The line that precedes the rather delightful, ‘they call her Natasha when she looks like Elsie (I don’t want to go to Chelsea)’ byt Elvis Costello. Easily my favourite track by him.
I was sent an email this weekend. It was from someone in the URC bloggers ring thing that I have a link to somewhere on this page. The email is something of an entreaty to get some of the stuff me and my fellow URC ‘emerging church’ bloggers are writing about out to a wider audience. Something I am all for, should be compulsory reading for everyone in the church. The email ends ‘The sense of urgency I feel is that we are in the best place yet to do some significantly different things and explore new ways of operating. We’re just desperately short of models!’.
Readers of previous entries on this site will already be aware that I am very wary of ‘models’ or ‘blueprints’ for ‘doing church’ (sorry). The whole idea of emerging church to my mind is that it does just that, it emerges. You can’t necessarily take what works in one place (BCLC) and try it somewhere else because it just won’t work. BCLC works for us now at the time we do it. That’s to do with the leaders, the location, the structure, the themes and the people who regularly come along. You could in theory take anyone of those elements and use them as the seed to grow something new elsewhere but you cannot take the whole tree and re-plant it and expect it to flourish. If we extend that metaphor we know that transplanting living things into new environments invariably requires a great deal of work to stop them being rejected and dying.
Why are we looking for ‘models’ of how we can structure ourselves when we should be looking for opportunties to enable people to encounter God?
This leads me very nicely into our inability to get ‘Encounters’ off the ground. To save you the bother of looking this up, Encounters is our attempt to do something BCLC like on a different day of the week in a different place with different people. We hoped to do it on a Monday night in a restaurant near us for people we think might be interested in the stuff we want to do. All very laudible and something that a number of people have shown quite an interest in. And yet we can’t seem to get it going. It has only just today occured to me as to why that is the case. I think it is because we are trying to create something based on some things that we have heard work elsewhere but haven’t come out of our situation or experience. For instance, the location, a local Indian restaurant that always seems to be empty hence they would be grateful for us to fill it once a month on a slow Monday night. Something similar could be said of some of the other ‘ingredients’. Basically this idea is emerging but the pieces aren’t in place for it to work yet. At some point in the future something will happen that we can then hang the rest of the stuff onto, at the moment that thing has yet to develop.
This idea of things happening when they are ready to happen rather than when we’re ready to do them is very much in keeping with the notion of the spirit moving opening up opportunities that we have to be ready to take. This is not the same as us inviting the spirit out for a curry once a month on a night when we have nothing else to do because we have heard that it is partial to bit of balti.
