Stephen's weblog

Another great quote is from Mark Sayers – phuture, forge, Red Network, ex salvo, all round good guy
A Chinese proverb is : “If you want a definition of water, don’t ask a fish.” Deep.

It’s possible the fish doesn’t even know that the water exists. The water is all that the fish knows – it swims in it, breathes through it, sees through it. Ironically you might think that a fish would know more about water than anyone else, as they spend more time with water than anyone else, but by being so close they can’t actually look at water objectively. One of the few ways a fish would be able to work out what water is would be to jump out of the water, experience the air briefly, and then they would notice the water more as they re-entered it. You need to get some objective distance up before you can see it clearly. We really see how the earth itself is a sphere by going out into space and looking down at it .

For us, it’s almost impossible to understand the situations we are in and the assumptions that we make about them, because we probably don’t even know where we are making these assumptions. For our Churches, it is hard for us as Christians to think through what happens in our Church objectively, as being Christians inside the Church is like fish being in the water.
Two things spring to mind. One, new Christians might have the best perspective on Church when they first enter into it as they have objectivity and are not yet part of the system. The problem here is they probably don’t have much Christian maturity at that stage. The second thought is that to analyse the Church objectively we need to be listening to the voices of those who think or practice Church radically differently to us. Those voices are often annoying, because they are often critical of what we do, but we need to listen to them to help us to jump outside the fish bowl that is the Church and see how someone else views what we do.

It is also rather important for us to understand our cultures, as this will help us to communicate to those around us, and help us to understand what it really means to be a follower of Jesus today. The problem here is that once again we are a fish in water, as we really can’t see our culture clearly enough as we are part of it. We can critique those cultures who are different to us fairly easily, but the culture that we are part of personally is like the air we breathe or the water fish swim in – a fact of life, an assumption that we hardly notice.
What would a non-Christian looking at us from a third world country say about our culture or our Churches if they could see us clearly? Where would they notice our blind spots? What would make them think that we are morally bankrupt?