Bournagain

There are many things we want to achieve while we are here in New Zealand, and one of them is to connect with as many church home groups as we can. It’s much easier to connect with people in a smaller meeting than on a Sunday morning. We had a great time at Kevin & June’s last night. This is one of the groups at St. Davids in Hamilton that takes a particular interest in what we’re doing in France. We gave our usual “missionary presentation”, and we feel we’re getting a bit better at explaining some of the changes we’re going through in our work in France. But not surprisingly, we got out of the meeting much more than we put into it. It seems that God’s purpose in us visiting different groups is not just for us to inform them as to speak to us through them. We were really touched by their understanding and perceptive questions.

Met some interesting people too. We prayed for Barbara who is off to northern Spain in two days to walk part of the camino with her daughter– the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. We feel like we’re on a pilgrimage of sorts while here in NZ so could really identify. Then there was Alejandro, an Argentinian studying English here. We had an interesting chat about how we find God’s mission for our lives. Should we look for it in spiritual retreats and solitude, or out there on the street where people are suffering?

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Our house is full of teenagers again – well, pre-teens really. Maria is having a girls night to say goodbye to school friends before leaving for distant shores for a few months. We were encouraged that one of the Dads that didn’t know us at all called to find out who we are and wanted to meet us before deciding whether his daughter could come or not – we’re not so weird after all wanting to know the parents of the girls that invite her to their homes! They are still 12 after all, but there’s such pressure on kids to be independent.

He stayed for a drink. Interesting guy – a former social worker very familiar with the kinds of “hard cases” Heather meets at La Maison on Monday mornings. He defined himself as a “catho de gauche” – a left-wing Catholic, which he also defined as a humanist (super handlebar moustache!) He burnt out in his work with street people, and this meeting comes at an interesting point in a discussion Heather and I have been having about what motivates people to care for the unwanted, and to stick at it, when God isn’t in the picture. Read the rest of this entry »

Just came back from a meeting that I could never have imagined happening even a year ago. It was just a meeting of the musicians at the St. Sébastien church to get a little bit more organised for the Sunday worship times. So what’s the big deal? Well, there were 13 musicians there – THIRTEEN!! It’s amazing what happens when somebody (yours truly) leaves. All kinds of people start coming out of the woodwork! And the meeting went really well and I did nothing toward it other than be there.

After feeling like “Mr Music” in the church for the better part of 8 years, this is all so weird. So many conflicting emotions – should I feel thrilled at all these new gifts coming forward in the church, guilty at not having got things better organised sooner, satisfied at being able to move on without leaving everyone in the lurch, miffed that they’re going to get on perfectly well without me, sad to be missing out on these exciting new developments…?

Mission seems to be about putting your gifts at the disposal of God and others, doing what you can, trusting that God is more than able to carry on the good work he has started and that other people won’t mess it up, and then leaving just when things are getting really good!

The leaving is the hard bit.

“Every church member who loves the church will also be deeply pained by it. This does not, however, call for discarding the church, but for reforming and renewing it.” This quote so reflects my thinking about the Church at the moment that I thought I’d share it with you. It comes from Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission by D. J. Bosch.

He talks about the tension that exists between the ideal Christian community that we long to experience, and the weekly reality that can seem so insipid at times. After 20 years of commitment to local churches, my feeling about church life over the past 12 months has been one of at times overwhelming fatigue. The thing that has saved me from cynicism has been the wonderful people in the churches, which is not surprising when we consider that the church is not the building or the religious system, it’s the people.

I have been trying to keep abreast of some of the many-faceted discussion on the Internet about the “emergent church”, simple church, home church etc. etc. Some of it is inspiring, some of it so negative about the existing “institutional” church it leaves a bad taste in your mouth. How to walk the fine line of living with the dissatisfaction and unfulfilled desire on one hand, while upholding the Church as the divine strategy for communicating the kingdom of God to the world? Bosch quotes a timely warning from Bonhoeffer :

“He who loves the dream of a Christian community more than the community itself, often does great damage to that community, no matter how well-intentioned he might be”.

I have no doubt that God is working in the local churches around us. But I have the uncomfortable feeling that the church’s structures often stand in the way of Christians fulfilling their mission in the world. What we call “evangelism” is all about trying to get people to come into our buildings, and very little about being out there making a difference among this generation’s “lepers, widows, poor, lame, blind” – the kind of people that Jesus spent much of his time with.

Kingdom people seek first the Kingdom of God and its justice; church people often put church work above concerns of justice, mercy and truth. Church people think about how to get people into the church; Kingdom people think about how to get the church into the world. Church people worry that the world might change the church; Kingdom people work to see the church change the world. Howard Snyder 1983, Liberating the Church

This is of course a very old discussion which has been going on since long before I became a Christian, and it’s a shame that it’s taken me 20 years to catch up! Back in my student days when I knew everything I used to think that people who talked like this were “unspiritual” and had their priorities in the wrong place.

Anyone out there feeling like me?

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.