Have you thought of any New Year’s Resolutions yet?…or reminded yourself of last year’s resolutions! How we would go running and get fit!!?…
David Spiegelhalter (allegedly)
For every half hour we run, we live for an extra half hour, which we spent running…
Have we ever thought of what resolutions our Churches might consider?
In today’s society we are awash with social media, informing us, deluging us with the latest breaking news – isn’t it all breaking these days?
We may try to avoid #FakeNews by taking feeds from various sources, so we may compare and contrast the views.
Then why do we still seek to take a singular view when at church? Although the understanding of the key word in the text of that day may require some exegesis from the original Hebrew or Aramaic, where does the wisdom of how to put that into effect in our daily lives come from? Where’s the midrash, a Jewish phrase for the “digesting” of those words, occur? Yes, they may occur in some weekly Bible Study, but if church attendance is dwindling, we may well presume that Bible Study attendance is also decreasing.
Albeit odd these days, but didn’t the liveliest conversations occur over the dining table? I’m hoping that Christmas didn’t bring too many heated moments as family’s came together. What if the periodic understanding, as weekly may now not be the current ‘norm’, were to be given over a meal, in the form of a dialogue?
If we perceive that Church attendance is falling, then as the population is still growing, we may need – as the Labour Party is currently doing – to evaluate where we are and what are we doing.
The Methodist Church, amongst others, is seeking to form #NewPlacesForNewPeople. It’s changing from entirely focussing upon the building, although many are historic, and noting that ‘church’ in its etymological form is about the people. What if we transformed the church, where contextually valid, to mingle with the community. It might not tell the community that they need to change but seek to understand where it is, how its message is being received. We may then be in dialogue not debate, a position with the people, rather than traditionally taking from the moral high ground. It would be a position of vulnerability, but one that Jesus countlessly demonstrated.
Estock & Nixon, Weird Church, (Cleveland : Pilgrim Press, 2016), p.20.
And who knows, maybe in the process we will discover the Christ in each other…