Where Real Church meets Real Life

There are so many wonderful Fresh Expressions of church all around us today. As I continued to read Ancient Faith, Future Mission, I felt like a kid on a storybook Christmas morning, unwrapping one bright expression of church after another.

I’m looking forward to meeting Stephanie Miller and the members of the Leadership Team from The Crossing @ St. Paul’s Cathedral in Boston. Having lived and worked in Boston for 18 years, I know the church’s neighborhood and the Boston Common well. It contains quite the mix of people with money and power, people who live on the street, and everyone in between. I’ll have to explore the web links mentioned in the text, the band U2 and U2Charists. I’m such an old fogey that I don’t think I could name a single U2 song!

I laughed as I read Abbot Stuart Burns' “Concluding Thoughts” in Ancient Faith, Future Mission (Ancient Faith, Future Mission, p. 173): “Remember, the disciples were with Jesus day in, day out, for three years, and still they persisted in getting hold of the wrong end of every stick Jesus gave them.” He continues, “It’s no wonder the genera­tions that have followed have been slow to grasp his meaning and have often mistakenly taken his metaphors literally.” It seems to me that many have, likely, mistakenly taken much that Jesus wanted to be taken literally as metaphor, essential things like “Love your enemies” and “Love one another”!

I agree with Burns’ words, “It takes time – a lot of time – to get to the point where we can allow God to be who God is, rather than what we would like God to be.” I cannot help but wonder about Burns next thoughts: “This God, who meets us in our neighbour, chal­lenges us to recognize the sacredness of other people, and espe­cially those we find difficult, and to receive them as gift.” (Ibid, p. 175). While I think Burns’ statement is generally true, I also believe that there are people who are so scarred by life that they become highly destructive of life around them, including themselves—people that M Scott Peck would describe as “evil.” I can love the one potentially evil person I believe I’ve personally encountered, and grieve for the destruction in his life that brought him to this point, but I find it hard to receive him as a gift or my encounter with him as an encounter with God. Likewise, the behavior of the drunk driver who killed my 19-year-old cousin Ricky was so contemptible in the years before, during, and after the accident one could argue that he met Peck’s criteria for being diagnosed as evil. I just can’t see that Rick’s encounter with him was a gift or an encounter with God.