In Crisis and in Christ: Interdisciplinary Discipleship at Chapter Seventeen

I've been toying with words.

Fellowship.

Shipwreck.

Reckless.

Lessons.

Do you see what I did there? ha. Fellow-ship-wreck-less-ons.

If you took a whole crowd or congregation of people and dumped them unceremoniously on a desert island, I bet they'd discover all kinds of collaboration and interdependence that they never expected.

They might even get on the lifeboat grateful for the experience. You never know.

Anyway.

I digress.

What I actually came here to say was, there was a morning that I remember well.

I was sitting on a sofa, upstairs in a long hall. (Long backstory. Not important.)

I was praying about my future. Lots of interests, lots of passions, abilities in different directions — but what to do, what to do, what to do with life…

I put it before God.

(It was prayer. So, a pretty ordinary thing to do.)

Which is it to be?

Philosophy?

Theology?

Psychology?

Arts?

Social Care?

or none of the above?

I knew that at that point in life I could make a choice to enter a profession and limit others. But my head was spinning. Each one of those took me into classifications that didn't sit completely well with me, even if they contained something that the others missed.

And then I had a thought.

Haha, not just a thought.

It arrived like a volcano.

This is not an exaggeration, nor a metaphor. I literally ran for about ten minutes round and round the long room, punching the air and feeling like YES, YES, YES contained all the answers I could ever have been looking for.

The words in my head that caused this personal explosion were words of Jesus, taken from the feeding of the 5000.

You give them something to eat.

After ten minutes, I ran straight down the stairs, got into my car, went to a shop called The Works, and bought sheets and sheets of big paper and different coloured marker pens, and raced back to the upstairs hall with my supplies.

I still have those pieces of paper.

I haven't looked at them for a while.

But I remember the kind of thing…

• You're good in a crisis. Initiative. Resourceful. If everyone else's ideas have run dry, you come up with something that wouldn't have been taken seriously until that point. (Until people were desperate!)

• From out of the treasury of things you've been learning, including the richness of suffering, of study, of grief, of creativity; from out of having to think of something when all the options have run out. You give them something to eat. You come up with something.

And so I thought of this:

• I know people who are professionals in different fields. But the fields are distinct. Just because someone has something to say in one area, that doesn't make it relevant in another area. It gets reframed. Seen differently. Interpreted as something else entirely. Philosophy says something, and Theology reframes it, then Psychology reframes that, and so on. Questions of what's appropriate, of discernment, of liability, of safeguarding — in the end someone who is a jack of all trades ends up — let alone a master of none — sometimes a laughing stock. As someone said of me once in a big room, "What I think she's trying to say, but not saying very well…" hahahaha.... (hmm.)

And then I thought of this:

• What would a collection of professionals from different fields say to each other over coffee.

• What would they explain to each other from out of their expertise — one thing to share today.

• What might they offer in terms of an exercise or workshop experience.

• How might they experience each person's different exercise or workshop experience.

• What might they receive into their expertise from out of other people's ideas.

• How might they collaborate with each other, so that groups of two and three — a philosopher and a theologian, for example — might together show something to artists that they don't just work to express or respond to, but that actually informs their work and thinking and creativity. (And in the same way, the theologian, for example, not just working out the ethics or the teaching point, but wondering how that affected their own relationship with God, their own approaches and sense of identity.

Someone observing all of this at arms length might be deeply moved and affected just by watching things unfold in plain sight, even if they weren't part of it at all in that sense, and may have no such expertise.

And then —

• What if several people who had interest, or even need, but none of those areas of expertise joined the sessions.

• What if they joined them as peers, not as guinea pigs or visitors. People, with people. Perhaps even people reminding the other people that they are all people. The expert people.

• And what if all that led to training, enrichment, entertainment, engagement, help and services and events that were regularly and ongoingly developing and taking place.

Why? Perhaps brought together by faith.

Perhaps exploring Christian aspects through out of the box adventures in each others fields.

So.

Chapter Seventeen.

Hmm.

Studios for practitioners and artists to be resident for a while. Collaborating.

Conference and retreat for workshops and collections of people to hang out in conversation — maybe in person.

Theatre and cinema! Music and narrative!

Caminos and adventure!

… can you see why I was running and punching the air…???!