Greenbelt 2012 Dave Tomlinson “Bad Christians” and a dazzling darkness.

For a copy of the book try Amazon How to be a Bad Christian: .. and a Better Human Being

On Greenbelt’s first evening I went to a “meditation” titled “a deep but dazzling darkness” prepared by St Luke’s the church lead by Dave Tomlinson.  There were two things which I found off putting.  First this meditation turned into a Eucharist, re-reading the blurb in the programme there was no hint that this session would have a sacramental element.  Now I would not want to appear to be critical of the Eucharist but the way it was celebrated did not, for me, connect with the theme of the meditation, it was not an encounter with the awful and unknowable God, it was a fairly causal encounter and gave me the feel they had run out of material and just needed something to fill the last 20 minutes of the session and thought “you can’t go wrong with a Eucharist let bung that in…” The second issue was perhaps more fundamental, the whole thing didn’t really seem to have the courage of its convictions. This darkness of God kept being watered down, we were told on more than one occasion that “some people” have an experience of God as darkness or absence – that is to say some OTHER people and not us ourselves, we need to help this poor unfortunates – it was nice that they felt that the encounter with God as darkness was OK but the session didn’t rest in the dark it kept trying to move us to the light.  Two days later I listened to Dave Tomlinson speaking in the Big Top – now I have never had much success with talks in the Big Top in part due to the same neurosis which blocks me connecting with mass worship events so to give Dave his credit he kept me listening for the full talk and I didn’t wander off part way through.  This talk was the plug to his new book “Bad Christians”.  The big news which he has discovered is than 1) there are spiritual people outside the Church 2) many of these spiritual people were Church goers but exactly because of their spirituality the religiosity of the Church drove them away 3) the Church would be a better place with more questions and less dogma.  The jaw dropping moment is when you realize that he is one of the brightest hopes for the Church and he has only just worked this out!  As a “Modern Catholic” I can call on generations of witnesses to these facts – we have been living them and our congregations have collapsed while dogmatic Evangelicals have set the agenda for the Church.  Dave Tomlinson has the right answer but I am not sure that he has worked out what the question is yet …