How Not Going to Church Worked Out For Me

Alex:                Did you find Abuelita?

Penelope:        Yeah, she’s with Jesus now.

Elena & Alex: What?!

Penelope:        No, no! Sorry! She’s at church. Poor choice of words.

One Day at a Time S1 E3, ‘No Mass’ (2017)¹

This is a sculpture in the Forest of Dean by Kevin Atherton, called ‘Cathedral’. Relevance will become apparent later. Thanks to DeFacto on Wikimedia Commons, who uploaded this photo under the conditions specified here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.

Disclaimer: Although the emails and text messages quoted below are direct transcriptions – given in italics, with omissions indicated by […] – the in-person conversations are necessarily not, reliant as they are on my own memories of them and, insofar as I remember the sentiment conveyed more than the words that conveyed it, my own instinctive manner of phrasing things. I have made some phrasing decisions deliberately for the sake of narrative flow. I have also, in the interests of privacy, given initials rather than names in all instances except my own name, but if you recognise yourself any in the interactions described below and feel I am unfairly misrepresenting what you said on the occasion in question, please do get in touch and we’ll see about correcting that. Otherwise, on with the show.

*

Emails, 10/01/2019 – 18/01/2019

Hi Anne,

Happy New year!

Hope this email finds you well.

Just a quick email to see whether you were planning on coming back to camp this year? We’d love to have you back again! […]

Thanks

B

B,

Happy new year to you too!

I am intending to come back to camp this year, just haven’t got round to filling the form in yet … I’ll get on to that :)

Best wishes,

Anne

B,

Me again … I’ve run into a spot of bother filling in the application form. Since last year I’ve developed some slightly left-field views on ecclesiology,² so that I’m no longer happy being part of an institutionalised church with particular people in charge of it, which makes answering the questions about my church and church leader a bit impossible. (Don’t worry about me, by the way, because I’m still fellowshipping with other believers, hearing teaching, etc., and honestly I’ve never been more determined in my pursuit of holiness; it’s just that the necessity of meeting together is being played out for me in more informal settings.) Sorry for kicking up a fuss; how do you suggest I respond to these questions?

Thanks and best wishes,

Anne

Hi Anne,

Thanks for the email and sorry for my delayed reply.

I wonder if the easiest thing might be to have a quick chat on the phone.

Happy to call you if you let me know some times that might suit.

Thanks very much

B

(Extract from) subsequent phone conversation, 24/01/2019

B:        So how will you answer if one of the teenagers on camp asks you which church you go to?

Me:      I’ll say I fellowship with other believers more informally.

B:        What do you think a teenager who heard you say that might think?

Me:      Well, I don’t know. They might think, oh hey, brilliant, turns out I don’t have to go to church! Or they might think, ah, OK, sure, legit. Or they might think, that’s weird, tell me more.

B:        I think more likely one of the first two … The key thing is, we want to be encouraging these young people to be discipled, and a massive part of that is encouraging them to go to church and youth group. Is that something you’re going to have a problem with?

Me:      Look, I’m not going to be telling anyone not to be fellowshipping. The really important thing is that they’re meeting with other Christians, whatever that looks like.

B:        Do you think Nicolaism as you understand it is a heresy?

Me:      Yes.

B:        OK, so, how then is it that you’re still OK to partner with us on camp?

Me:      Well, you know, it’s not a salvation issue–

B:        How do you mean, not a salvation issue?

Me:      As in, getting this wrong isn’t going to threaten your salvation.

B:        The definition of a heresy is false teaching that does threaten your salvation.

Me:      Oh. Sorry – I’m not much cop at theological terminology. In that case, no, I don’t think it’s a heresy. At the end of the day, we agree on the gospel, and that’s what we’re trying to communicate to these young people, and so whatever else we disagree on, I’m happy to join in that work.

(Extract from) conversation at 1-to-1 Bible study, 13/05/2019

A:        So what’s next?

Me:      As in…?

A:        Well, this is our last ever 1-to-1 Bible study, and I know you’ve not been going to St. Leonard’s for a while, so what’s next for you in terms of Christian fellowship?

Me:      Fellowship is actually brilliant for me at the moment – I’ve got Women’s Bible Study on Wednesday mornings of course, and then there’s a whole bunch of us that meet up on campus to study the Bible and pray and break bread and do sung worship at various times in the week, and we also kind of have a little four-person house church going on where we read the Bible and pray for each other and really share our lives with each other … Yeah, it’s going really well, I’m getting loads of fellowship, growing a lot.

