Movement 111

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small ritual -1 rt small ritual I steve collins different sides of the glass . Steve Collins as a writel and web designel in London t've been trying to pin down a discomfort I have about the way churches and church organisations discuss club culture. I'm in a meeting somewhere, a church person is telling me about some laudable initiative in mission to the club culture, and it's all very cool and the people are authentic '.. and yet something bugs me, something's wrong. And I think I've worked out what. It's the way so many church people talk of 'club culture' as if it were a discrete selfcontained entity, something that one is either in or out of, something that can therefore be analysed and ministered to. Part of the Nine O'clock Service mistake, part of its strangeness, was to treat club culture this way, as discontinuous, oppositional, apart from society and demandin$ one's whole allegiance. Maybe it's a London thing, but as a clubber I never felt so marked out from life in general. Some club scenes are seParated, or separate themselves. But club culture in the usual sense means dance music culture - that vast multifarious commercial entity that permeates huge areas of our $eneral culture. There have been times, defining moments when parts of it have been oppositional. There are always undergrounds, but even these are part of a continuum fading into everyday life, with times and places of greater intensity but never separate from the general culture around us. For many people clubs become their whole life at one time or another, but then at other times it's part of the background, part of leisure time. Holidays in lbiza, DJ mix CDs and Mixmagin WH Smiths. Ctub culture is so varied and ftagmented, dance music so ubiquitous' that it can't really be addressed separately from the rest of contemporary society. So the problem of how the Church relates to club culture is a subset of the Church's general culture problem. That the Ghurch sees club culture as a separate entity is a mark of its own separation. lt's almost the only place where club culture isn't just part of the background. Talking to people in church organisations about such things can lead to strange conversations. Sometimes it feels like there's a $ass wall between me and them. We speak the same words, but mean different things. lt's a hard matter to work out why you're not connecting, because it's about 'head-space' - the stuff you carry inside you, the internal furniture of your life. The things we say that sound alike come with different pictures attached in our heads, born out of different cultural vantage points and references. A lot of this stuff goes unexamined until we find ourselves outside our normal context. We would have to live one another's lives for a while, before we could really understand what each was trying to say. Church people talk to me about cross-cultural mission, assumin$ that because I'm a Christian I'm on their side of the divide. But for lne, cross-cultural mission means talking to people inside the Church. The hybrid called alternative worship can be interpreted very differently depending on which side of the glass you stand. For those within the Church, alternative worship exists within church culture and reaches out into the secular. But for many - perhaps most - of those who make it, alternative worship exists within secular culture and reaches into the Church. Both parties are looking at the same thing. But how You read it depends on where you're coming from. lt affects what weight you $ve to its elements' what you think it should be doing, and how. I'm in a caf6, right, trying to explain this to you. Consider Ghurch and world as two buns on the table (not that sort of buns, please). Church sees the task of alternative worship as either building a bridge between the buns, or making the Church bun more tempting. But alternative worshippers are in the other bun (the currants perhaps). They don't want to cross over to the Ghurch bun. They want to make the bun they're in into a Church bun. To do this they'll use its existing ingredients, plus stuff stolen from the Church bun as required. Church as a resource to help them where they are now' not as a Place to move to. The Church fondly imagines that alternative worship is some kind of mission to secular culture. Could it be that alternative worship is really some kind of mission to the Church? ,41- 14 | movement l I
feature: mental health mind a out for mental health Mind, the mental health charity, wants society to break its taboos about mental health problems and work towards healing. One in four of us every year will experience mental health problems of some kind. The World Health Organisation estimated that 1, million people committed suicide in 2000 and that by the year 2O2O, depression will be the second leading cause of death worldwide. Shocking statistics, but nonetheless true. Mental health is increasingly an issue for all of us, yet mental health still suffers from a bad press and ne€lative public attitudes, which sometimes feel so entrenched in our psyche that they'd be impossible to permeate. Public attitudes to mental health problems surface in many different ways. They are apparent in the language people use to describe mental illness and in their reactions to those experiencing mental distress. Traditional attitudes towards sex, race and physical disabilities have all been challenged quite successfully and it is no longer politically correct to use pejorative terms in these areas. Not so for mental distress. These negative attitudes are evident in the discrimination faced by so many people with mental health problems. This discrimination can affect almost every aspect of their lives: employment, family life, finances, even basic human rights under the Mental Health Act. Mind has carried out research which clearly suggests that people with mental health problems are amongst the most socially excluded ih Britain today. Young people are no less affected by public perceptions of mental health, yet they should be. Young male suicide has risen by 2Oo/o over the last decade and we only know the tip of the iceberg of the extent to which young people have eating distress and self-harm. A recent survey from the Association of University and College Counsellors shows that the proportion of students with serious or severe mental illness has risen substantially over the last few years. Some studies estimate that MiM The Mental Health Charity studies estimate that up to 50% of students suffer from anxiety or depression up to 50% of students suffer from varying levels of anxiety or depression. Mental illness of all kinds is exacerbated by stress. How many students are juggling debt and parttime work? How many feel pressured to get a good job to justify expectations or pay off their debts? Many misconceptions surround mental illness. Many believe that people experiencing mental distress are violent, odd, abnormal or are likely to behave unpredictably, aggressively or violently. People are unaware that mental health problems can be overcome, that people can 'recover'. Many young people see mental health issues as far removed from their own experience. This attitude was compounded in the findings of a MORI poll, which found that 23%of respondents said that ifthey had had, or were having, psychiatric treatment they would be reluctant or unwilling to admit this to their friends. lt is hardly surprising that mental health is still swept under the carpet, even amongst close friends and family. Psychiatrist Suman Fernando says: 'When we do not understand people, we fit them into categories we think we understand. The same could be said of the pejorative terms used by many to refer to people with mental health problems. These terms are applied to a whole variety of mental health problems with very little thought.' 'Spastic', 'cripple', 'paki'and 'nigger'are no longer acceptable in society, but read any tabloid, stand in any pub or school playground and before long you'll read or hear words like 'schizo', 'nutter', loony' and 'psycho' used as terms of abuse. What does this reveal about our attitudes to mental health problems? This use of pejorative language has the effect of dehumanising the person being described so that they become the targets of cruel jokes or public outrage. A good example of this is the use of the term 'schizophrenic' as a noun. The individual is quickly reduced to just their diagnosis. This can be seen when newspapers I movement | 15
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Movement 111

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