Our moderator, Gary Patterson,
recently had the opportunity to meet with other church leaders in the Canadian
Council of Churches. He discovered that other church leaders, from across the
liberal/conservative spectrum were facing distrust of institutions, spiritual
not religious people. Apparently we're in the same boat. Says Gary
in his blog,
"Willard
Metzger, head of the Mennonite Church of Canada, described his sense of what
was happening by imagining the church leadership as being in a boat, trying to
go forward but being surrounded by fog. You can’t see what the future church
looks like or even where it’s going to be found. But you keep peering ahead,
watching carefully, trying to read the currents, hoping you won’t hit the
rocks. Always staring ahead, trying to discern what’s out there. Then the fog
clears for a moment, and you catch a glimpse of the “new church”…but it isn’t
anything like what you thought it would be. And then, just as you reset the
tiller, the fog closes in again, and you’re forced to steer by faith once more.
There was
talk about this being God’s work—that what is happening to the churches, to all
of us, is the movement of the Spirit, similar in many ways to Jeremiah’s
understanding of the exile of Israel into Babylon. We are not being called to
“fix it” but to discover new ways of being, to discover where God is already
doing a new thing and join in.
There's
something in the New Testament about walking not by sight but by faith.
with
thanks to Gary and to Christine who passed this on.
Peter
