Gayle and I were not able to attend the recent Sparks conference at Ashburnham Place. In due course we will get some greater feedback but the little we have heard about it sounds great. We also watched this morning a video from the conference of a workshop that Brad Jersak hosted on ‘A more Christ-like God’. Worth watching…
In the presentation Brad used an illustration of being on a journey to cross (eg) London. His background, and many others of course, was that of the evangelical faith with a bias to seeing God as one who needs to be appeased. This ‘evangelical train’ can get one to the station but not across the city. There are then the options of getting out of the train but wandering in the station. Freedom at first but no onward journey. So the need is to find the next train, and one that maybe has the characteristics of ‘forgiveness’ could be an indicator of an appropriate train.
He described part of his own journey as moving from that evangelical train to seeing the value in a dispersed contemplative approach but then moved away from the dispersed aspect. Maybe similar to what Gayle and I read in Brian Zahnd’s book of Water to Wine.
I wonder if we have a bias that is hugely affected by our experience and personality (type)? I tentitively think our analogy might be more along the lines of, leave the station, take to walking, mix with crowd, learn the geography and amble across town. So we are not looking for the next train and do not think that this approach takes away the possibility of leaving the station.
All analogies are simply analogies and imperfect. Mine certainly leaves the question unanswered about intentionality of Christian community. Laying the analogy on one side we of course can defend ourselves (!!) by referring to the many meaningful and accountable connections we make with people who have been key to us over years – and we think mutually beneficial.
A deeper scenario in the current ‘train terminates here’ is probably over priorities. Does the intentional Christian community come first or is it embededness in the wider community? If we are interested in answering that I think that a whole host of things kick in. Our personality type (I can so make out how much I understand the Enneagram with statements like that!), the stage of faith we identify with, and also the context where we find ourselves. The latter should be fundamentally a gospel / mission question… And maybe God might help us find the context that fits our personality type, bring healing to us in the process and enables us to have some measure of effectiveness.
Even if none of the above is of interest (after all my comments and question is as a result of only a couple of lines in the video) the whole video carries a wonderful richness. Enjoy!!