doing church

Ian & I have been listening to some teaching CDs by a guy who spoke at my dad's church (in Belfast) a few weeks ago. He's called Erwin McManus. He was born and brought up in El Savador and now pastors a church called Mosaic in LA. He was basically talking about doing church in such a way that we develop a community that demonstrates that God can be trusted.

He mentioned a number of metaphors that the church now holds on to that he suggests may have lost their biblical meaning. We now believe that "making disciples" is something that we do with Christians and that "Feed my sheep" is a command that Jesus meant for Christians to do for other Christians. If that were so then the 11 disciples would not have got beyond their own number. We are very familiar with the image of a pastor as a nurturer and counsellor for the church when in fact the ultimate image in the bible of a shepherd/pastor was David. David who fought the lion and slapped the bear and said not one of my flock. Our shepherds and our pastors are the tough guys on the front line who sleep outside and put themselves between their flock and the enemy.

Through lisening to Erwin's teaching I have been thinking about how we can use the poetry of this world to reach out to the people around us. We know that as we are made in God's image so everyone needs relationship and community. Or as the Corrs say: "Everyone's searching for intimacy.." Faith, hope and love, of believing, belonging and destiny. The themes of many a great movie. There are lots of things around us that we can use to talk about the kingdom of God. In many ways there is no point in starting with the Bible in conversation with people who just don't consider it to be true. I have been discussing this very thing with my brother. His church is about to start a number of projects in and around Bangor (NI) and he is involved in reaching the 17-25 year olds. They have already do a lot of servant evangelism stuff such as giving out bottles of drinking water to people leaving night clubs in the town.

The challenge I guess is that evangelism is not something that we do but something that we live.