Even in teeming world cities such as Sydney, there is a place for craft. Those singularly focussed, lovingly tended, vocations in which generations have been undertaking the same gentle task at the same gentle pace. There is still a place for slow time. Even a place for a craft that fixes time. A few weeks ago, having discovered that the crown of my prized Seiko Presage watch would no longer wind, I searched online for a repairer in the CBD. I had bought the watch—with its fine emerald-green face, its slim chamfered hands, and its glass back that allows you to see the full machinations—with the firstfruits of my first book’s royalties. I love wearing it. I love looking at it! I love the smooth wind of the crown, the burnished leather strap with its distinct doubled-back clasp.
So I made my way to a repairer, located in 1920s building in the centre of Sydney city, awash with dark timber walls and mosaic tiles. That was a sign of wealth back in the day, but such trappings have long given way to the glass and concrete super-structures now dwarfing it on either side. The elevator had impossibly small doors, the narrow hallway of the third floor, with its anaemic white doors and creaky floorboards were archaic. The watch repairer’s shop was a quiet room. A place of craft. One craft. Here was a place given over to the preservation of one thing and one thing alone. Crafted to perfection over time. A gent in his sixties with an eyeglass, seated before an array of small metallic instruments, turned as I walked in. A gent, I had learned online, with forty-five years’ experience repairing watches.
I explained the problem, hoping it was not going to cost hundreds of dollars. He listened, asked a few questions about the age of the watch, where I kept it, where I wore it, and the like. Then he held out his hand and took the watch from me as a vet might reach out for a sick kitten. Within a few quiet minutes over at his bench he had the crown fixed (“A silicone issue,” he said) before waving away my protestations about payment. I thanked him, and was soon back out onto the noisy street, light rail trundling past, people everywhere, walking, vaping, busking, shouting. Back into the world of fast lanes, fast ideas, centralised markets and side hustles. The real world. The world without craft.
A Needed Craft
In a world of iPhones and smart watches why do beautiful timepieces still exist? It’s clearly not simply for functionality, is it? I mean they’re far more awkward and potentially more problematic. My constant interstate and international travel means that I often glance at my watch in a panic, having forgotten to wind it forward or back depending where I am. But they do exist. And so watch repairers exist as well. It’s a needed craft. One that is handed down, very often, in family lineage.
In the same way, in a world of screen apps and screen taps, a world of swiping left and right, of commodification outsourcing, of virtual sex and with the promise of even more realistic virtual sex to come, the quiet craft of culture repair seems almost quaint. The church has been viewed in the same vein as that 1920s Sydney relic, a building past its use-by date, that has been superseded first by self-help, then by self-construction, then self-deconstruction and then finally by self-loathing as the self-reconstruction mode refuses to kick in. Yet in line with the news of the “quiet revival” slipping ashore in the UK, like a surreptitious and slow-moving William the Conqueror, it would appear that a version of craft, Christian craft, overseen by long-term, deeply embedded, and single-minded repairers, is a pressing need in our day.
Culture Repair
A quiet revival will require a quiet craft to undo the destruction that over six or so decades has rotted the culture out from the inside. There comes a tipping point where one too many cogs stop working and the whole thing comes to a grinding halt. We’re almost there. Stiven Peters makes a similar observation:
Instead of having a defensive or even triumphalist posture, repair taps into what Christians are best at doing: helping those in need. Our Culture does not give guidance on how to interact with the opposite sex. The Church should aid in modeling romance, flourishing marriages, and fulfilling family life. Zero-child households are becoming the norm. The Church, in response, should be saying, “Here is how you date. Let us help you. Here is how we’ve married. Let us help you. Here is how we’ve parented, let us help you.” Our Culture is marked by profound loneliness. The Church should model generous hospitality and deep commitment to the community. Our Culture does not know how to have hope in times of adversity. The Church should model suffering and perseverance. No one else is going to repair these institutions. Only the Church can.
We are going to need churches that will be willing to do craft like a watch repairer does craft. Slowly and over time. Generations. Accumulating gravitas and reputation. We are going to need churches that decide against the bigger, further, faster model. We are going to need churches that slow down in order to build deep craft. Churches that pull out of the fast lane, find the equivalent of the third floor of a once grand, but now passed-over building, and create a community that leans into slow time, and repairs its own brokenness first, before the doors creak open and the equivalent of me with my Seiko Presage walk up to the counter in hope that they can afford the cost of this repair.
Not Broken Despite the Culture, Broken Because of the Culture
For a time we were used to the broken people being broken despite the culture they lived in. Why couldn’t they get themselves together? They had fallen afoul of something, but it wasn’t the surrounding culture. They were dropouts. And that understanding—that the culture was somehow fixed, or at least fixable with the odd silicone squirt—seduced the church into thinking that the culture was not too far from us in terms of what needs to be done to repair it. Those days are long gone. If there are broken people coming to us for repair now, it is because it is the culture that has broken them. And they are deeply broken. They have so little sense of time, that any sense of deep time—seasons, epochs, liturgical frames—stopped a long time ago for them. The almost gleeful dismantling of what it means to be human, and the dehumanising processes of the proud, amoral technological class, have shattered them.
What they need is not a Christianised version of broken time, all shouty and fast-paced. They need the slow, repairing work of craft Christianity. The pastoral equivalent of a watch repairer with forty-five years’ experience, taking his eye glass out and poring it over the deep inner machinations that no longer function. Marriages are deeply broken. The senses of reality, of right and wrong, of how to (or whether to) forgive, of what we are here for and why. The brokenness runs deep. And only deeply-crafted Christianity, over long periods of time, will fix it.
Where are the churches committed to such craft? Where are the faith communities that will slow the whole process down long enough to do the deep work that our culture desperately needs? When the quiet revival slowly pushes on your door, and a face peers through, anxious, nervous and unsure of whether the cost of repair can be met, will your church be there to do the deep work of craft Christianity? It’s time.
This article was first published on Stephen’s Substack.
