Vision for a Viable Church

Context: my wife (Jess) and I spent 4 months last year running weekly “Experimental Church” services, going on hiatus when our daughter was born. Part of what led into this was checking out different churches and finding them lacking, following which I started drafting this document… and then a month or so later we started the services. I iterated on this doc a bit during that time and somewhat after. It was originally called “Vision for a Viable Christianity” but as I got into the church project I found it surprisingly liberating to feel free from anybody’s concept of what Christianity is or was (my concepts or others’)

I still resonate with most of what’s written here, but as I stare more at the nature of faith (as a key counterpart to trust), and as Jess & I get further into reading Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age I’m sure my thinking will evolve a lot further—not, I suspect, to outright disagree with the content of what’s below, but to new senses of what I’ve missed below and where I’m confused about the center or the question to even be asking. It feels good to publish this now as documentation of my 2024 view of this journey. At some point I’d also like to write up a short retrospective of the experiments we ran, which this is not.

The church I envision…

Has a sense of being “one church” (even with many different places and practices) unified not by top-down creed or belief or dogma, but via the ability of its members to recognize each other as fellow people who are open-mindedly resonating with a similar shape in godspace.

Supports the development of gnosis / direct-knowing of people within and without the church—on a mainstream level, not merely for the mystics. Does not appeal to authority, but respects that there are lots of ancient sources of wisdom that are worth drawing on.

Memetics-conscious/literate:

The church I envision is memetics-conscious/literate, ie, recognizes that:

• there aren’t infallible texts or explanations
  • and even if there could be, there aren’t infallible interpretations
  • and even if some people somehow did have infallible interpretations, they wouldn’t be able to transmit them to others infallibly
  • therefore errors are to be expected, and developing the capacity for error-correction within each person is central
• there are different patterns & forces to how ideas spread and evolve
  • sometimes ideas stick & spread because it works well enough – I use a word for something, and the word isn’t anything special but you need a word for it so you use mine and now we have a word for it
  • sometimes ideas stick & spread because they scare us into spreading them, not because they’re true or healthy for us…  and they’ll evolve to do that even better up to the limit of where they destroy the entire body of people who hold those ideas
  • sometimes ideas stick & spread because we can tell they give us a real benefit in terms of what we care about, and so we want to keep using them and to share them with people we love
• ideas that come from the outside need to be clear about how their solutions address problems we already know we have, not create new problems and offer solutions to them
  • classic story of missionary saying “if you don’t know about hell, then you’re not doomed if you don’t accept Jesus” and indigenous person saying “then why on earth did you tell me about hell?” …nobody fears God’s punishment who hasn’t heard of God The Punisher.  they might fear something else, which they then project onto that when they do hear about it, but this is a bit of a psy-op
  • by contrast, these are some problems religion connects to, that people already know they have:
    • “I feel ennui / purposelessness / alienation / disconnection”
    • “I’m afraid of death/dying/illness”

Aims to not rationalize or justify. Is not about pretending we all believe things we don’t believe.  Isn’t about faking belief til we make it—at least, not propositional beliefs.  Maybe “believing in” in the sense of putting one’s weight behind something.

Openness

Is open-ended (draws on Vervaeke and Kauffman and Romeo Stevens).  The opposite of eg Islam claiming that while it comes from a lineage, it finally found the final prophet and has the final word of God.

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