What Does "Riparian Church" Mean?

From FB (where I never got cool questions, until today):

What does riparian church mean?

Thank you for asking! "Riparian" is an adjective for the area around a river, a borderland between the insubstantial but dynamic stream and the stable but static earth.

Riparian environments contain features of each.

And this is a bit like searching for truth, which sometimes is clear and easily laid out ("The 66-book version of the Bible is God's inspired word") and sometimes a little more difficult to navigate ("Why do you say so, and what does that mean, exactly?").

It's a scary environment for some: I've had a few emails from people who talk about the terror of stepping off the dry land of dogmatic belief, and even one really interesting one from somebody who was approaching Christianity for the first time through the blog and wanted guidance in this new way of thinking: coming up out of the water, as it were.

Such a strange place isn't for everyone, but you'd be surprised at how many people sit in church every week really thinking hard about what's being said, disturbed by the assumptions, unable to just chuck it all, looking for a place to talk honestly about the things that disturb them.  In a lot of cases (see the "comments" sections for examples) questioning causes people to be gently disfellowshipped: churches depend to a surprising degree on some questions not coming up at all, which is a sin as bad as adultery or gossip in my view.

Here you'll find guest-blogs and comments from committed Christians, agnostics, devoted atheists, and many others who attempt to understand scripture, faith, life, the nature of belief in unseen things, from a critical perspective.  But you won't find those things abandoned as unimportant or trivial.  Critiqued right down to the foundations?  Maybe so.  But only because they matter enough to think clearly about.

So "Riparian church" refers to the place between faith and agnosticism, where one is unable to abandon fully either the questions that drove them (or caused them to be driven) from formal faith or their belief that the word "spiritual" means something mysterious but definite.

"Riparian Church" is a place in between, where I think about what the language about an unseen god actually _means,_ when one can say just about anything without fear of contradiction.

In any riparian environment you'll find some creatures more suited to the water, some more suited to the land.  But what they have in common is their reliance on both, the inability to abandon entirely either one or the other.

Finally, it toys with Dostoevsky's idea: "Beauty will save the world."  That might mean nothing.  It might mean everything.

Does that help?

Update on Friday, July 8, 2011 at 11:44AM by Otter

Followup exchange here.