Wagging Church on Sunday is symptomatic of where I am at the moment in life. I’m feeling like I’d like to be doing more in my life and contributing more to the world and a Sunday morning service is just not cutting it. I feel like I’ve used up half of my life and I haven’t had as significant an impact on the world around me. Part of the problem is I have no idea what exactly I’d like that impact to be. Social justice is important to me and although that is what I do for work I often feel like I’m putting in a lot of effort for little reward, a bit like shoveling jelly with a pitch fork. Part of the problem is that this is just the nature of helping volunteers with limited time to work with the marginalized who often have big problems. I thought starting The Space would do a lot for me, and in one sense it has, I get more out of it than any church service I’ve been to in the last 10 years. Perhaps it has filled that “church shaped hole” in me and I’m keen to get on with how I might serve the world around me. A second problem is that as I age I find myself feeling more and more like a social recluse than ever. The more I feel like a recluse the more I’d like to help people. Today I'm starting to pray that God will help me to work this all out.
2 comments:
Hi Chris - I can understand your feeling ... and I'm the leader of the Church you're "wagging" ;-)
We named our large group gatherings "Celebrations" because they are meant to be a time of celebrating the life and the things that we are doing individually, in small groups and corporately.
The idea is to comfort, encourage and challenge each other to keep walking the talk. It certainly saddens me that it seems nigh impossible to create/sustain a living breathing Christian community and I'm continually struggling with missing the mark ...
Over the next three Celebrations we are going to invite people to give a testimony on how they are experiencing/living out the three things that will last - love, faith and hope. For the hope one (on 8th July which clashes with the TEAR conference - sorry) is to have an open mike for the "sermon" time. Anyone can come and speak for a few minutes about the "hope that they have" ... perhaps that might kick start a better way of doing large groups?
However before I give up on large groups, I have to remember that for some people this is the way for them to begin to connect with God .... but we only have large group gatherings fortnightly so that they might not get addicted to them, and move quickly into small group life where the life of the church is meant to be better expressed - worship/fellowship/discipleship/ministry/evangelism - but even there it struggles ....
In Jesus
Hey there Mark.
Thanks for your comment and continuing to read my blog. First I should say that there is no other church that I'd rather wag from the one you lead (if that makes sense in a kind of complementary way). The people are great and I have always felt very welcomed, accepted and valued. Part of the greatness of the church is the awareness (as you've articulated) that being a collection of Xns is a process that will be constantly evolving.
I do think large groups are really important. No one would know who Amnesty International was if they were a small group of 5 well intentioned hard working individuals.
I'm about half way through a post about how churches might get big. Small groups are house churches are great but when they are really great they get bigger and you just can't have a small group of 100 people. So, I think the question for me is not how can we get rid of big groups but how does any gathering of Xns become a big group, without becoming a Mega-Church type church? I've been listening to a few Mike Frost talks of late and might have some constructive suggestions soon.
Chris
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