Overheard

I overheard that the denomination is reworking what it means to be a member, and asking whether belief in Jesus is still essential to that membership.

Fast forward. At lunch with a gifted staff colleague I overheard a gripping formula for the church’s best way forward now.

Worship is no longer to be central. The general population does not worship. Face it. Therefore what we offer, as primary, goes generally unvalued. Worship is seen to be like a Gaelic concert on a Friday night or an Armenian ballet on a Tuesday. It calls ever more for a localized and particular audience.

Here is the thrust for today:

Be intentional about walking with people through the stages and crises of their lives.

To be there, person to person, is crucial. We all go through them.

Pay attention to the isolation and loneliness that haunts urban life. Let our people be people to each other, to laugh, and talk, and spend time, and listen and care. This is not religious. It precedes religion and dwarfs it. It is human.

Brave the questions that people are really asking. Our culture may not be religious or institutionally loyal but it is curious, hungry, and keen to know. The questions are eternal and belong to us all. Religious responses are often the property of vested interests and seem a step removed from the street and the beating heart. So listen to the questions and join in the wrestling. We don’t necessarily have the answers. We simply share life-experience out of which stepping-stones to answers sometime emerge.

So, it’s back to the question of the inclusion of Jesus. If Jesus’ name and stereotypes are blocking these deeper conversations, set him aside. He did not lead with his own name in his day. He engaged the conversations. Beneath every great deed and every deep word of his is a series of conversations, gone unrecorded in history perhaps, but vital to the greatness of his work.

In truth it may be easier for us to worship in our familiar ways than to do these harder things within and beyond our doors. Worship can let us slide untouched through three pages of paper and a trio of hymns. Human engagement raises all the terrors and triumphs of an open road, of life. But that is where we live. That is where our truest membership begins and ends. That’s where Jesus lived. We all belong to him in that sense. Not to hide in him but to walk with him and with each other there.