Bournagain

Fridays bring a bit of a change in our daily routine, as Heather has started some volunteer work, which means Dad gets to spend a morning teaching the children (we’re home-educating for anyone who didn’t know).

For ages Heather had noticed how many “SDF”s we have in our community (”SDF” is an acronym for “no fixed abode” in French), but we’d always struggled to find a practical way of getting involved with these people. That is, until we discovered the Maison bleue - “the Blue House”. We’ve found churches here to be fairly unengaged when it comes to working with the down and outs. It’s partly to do with the Church and State thing - since 1905 the institutional Church has been pushed to the periphery of social action as the State has taken more responsibility. It has got more and more complicated for religious organisations to be involved in this kind of thing, and I guess Christians have just put it in the too hard basket.

But there are a surprising number of secular people with a social conscience who are out there trying to make a difference, and we met some of them this last August at a Forum for clubs and associations in our town of Rezé. Heather has started volunteering there with a friend, Sarah, every Friday morning. The Maison bleue is like a little haven for homeless and street people, or people who have simply fallen on hard times. It’s open every morning. Breakfast is served, there are places to sit and chat, play cards, take a shower, and a group of volunteers who are there just to serve and offer a listening ear.

“We mustn’t ever expect these people to change” is something Heather has heard more than once from the other workers. Sure, the “clients” are angry, they are unwashed, they are lacking even the most basic social graces. Some of them even get quite violent: the Maison was closed for a week a while back after the violent outbursts of one of the patrons. But the goal is not to change these people, but just to be there for them.

How often do we see needs in our communities, but feel paralysed into inaction because it just seems too difficult to do anything about it? This paralysis blinds us to the fact that there are things already going on. We don’t necessarily need to be the people who start these projects; sure, if we aren’t the initiators then we can’t put a nice plaque on the door to show that the project is owned and run by this or that church or ministry. But are people really interested in what we do on Sunday mornings?

In a world without God, “we can’t expect change” is a very tragic, but very inevitable statement. But what happens when Holy Spirit-filled, Kingdom-oriented, Jesus-loving people step out of their religious buildings and come into places where real life is happening, where people are struggling with the hard realities of existence, longing for change, but seeing only impossibility?

Disciples know that change is possible, because they’ve seen it in their own lives.

It’s early days yet, but we’re very interested to see what might develop here.