this idea of Christian education in the context of digital media, connected learning, and personal learning networks. This is an idea I’ve had that I’ve been trying to find words for and an example of for a long time.
For me, this is something very different from parishes using social media to market their churches or even organizations using digital media to create and curate content. These are both components of a faith formation network, but merely components. The Faith Formation Learning Exchange gets us much close to finding faith formation networks, but if a faith formation network is based on a personal learning network, then it must be something individuals create for themselves.
There are various starting points for a faith formation network, and it seems as if many of the starting points right now seem to be focused on extending existing resources, like a church or seminary webpage or social media presence. It seems like we need some other starting points.
To illustrate this, let me relate an old marketing adage. People don’t by shovels, they buy holes. People buy things because they want or need it. They don’t need a shovel. They need to get a hole dug. The shovel that will be most helpful getting that hole dug is the one they will buy. We need to be thinking about experiences of the divine the same sort of way. People want to experience God. They want to experience forgiveness, acceptance, love, community, and many other things that we associate with God. For many people I know, church is probably the last place they would look for these sorts of things, with seminary coming in a close second.
Those of us who are drawn to God who wish to draw others to God need to think carefully about how people are invited into their faith formation network. To illustrate this, let me explore a little bit of my faith formation network.
I will start with one of the churches I currently attend, Grace and St. Peters in Hamden, CT. While not everyone will start there, and where you start probably doesn’t especially matter, especially if you are thinking of a faith formation network in the context of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, it is where many people start. There are a few important things to point out about the church I attend on most Sunday mornings. We started attending that church because my wife was friends with someone from that church in an online community and that friend invited us to church. It was an example of someone from one online network inviting another person to another network, which in this case was not online.
Another thing to notice is that I mention Grace and St Peters as one of the churches I currently attend. On Thursdays at lunch time, I attend a Eucharist service at The Church of the Holy Trinity in Middletown, CT. On Saturday evenings, I attend vespers at Three Saints Orthodox Church in Ansonia, CT. I also attend a dinner bible study and worship on Thursday evenings with people from Andover Newton seminary at Yale Divinity School and participate in their closed Facebook group. In a faith formation network, people find many similar and competing resources across the religious spectrum.
As part of being a member of the CDSP community I help maintain and participate in the CDSP Virtual Daily Office. This is a digital resource which ties back to digital communities. I’m in a small closed Facebook group with a cohort of students who first arrived on campus in the summer of 2018. We talk about the daily office there and the cycle of prayers that is currently being used in the daily office comes from that group.
I am also part of a small group that I started on Facebook for people seeking discernment. Given the difficulties of my own journey, I started the group and it has grown. One person from that group has started studies at CDSP. All of this illustrates the interconnectedness of groups and resources in a personal learning network.
There are numerous other resources that are part of my faith formation network. A high school classmate whose blog I subscribe to. A friend from my young adult days in New York City has a blog, Water Daily that I subscribe to. I subscribe to some of the better known resources online, like Brother, Give Us A Word from the Society of Saint John the Evangelist and Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations. There are a lot of resources like this that I subscribe to and I should probably find time to curate this list and make it more available.
There are also the various live streams on Facebook that are part of my faith formation network. Right now, one that I especially appreciate is Pop-up Prayer with Canon Katie. She identifies herself as ‘your Facebook priest’ and ends each pop-up prayer reminding people that they are “so loved by God”. It is a wonderful ministry and exemplifies much of what it means to be a node in a faith formation network. Another group of Facebook resources that I subscribe to is live church streams, perhaps best exemplified for me right now with Dallas West Church of Christ. This is the church where Botham Shem Jean attended and I started watching their streams as they remembered Botham’s life and called all of us to action.
Dallas West Church of Christ illustrates my point about shovels. I started watching their stream, not because I was looking for a church. I started watching their stream because I was praying for justice and their prayers and my prayers came together.
Next week, Presiding Bishop Michael Curry will be preaching at Western Mass Revival. I have been talking with the organizers about what happens after the revival. I’m particularly interested in this in terms of faith formation networks. We’ve set up a Facebook page for people who will be attending the revival, either in person, or watching the live stream. If you are attending the revival and want to join with us in a faith formation network, check out WMA Way of Love.
I hope to build upon some of this for a project for Postmodern Christianity and learn more about the role faith formation networks will play in my journey and the journey of those around me.
Home Cooking and Theological Questions
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 10/13/2018 - 07:00This fall I am taking Theology 1 in seminary and struggling greatly with it. Some of this is because I do not yet have a sufficient theological language to respond to the questions being asked. Because of this I can only respond with statements of belief and analogies to try and help explain my beliefs. Another part is because it feels like many of the underlying theological questions are superfluous.
We are asked to say why we think theological questions are important and what is at stake with them. To me, mostly they seem fairly unimportant with little if anything at stake. It seems like the response acceptable in class is, because God is this or did that, then we should do something in particular. Because God created the world ex nihilo or out of chaos we should care for creation. Because we hold a social trinitarian view of God when should love our neighbor.
