Karen, thanks for filling in the background - and for deflating my sense of being, for a moment at least, at the dizzying leading-edge of contemporary ecclesiology!

The funny thing is, when I googled ‘christ collectives’ I came up with next to nothing - I rather expected the term to have been played with a bit more.

I’m not particularly advocating the use of the term. Indeed, ‘Christ collective’ rather obscures the metaphor - we could be thinking of state-owned farms or some such - ‘Christ commons’ sounds less totalitarian. But I was struck i) by the potential for viewing any Christian community (not just the arty ones) as an ‘art collective’; and ii) by the way the analogy might stretch the imaginations of churches attempting to communicate Christ locally.

I thought it interesting that these ‘art collectives’ are doing a lot more than just art - the analogy suggests a much wider spectrum of creative and provocative activites than might be encompassed within a worship service. It spills out of a controlled environment (worship service, art gallery) into public life.

If anyone else has got examples of where this is happening, it would be good to hear about it.