Pilgrim's Progress

The Ark Moves Again

Darn. I just thought I'd got a handle on things, but it's all been shaken up again. I'd been settling into a conviction that I was heading for some creative\leadership role in some "fresh expression" of church, but it feels like that's back on the drawing board again.

I'm just back from New Wine North 2007, where a great deal of shaking up went on.

But then I shouldn't be surprised, should I? How often did God move his people on once they'd got settled?

The big things that hit me at NW this year were ...

• God's heart for the poor and broken, and for people on the margins
• Jesus' longing to be united with his bride, the church, and his heartache over all the pain and division in the body of Christ.
• God's desire to heal all of creation, including the environment
• A renewed invitation to live a life of radical surrender and devotion.
• The call to "minister from the dirt" - to serve from the ground up, not from the platform down.
• A sense that this might all take me overseas at some point.

Sheesh. Big stuff. But it kind of rings true as well. So I hit the road once again, and ask "Lord, where is the ark going?"

"I seem to see ahead, in a kind of way. I know we are going to take a very long road, into darkness, but I know I can't turn back ... I don't rightly know what I want but I have something to do before the end, and it lies ahead, not in the Shire. I must see it through, Sir, if you understand me"
(Frodo Baggins; LOTR p100)

"I have not yet done that for which I was made"
(St Anselm of Canterbury, 12th Cent.)

Connectedness and Completion

This is my most recent image. On the surface it's about two people meeting for the first time, and wondering what they might find in each other. As someone commented to me, you can see in their posture a mixture of "anticipation and hesitation".

But I think it's about more than that. For me, it's about a human longing for connectedness and completion. And the whole relationship\marriage\sex discussion is really about those two things, deep down.

So it was refreshing to find Rob Bell's latest book, "Sex. God" was written about exactly this. The simplest and most energising account of sexuality and spirituality I have read.

So I'll continue this post in Rob Bell style now.

One sentence per paragraph.

But it's easy to grasp.

Seriously, his message is so simple. We were made to be fully alive and fully connected to God and his creation, to each other, and to ourselves, and relationships, marriage, sex and so on point us towards the new creation in which everything and everyone is perfectly united and connected once again in God.

But we're not there yet.

Which is why the "What We Believe" on Rob Bell's church website is refreshingly entitled "Narrative Theology Statement" - God and his people on the move towards the completion of all things. I was reminded painfully yesterday of my own incompleteness, but of God's standing right there with me in the pain of it. And the epilogue of Sex.God is about a broken marriage. We're not there yet.

Connectedness and completion. When we peel back the anticipation and hesitation, and all the different layers of attraction, that's what these two above are really looking for, what we're all longing for, and what the broken world around us is crying out for.