These responses seem to me to be at best superfluous. I care for creation and love my neighbor because of my loving experience of God.
As an illustration, I will turn to my mother’s home cooking. We are approaching the sixth anniversary of the death of my mother and I will say something it may seem incredible for a loving son to say, but my mother really wasn’t a great cook. There was often not enough food. Spices were a luxury rarely used. The meals were often utilitarian and boiled to blandness.
Yet it was also, other than my wife’s cooking, the best food I ever ate. The spices or lack thereof did not really matter. What mattered was that the food was prepared and served with love, with a deeper love than I could fully comprehend. My mother wasn’t looking for praise for her cooking. While she might have gotten some pleasure if I said I really appreciated the way the flavors complimented one another, what she was more concerned about was that we were nourished. If anything, the response that meant the most was, “Thank you, mommy. I love you.”
The Psalm 51 says
Open my lips, Lord,
and my mouth will declare your praise.
You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it;
you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings.
My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart
you, God, will not despise.
For me, the key theological question is, “how do I praise God from my place of brokenness”? Starting anywhere other than “Thank you God, I love you” seems superfluous.
Christian Education and Brett Kavanaugh
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 09/29/2018 - 09:11Recently, for the Postmodern Christian Education class that I’m taking at Church Divinity School of the Pacific, we were presented with several case studies. An affluent white man who has always been involved in church but not in Christian education is facing retirement and about to become a grandfather. A group of urban singles and couples in their twenties who grew up in the church but are no longer involved in church struggle with their multicultural friends to find stable jobs and housing. A retired African American social worker in her eighties who has always been involved in her church and now many of her friends are passing away.
We were invited to think about where they are on their faith journey, the issues they face, and how we might design Christian education opportunities that meet their needs. I thought of these scenarios as another played out on the national stage; a highly successful white man in his early fifties about to be awarded an incredible honor, a lifetime appointment to a job that will help shape the course of our country, who sees his success threatened by a ghost from his past.
It has been a tough week. I have seen friend after friend post on Facebook about their experiences of sexual abuse in years past. I have read about record call volumes to rape crisis lines as the unfolding news triggers painful memories. I have read about seeking self-care during this time.
For me, some of this self-care has come in spending time in my studies. I look at what is going on in Washington and then I read about theologians thinking about important attributes to the concept of God. I wonder, “what can we do about the moral crisis our country is in?” Then I read about reflective, liberative, and transformative pedagogy. I am incredibly blessed to be in seminary right now.
A friend of mine posted about the Kavanaugh hearings. She spoke about his testimony about getting into Yale and Yale Law school.
From the way he spoke of it, it sounds as if his academic journey was hideous and soul-destroying, and only to be justified by a very specific reward, dangled in front of him for decades, and now to be inexplicably, outrageously, snatched away by conniving enemies.
It is a stark contrast to my experiences in seminary. One of the texts we are using for Postmodern Christian Education is Parker Palmer’s, To Know as We Are Known: A Spirituality of Education. In chapter 3, Palmer talks about the “hidden curriculum”. He quotes Schumacher,
Meanwhile, world crises multiply and everybody deplores the shortage, or even total lack, of 'wise' men or women, unselfish leaders, trustworthy counsellors etc. It is hardly rational to expect such high qualities from people who have never done any inner work and would not even understand what was meant by the words
This takes me back to the exercises in Postmodern Christian Education: How might we design Christian Educational opportunities for Brett Kavanaugh and his friends?
Postmodern Online Seminary Water
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 09/08/2018 - 09:03This is a discussion post for the class Post Modern Christian Education that I’m taking at Church Divinity School of the Pacific, adapted to the blog. The references are to James K.A Smith How (not) to be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor and John Roberto Reimagining Faith Formation for the 21st Century. The discussion questions
To me, the enlightenment and modernity with their focus on rationality presented a greater challenge to Christian Education than postmodernism. I tend to think of God as being so much greater than what we can approach rationally. We need stories and metaphors and with my strong leaning to apophatic approaches to God, I wonder if that is even enough. Postmodern questions of our ways of understanding, challenges of binaries, and promotion of counter narratives provides rich ways in which we can expand our experience of God.
A good illustration of this right at the beginning of Smith where he asks, “Where should we look for the ‘thin spaces’ that still seem haunted by transcendence? Or have they disappeared…?” (Smith, 1). The idea of “thin spaces” doesn’t seem very modern or enlightened either in terms of rationality or in terms of the dominant narratives. Postmodernism allows us to talk about other narratives that go beyond rationalism to make space for the transcendent.
