It seems that it has always been the domain of institutional Christianity to try and keep people in line. We invent all sorts of rules and artificial boundaries that might have little foundation in scripture but comply with our own sensibilities and preferences. Then we impose them on others.

Usually these rules have an air of holiness about them, but typically if you dig a little you discover that they are grounded in fear and have little to do with the gospel.

I was reading John again this morning and got up to chapter 5 where Jesus heals the lame bloke by the pool and tells him to ‘take up his mat and get out of there’. The man does as he is told and immediately gets in trouble from the Pharisees because he is carrying his bed on the Sabbath. Somehow the miracle of his healing had eluded them and they only saw a rule breaker (who was violating one of their own laws, as distinct from a God given law.)

This is one of the tragic results of being legalists – we miss the incredible good that happens because we are so concerned about dotting the ‘I’s and crossing the ‘T’s. When Christians / churches begin focusing on the minutiae of personal preference in matters of behaviour and then move to legislate (culturally) on these issues the gospel becomes completely obscured.

Jesus couldn’t care less if you wear a tie at the communion table…

Jesus doesn’t get upset if you leave your hat on when you walk into the church building…

Jesus doesn’t shoot concerned glares each time you open a naked pure blonde

Jesus doesn’t doesn’t care if… you can finish your own sentence here

In fact who was the person that told the man to take up his mat?…

Jesus.

Jesus!

Jesus knew exactly what he was doing. He is the one who flouts these crazy man made laws that only serve to obscure the bigger issues of grace and truth.

I have increasingly less patience for the ecclesiastical police who inhabit our churches and who seek to correct the behaviour of others by trying to conform others to their own standard. Whether it’s the dress code police, the language police, the consumption police or the ‘sanctuary’ police, I think Jesus would take great delight in flouting their rules and showing them to be mere preferences rather than divine commands.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for holy living, but let’s not confuse that with fearful living.

Just a few that I am pondering today…

> I enjoy my life as a part time church leader and part time blue collar worker as it keeps me well and truly earthed in the places ordinary people live, but… I also notice how hard it is for my head to engage more fully with the bigger picture church stuff and I am not sure what this means. Is this how it is meant to be?… Does this allow us to simply better function as a body or is this is going to be a problem?… I used to be a pretty creative thinker and regularly had new ideas flooding to mind, but I get the feeling that physical work and the subsequent tiredness has numbed that part of my brain.

> Because I am only officially employed 2 days a week there is clearly a limit to what can be achieved. As with most established churches, the Sunday gathering is currently our biggest single focus and while I am trying to limit the time it requires of me, I am also finding that a large portion of my paid time simply needs to be spent on this and the internal mechanisms of the church. I am pondering how I effectively lead people out of the buildings while investing most of my paid time within them…

> Compounding that question… In 2 weeks we have to exit the room we meet in for our Sunday gatherings. It is simply a large and fairly bland space that will be divided up into 4 classrooms. We have available to us possibly the largest auditorium in the northern suburbs as part of the school building. It holds around 1200 people and the 60 of us will rattle around like peas inside it. I know many would drool over the possibility of a stadium to fill, but I observe there are two significant tensions here.

The first is that it will shape our imagination and we will feel it is now our duty to ‘fill it’. I know there are plenty who dream of the day when the building is full… While I want people to come to faith I don’t share that dream for a big humungous beast of a ‘church’, because I think it would completely undermine who we are at present. The second tension is simply that we could choose not to meet the coliseum, but the set up required to meet elsewhere is much greater. There is virtually nothing to do in a dedicated auditorium, but it would require several people a few hours of work to set up another smaller room… So there is a tension… Which would you choose?…

> Pain and suffering have been a big part of the journey for the church community over the last few weeks. Some people have been doing it really tough and when you are a small community the pain is felt by all. I wonder what it means for us to be a missionary community in these times. The death of a leader, a cancer scare, families struggling with serious health issues all take enormous amounts of emotional energy and yet this is ‘who we are’ and ‘where we are’. I get the sense that there is a time to ‘look in’ and ‘bear one another’s burdens’ (to use the biblical phrase) and this is possibly the most important thing we could do at this time. To gee people up for work ‘out there’ when the body is going thru intense pain is like insisting you go to work on a day when your leg has been lopped off and you can’t get out of bed. A time for everything?…

> We have a church sign that sits on one of the most visible pieces of signage real estate in the suburb, but it is pretty lame and outdated… If it communicates anything it isn’t that we are a community you’d want to be associated with. As a person who isn’t really into signs, one part of me couldn’t give a fig about it… except that we have a sign and its a bad one and it is highly visible… So I am thinking that if we are going to have a sign in the most visible area in the suburb then we at least ought to have the best sign we can possibly have. If you’d told me 12 months ago I’d be pondering signage I would have laughed at you…

> So in the middle of the time constraints, physical challenges and the pain of being a church community I am finding myself having to re-imagine my own missionary identity and my own contribution as a leader. This is a new era for Danelle and I and I don’t feel like I am going back to ‘riding a bike’ and can simply hop back on. It would be easy to do that, but its not where we want to head.

One of the inspiring parts of the last 5 weeks for me has been seeing the extent to which Danelle has shared the leadership role with me. It is the first time we have been officially invited to be joint co-leaders and we are seeing it work out well. She is very pastoral and very good at identifying needs and working with people to get them met. We also function well together and value each others unique styles and emphases so it has been great to do that more intentionally in this setting.