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about the author...  Paul Fromont Paul, Kathryn his wife, and their two daughters currently live at the bottom of the world or "top" depending on your perspective; they live in Cambridge, New Zealand. He is a self-confessed wayfarer for whom questions and exploration are the stepping stones by which he moves forward, grows, matures, and stretches homeward. He blogs here and his favourite bands are Radiohead, U2, Joy Division, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
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The "Kama Sutra" of an Emerging Church: Positioning Ourselves to Engage the Senses by Paul Fromont
Now that I have your attention, let me introduce you to something fellow “Kiwi” (a colloquial way of saying, “New Zealander”) Mike Riddell has written:
"…Several centuries of modernity have made the Western church aesthetically anorexic. The triumph of reason, when added to an historic suspicion of images and the feminine has provided thin gruel for embodied human beings. Paganism becomes an attractive option when compared to the asthetic and colourless face of demythologised Christianity. What has become of the art, the symbolism, the mystery, the wonder and the transcendent earthiness of Christian faith? It is no surprise to me that those sections of the church which are resistant to current hemorrhaging are those such as the high Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions which have preserved some colour and bodily resonance in their worship... In practical terms, the recovery of sensuality would mean a new romance between faith and artistic expression…” 1 So, where does your church position itself on the “sensuality” scale? How multi-sensory, multi-layered and ‘multi-connectional’ is your church experience? What does your church (in both the sense of church as “building” and church as “people”) look like? What does it feel like? What does it sound like? What kind of ‘taste’ does it leave in your mouth? What does it ‘smell’ like? Are beauty, life, and vitality present?  A recent article by Tim Corney2 highlights the fact that we learn a lot about a church community’s view of God by the kind of building they inhabit (whether it’s owned or rented space) - it’s architecture; the functionality of it’s space; its diversity of ‘spaces’ and the ways in which these might connect with people’s journey’s; the choice of colours and textures; the kind of music heard within it; it’s use of technology; the place of art and creation etc. How is beauty manifested in your church community or building? What might your building and/or ‘liturgy’ say about your theology of mission? Of worship? Of community? How is your particular cultural and geographical context woven into your experience of being and doing church? Is the creating and sustaining Spirit sensed and engaged with, not only in the 'church,' but also in the everyday; the Spirit inspiring acts of creativity that bring about life in it’s fullest and most God-originating sense?Leonard Sweet, post-modern guru sees a very close link between “physical space” and “spiritual awakening.” In his thoughtful article, “Church Architecture for the 21st Century,” 3 he writes, “Today we are undergoing another kind of spiritual awakening as the church undergoes a postmodern reformation from print to screen, [from “text” to “image”]. That revolution can’t happen without altering the physical space of church…Architecture for the postmodern reformation is egalitarian, mobile, and adaptable for multiple use.” Peter, a friend of mine, has me thinking about “gathered church” and ‘spaces.’ How well do we create “pick and mix” spaces for people, spaces that allow them to engage with God in ways that meaningfully connect with where they are on their journeys, and the kinds of issues they’re dealing with in their lives? Multi-layered spaces - Quiet space; grieving space; conversation, communal, and mentoring space; interactive and participatory learning spaces; singing spaces; prayer and day-dreaming spaces; multi-media and liturgical spaces. How well do we respect and make room in the gathered life of the community for the life contexts within which people find themselves? Cathedrals perhaps made some allowance for this when they created “chapels” and annexes within the larger building, while the July 2003 edition of “New Zealand House & Garden” published an article about New Zealand author Elizabeth Knox’s house in which the text included the following, “…The new addition [to her house]…is bare, spare and soaring…the perfect place for a vivid imagination to run free…Elizabeth Knox considers herself a “migrator” and a “cave dweller” (“I do tend to move around the house when I’m writing.”). Her house has small “womb rooms” and big spaces. What kinds of “womb spaces,” or ‘circles’ of friends are present to help form and nourish a Jesus-relating’ and ‘Jesus-following’ passion and spirituality in us?  