Ordinary People

One aspect of being the parent of adult children is that you never know who's going to be home for tea. For the first time we found ourselves home alone on New Year's Eve and seriously debated whether to stay up until midnight or not (for the record, WE DID, cause we're hard-core), the combination of work, social activities and our eldest having moved out mean that everyone sitting down for a meal at the same time doesn't happen.

Except for Sunday nights. Most of the time Sunday evening is family meal. It's a time when we enjoy being 'us', a family. It's where our lives intersect and we get to share each other's worlds and the laughs, concerns, triumphs and challenges we all face.

Sunday nights are one of my favourite times of the week. I love the banter and jokes and wide-ranging conversation the seven of us share. I love sitting down after the meal and continuing this time of shared life. I love family night.

It occurred to me that we used to do this all the time. When our kids were little or at school we used to sit down and have this pretty much every night. The conversations might have been a little different (more, "Eat your veggies" and less, "How was work this week?"), but the laughs and enjoyment were the same. I think I appreciate our Sunday evening meals because they are an event rather than routine.

And I wondered, how much of our normal routine, of the the ordinary and regular aspects of life do we fail to truly appreciate because they are just that: routine, ordinary, regular?

We've just celebrated Australia Day and a friend of mine posted an article from an American visitor reminding us to appreciate some of the great things in our nation that Americans don't enjoy. The article highlighted the fact that we have free health-care, good roads, fewer guns, and even small shops and bakeries can make good coffee (apparently the word 'coffee' in America is also applied to flavoured dirt and constantly re-heated, drip-filtered bath water).

Once again these are the ordinary and regular aspects of life in our nation that we fail to adequately appreciate. Often it takes an outsider or a change in circumstances before we really take notice of the special things, times and people in our lives.

All of this caused my thoughts to wander off into this question: do we give appropriate value to the people in our lives, or even those we simply meet everyday?

I was thinking about how much I enjoy Family Night and the relationships and dynamic of our little times, and a little thought (hmmmm, maybe God?) popped into my head. Do I place sufficient value on people? All people, everyday people, regular people, the people who matter so much to Jesus whom I claim to follow.

I didn't appreciate that thought intruding on my warm and fuzzy family feelings. I tried to ignore it, to push it away, to close it behind a closet door in my mind, but the irritating little critter just kept popping up again. So I addressed the issue: Do I value people sufficiently in my life?

No.

It's easy to place value on people I like. It's easy to 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you' and practice forgiveness and kindness and generosity to people who I count as friends, family, are like me and who like me. But that's not the question I feel I was being asked. I think the suggestion was that I examine my attitudes towards a whole lot of other people.

I just typed, and deleted, a whole paragraph of the type of people I don't value and, in fact, really irritate and annoy me. That isn't, however, the point of this post. I think the point of the persistent little though was to remind me to place value on every person I meet and everyone who crosses my path each day.

The point was to remind me that my life and my world is full of people of all walks of life, of all cultures and ethnicities, of all beliefs and genders and orientations that are so loved and valued by my God that he went to extreme lengths to demonstrate his love and provide a way to welcome them back into relationship. If God places such value on them, so should I.

It matters not whether I like them or not, whether they like me, or whether we actually know each other; what matters is the way I view them. Family Night is special and precious because it is no longer ordinary - no one is ordinary and therefore everyone is special and precious.

I'm suggesting for a moment that everyone is nice, or 'good', or the sort of person you'd have over for dinner. I'm not proposing that the attitudes, behaviours and actions that people exhibit are all to be supported, accepted or even tolerated. I'm simply suggesting that in the ordinariness of life, there is the opportunity to celebrate the value of the people we meet and see in them the image of God in whose image they are created (damaged, distorted, twisted and fractured though it may be).

To me this is a challenge. I'm not a particularly grumpy or nasty person (I don't think so anyway), but I am impatient and frequently distracted by me and my agenda rather than noticing the surprising and constant presence of God in my world.

And in the midst of my life I wonder if the Christian message, the 'love God and love others' essence of my faith, the 'whatever you did for these others you did for me' practice of my faith, is sometimes as simple as looking at the bank teller, the checkout person, the mum with her baby in a stroller, the elderly person with their walking frame, the woman in her burka, or the two young men holding hands, and see them as valued, loved and welcome.

Ordinary has value, ordinary is beautiful, ordinary is....well....extraordinary....

Adventure

On a scale of 1 to Indiana Jones I think I'm around a 2, or perhaps a 3 on my more radical days. I'm sorry to say that I'm not very adventurous. I'd like to be one of those cool, trendy, exciting, debonaire, risk takers - but I'm not. I don't even like roller coasters, and don't suggest bungee jumping! Are you crazy? I've watched people do that, most recently in Queenstown on our holiday, and it only reinforced my absolute conviction that tying an elastic band to my legs and jumping head first off a perfectly good bridge in not on my 'to do' list.

