A few months ago I posted this, and I'm posting it again because I found myself writing almost the same thing over again. Something I read or heard in the last few days has set me thinking about the kind of aggression and anger with which some people kick out at the Church. There are all sorts of good reasons for being angry with the Church as we know it. But there's also the need to accept and forgive the Church as we know it - especially if you want to start something new. Being angry will never form the foundation for a new thing.

[I've been] thinking about some of the 'emerging' type groups I've been involved in. In 1990 I was a founder member of Holy Joe's - the church-in-a-cellar, turned church-in-a-pub that later came to fame as the community about which Dave Tomlinson wrote The Post-evangelical in 1995. (I was one of 6 authors who wrote a response in The Post-evangelical Debate in 1997.) Holy Joe's was an 'emerging' or 'alternative worship' community before either of those terms had been coined - we didn't know there was going to be any big movement, or anyone else like us - we were simply a group of people who found each other pretty much by accident in South London in 1990. At the start, we met as something of an artists' community - most of us were singers, musicians, painters, writers, or whatever. But we also found a common interest in that we were all people who had pretty strong convictions about faith but, to varying degrees, didn't feel altogether at home in Church. Some of us were going through a transition out of Evangelicalism into... well, we didn't know what yet, and some were probably on the way out of faith altogether. So we started not only as a group with positive interests in common, but also as a group of slightly uprooted Christians who were disenchanted with Church. Many of the regulars at Holy Joe's were what I termed 'recovering evangelicals' - they practised what Alan Jamieson later called A Churchless Faith. All too often the main topic of conversation in those early days at Holy Joe's was everyone's anger, hurt, and general critical comments about 'Church' as they knew it. And for a while, this was therapeutic. But fairly soon, I began to get bored with the fact that no matter what kind of interesting topic we started off on - hermeneutics, atonement theory, church and culture, christianity and the arts... we found it too easy to lapse into a slanging fest about 'the Church' - all the reasons, rehearsed over and over, about why the church was so bad, so stupid, so hurtful. After a while, I began to think that there were 2 options: either get stuck back in to the Church in some recognisable form and get on with doing the job in a way that we felt had integrity, or check out altogether. I was the first from Holy Joe's to set out on the road to Holy Orders. But interestingly, about 5 more followed, including Dave T himself, although not before Holy Joe's itself had begun to morph into something that had a positive raison d'etre, and leave its transitional stage behind.

There is undoubtedly a place for a bit of therapeutic negativity. The early days of Holy Joe's gave a few dozen people a safe place to sound off about our frustrations ad work out what to do next. But there comes a time when you have to move on from that, and either go back to where you came from and make it better, or go elsewhere and find or create something better. There will always be battles to fight; there will always be complaints to be made; there will always be things wrong with the church, whether it's trad, emerging or whatever. There's nothing wrong with a therapeutic complaining session every now and then, and it's just a fact of life that things have to be toughed out from time to time. But if you feel like complaining all the time, something's wrong. The angry stage has to be temporary. If the core of your life isn't positively committed to where you are and what you're doing, you'll end up poisoning yourself, and the people around you. You can't build a church on a foundation of what's wrong with another church.