I've somehow found myself helping to lead Graceland, the church's semi-regular evening alt-worship service. (No, we haven't got a website yet...) If alt-worship is the buzzword, then really what we're trying to do is, quite simply, to seek God. It's more relective and experimental than our morning worship services, and there's more room for personal thought and self-expression. I find it encouraging that it does, after all, seem to be possible to be a Christian while still retaining the ability to think.
Planning for Graceland has got me back on one of my favourite hobby-horses, the question of what church is actually for. At the moment, I'm chewing over Bonhoeffer's ecclesiology: put very simply, the idea that church is a place where relationship is restored- our relationships with each other and with our creator. This definition appeals to me because it's simple and elegant, and has the ring of truth about it. I think it really sums up what worship and prayer are all about, and it encompasses the Bible too, which explains more what restoring relationship means in every day life. I find this definition quite liberating too, because it leaves so much scope for worshipping God and building community in new and different ways. So having a meal with a group of people who are seeking God can be every bit as much an expression of church as singing hymns, lighting candles or enjoying God as revealed in his creation.
Am I getting woolly and liberal in my old age? I just love to explore new ways to worship God. It strikes me as a particularly worthwhile exercise, since the traditional (or at least most common) modes of church seem to be becoming less and less relevant to the world outside the church. The gospel never changes, of course, but isn't it time to exercise a bit of courage and try expressing it in new ways?
1 comments:
Over the last few years there seems to have been a fairly indiscriminate trend towards a Church that exists rather than happens-- a collective rather than an event. While some people have sought an expression of Church that resembles that in Acts 2 or the Celtic Church, and some a Church that happens in their world (clubs/skateparks/football stadia), others have simply sought to be Christians that do something.
Although it's quite hard to quantify what links these trends together in any meaningful sense, there seems to be a common link between them in the spirit behind them-- the desire for something real, pure and fresh.
As this trend doesn't seem to mirror any current social trend outside the Church, 2 possibilities spring to mind: either a) the Church is experiencing a reform akin to the social "liberation" of the 1960's, 40 years after the event-- which doesn't sound unlike the customary behaviour of the Church-- or b) this is something that God is stirring within the Church and forms part of the renewal that heralds the beginning of revival.
Either way, the upshot of this trend is that the Church becomes something that the members own, rather than something that is forced upon them by the clergy, and by choosing how to worship and relate to God, people become responsible for this relationship and take an active interest in it, as opposed to waiting for someone else to tell them what to do, which can only be a good thing.
The challenge, however, is once you've found a format that works for you, not to hold onto it but to always look to where God is leading you. In the same way that if you try to look directly at the picture you find hidden in a "magic eye", it disappears, the moment you try to hold onto the expression of Church that works for you and do it all the time, you succumb sooner or later to staleness and relgion and you lose the spiritual dynamism that you found and almost exalt the method above the Purpose.
All this to say that you're not the only person that is seeking a new expression of Church and that there seems to be a good Reason that you are doing so, but to remind you not to sit on your laurels when you're happy with how it's going.
Oh, and hello ;)
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