You don’t know how wonderfully cathartic blogs can be until you have one. Sending out little missives into the great gnostic beyond – nothing beats it. Gotta get some of this down, lest it escapes me.
Credenda has always been a source of equal parts delight and consternation. A dear friend and fellow chorister at my ancestral church wrote a song glorifying the mag which appeared in the letters to the editor, and another friend’s excoriating subscription cancellation letter also appeared in that section, to be summarily mocked – of course.
All of this made the magazine a must-read. But I must confess the magazine’s latest reincarnation confounds me in a completely different way. I still respect all the contributors and their writings. They are fathers in the faith and I am their man. But despite a more periodic schedule, I cannot figure out Credenda’s new editorial focus. What sacred cows are they tipping? What new directions are they pushing?
First came Luke’s article, “Buy Local”. It stressed the importance of gratitude and abundance, while completely side-stepping any of localism’s substantive critiques – aesthetic critiques, questions of economic justice, the ideal of political subsidiarity, and of the unsustainability of our current system. It missed any chance to criticism localism’s foibles – a tendency to glorify self-sustainability, the postmodern notion of creating ones own cultural meaning, etc. Instead, it accused localism of being a nostalgic, primitivist movement design to alleviate nebulous consumer guilt.
No self-identifying localist or sympathizer I’ve talked to has recognized their position in this article. It is a happy straw men, or an article set against a group of people I have yet to encounter. All of the localists I know derived their position from a desire for a more grateful existence, and to deal with real cultural problems. In fact we were emboldened to be culture makers by Credenda, and by the success of the Christian schooling movement. We were even taught about co-belligerents, allies who share our concerns though arriving from completely different presuppositions and commitments.
But Ben’s latest article also baffles. “Growing Up” contains broad pastoral counsel – good counsel. One of the primary marks of growth in Christ is growth in unity with His body, the church. And that church includes specific members, and those members should come to mind when thinking about the church. People can claim their ‘doctrinal or liturgical or cultural differences’ as a sign of growth when in reality it is a sign of immaturity.
This initially hit hard, but then confounded. It would be great vanity to assume Ben is talking in a roundabout way about my personal concerns, as I assumed on first reading. He’s a direct guy – if he wanted to address natural food or home birth, I bet he would. But it is easy to read it between the very widely spaced lines of his article, if only because I am desperate for people like Ben, who I respect and who I suspect disagrees on these issues, to speak to them openly and forthrightly.
In fact, my greatest fear in these inquiries is to grow apart from the body. I have made myself a nuisance, I know, seeking counsel about these issues, for fear that I will drift and become schismatic.
This is not a “let’s you and him fight”, or a desire to argue for arguments’ sake. These are deep and sincere convictions, all the more frightening for me because I didn’t use to have these. But I also view them as intramural – it’s easy to love and respect those who disagree, even when they don’t seem to understand my first concerns.
In light of all that, I was greatly encouraged to read Pastor Wilson’s post, “Earthly Clay on Our Heavenly Boots” [Link] as a helpful companion to “Growing Up”. In it Pastor Wilson defends loyalty to ones personal history and embodied ideas against abstractions. My convictions about localism (for lack of a better term, as always) developed in the context of a church and a community. To turn my back on these convictions wouldn’t be sacrificing ideology for community, it would be sacrificing people for a shallow unity.
These ideas are of the same cloth. Unity does not mean ‘doctrinal or liturgical or cultural’ uniformity, and loyalty to ones convictions and the people who gave them to you is commendable. If we were all uniform, unity would be easy. It’s the messy challenge of loving our brothers and sisters *despite* our differences that life in the body, and life in community is all about. And that’s a fundamental part of my localist convictions.
F, 
themom, 
Lola Storm are discussing. 
Frank threw down
A 9:01 am on March 2, 2010 Permalink
Completely agree. The lengthy discussion after the post is also helpful.