A:        That’s great. I’m really pleased to hear that. And even though we’re not 1-to-1-ing any more, it would be lovely to meet up for coffee every so often.

Me:      Yes, definitely.

(Extract from) conversation in a pub, 10/05/2019

Me:      Well, I guess people are just busy. Most of us do a lot of Christian stuff, they’ve got other priorities, that’s fine.

E:        Well, yeah, but you know … People always talk about it like that: you’ve got to prioritise, you can’t do everything, you can’t be everyone’s best friend, you’ve got to decide what and who you invest in. But is that really how Jesus did things? And since when did God only ask for part of our time? We talk about needing ‘me-time’, but shouldn’t we really be willing to sacrifice that for the sake of building up the Church? Isn’t that kind of what denying yourself and taking up your cross means?³ And if we’re really loving one another, then surely church stuff should be something that recharges you, rather than something you can only do so much of before you need to take some ‘me-time’ to recharge?

Me:      Yeah. It really should. Maybe we should start something, then. Something where there aren’t a billion jobs to do, where we just meet, and where we really talk about what’s going on in our lives and we’re really, really committed to loving one another – where we love each other to the extent that it doesn’t feel like one more commitment in the week, but something way more positive. And then maybe people could go back out and do their other Christian stuff with a refreshed passion for the gospel that causes them to help bring that other Christian stuff more in line with what scripture says it should be.

 (Extract from) conversation in Oxford university parks, early June 2019

Me:      The thing is, last term, it was so brilliant, you know, we were doing so much, and I felt like, this is what church should be like – well, not completely, but definitely a start on the right trajectory – and I was so excited to see everyone start exercising their giftings (you included, bro, you’re seriously gifted to teach), but then it turned out that all this stuff that was core for me was peripheral for everyone else, and we hit the summer term and the routine got disrupted and it all fell out from under me. Everyone went back to just doing their own core stuff, Sunday services and that, and it just all fell out from under me.

B:⁴       I just feel like I want to say I’m sorry. We should have done better for your sake.

Me:      I didn’t mean to blame you guys–

B:        No, we should have done better. We knew you weren’t in mainstream church and so what we were doing on campus and stuff was really important for you, and so, as your brothers and sisters, we should have been there for you, and we weren’t.

Me:      Gosh. Thanks. I usually think I’m just being an idiot and shooting myself in the foot.

B:        Even if that were true, though, we should have been looking out for you and making sure we didn’t leave you not getting any fellowship. That’s our job as the Church. So yeah, I’m sorry.

Me:      Wow. Thank you. I really appreciate that. That means a lot. I’m feeling quite emosh right now, actually.

(Extract from) Women’s Bible Study session, 03/07/2019

L:        How can we be praying for you at the moment, Anne?

Me:      Um … So you guys know I have some pretty unusual views about how church ought to work. Well, right now I’m sort of taking another look at what that might look like in practice. So if you could pray that I’d be wise in that, and driven by a zeal for God’s glory, rather than my human desire to be right about stuff or whatever, that would be ace.

(Extract from) post-WBS conversation, 03/07/2019

Me:      …and the thing is, even if I manage to get through this summer and everything picks back up again in the new academic year fellowship-wise, well, we’ll hit the summer term next year and … it’ll all just fall out from under me again.

L:        Oh Anne. Come here, lovely.

(Extract from) conversation at home, early July 2019

Me:      Aw man. I think I’m going to have to start going to church again.

M:       Ooh. Juicy.

Me:      Shut up.

(Extract from) conversation in a café, 13/07/2019

S:         Do you ever just imagine what it would be like if we just met together and didn’t put anyone in charge and didn’t prepare anything and sought the Lord and waited to see what he did?

Me:      Yeah. Yeah, I imagine that all the time. And then I stop, because it makes me sad.

S:         One day, we’ll do that.

(Extract from) conversation at home, 13/07/2019

Me:      Are you going to church tomorrow?

M:       Yeah.

Me:      Which one?

M:       Calvary.

Me:      OK. I’m going to come too.

(Extract from) conversation in the Forest of Dean,⁵ 20/07/2019

Me:      …and so I think what I needed to get past was the idea that deciding to go to church, as it were – yuck, I hate the expression ‘going to church’ – somehow meant giving up on the whole big idea of what I think church ought to be like. At the end of the day, I need fellowship and I’ve got to get it however I can get it. And right now I only seem to be able to get it by going to mainstream church, so if I do that for the moment, it doesn’t mean I’ve, like, failed. OK, you’ve been smiling away for like the past ten minutes I’ve been talking. What are you thinking?

