I am struggling at bit at the moment. Is it okay to admit that? It's been a bad week with a lot of internal church stuff which I have lost patience with, groups of people who have met and talked about stuff which should be so easy to sort and yet it is made so difficult... Church meetings can be frustrating at the best of times but sometimes they make me almost lose it. I remember a Superintendent at home when I was a teenager coming to a village church. He was brought in to sort out something trivial. He opened the meeting by saying "if you lot think I've got time to come over here and watch you muck about, you are very much mistaken." I can't remember what happened next!
I am struggling with this part of Church and being Church in the world. I am struggling because I am doing more God conversation and more God offering in the world than radical theology in the Church. I preached last night on being the radical Jesus in the brokenness of the world. One lady looked at her watch half way through and the only response I got was "nice hymns." I am called to be a minister in the Church but sometimes I am only hanging on in there to change it. I am beginning to see that traditional forms of Church and things some of our folk are clinging onto for dear life, will not cut it for much longer. Meanwhile, outside organised Church it seems that God is doing a new thing and where Church is exciting, we are meeting that new thing. It is all about relationships.
I reflect on three instances in the last fortnight which have encouraged me but have left me pondering the place of organised and trifle obsessed church (and I don't mean the sort with custard.)
This picture is of The Sanctuary, a space which the Church offered at the South of England Show. I go and do a day's chaplaincy here every year and also in July at the Kent County Show. This year the space was different, renamed and remodelled. The old "Church Tent" had gone and interestingly, so had formal worship on the hour. There was space for people to sit and be, eat lunch, chat, drink tea from the Salvation Army van, come with school parties for activities, use a prayer tent if they wanted and importantly for some use the baby changing facilities. All we did as chaplains was loiter and join in conversation. The Bishop of Lewes was there in the afternoon and after a time was asked what else he wanted to see. He said he was quite happy sitting chatting. We got so many comments mostly from young families about the space and peace and some conversations were very deep indeed. Relational over ritual.
The other week I led my first ever residential retreat at the lovely Penhurst Retreat Centre near my home. 9 of us gathered, all different, with different needs and from very different church traditions. Somehow we created a special community together in 46 hours, and again the God stuff was profound and there was an amazing sense of trust. Our churches were mentioned very little. Our prayer life and time to listen to God was very special. I found a new energy leading them, unlike I have had for some time, despite enjoying my work in a Circuit. God was there.
Part of what I love doing in Hastings and in Rye and in my villages is meeting people on the edge of Church and having conversation. We are finding Messy Church is growing here. We now have it in five out of our twelve churches in the Circuit. We have planted new church communities in it for example on a Wednesday afternoon once a month after school in one of the villages, and a regular Saturday morning community of nearly 50 people in Hastings. A lot of the parents and carers are alien to formal Church but the worship is meeting them, it is very basic and fun but we are beginning to see people ask questions. I have my first Messy Church person want membership and my first Messy Church Mum ask for a wedding next year.
I like what the Vicar in Steyning writes about Messy Church in their magazine I picked up last Monday:
"Do not think that it is the mission of God to make more people like you! It is NOT! We are not encouraging membership of a club with our rules (which seem pretty irrelevant to those beyond) but to invite people to find their own feet in the soil and build their relationship with the Church in new ways which will not fit the way we "do" Church." That's hard for a lot of our people in Church to get.
I am valuing conversations with people where they are. I am doing a lot of baptisms. I meet people in dire poverty and difficulty who just want to know God loves them, whoever this God is. I was thrilled this morning when Zoe my hairdresser for the last three years who finds what I do fascinating and tells me I am "so normal" shared with me she is expecting her first child and then she said "and I am hoping you will do the christening." I was weird three years ago, now we talk about anything. That will be a special thing when it happens. I have her trust because I haven't been churchy and remote.
Amazon has just delivered "Searching for Sunday" by Rachel Held Evans. I am looking forward to reading it. I have just found this on page 158. Perhaps I was meant to read this today. For this paragraph sums up my unrest but still my charge to those who will hear that we can do it differently and make a difference from within what we have, spending more time going out and being, than worrying about how we exist. I am conscious I am writing this having spent a long time working out with folk how you book a room in church!! I hope the Church I serve might soon embrace this sort of vision:
"God surprises us by showing up in ordinary things: in bread, in wine, in water, in words, in sickness, in healing, in death, in a manger of hay, in a mother's womb, in an empty tomb. Church isn't some community you join or some place you arrive. Church is what happens when someone taps you on the shoulder and whispers in your ear, "pay attention, this is holy ground; God is here."
So, where am I in all of this? I am not saying Church is rubbish and that nothing relational is happening in traditional church life. I think I am saying I am frustrated when sometimes we go round and round and think people will come to what we like and we need not do anything other than what we like, where we have always done it and at the time we have always done it. We are blind to what God is actually doing! I believe the Church is on the move. And maybe some things will be left behind because they will naturally run out of energy and relevance. I see a lot of my colleagues really wanting to do something different in ministry at the moment, outside of running churches. I am not there, but part of me just wants people to try and break out and see a bit more what is clearly happening beyond the walls of the institution. Older people say to me about schools - "it is a pity children don't do God in school any more." Then I explain to them that I do more theology in primary school assembly than we do in our church programme. If Sunday congregations came to Messy Church or assemblies or were bolder in chatting what we believe in community, there might be revolution! How have we become so staid?
Sometimes we act as though God is only in what we know and inside our structure. I sense he is more these days let loose in the world, in building community with people who need some rest and space, in cups of tea and picnic lunches in a wooded space, in conversations in hairdressers, in school assemblies and conversations with Year 3 children in break time, in messy ways of doing things that just, well, work.
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