nakedpastor

I received a call yesterday from someone who wanted to interview me regarding emerging forms of Christian and church expression in Canada. It was a nice talk. He asked me about the community I pastor. I told him what I could. But I could appreciate the frustration this guy must feel when trying to get a grip on what’s happening here. I could tell he understood much of what I was saying. We seem to be on the same page.

He’s making a documentary on the issue. So he asked me questions and I gave him answers as best I could. But I told him that there’s really no way to describe what we’re doing. It’s kind of like asking me how we are as a family. It is never the same. There’s no pamphlets or brochures that we can hand out. He would like to come visit us. But again, I’m always nervous about those kind of things. You can come visit us on a Sunday, but there’s no way you’ll catch what we are about. It has to be lived and experienced to be understood. Our community is unpredictable, spontaneous, bi-polar, and often messy. The music can be good. The coffee may be ready. The room may be warm. But then there’s all the people. Sometimes we’re dealing with suicide, sometimes infidelity, sometimes drunkenness, sometimes drugs, sometimes anger, sometimes heresy, sometimes death, sometimes depression, sometimes silliness, sometimes all the good things too…. well, you get the idea. In fact, I never know from one day to the next where I stand.

Sometimes people visit and leave because, they say, they want to feel like they’ve actually been to church. Some leave because they say that our church is too full of pain. Sometimes they leave because they are offended by the crass humanness of our people. But once in a while they’ll stay, and they are usually people who are totally unchurched or people that have been so burnt by the church but aren’t quite ready to totally abandon it altogether. This is its last chance.

I imagine, at the end of our chapter… if we have one… it will say: “They’re just a gathering of pretty f***ed up people! But I found a home.” Maybe.

I cannot change the world and I have no intentions of doing so. I can’t change the world, but I can change! So I don’t expect or ask the people of my community to change the world. I resist all invitations to change our city, to transform our town, to change our society. I always encourage us to work on ourselves. It is urgent! This at first might look like passivity.

At the same time, I feel it is my task to love what is, to love reality. I cannot live in a fantasy world of what could’ve been or should’ve been or what can be. I have determined to forsake fantasy and to love reality. I am convinced that this is where God is truly present. This is extremely challenging because my mind yearns to flee from the harsh realities that are presented to it, including those harsh realities that come in the form of other people. My mind yearns to build a fantasy world where it can pretend it is immune from all danger, weakness and ultimately death, and where it can exalt itself in a dream of invincibility and immortality. But I am pulled by reality to leave behind all my theories, dreams and heavenly theology and become grounded in this reality that I find myself in now.

If I recognize my own fear and frailty, then I can recognize the fear and frailty in others. And this is where true love, true compassion begins. And this is where the apparent passivity is transformed into action… the action of love. It is actually quite subversive and counter-cultural. This is why I think it is of utmost importance that Rothesay Vineyard be a safe place for this to happen. This would explain a great deal of why we are the way we are.