a new hope for amateur church

If you’re a fan of Star Wars, then you’ll love the brand-new crowd-sourced fan film just released online – in normal-speak, that’s where Star Wars nerds made their own versions of scenes in the film, using actors, cardboard cut-outs, puppets and anything else they could find, sent them in to Darth Vader and he cut hundreds of 15 second clips from them to make the whole film. It is random, disjointed, painful to watch but also brilliant, and mesmerising, for perhaps the same reason.

I love the idea of fans – people who love something – being asked to make it themselves. Instead of being passive consumers of the latest Blu-Ray DVD Extended Directors Cut Olympic Edition, you get involved yourself. Yes, of course it won’t match the professionals; it won’t pass for 3-D when it’s made from a cardboard box. But it’s yours!

It reminded me a bit of when we as Christians go to “Big Events” to see professional musicians & talkers at conferences and things like Spring Harvest or New Wine or whatever is your chosen flavour, get all immersed in the wonder of the Hillsong gas-light anthem with 1000 beautiful people on stage smiling about how Jesus made them all shiny and new… and then try and recreate it in our home church with Marjorie and her 83 year old piano. To be honest, it’s a bit,well, crowd-sourced. It’s a fan film. It’s not going to win an award. But it’s real.

We don’t expect it to be brilliant. It isn’t. But that’s the church. You work with what you’ve got. Jesus came and invited us to follow him, to worship him, and he did away with Professional Worshippers who do it for you, like High Priests. So, you’re not meant to get a glossy show, which is why I am suspicious when I do.

Even the C of E, for all our dodgy theology about priesthood, is crowd-sourced. The reason there is no C of E press office is because we are a collection of diocese who agree to work together. There is no-one ‘in charge’, which is why what Rowan says is not the ‘official’ party line. It’s just his.

May we the church forever be crowd-sourced, the best ever fan film, made by people who love Jesus and spend our time worshiping him because we love him. We won’t be shiny and glossy, there’ll definitely be some visible editing cuts, jerky cameras and accidental comedy moments. But you’ll love watching it.

And better, you’ll love being a part of it. 

george’s [one holy catholic] marvellous medicine

I am an accidental Anglican, by virture of a beautiful lady I fancied who I followed to church back in the 90′s. I’ve now been married to the beautiful lady for 10 years and an undercover Baptist (erm, Anglican) vicar for 6. I don’t mean I’m married twice. I’m the vicar.

Accidentally and reluctantly, I was drawn into the strange concoction of personalities and traditions that is the Anglican church. A bit like George’s Marvellous medicine, it often feels like someone was having a laugh when they decided to put us all together. Po-faced cassock-wearing catholics / cords-and-shirt-wearing evangelicals * [* delete as applicable], too-trendy-jean-and-hoody wearing young upstarts and a whole load of [insert adjective] people across the board.

See what I have just done. Succumbed to the basic human desire to categorise according to prejudice. You are like me, you are not. You are different, so I will stereotype and ridicule, thereby reinforcing my own belief in my innate superiority.

I have just been to a licensing of a vicar in the neighbouring parish, and there could not be a more different church experience. From our low-church mostly evangelical working-class urban thing, to a cathedral-like exposure to choirs and cassocks and incense and posh people in suits and hats and a word called ‘Mass’ and someone called the Mother of God. This can bring out the worst in me. I look around and see so much that seems wrong. 

God seems to be worshiped from such a distance, people seem to need to wear fancy haberdashery and look all solemn to approach their Saviour who bled and died and rose through shit and death so we didn’t need to do just that; where the church seems to say ‘over there, look, God!’ rather than ‘in here? God? amazing!’ Where the incarnation seems to be restricted to the sacrament, like God is bound into some contractual agreement not to cause too many problems by running around like a naughty schoolboy, but only to appear when the priest is there to maintain order…

There I go again. Sometimes prejudice just flops out. The way to challenge prejudice? People. Simple, really.

