pat loughery

Continuing the series of digging into Kurt Neilson’s book, Urban Iona.

From chapter 20:

A great deal of talk and writing goes into diagnosing why many ways of “being church” and “doing church” either don’t work anymore, or even if they work the result looks and feels more like American culture than it does the radical values of the Gospel. Ever since Constantine made Christianity the official “imperial faith”, Christians have been trying to push the camel of power and wealth through the slender needle’s eye of the vision of Jesus. What is going on these days is an older “empire” model of Christianity, the traditional “mainline,” has given up center stage to the new imperial Christianity, which some of my friends call the “dominant evangelical paradigm.” Why each era thinks they can do better than the Holy Roman Empire is a mystery beyond me.

But the Celtic Christians founded vibrant communities of seekers and pilgrims, scholars and poets and mystics, dynamic and restless, while Rome fell and came close to taking the Roman church with it. Pilgrimage, prayer, a mystic’s eye, dynamic community, scholarship, a gift for seeing God everywhere in the world … all this says that the Spirit of God is not bound to any structure or polity and can bring about new vibrant life even when it seems natural that everything, even sacred things, are winding down to death.

Neilson points out that Christianity and Empire continue to be intertwined, and then reminds us that the Celtic reality was at the edge of the empire – really, past the edges of the Empire.

One of the things I love about the Celtic Christians is that they didn’t have much of a grid for being embedded in the dominant empire. they had other grids and worldviews, some better and some worse, but as we again find ourselves in the middle of Empire, this part of Christian history can again illuminate us who wish to be and do church differently than the norm.