O:        I’ve just been thanking Jesus a lot for showing you all this stuff you’ve been saying.

(Extract from) conversation on camp, 11/08/2019

Z:         So what do you think of the new service pattern at St. Leonard’s?

Me:      Um, I’m actually kind of not at St. Leonard’s any more…

Z:         Ooh, controversial! Where are you at now?

Me:      I’ve been fellowshipping more informally, on campus and in houses and stuff.

Z:         Ah, OK, sure. Legit.

Texts, 10/09/2019

S:         You’re going to Calvary?! x

Me:      Um. Sort of. Have been 3 times

S:         M is so dropping you in it right now […]

Apparently you’ve joined the worship band!

Me:      That’s not actually true! For starters there isn’t one. But this lady who leads the music sometimes asked if I might be up for doing some harmonies some time. If she decides my voice is OK :P And I guess I said yes to that.

Point is, if I’m going to church I want to be involved. I’m not there to be a consumer, y’know. I just wish I had enough else going on in the way of fellowship that I didn’t have to go. ’Cause the compromise really grates.

S:         I’m winding you up in cahoots with M … On a serious note, I get it – I feel the same way … x

WhatsApp messages, 22/09/2019

O:        Anne, I am sorry if this comes across as blunt or strong … I feel like I can be blunt with you :P I don’t want to offend! I feel like it would be helpful to reflect on which bible verses are telling you to go to church versus which bible verses are telling you that you shouldn’t go? Our feelings & level of motivation is not the same as truth. Our feelings can lie.

Church may not be the type/amount of fellowship that you need right now. But you need fellowship of some sort & it is definitely something we should be doing as Christians. I just don’t want any lies to prevent you from spending time with God & encouragement from other believers x

I love you & that message is coming from a place of true concern for your faith journey! I hope you know that <3

Me:      Oh gosh of course I know that … Be as blunt as you like, I know you’d only ever do it in love and sometimes (read: often) I’m an idiot and need to hear it. And you’re right, I do need to not listen to my feelings on this.

As of this morning I am on the music rota at Calvary. We’re gonna do harmonies and it’s gonna be freaking lit.

If I seem to you as if I’m a bit all over the place on this issue, well, yeah, I seem that way to me too. Writing a blog post about it now. Mind if I quote some of what you said above in it?

Footnotes

¹ Thanks owed to the friend who introduced me to One Day at a Time earlier this year. It’s a lot of fun, so if you’re looking for a new sitcom to get into, worth checking out: https://www.netflix.com/title/80095532.

² See my series ‘Those Pesky Nicolaitans’ from June and July last year.

³ Mark 8, but you already knew that: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mark+8&version=ESVUK. This is an insane demand Jesus makes of his followers. But the promise attached to it is just as insane. Put your fleshly self to death in Jesus’ name, and you’ll inherit everlasting life. There is no currency that can buy back human souls but his blood.  

⁴ Not the same B as earlier. All the other initial repeats refer to the same individual, though.

⁵ We did the sculpture trail: https://www.forestofdean-sculpture.org.uk/. Only found like two-thirds of the sculptures, but it was a top-notch catch-up so I didn’t mind a bit.

Campfire Songs and the Death of Oral Culture

“I moved to the front of the room and clapped my hands for the room’s attention. Once the room was moderately quiet I began to play. By the time I struck the third chord everyone knew what it was: ‘Tinker Tanner’. The oldest song in the world. I took my hands from the lute and began to clap. Soon everyone was pounding out the rhythm in unison, feet against the floor, mugs on tabletops.

The sound was almost overwhelming, but it faded appropriately when I sang the first verse. Then I led the room in the chorus with everyone singing along, some with their own words, some in their own keys. I moved to a nearby table as I finished my second verse and led the room in the chorus again.

Then I gestured expectantly towards the table to sing a verse of their own. It took a couple of seconds for them to realise what I wanted, but the expectation of the whole room was enough to encourage one of the more tipsy students to shout out a verse of his own. It gained him thunderous applause and cheers. Then, as everyone sang the chorus again, I moved to another table and did the same thing.

Before too long folk were taking initiative to sing out their own verses when the chorus was over. I made my way to where Denna waited by the outer door and together we slipped out into the early evening twilight.

‘That was cleverly done,’ she said as we began to stroll away from the tavern. ‘How long do you think they’ll keep it up?’”

Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind (2007)

 

Our Guide campfires tend to be bigger than this one. And not as neat.

So you know ‘Baby Shark’?

In the event that you don’t, I feel I should warn you that, even though I have felt obliged to leave a link to the relevant video in the forthcoming footnote,¹ you may well find that your day is a better one if you refrain from clicking on it. The song is, to put it bluntly, blooming annoying. There isn’t really enough of a melody to call it ‘catchy’ per se, and yet it will still somehow manage to end up as firmly stuck in your head as chewed gum on the underside of a secondary-school desk. If you’re unlucky enough to have heard it already, I imagine it’s taking up its lodgings in your brain even now. Sorry. But I assure you I’m not just needlessly torturing you; I do have a point.

The thing is, the particular version of ‘Baby Shark’ that has so successfully impressed itself upon society’s consciousness is just that: a particular version, and a recent one at that. A Korean company called Pinkfong uploaded it to YouTube in 2016, and it went viral from there,² but the song itself is far, far older than that. I know, because we used to sing it as a campfire song at Brownies and Guides when I was a kid. ‘Baby Shark’ as we knew it was, as campfire songs tend to be, rather more violent than Pinkfong’s smiling, bubblegum version: it involved limb loss, failed cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and some very strange ideas indeed about life after death – although that last one is, again, standard practice with campfire songs. It’s a lot more fun than the Pinkfong one, though, and so when members of the Brownie unit in which I’m proud to call myself an Assistant Leader asked, during a singing session one meeting, whether we might sing ‘Baby Shark’ next, I was happy enough to oblige. What caught me by surprise, though, was that, when my version began to diverge from Pinkfong’s, the girls were rather put out and told me I was doing it wrong.

I mean, it would have been a fair enough comment, if it were the case that there were one correct incarnation of the song and I wasn’t singing it, but that simply isn’t how campfire songs work. They are fluid by nature. You learn them by ear of an evening and repeat what you remember later; you readjust, add or remove verses as suits your circumstances. You meet another unit at an event and swap songs and parts thereof that the other hasn’t heard before. These things are passed down through generations: they persist for decades and decades and, though unchanged in essence, they morph into new versions of themselves everywhere they go. In order to be doing ‘Baby Shark’ wrong, you’d have to be doing it in such a fashion as to render it unrecognisable. And yes, your unit will have certain verses it’s attached to, and it probably isn’t very kind or sensible to disregard that, but the valid complaint is, I don’t like that version, rather than, That’s not how it goes.

A baby shark. And its mother. That’s the first two verses gone.

But for those of my Brownies who’d learnt the song off YouTube rather than round a real or imagined campfire, it was conceived of as having a set form, à la Pinkfong. To be honest, I can hardly blame them for that. All I can really do is draw attention to the fact as exhibiting one more way in which our ever more codified society is making oral culture firmly a thing of the past.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m a ginormous fan of codifying stuff. Write the thing down, make copies, digitise it, do everything you can to make sure it’s not lost to posterity: given that my day job at the moment entails producing codified forms of artefacts whose place of origin has lately been a war zone then overrun by extremists intent on the total destruction of anything and anyone inconsistent with their own narrow worldview,³ I’d be the last person to criticise any project designed to get some element of human culture concretely recorded in such manner as will last for future generations. And it’s absolutely brilliant that we live in a world where information can be laid up so that it’s unerasable and accessible to anyone, not vulnerable to war or extremism or fire or flood or anything. I love that we live in a world where it’s possible for people to carve their mark in digital stone and know that it will be there for anyone who likes – anyone mad enough, in Pinkfong’s case – to look at it. You know what, I’ll say it: the disappearance of oral culture – of the setup whereby traditions are passed on from one generation of a society to the next solely by word of mouth – is a price worth paying for modern information technologies. But am I allowed to affirm that, and still acknowledge a sense of loss or sadness that my Brownies know Pinkfong’s version of ‘Baby Shark’, as if it were some kind of universal canon, rather than a version they might have claimed for themselves in their own Girlguiding community? Am I allowed to permit the death of oral culture while still enjoying what I can of its last stronghold?

