booklogging

By Nick Spencer.
Nick Spencer is clearly interested in the history of the English parish system and has researched it well. I certainly learned a lot, and like Nick, thought it very helpful as a way of thinking about our present church situation in terms of stewarding resources and also in terms of seeing common themes emerging time and time again in church history: the way that funding has sculpted ecclesiastical arrangements; the constant to and fro between the local and the regional or national; the way that a minster-like structure constantly reappears in different guises. An one stage even non Anglican churches seemed to have been encompassed within the structure. I was also taken by the way that different religious orders seemed to play a role now taken largely by different denominations or churchmanships; the ever changing back-and-forth between diversity and uniformity, innovation and tradition.

however, though the book is strong on a historical perspective, it is also impressive that contemporary debates about church growth are referenced and form part of the thinking. This is very much a book rooted in the possible and the desirable.

The whole book is directed to the main aim of commending a minster-like system to explicit and conscious development as part of local and national strategies for resourcing the churches into this new milennium. Some of it will not be heard easily; the call to reconsider our architectural heritage and role in relation to it is hard to deal with for many. However I think he argues the case well, and the bottom line really is that if the nation want the buildings, it's going to have to do something more about it; expecting churches [that is bodies of people dedicated to Christ's mission] to be museum curators is not on.

Personally, I am pretty much convinced by the minster thesis and this book only helped me to feel that the evidence was better than I'd thought to proove the worth of the model. In various forms the idea has been finding proponents for the last 30 years, longer if some reports in the early twentieth century are anything to go by.

The large amount of history seems to belie the book's contemporary message, and perhaps that has put some off. It does deserve to be widely read by those who are concerned with fitting the churches for mission in

What drew me to this book was the fact that it drew together a number of people from diverse academic disciplines to think a bit more deeply than is usual on the practice of speaking in tongues. We have, from New Testament Studies, Max Turner, Theology from Frank Macchia, some History from Neil Hudson, Philosophy from James Smith, Linguistic insights from David Hilborn, some sociological perspective from Margaret Poloma and Psychology from William Kay. Mark Cartledge the editor, closes the book with an article which shows how insights from all of these disciplines can be used as part of theological reflection on the actual practice of the use of tongues at a major British Anglican Charismatic event. In a sense, therefore, the foregoing articles functioned as the theological resources for the final chapter, which was a nice way to choose the articles and to organise the book.

It also meant that we read a set of articles that represent a helpful contribution to thinking about the issue of glossolalia because they are articles that Mark Cartledge himself uses. In any collection like this there will be things that one finds more interesting or relevant than others, depending on interests and prior knowledge, the real attraction however in a book like his really is the breadth of disciplines brought to bear. While I found more personally congenial the linguistics, psychology and sociology, I was glad to have read and learnt some history, to have been updated on New Testament scholarship and to find some further reading theologically. The article on the linguistic-pragmatic angles could also serve as something of a crash course or introduction to speech-act theory and similar.

For me, the most stimulating essays were Frank Macchia's discussion of the theological motifs particularly in relation to the idea that Pentecost is a kind of counter-point to Babel. Especially as it enabled some reflection and positive theological appreciation of diversity and of language difference as well as their downsides. And, although, I knew some of the history of early Pentecostalism in the UK, Neil Hudson's history was fascinating, not least in laying bare some dynamics that tend to recur whenever glossolalia and other spiritual gifts come into prominence. I appreciated too that several articles enabled the reader to get away from the ideological and biblical-hermeneutical issues and concentrate our minds on the hermeneutics of the use of tongues speech in concrete situations. It called to mind the one thing I felt that this collection lacked which was a cultural studies perspective (though I suspect that there may be none published), though Dr Cartledge's article at the end went some way to addressing the kinds of issues that such an approach would have brought out by synthesising some of the other perspectives.

William Kay's psychological perspective also gave a brief history of psychological research into and interpretation of tongues-speaking. Much of it derogatory to tongues speakers, but it is a useful study also of the way that prejudice can influence allegedly scientific study.

One of the unintended (?) consequences of an interdisciplinary study like this is that what, from the perspective of the disciplines represented may seem somewhat esoteric, turns out to have lots of interesting and helpful things to contribute to our understandings of what it means to be human, as well as what it means to be before God. I'm really pleased to have this book on my shelves.