Moving into the neighbourhood: embodiment, sacrament and ritual in urban mission

What have I done? Will anybody come? The first hour is a very lonely hour, plenty of time to think about what I have done and about how I got here, because nobody does come. It is 10am on Palm Sunday and I am sitting alone in a unit of The Royals Shopping Centre, Southend-on-Sea.

Southend-on-Sea is a large seaside town on the south-east coast of England.

‘Easter Icons: a Pop-Up Installation’ is an ecumenical project, a creative collaboration between Baptists and Methodists, others from various other local churches who are helping to staff it, but the rest of the team will be in their respective churches this morning. In a sense I am in mine. I am the town-centre minister, ‘for all of us’ a Baptist colleague says. I am the project leader for ‘Easter Icons’, the one who built the relationships, made the connections in the town, and brought the Christian story to the shopping centre for Holy Week. So I am the one sitting here, alone, feeling vulnerable, waiting for someone to come.

If they do come, what will they make of this attempt to tell the Easter story for today? Will it mean anything to them? Will they post a prayer in the Temple wall installation and reflect upon the fickle nature of celebrity at the Palm Sunday installation? Will they write down a beautiful act they would like to be remembered for and use the scented hand lotion at the anointing installation? Will they take bread and grape juice from the Last Supper installation, remember a betrayal at ’30 Pieces of Silver’? And will the experience be anything more than a ten-minute distraction from their shopping trip?

People do come. A trickle on the first day but it seems to gain momentum over the course of the week and over 650 people have come by the time we close on Holy Saturday. Nearly 300 prayers have been posted in the wall. A second book has been bought to accommodate the beautiful acts people wanted to record. Around 70 glasses of grape juice are consumed.

Of course the numbers do not say much. I do not really know what people thought, what people experienced, whether it helped unchurched people connect with the Easter story, at least for the most part. But there are some glimpses as I sit and watch people come and go during the week. The churchgoing Christians are easy to spot. Some have come especially to see this new initiative. They walk in confidently, follow the numbered stations confidently, write their prayers, their beautiful acts, and take the bread and grape juice confidently. They know what to do. Other people are less confident. They hang around the door looking in – this is not a normal shop, not what they are expecting in their shopping centre. Some never make it inside, some walk past several times before venturing in. They ask ‘What is it?’ ‘What do I do?’

The woman from the coffee shop comes to bring me coffee. I encourage her to have a look around but she is already visibly moved by the atmosphere created by the music, lighting and the more striking sculptural installations. She is not religious, she has told me. One of the Street Rangers who patrols the High Street comes in to have a look. She writes a prayer. She is not religious. An elderly man takes his time at all the stations and then comes back to me on his way out, one of the few who offers feedback: he enjoyed it very much, very interesting, very thought-provoking. He tells me he is an atheist. I am glad these people have come – this is for them.

By the end of the week I have become very attuned to body language. I am particularly intrigued by the response to the sacrament-like

While the bread and grape juice used for the installation were not consecrated, they were used as a deliberate reference to the sacrament of the Eucharist. The Methodist Church recognises two dominical sacraments: Baptism and Eucharist, though the term ‘sacramental’ may be understood much more broadly.

We have created these installations, making space for prayer and something sacrament-like, for encounter with the Christian story in a shopping centre, because most people do not come to church. Mainstream denominations in the UK have experienced a significant decline in attendance since the beginning of the twentieth century.

Brierley Consultancy 2014.

Perhaps none of this is surprising. These are times characterised by a distrust of institutions and authority, of metanarratives and claims to universal truth, times in which the individual takes precedence over the corporate. Professor of sociology Zygmunt Bauman describes what is often named ‘postmodernity’ as ‘liquid modernity’ in his book of the same title.

Bauman 2000, p. 10.