There is a beautiful scene in the New Zealand movie, “Whale Rider,” 4 where estranged son Porourangi meets with his Father Koru in the ancestral meetinghouse of the tribe. On the walls are carvings, ‘icons’ which tell the ancestral and tribal stories. There are ‘totems’ that represent ancestors. Porourangi runs his hands and eyes over the surfaces, reading the stories, connecting with and feeling “his” story. The walls tell stories. The walls have texture. The walls are both ancient text and visual image. What founding and communal stories do the physical spaces of your church building tell? What biblical narrative is visible and embodied? Into what story and stories are you both “called” and “sent” as participants and God-bearers? What experiences of God are in your hands as you carry them from the ‘church gathered’ into your everyday ‘worlds’ and roles? Now not every church owns a building, some, like ours, rent a hall so there are real challenges around creating ‘multi-sensual’ space. Perhaps in this context, a more important response to positioning the sensual might be through liturgies that encourage ‘doing’ as response and worship; moving away from church as “audience.” Perhaps the means will be “festival spirituality,” like Graceway’s Enliven5 Perhaps it will be “gathered church” actively resourcing us in our dispersed life, helping us too embrace every moment as sacrament, or in what Australian Michael Frost refers to as our learning to have our “eyes wide open,” learning to see, hear, and feel God in the ordinary. Jesus did! Priority needs to be given to recovering “the place of imagination…[rediscovering] the use of metaphor in a prose-flattened world…[and in] being open to the intuitive.”6 It will be in our honoring the ‘portable’ metaphors and symbols of poetry and art, of visual image and movie. For some of us richness and depth will be gained through our experientially encountering God in creation contexts such as this one of which author Donald Miller writes: “I once listened to an Indian on television say that God was in the wind and the water, and I wondered at how beautiful that was because it meant you could swim in Him, or have Him brush your face in a breeze.” 7 For a small number of us in the church I belong to, the sensual was recovered through recasting church as a caving experience, as church entering deep into a limestone cave at Waitomo, accessing it through a river, climbing a waterfall, having John 1:6-9 read in complete darkness, for all except the reader, then lighting some candles and celebrating the sacrament of Eucharist together. Whether we own church buildings or not, another area we can work at is in creating Christian rituals that connect deeply with what it means to be a God-created “sensual” human being, human beings who grieve, who celebrate, who age, who are baptised, who approach death. Human beings who are being converted, who are struggling with sickness, who as teenagers are grappling with sexuality and the changes that accompany puberty. Human beings who are leaving college, getting their first job, starting school, moving into a new home etc. How quick we often are to render the human journey, the Jesus-following journey into insignificance, or into words, rather than art and ritual, touch and movement! “Positioning ourselves to engage our senses” is to take seriously the incarnation: “The Word becoming flesh and blood, and [moving] into the neighbourhood” 8 God becoming flesh and taking up residence amongst us. Genesis 1 and 2: in the beginning…God created the biological and chemical mechanisms that carry sensory impulses, our sense organs: ears, eyes and noses, and the major senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and pressure. God enables us to perceive stimuli, to distinguish and evaluate thirst from hunger, pain from pleasure, changes in temperature, spatial recognition etc Our senses are the God-created means whereby we worship, pray, ‘feel’ for others, can be still and listen, can discern God’s presence, and like our God who creates, we too can be creative, offering our whole selves as an act of worship to God (Rom. 12:1). Finally, I started with Mike Riddell, now I want to finish with Steve Taylor, for me a kind of visual way of acknowledging and honoring two Kiwi “voices” who’ve profoundly and deeply enriched my “voice”: “…The danger is that the emerging church is a re-run of evangelicalism, but with PowerPoint. We’ll keep trotting out the same words, without thoughtful reflection on our faith in light of new technology. We’ll remain caught up with our words and our retro-theologues. We’ll never consider image, community and chaos in our theology; what Christ as the Image of God might mean (Colossians 1:15), on the impact of revelation in community (Emmaus road), on the power of chaos to invite new ways of being (Genesis 1)…” 9
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