Learning to BE Church

Paradoxology: An Interview with a House-Church Team, part 2"...if I don't help them find their calling and release them, as opposed to “keep on patting them on the back for their participation in my program, never acknowledging the calling on their life -- then I’m simply holding them "hostage" and keeping them from fulfilling their true calling by God. Also, if I never took the time to know my sheep, I wouldn’t identify their true callings in the first place."

As someone who has pastored a reasonably big [UK standards here] church I so identify with this; I got to feeling that the church enterprise had a momentum of its own and that we were really mainly servicing the ministries that met expectations of the crowds but we didn't really manage to make such a great deal of headway with making sure that people got the spiritual growth coaching that they needed. What tended to happen was that they were expected to plug holes in our programme and pay for the upkeep of it all.

I desperately want to see this turned on its head: the really creative thing is helping to make something of what we have rather than trying to force what we have in terms of people gifts and skilss into our module slots. The art of pastoring is like the art of painting or sculpting or putting on a play: the important thing is the dialogue between what we have and what the vision is that emerges.

The reverse of this to some extent in the exhibition at the Baltic in Gateshead at the moment of the Archigram group of architects in the sixties and beyond. In effect they were set free from the limitations of materials and community and imagined the most wonderful ideas and the creativity and exciement is tangible from the models and drawings, but ... that kind of thinking is now being pulled down in its concrete forms and its blighting of communities pulled apart and never able to reform in these alien environments. Why? Because there was no real dialogue with the raw materials and the communities that they set to house and provide built environment for. I'm not saying these men were personally responsible, just that the kind of runaway creativity freed from the constraints of fundamental realities was destructive.

In fashioning church [and the word 'apostle' is linked by Paul with the word "architektwn" interestingly enough] we need to start with the giftings and callings of God to his people and seek to fashion life together and mission with the grain of what God has already given. It's a kind of corporate spiritual directing. I'm afraid, in learning this, I think I rather failed 'my' church at that time. And yet there's me also thinking; how come I didn't pick any of this up in training? Was it not there or did I miss it?

Ah, perhaps I should stop there. Thanks Chris at Paradoxology for this insightful interview series.