This need for church and society to reconnect is where I perceive the focus of my ministry to be. I am a Methodist presbyter pioneering a ministry of word and sacrament in the town centre. The Methodist Church has been absent from the town for over 20 years: the circuit closed its last town-centre church in the 1990s, leaving the area of densest population and highest deprivation in favour of a largely suburban presence. As I begin my ministry there is no Methodist congregation who gathers to worship here, no building to invite people to. I am stripped of conventional ministerial or ecclesial context. There is only one way for me to be ‘in the neighbourhood’:

The Message paraphrase of the Bible renders the description of the Incarnation in John 1.14 as ‘The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighbourhood.’

On my first day as the town-centre minister I sit on a bench at the top of the High Street. I have put on my clerical collar with jeans and a parka – the uniform of my vocation worn with the uniform of the street, of everyone from rough sleeper to student to shopper. I wonder what I have done, what I am doing here, but mostly I wonder what I should do now. How on earth do I build a ministry here? Where do I start? What is my common ground with these people, who do not necessarily share my faith commitments? The answer seemed to be small and insignificant: I am here.

‘Being here’ is perhaps an obvious starting point for a Methodist minister. The Methodist Church has its roots in the Evangelical Revival of the eighteenth century and in reaching unchurched people by finding new ways of communicating with them effectively, John Wesley himself preaching in the open air.

Wesley 1967, p. 139.

Philosopher Martin Heidegger suggests that technology has made global travel and communication faster than ever so that ‘time and space are shrinking’.

Heidegger 1975, cited in Inge 2003, p. 13.

My experience of ‘being’ a minister of word and sacrament in Southend-on-Sea, with nothing more than my embodied self as a point of connection with others, is worthy of significant exploration and reflection. From my own experience of dasein I have encountered and related to the grieving woman who cries in front of me, the heroin addict whose broken body sleeps where I park my car, the woman who smiles and serves me coffee through her untreated depression. They are all here too, experiencing this place as embodied selves. This common experience of being embodied has a central place in the Christian faith, which stands in opposition to notions of spirituality divorced from the body and the material world, notions rooted in the dualism of Platonic thought. The importance of embodiment to the Christian faith also challenges the contemporary phenomenon of ‘excarnation’,

Frost 2014, p. 11.

In recognising the value of the experience and particularly embodied experience, it is appropriate that I consider my own faith journey as a text worthy of reflection and influential to my ministerial practice. Significant to my understanding of God and of the human/divine relationship is a personal divine encounter of my own with both physical and emotional dimensions. I trace from this moment, which I would identify as an experience of the Holy Spirit, a dramatic shift in the way in which I relate to God. Prior to this event, my understating of God was grounded largely in an intellectual appreciation of the teachings of Jesus as those most conducive to a just society and of Jesus’ life as a model for right living. The shift was from a commitment of the mind outworked through behaviour in the world to a sense of relationship with God in which my whole self could know God intimately. As significant as the moment of encounter itself, which I can pinpoint in time and place, has been its ongoing effects within daily life: I am now conscious of the potential to encounter God in every moment and of the divine presence in the everyday.

Seeking to understand my experience further, the concept of poiēsis offers a useful insight. Academic practical theologian Heather Walton, drawing on the work of Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre and Jesuit theologian Michel de Certeau, describes poiēsis as ‘the supreme, restless, transformative capacity of human beings to reshape their world and create meaning out of the mundane’.

Walton 2014, p. 13.

In the light of my experience of faith and of my context for ministry, the remainder of this article will explore embodiment, the material and the sacramental as a means for encountering the divine. Much of the literature I have drawn upon takes a broad view of the sacramental, regarding the whole universe as a potentially sacramental place.

Baptist professor of systematic theology Paul Fiddes offers a useful overview of issues relating to embodiment, the material and sacramentality in his seeking to create a pastoral doctrine of the Trinity.

Fiddes 2000.

Citing professor of theology and eco-feminist Sallie McFague’s argument that the universe itself may be regarded as the ‘body of God’,

Fiddes 2000, p. 280.

Fiddes explores McFague’s argument for a sacramental theology that begins in the universal presence of God in the whole created order and moves to an understanding of the particular presence of God in Christ. This understanding reflects McFague’s eco-feminist theology in which the denigration of non-male and non-human bodies in both historical and contemporary Christianity is problematic. However, while acknowledging the validity of this, Fiddes favours a view of the Incarnation as the paradigm for a sacramental world because of the ‘unique depth of participation’ of the Father and the Son in which the ‘divine and human “yes” to the Father were one voice’.

