It would have been sometime in the mid 90s when I went up to see Granny one Christimas as a student and we went out to the Grinshill Village Carol Service. I don’t remember an awful lot from the service except the golden glow of candles, mince pies, mulled wine and Granny’s talcum-powdered pink cheeks fresh from the snowy walk outside as she recounted some outrageous yet hilarious situation from the choir practice.
Granny had a very naughty sense of humour. She was pretty direct and could be fairly unkind on occasions so I grew up a bit scared of her but as I got older, I realised that she would collect and tell cheeky stories, her upper lip doing a turtle lip as she tried not to chuckle before the punch line. She had a funny laugh, a sort of hyuk-hyuk mixed with a hee hee hee and however outrageous, you couldn’t help but laugh along with her.
This is my Granny who had cancer and decided she’d had enough of hospital so she disconnected the IV but left the catheter in her arm and escaped via the fire exit having prepped my uncle to be at the ready with the car and a pair of plimsoles.
She assured Uncle Iain she had been properly discharged and asked him to stop for bread and bacon on the way because she was sure Grandad hadn’t got any at home. It took the doctors several days to track her down at home and remove the catheter.
That sense of humour runs in the family – my Dad, my uncles and aunties all have it, my Mum has it but in a different way, when I get together with my brothers and sister the conversation gets to taking the mick and laughing a good deal.
So the fact that this runs in the family makes it difficult to see whether it’s just genetics and personality or whether this sense that for the future, God has an outpouring of joy.
I think it’s the latter though. I find that I can be at work and I feel joy bubbling up inside of me for absolutely no good reason. For no reason at all, I feel like I could laugh hilariously outloud and anything could set it off.
Along with this sense of out of the blue joy comes a desire to be creative, to learn new things just for the pleasure of it, to take up hobbies because I can and because it gives God pleasure to see me enjoy the world.
On my random things I’d like to do list are – keep learning the guitar and Korean, learn to play the drums, write a film script, work for a film company, make pj bottoms, finish painting the cupboard, buy a chainsaw and chop up the branches in the garden, renovate an old piece of furniture in the garage….
These things seem to be an overflow of a stream of creativity that is flowing and comes following a weeding out of religious thinking in me over the last five or six years.
Moving across the world followed by being ill for a year, then covid hitting and starting full time work, these things have been a process of deconstruction and then reconstruction of my faith and how I live it out.
All of these events have taken me, a person who was fully committed to her local church, wouldn’t miss a Sunday, was at every church event with the family in tow, involved in church leadership etc, to a place where I go occasionally, am not in a connect group, am not serving in a local church but I still am committed to church planting and the gathering of believers, still praying, still full of faith, still sharing my faith, still reading the Bible and hearing from God.
I have been dechurched or deinstitutionalised (and not by my own volition), if you like.
In all of this process, my thoughts have been: am I a heretic? why God? what’s important to retain? Am I backslider? have you forgotten about me? have I gone off track? what does the Bible say about this? what do you want the church to look like in the future? have I got it wrong?
I’m not going to lie, during these events I have struggled but particularly we were in lockdown, I felt God clearly say to me in a particular situation:
Stop trying to drag people to church by the hair. I’m not interested in their forced presence. That kind of relationship is not what I am after.
Here’s some takeaway thoughts that have accumulated and become a part of me over the last couple of years:
God is not in a rush. He is so patient and he will wait for people to catch up before he moves on because he loves them. This means that we can be patient with them too. Isaiah 40:11 has a beautiful prophetic picture of God the Father and of Jesus the Good Shepherd carrying lambs (those who are young, weak or have no stamina) and of gently leading ewes and their young, going at the pace that they can travel at.
God created us for his pleasure. He created us with gifts and talents that have no salvatory purpose whatsoever. Just like he created the bizarre and varied form of thousands of orchids and fish live at the bottom of the ocean that haven’t even been discovered yet, God created you and I with things that are completely for his glory and may never be used to bring someone to faith in him.
He wants us to enjoy living those things because our delight in how he created us gives him pleasure.
Somehow in the church we have come to the wrong conclusion that everything we do must be for a purpose and if the purpose is not salvation of souls then it is not worth pursuing.
The irony is that in enjoying the random things God has created us to enjoy, we put on display his glory, which in turn turns people in amazement to look at him.
So enjoy candle-making or making tiktok videos or learning to speak Chinese even though you live in Patagonia. Let’s get rid of this idea that we shouldn’t have hobbies because they’re not a worthy use of our precious days here on earth.
God has created rest for us to enter. This is a biggie because it affect absolutely everything we touch and do. Entering the place of rest that God has for me means that I in fully trusting him to provide, and I am no longer plagued by anxiety, fear, depression or the uncertainty of the unknown.
The pressure is no longer on me to perform or achieve because I can ask him to arrange things on my behalf. Entering God’s rest means that he has offered to sort out the things that are bothering us if we bring them to him.
Hebrews 4 and Matthew 11:28 talk to us of him carrying our burdens. He’s already provided peace and rest for us to step in to and he will even help us enter it if we find it too difficult.
So what does the church of the future look like?
For me, it looks like a place where we live our lives hanging out with other believers and inviting people into to an atmosphere where there is an overflow of joy, of peace, of freedom, of grace, of mercy. A place where creativity is poured out in abundance, where people’s lives are restored, where worship and thankfulness abound and where people are accepted just as they are knowing that the Holy Spirit is speaking to them at the pace at which is right for them.
I’m so excited by this thought because I know how much of difference it has already made to me and I can see the potential in the lives around me. I can’t wait to jump in and be immersed in everything God is doing.
Matthew 11:28 in the Message version says:
Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”
The unforced rhythms of grace and living freely and lightly are where it’s at.
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