Our new gathering cycle (beginning Sunday 17th June) is entitled ‘What is the point in going to church?’ – a question all of us must have asked at one point or another on our faith journey! For many of us who have a sense of having left something behind (for example, the church of our childhood or teenage years, the ‘institutional’ church or ‘organised religion’) the question remains – ‘how can I have a healthy relationship with the church?’ or even perhaps ‘Is church necessary at all?’
In a culture where the church seems increasingly out of touch and irrelevant how do we avoid throwing the ecclesiological baby out with the bathwater and maintain a good, honest, and genuine participation in this thing we call church? What is the church really there for? What does it do for us or provide for us? What is the meaning of our participation in it?
These are some of the questions we will be exploring over the course of the next cycle. Pete Ward – member of the Home community and also the author of ‘Liquid Church‘ – will be kicking off the cycle with a talk on Sunday 17th June, with the by now familiar elements of the cycle following over the subsequent weeks.
Sundays 17/6, 24/6, 1/7, 8/7, 15/7, 22/7 @ St Albans Church, Charles St, OxfordÂ
Matt, I loved your ideas of church as signpost, advertising agency and tool… the last one made me wonder is there a time when the church has done it’s job of helping us live well and it’s time to take those fully intergrated tools out into life, to leave it and go and live, I just wonder if by doing church for all those years I was kind of hiding from challenge of living as part of the world.
I’ve not attended anything like church for three years now and I still find that I experience moments of fear when I’m engaging with ‘the world’. There are good personal reasons for this related to a terible experience I had when testing out my independece as a teanager, now I think I took refuge in the saftey of the familiar, in the form of Church and avoided the larger unpredictable place of ‘the world’.
The world seems quite an unfamiliar place to me still, but I’m no longer happy in church either… I wonder weather it lost it’s relevance to me because I was doing too much of it… like making yourself allergic to your favourite food.
It seems to me that going to church isn’t always important, particularly if we really do believe God is every where and to be found in all things/relationships. Being surrounded by Cristians on my course at Uni, occasionally listening to Home audio talks, living with traditional church goers and eating a meal with their guests from their local church is as close as I get to Christianity/spirituality at the moment. (I was dissapointed how many Christians were on the Uni course it has nothing to do with faith but there are so many I can’t easily escape!)
Interestingly one of the things that has dropped away easily in this time is my ability to clearly categorise experience as spiritual, mental, physical, sociological, emotional, sexual, natural, moral, philisophical… etc. (or even a combination of these). What I saw as plainly a spiritual experience is now something that could have elements of all of the above and more, so how can you generalise? Add to this that these experiences/events/interpretations are in flux and a much more complex view emerges. I find myself responding to and initiating various experiences that we call the journey of life and that I have so many ways of interpreting them. I suppose life has become more confusing and subtle.
I don’t have a sence of loosing my faith, I feel like I’m discovering life and to do that I had to walk beyond the edges of my known map…leaving some very important things painfully behind; regular church going has been one of those things.
I think my life experience has some uniqueness, but if what I read in ‘Churchless Faith’ (Alan Jamieson) is correct, there are many people who carry their faith with them as they journey beyond the conventional interpretations of faith, church and church going. People that ‘the Church’ don’t really know much about. But if Kester Brewin and Alan Jamieson are correct times of going beyond the known map are essential to becoming a mature christian. This gives me some comfort while I’m exploring.