Smith goes on to talk about the secular “shift in the ‘conditions of belief’” (Smith, 22) which he does in the context of David Foster Wallace (Smith, 14-17). Many people know Wallace through his famous 2005 Commencement address at Kenyon College, this is water. The ‘conditions of belief’ are the water we find ourselves in. The full text of Wallace’s speech also talks about an atheist and a religious person discussing God and what it takes to believe.
This leads to Roberto’s list of forces affective religious identify formation in the twenty-first century. Roberto mentions the “increasing impact of digital media and web technologies”. (Roberto, Kindle Location 173). The fact that I reference this from a Kindle in a post to an online discussion forum illustrates this point.
Wallace talks about the water of the modern human condition. In the Gospel of John, Jesus speaks about “living water”. How do we talk about this living water in a Postmodern digital world?
Post Modern Christian Education, #CDSPTheology, and the Decline of Church Involvement
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 09/03/2018 - 19:59Tomorrow, classes start for my second fall semester at Church Divinity School of the Pacific. Since I started, I’ve had much less time for writing in my blog, so I figured I’d try to get this post written before all my writing energy goes elsewhere. If I can manage it, I’ll post extracts from some of what I’m reading and writing for class here, but don’t be surprised if there are fewer posts here over the coming few months.
This semester, I’m taking Post Modern Christian Education and Theology 1. I’ve done my readings for the first week and find them overlapping in some interesting ways. I’m also thinking about current events and how they might relate to these classes.
Morgan Guyton has a post up on Patheos about the Roman Catholic Clergy Sex Abuse Scandals in Pennsylvania and the call by Archbishop Vigano for Pope Francis to resign. No, You Can’t Blame Pope Francis For This. He writes, “It is not simply a matter of policy; it is a theological issue.” The original post got a bunch of comments and my sharing of it on Facebook got its share of comments too.
It seems like there are several different components to the discussion that seem to be talking past each other. How should the church be organized and how hierarchical should the organization be? Richard Hooker, an influential sixteenth century Anglican theologian, in his “Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie”, considers the role of bishops or presbyters in church polity to be adiaphora, or a matter indifferent to salvation.
How libertarian or authoritarian should church leadership be? What role should gender play in church leadership? How do we understand sexuality? Lots of fun topics to explore. Is lack of consensus on these issues leading to a decline in church attendance?
Yesterday, after nearly 200 years, the UCC Church of the Redeemer in New Haven, CT had its final service. Around me, more and more Episcopal churches are moving to part-time priests. What is the future for churches in the United States?
As I think about clergy sexual abuse scandals, the decline of church attendance in the United States, not to mention the impact of climate change on our world, it seems like all that is missing is a pre-exilic prophet, from the time before the Babylonian exile, putting things all into a greater context. It could be supplemented by more readings of the current U.S. Presidency in the context of The Scottish Play.
How do we link the stories of pre-exilic prophets and Shakespeare to our situation today? One of the books I’m reading for Post Modern Christian Education, Soul Stories: African American Christian Education by Anne Streaty Wimberly talks about “storylinking”. It will be interesting to explore how we can link some of these stories.
One interesting exploration of this was the introduction to James K.A Smith’s “How (not) to be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor” which we read for this week. I appreciated the references to David Foster Wallace’s stories (pages 14-17).
Yet what I found even more interesting was the discussion of different aspects of “secular”. Smith describes Taylor’s view of secularism this way:
A society is secular3 insofar as religious belief or belief in God is understood to be one option among others, and thus contestable (and contested).
(pages 21-22)
This leads me over to my thoughts about Theology 1. We’ve started off with Alister E. McGrath’s “Christian Theology: An Introduction” and Ralph McMichael’s “The Vocation of Anglican Theology”. I’ve been thinking a lot about western Christianity’s apparent need for its theology to be systematic and rational, especially after the Enlightenment.
How does a systematic rational theology help us deal with the aftermath of the Great War, with the Holocaust, with nuclear weapons, and with climate change? Are there limits to our systematic rationalism?
Has western culture fallen into a form of idolatry where created rationality is worshiped instead of the creator of all that is rational or beyond what can be understood rationally? How does this fit with Taylor’s talk about secular society and the decline of church involvement in the United States?
Recently, a friend spoke about her thoughts on why religion is declining in the United States. She attributed it to problems people have believing in the angry God of the Old Testament and the religion of angry white men who worship this God and hate homosexuals.
I don’t believe that the God of the Hebrew Scriptures is this angry God that many people caricaturize God as. Perhaps the bigger issue is that the assumption is that we live in a rational world and we can understand God rationally. It seems like we’ve lost our ability to see and appreciate that which transcends our understanding, and that this is the great loss. It is where I find common ground with those who have little use for God that are seeking to reconnect life to art. It is like trying to reconnect life to spirit and things that go beyond rationality.
It will be interesting to see how my thoughts and feeling evolve over the coming term. It will be interesting to see how some of our national and global dramas shake out over the coming months, and, of course, it will be interesting to see how much time I can make for posting to my blog.