Image from ASBO Jesus

The way we structure our relationship with God is so precious to us. So it can dominate our thinking. But I meet people from the breadth of church traditions and, mysteriously (and occasionally disappointingly), find them to be genuine. Genuine followers of Jesus. In a very different way, and often in a way I do not understand. And some ways I cannot agree with. And me also for them. I know what I look like. Disrespectful of tradition, casual with the Eucharist,  slouchy with the liturgy and lazy with the proper order of the church. Offensive, even.

But I follow Jesus. And people who fundamentally disagree with me can see that. Mostly.

One of the beauties of the Anglican Church is that we rub up against each others differences all the time. In charitable moments, this feels like a beauty and a gift. In less charitable moments it is frustrating and annoying, because so often we go for the lowest common denominator, bore ourselves to death and it makes me want to leave.

Image from ASBO Jesus

But we follow a subversive rabbi who included in his inner circle Matthew the collaborator and Simon the insurgent and used a Pharisee to build the church so I feel it must be right to try and find our common ground and purpose and try and see each other as people and not representatives of ‘tradition’ or any other kind of label. So I promise to keep trying. Maybe you will too.

That being said, please don’t put me in a cassock, sit me in a straight-line and make me enunciate every word to old hymns like I’m teaching a toddler to lip-read.

how to not really have plan

There are many books about how to be a good leader. There are many strategies on church growth. There are many conferences for conference types to share conferencey ideas. I haven’t yet seen a book, strategy or conference called “how to not really have a plan”. Funny that. Though most of us work that way.

a building, not a church

Do I? Well, I do have a plan, it’s just it… changes. Or maybe it’s not so much a plan as an idea, or a vision, or a hope. I know roughly where I am going but I haven’t planned how to get there. That doesn’t make for a very good book.

Let’s begin 2 1/2 years ago, when we first felt the call to come here. On paper it didn’t look our kind of thing. A small church with roughly 14 older ladies, one child, fortnightly robed HC services, no musicians, no kids work, living under the shadow of threatened closure. So many people said to me, what is your plan?

My response was always: I have no idea. How can I know until I am there? Except to love. We will go, and we will love. But you must have some idea, people said. Nope. Except that I feel that God has called us here, and that we will not achieve anything unless we love. And we could not achieve anything without the foundation of 80 years that has gone before us, and specifically the prayer that led to the parish and the then Bishop supporting a new appointment in an apparently dead-end outpost of a cash-strapped and difficult parish. That was brave.

"...and this is how not to have a plan..."

Here we are 2 years later, with an average of 25 -30 adults and 10-15 children on a Sunday, which has blown us away. And brought its own problems! 2 adults to 1 child is a pretty tricky ratio, and not a problem we foresaw! But what a problem to have. Especially as the 14 ladies are still on board.

And those of you who have followed our story on this blog will know about the detached youth work we found ourselves doing, which began as chasing people off the roof and grew into our trampoline ministry, and supporting families and helping young people into college; and this week we take on a new risk as our youth work student begins for the year, with the plan to build on the detached youth work. Apparently not many churches take on youth workers specifically to do detached work – maybe we are about to find out why.

I wanted to tell you about it, because it is exciting. I wanted to tell you about it because I haven’t seen this sort of change happening before. I know it does, I have read about it, but always with a cynical and jealous tone. Ministry is not a competition, but I have yearned for stories to tell. And here we have them. It is a fragile ministry, as I have written before. My boss is going on maternity leave as the youth worker begins, upping my workload considerably; 2 people leaving or falling ill could cause everything to crumble; we have gained a son in the last year which has changed our availability and energy levels; the parish has no money for new projects; people growing in faith is so hard to quantify and it’s a tough place to grow faith… endless is the list of things that could change everything.

houses or community?

But on Sunday I thought to myself, if I had had a plan, this would have been it. This is where I wanted us to get to, but I could not see how. I could pretend I did have a plan, and that it worked. Then I could write a manual. But there was no plan, only a dream, a hope, a future unseen.And love.

Thomas asked, if we don’t know where you are going, how then can we know the way? That is the beauty of following the Way.

And these 3 remain: faith, hope and love. The greatest of these is love.