My lack of adventurous nature is such that when on a holiday in Tasmania a few years ago we decided to be spontaneous and not book accommodation! We'd just find somewhere to stay wherever we ended up. For most people that is no big deal. For my wife it was an expression of her adventurous personality. For me...I spent the days stressed because I didn't know where I'd be sleeping that night. Yes I had fun, yes I enjoyed the sights of southern Tassie that we visited - BUT WHERE WAS I SLEEPING???

I tend to be a creature of habit. My wife recently moved our toothbrush holder to the opposite side of the sink, and it has taken me a couple of weeks to stop trying to put my toothbrush where it doesn't go any more. Even today my habitual nature was on display. I've taught all four of our children to drive, most recently our youngest son. So this morning we dropped our car off for some repairs (thanks hail storm...) and my wife drove us home in our son's car only for me to be constantly checking her speed and the rear vision mirror. It wasn't about her driving (honestly), but when I'm in the passenger seat of that car it's what I habitually do.

Creature of habit, not Indy.

Which is disappointing because I've always loved adventure stories and movies and, from the comfort of my own home, can imagine myself as an intrepid explorer discovering new lands, overcoming daunting challenges, enjoying new experiences, in short, having adventures.

In many ways the journey our church has been on over the last few months and the unfolding plans for 2014 can best be described as an adventure. If an adventure is exciting and terrifying, is filled with challenges and possibilities, requires a trust in those you are traveling with and a dependence on God, takes you into unexpected places with surprising discoveries, and requires that you get your own personal Star Trek on to "boldly go where no one has gone before," then I'm finally on an adventure.

As a result of prayerful reflection linked to a growing conviction that God was calling us to be church rather than do church, and that church wasn't an event or a place but a people (I know we all say that, but think about it, is it really evidenced as such in practice), we embarked on deconstructing our faith community to re-birth and re-plant it in a way that was more organic and relationship centred. We were influenced by Mike Breen and 3DM ministries (weare3dm.com), Hugh Halter and the Tangible Kingdom (missio.us), Brandon Hatmaker and his book Barefoot Church (brandonhatmaker.com), Tim Chester and his book Total Church as well as numerous books, articles and podcasts from Alan Hirsch, Neil Cole and others.

Vision, conviction and circumstance all collided and we have now spent almost five months as a community of communities. Each Sunday our church meets in several homes across our city for the purpose of spiritual formation, discipleship and mission. We seek to strengthen our relationship with God through prayer, reading and studying the Bible and hearing what he is saying to us as individuals and a group; we seek to strengthen our relationships with each other (fellowship) by developing open, honest, authentic relationships that facilitate discipleship as we challenge, encourage and learn from each other to walk in the way of Jesus; and we seek to strengthen our life of mission, to image Christ in our community through our everyday life and find ways to serve our community and connect with it to show love, compassion and justice, and tangibly demonstrate what life looks like in God's kingdom.

Once a month we all come together, because we are a community of communities, and worship God and celebrate what he has been doing in our lives since last we gathered. We see ourselves as a community of believers who practice a rhythm of Gathered, Scattered and Sent.

We are on a journey (an adventure) and have learned a lot, have so much more to learn, and so much farther to go. We are trying to get out of our Christian box and find ways to just connect with people. That means lots of different things. It means serving the poor and needy, it means partnering with other groups to provide help wherever it is needed, it means activities where we can welcome people to widen our circle of friends, it means seeing people as people and not as prospects, it means trusting that God knows what he is doing in us and through us and that the life within will actually shine through, it means being creative and generous and going places we wouldn't normally go and listening and loving and accepting.

In short in means being the sort of people Jesus expected his disciples to be.

The journey we are on and the changes we have made to the life and structure of our church isn't the only way of being 'church' nor is it a criticism of any other church or group. It's simply where we believe God has led us. My prayer and my hope is that we will be able to connect with people who are in different places of their journey of spiritual discovery and in some way point to Jesus as the perfect revelation of God and his love and redemptive plan for our world. My hope is for our small communities to network and grow and for our Gatherings to rejoice in lives changed, families healed, people fed and clothed, dignity restored, and the light of Christ turning up in the most unexpected places.

This is my adventure. It could all go wrong, there are no guarantees of success (whatever that means), but we can't do anything else.

So let me revise my first sentence: On a scale of 1 to Indiana Jones, I'm Bilbo Baggins - on an unexpected journey, feeling ill-equipped and out of my comfort zone, but with a growing confidence that this is the story I was always meant to live.