Fiddes 2000, p. 289.

Ultimately, in spite of the differing directions from which they approach the sacramental, Fiddes and McFague concur that God must be understood as being in some way embodied and that this opens up possibilities for the sacramental in all of life. It is from this context that Fiddes moves to explore the intriguing possibility, put forward by Austin Farrer, that the Christian minister might be regarded as ‘a walking sacrament’.

Fiddes 2000, p. 294.

Fiddes’ linking of the embodied, the material and the sacramental offers a fruitful starting point as I explore a ministry with a sacramental dimension, focused in my ‘being here’. The questions ‘Where is my body?’ and ‘What is my body doing?’ are a constant as I reflect upon my role in the town centre. I recognise, though not entirely comfortably, the sacramental nature of myself-as-minister, in which simply ‘being’ in the town is a deliberate representation of Christ’s ministry in the world. The wearing of a clerical collar in this context has the potential to act as a reminder and a sign of the divine. By, for example, choosing to sit on the pavement with rough sleepers I understand myself to be engaged in an act in which the representative role I embody enables me to become a potential place of encounter with the divine.

Taking Fiddes’ argument that it is the particular person of Christ from whom all things may derive their sacramentality, it follows that some understanding of the Christian story, particularly of the Incarnation and the Passion narrative, are an essential precursor to any perception of the world as a sacramental place and any experience of the divine through it. This question of how God is perceived and who may perceive God is explored further by anglican bishop John Inge.

Writing in A Christian Theology of Place,

Inge 2003.

In common with Fiddes, Inge points to the world, particularly the natural world, as a place of revelation with sacramental potential. Here Inge also highlights the concept of the world as God’s body, though through a much earlier example than McFague’s work: that of seventeenth-century Anglican theologian Thomas Traherne.

Inge 2003, p. 63.

In conceiving of sacrament as ‘event’, Inge then goes on to cite a number of pieces of research into such possible sacramental events which suggest that they are not unusual, tracing the work of William James in the late nineteenth century, through Alister Hardy in the mid-twentieth century and up to the work of David Hay, whose national survey in Britain in the 1990s found over a half of adults believed they had experienced a sacramental encounter of some kind.

Inge 2003, p. 70–71.

However, despite this concession to the ‘artificial’ as opposed to the ‘natural’ world as a possible meeting place with God, it would be fair to conclude that Inge, along with other writers with a broad understanding of the sacramental, places particular emphasis on the ‘natural’ and the ‘holy’ locations as most conducive to divine encounter. This is particularly clear in the writing of Roman Catholic eco-feminist theologian Mary C. Grey in Beyond the Dark Night.

Grey 1997.

Reinforcing this bias towards the natural, Grey’s position as an eco-theologian becomes particularly evident in her discussion of the sacramental, located for her in encounters of the earthy Jesus among fishermen and in stories about sparrows, vineyards and bread-making.

Grey 1997, p. 66.

While my own love of nature makes me sympathetic towards the idea of the divine encountered through the natural world, I find Grey’s view of the city troubling, as one who walks among the concrete, steel and glass of a post-war High Street, among high instances of addiction, rough sleeping and poverty. According to Grey, such a context could well demand a ministry dedicated only to social justice. While there are Christians engaged in such work in Southendon-Sea, the focus of my ministry is less upon the transformation of people’s material circumstances and more about enabling moments of transcendence, resourcing poiēsis, and pointing to God in urban places rather than in spite of them. My identity as a presbyter, a minister of word and sacrament, is significant to the way in which my ministry has developed and is distinct from that of a deacon or Christian outreach worker.

What is clear from the work of Fiddes, Inge and Grey is that while understanding of the sacramental may be broad, there is a need to set some boundaries. Inge in particular recognises the potential problems that may follow from identifying all things as potentially sacramental and highlights the importance of relationship and response in order to offer a further criterion for sacrament. Quoting Macquarrie, ‘For anything to become sacrament, something has to be contributed from both sides,’

Macquarrie 1997, cited in Inge 2003, p. 80.

