By Grant Longenbaugh, sophomore
The pub, tucked away in an alley behind Russell Square and a short walk from the British Museum in London, hosted football fans, dates, co-workers—the normal pub crowd—and in one corner, a group of students huddled around a table, listening, discussing. We, the students, listened to thoughts about Jesus, postmodern philosophy and pyschoanalysis; we heard parables. We asked questions on church, social justice, God. Pete Rollins, from Belfast, Northern Ireland, organizes a group in Belfast who meet at a pub to talk about and experience God in exciting, engaging, and many times, uncomfortable ways. The other, Alistair Duncan, organizes periodic events in Brighton, South England, (a community often compared to San Francisco) to engage a population often averse, apathetic, or simply undecided about church and God.
Both Pete and Alistair stressed that they rarely sought to offer definitive answers to people’s questions about God, belief, Christianity. Pete explained being “like salt” as making one thirsty for God, not quenching their thirst, and Alistair often used the question “What’s the itch?” to describe the idea behind the questions asked as being perhaps more important than any answer. Both understand deeply that in their communities, to offer definitive, no-contest answers is to conjure the language of the violent and divisive politics and theologies that even still misrepresent and commandeer the Gospel of Jesus, driving many to leave church—and God—behind. Both speak to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” and taking after the Son of Man who spoke from the Galilean margins, offer fresh, challenging, discomforting ideas to the church, not to create new, definitive doctrinal structures, but to open up the conversation to more and more people, from more and more places.