Because it does seem to me that, in the developed and digitised west at least, campfire songs are indeed the last great stronghold of oral culture. Where else are traditions handed down merely by speaking and listening in the same way? And their very orality is part of their essence, part of what makes them such enormous fun: the adaptability, the feeling of being in on something, even the openness to corruptibility. For instance, I know a campfire song about an ostrich who goes yodelling on a mountaintop – except that I recently learnt that I had been taught a corruption of an earlier incarnation in which an Austrian went yodelling. Obvious, really; I’m ashamed the thought never occurred to me before. But isn’t the idea of an ostrich going yodelling better fun? And since the song serves no higher purpose than that, who’s to say the version with the ostrich is wrong? It might represent a divergence from the song as originally conceived, but given that you’ll never manage to trace and pin down the ultimate original form of something in such a constant state of change and development as a campfire song, what does it matter? Or similarly, when I was first taught the song ‘Three Little Angels’ (which is as utterly daft and repetitive as just about anything you’ll ever sing round a campfire), I only learnt three verses, but when I later heard one in which some Boy Scouts try to get to heaven on a washing machine but are thwarted when the spin cycle ends, I was so amused by it that I rarely teach the song without it now; it would never occur to me to say of it that that isn’t how ‘Three Little Angels’ is supposed to go. There is no canonical form: the only criterion is what’s fun to sing.

 

I mean, just imagine an ostrich yodelling. Hilarious.

There’s rather a lot of going to heaven in campfire songs, actually. Possibly that tendency is partially blameable on the fact that many campfire songs stem from a time when culture at large was at least superficially Christianised. There’s a famous one called ‘You’ll Never Get to Heaven’ which could arguably be taken as a song of repentance if the whole thing weren’t so patently ridiculous: it has a chorus, as I learnt recently, that goes: I ain’t gonna grieve my Lord no more; I ain’t gonna grieve, I ain’t gonna swear, I ain’t gonna pull my sister’s hair; I ain’t gonna grieve my Lord no more. That comes after verses like, You’ll never get to heaven in a biscuit tin, ’cause a biscuit tin’s got biscuits in and You’ll never get to heaven in [insert name of leader]’s bra, ’cause [leader]’s bra won’t stretch that far. Total nonsense – but because campfire songs persist, and because they persist in use, moreover – not codified, not sitting gathering dust, not needing to be studied as foreign artefacts or translated from the forms in which they were captured all those years ago – they preserve, however imperfectly, the shapes of ideas that society as it is now would never generate of its own accord.

That’s not me saying that campfire songs might serve as some sort of roundabout evangelistic tool (that’s right, Brownies, you better had make a commitment not to grieve the Lord any more, because you never shall get to heaven in any covering but the blood of Jesus shed on your behalf, biscuit tin or otherwise) – as I say, they’re total nonsense, and meant to be taken as such. I suppose that’s what makes them so ripe for continued existence as oral culture in a world where instant information access on demand has left us all with terrible under-exercised memories: it really doesn’t matter if you remember them wrong, just as long as they’re a good laugh.

I suppose, in citing the lyrics of parts of ‘You’ll Never Get to Heaven’ above, I have made my own contribution to the great inevitable march towards codification. But you really can’t imagine that you know the song from a few typed-out lyrics. You have to sit there in a circle with your peers and learn this stuff by call and response. You have to laugh, and get it wrong, and forget bits, and make new bits up and see if they stick, and pick up elements of other groups’ versions and pass yours on to them. You have to hold it in your head and bring it out when the occasion calls for it and see what the thing becomes this time. Pinkfong doesn’t get the last word on how ‘Baby Shark’ goes: any campfire-song-singing community anywhere can inherit and adapt and maintain and hand on its own version.

At the end of the day, modern information technologies and campfire songs do, after all, have one important thing in common: they put the power to create and adapt and pass on certain material in the hands of ordinary randomers like you and me, without requiring the approval of any appointed higher authority that dictates what that material is supposed to look like. The same freedom that lets me teach the version of ‘Baby Shark’ I remember from my childhood to the Brownies, lets me upload blog posts sketching out my strange little thoughts for lovely people like you to peruse should they wish to. I dare to entertain a hope that the latter activity is of marginally more benefit to the pertinent audience than the former.

Footnotes

¹ Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqZsoesa55w. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

² Apparently helped along to some degree by Kpop groups like Blackpink performing it at their concerts. Personally I think Blackpink have much better things to do: if their video for ‘Ddu-du Ddu-du’ – currently the most viewed music video by any K-pop group – doesn’t convince you that Kpop is super fun, I’m not sure what will: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHNzOHi8sJs.

³ I work on stuff from what’s now Iraq. So … yeah. There are some glimmers of a positive future for the Iraqi heritage sector though: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/may/01/training-fieldwork-iraqi-archaeologists-of-the-future-qalatga-darband.