Taking the research of Hay and Morisy already cited, in which over half the respondents claim some kind of ‘religious experience’, it seems that Inge is limiting sacramental experience that leads somewhere to those with an understanding of the Christian tradition. He argues that churchgoing Christians may experience a sacramental encounter with God both inside and outside the church and its building; people outside the church community who do not have such a background or understanding cannot experience such sacramental encounter. Although he argues for ‘a two-way interaction between what is experienced in church and what is experienced in the world’, this is reserved for Christians with an understanding of Scripture and tradition.

Inge 2003, p. 80.

On this crucial issue of the relationship between experience, meaning and revelation, the influence of post-liberal Lutheran theologian George Lindbeck is worthy of exploration. Of particular interest are two of the models of belief Lindbeck examines in The Nature of Doctrine.

Lindbeck 1984.

For an alternative view, which emphasises the value of bodily experience, I turn to Anglican professor of religious studies Douglas Davies, who draws on social anthropology in his work. In common with Fiddes, Inge and Grey, Davies cites the doctrine of the Incarnation as the foundation of a world-view in which all earthy matter is ‘a potential vehicle for the divine’.

Davies 2002, p. 11.

Davies goes on to explore the writing of influential Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, who he regards as dismissing ideas of two separate realms of existence in the ideal but accepting that religion often sets itself apart, creating notions of the sacred and secular.

Davies 2002, p. 11.

A central theme of Davies’ book is the relationship between embodiment and religion, and the way in which behaviour both expresses and consolidates our beliefs and values. ‘Embodiment theory’, he argues, prevents the ‘over-systematizing’ approach of traditional theology to religious belief.

Davies 2002, p. 41.

Davies’ ideas about ritual have an impact not only upon the question of who may experience the sacramental but also on the question of what form this experience may take. Ritual is of particular importance to the Christian religion, argues Davies, because it has a particular ritual at its heart: the Eucharist. However, Davies goes on to express doubts about the role of the Church and its representatives in effectively mediating and controlling what is understood by Christians engaging in religious ritual. He acknowledges the theological tradition in which ritual is viewed as expression of doctrine yet he favours recent developments in ritual theory which regard it as a discrete phenomenon.

Davies 2002, p. 112.

Ewan Kelly, a pastoral theologian who also draws upon social anthropology, concurs with this view that part of the power and importance of ritual, for people of faith and no faith, is found both in its rootedness in the ordinary and its enabling of a whole-body experience as an end in itself.

Kelly 2002.

This conceptualisation of ritual as relating to the ordinary and mundane aspects of life is significant to my sense of needing to ‘demystify’ the ritual of the Eucharist among the people for whom I am a minister of word and sacrament. Here I return to the installation with which I began. The invitation to all to share in bread and grape juice at the shopping centre was a means of enabling people to participate in a sacrament-like ritual and to share in the story of Jesus, an opportunity for me to minister word and sacrament beyond the ‘language barrier’ between the traditions of my faith and the people among whom I minister. Reflecting on the last meal Jesus shared with his friends, it is the locus for much of what has been explored in this article: the sacramental, the importance of embodiment, the material and the everyday as a means of experiencing the divine, and the role of ritual in faith and life.

Taking the shared experience of embodiment seen through the lens of the Incarnation as a starting point, this article has explored approaches which value the sacramental and do not confine it to Christians attending eucharistic services. Rather, they allow for sacramental encounters in all of life and in all places. However, even within this broad understanding of what is sacramental there remains a desire to set boundaries and limitations among those writing from a primarily theological perspective. These boundaries are formed by the prioritisation of church tradition over human experience and based upon assumptions about the relationship between understanding and behaviour. Alternative interpretations from a social anthropology perspective do not subordinate experience to understanding but rather recognise the dynamic flow between the two and thus do not seek to limit experience of God to prior knowledge. Further dialogue between theology and anthropology on the nature of meaning-making and religious experience may bear much fruit for a Church seeking the common ground to communicate with those we have yet to reach.