Its always puzzled me why churches close during holiday periods, evening services close down and day time activities stop, its like we are a school. When I was a student it drove me mad that as soon as I had some time to get involved in church everything simply stopped. Today for example, is another bank holiday and I was meant to take the day off from work. But instead this morning I went to work.
It occurs to me that if you are lonely, isolated or feeling a bit sad the one thing that would be really rubbish would be if the church was closed on a bank holiday. The one day when everything is shut, everyone is busy, the one day when the world could be incredibly empty looking seems like the perfect day for the church to be open. So this morning The New Place was open. OPEN.
I’m not saying we should work ourselves into the ground if we are involved in the church, I’m only trying to say that we are meant to be contrary and upside down, we are called to do things differently. lets think like the person who needs us the most, not think of the lie in we could have. I had a lie in yesterday, when I didn’t go to church.
Its time the church began to think creatively about how it operates. It seems the case that many of our members view church as being like work, its like having another job. You can go into churches where people talk about duty a lot or they tell you that they work so hard for the church because they feel the burden of keeping it alive.
In so many churches the members look so fed up, so tired, and honestly so pissed off with it all. Its the way people look when they’re unhappy with their jobs. And if you listen to people in churches it often doesn’t take long to hear the grumbles and the worries; it reminds me of when I worked in telesales. There’s always a seemingly unachievable target to meet, usually in the church this revolves around two things, one is money and the other is numbers.
Everything seems like such hard work and no matter what you do there’s always that one person in every congregation who will grumble and complain. Deep down I’m sure its because for them, the church has just become like another job.
If you are in a small church the feeling is compounded by phrases like “not enough workers”; and you find people in positions which they would never have naturally gravitated towards; or perhaps, sadly, you find people who are so held in by this church/ work ethic that they never get to move out of that mode into a space and place of creatively engaging with God and with others.
I wonder sometimes what it would be like, if we got rid of the roles, targets and ‘work’ of the church. What would happen if we were just a group of people who got together once a week to share stories and sing songs; what if we were a group of people who ate together and prayed together? There would be those people who would worry about who was going to tel the stories and who was going to cook the food; there would be those people who would really struggle to get away from the church/ work thing.
But if we sat on those people for a month or so until they stopped worrying and struggling, could church become something that we love to do, something that nourishes and gives us hope and laughter? As we told our stories would these people who most of the time dislike each other come to love each other, as we ate together would we realise that we wanted to spend time with each other? Would we start to open on bank holidays?
I’m back after my Easter sabatical. It was nice but weird having a lentern fast from blogging, and much creativity took place which I’m trying to display here but apparantly my internet connection doesn’t like the photos so I will have to work on it in the next few days. I have lots of pictures and will flickr them this week and put up a link.
