The Experiment

So tomorrow myself and 8 others will be going on holiday…to the beach!! Great! But we are going with a vision and a purpose which I must confess I don’t always have when I go on holiday, although I should.

Our vision is that God will be with us, and our purpose is what ever God has install for us when we get there. We have no plan, no intentions, no details and very little idea of what will happen.

We go only with the intention of being a community of people who follow God, and we’ll see what happens from there…

We don’t go to preach, or to tell people ‘the gospel’. We don’t go to stand out and hand out flyers. We don’t go to love people so they can be loved by God.

But we go to have fun, and invite others to have fun with us. We go to live life to the full (where better than the beach) because our lives have been transformed. We go to love people because they are already loved by God.

It may all go tits up. It may be boring. It may rain.

Who knows…

But in sharing this vision I’d ask you to prayer for us, or wish us luck, or to think about us and in 10 days time I’ll come back and I’m sure I’ll have some stories to tell…

Maybe it’s that nothing is new

I was on a wee bike ride earlier, listening to music as I do and although I’ve heard this song loads of times, these lyrics stood out…

‘Constantly searching to find something new
But what will you find when you think that nothing’s true?

Maybe it’s that nothing is new’

Idlewild, American English

Even though it probably has nothing to do with what Idlewild meant, my thoughts were as follows:

As we search for some thing true, we often look for new and exciting things. But sometimes what is true has always been there, and is found, not in the new, but in the old, the boring, the mundane, the day in day out, the things we take for granted, the things that are always there but we fail to see them, because although they are extra-ordinary, they are nothing new.

The Church is a Whore

For those of you that know me well you’ll be aware that although I may speak highly of Jesus I don’t speak highly of the church or Christianity – which is an oxymoron for some. For sometime now I’ve been asking questions about the necessity of ‘church’, about its culture and practices, and about it’s ability to be God’s agent on earth. Why do so many of my ‘non-Christian’ friends feel uncomfortable and let down with church? Why do we rarely see the church globally, with brothers and sisters in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Nigeria, etc? Where is Jesus in the church?

I often have long conversations with friends who have a love for both Jesus and the church about ‘my cynicism’s’, some encouraging, some not. But always I’m prompted to re-think and re-evaluate my reasons for detracting from ‘the church’, which is a good thing. Such a conversation prompted this post.

I’ve come to see church in 3 ways, there are probably more. There is church as building (chapels, cathedrals, ‘churches’, and as some people try and move away from tradition, houses, cafes, pubs), church as occasion (time, place, activity), and church as people (or as some might say ‘the body of Christ’).

People often tell me, and I agree with them, that church isn’t about going on Sundays, but it’s about being a community of people. They say it’s not about building and occasions, but about people. People say this all to easily. (If you’ll allow me to be cynical then I’ll tell you I often see church as a bit of a social clique for Christians, with further factions of groups within the larger. If Jesus wanted a church, which only a certain type of Christian feels comfortable in, then we’ve succeeded.) When church is about buildings and occasions then it’s only the people who walk through the doors and lift their hands that count, but I think when church is about people we have to realise that the church (people) isn’t just about those in church (building).I consider myself to be part of the church, despite not always going to church. Jesus said ‘when two or more gather in my name I am there also’, something I’m a fan of. Is our gathering so confined to certain places and times? My vision of church isn’t.

Unfortunately this has turned into a rant, which it wasn’t meant to be, in fact I wanted to say how much I cherish the church. Despite its share in the history of atrocities, it should also be credited for its good work too. The church runs deep in my own story and in many others, great stories of the churches, on going, ‘success’.

The most important message should be that nothing will never change by leaving and setting up camp elsewhere, and so it should be ones roll to help grow the good fruit, regardless of the bad (see my previous post).

I’m sure I shall always have a ‘holy dissatisfaction’ (a phrase used by someone else to describe ‘my cynicism’s’) for the church, but it should be this dissatisfaction which drives me to strive for something bigger and better, to strive for a church which really does bring good news.

As St Augustine said ‘The church is a Whore, but she’s my Mother’