Groping Towards A New Style of Community

Last Sunday, I was surprised by my reaction to Rozina's question about Solomon and his wisdom. I was finding it hard to cope with the myriad demands of being a pastor on a Sunday morning. I'm not sure whether it was a physical thing or a spiritual attack but I found Sunday very stressful.

So when the sermon was interrupted by a question that I had no immediate answer to, I felt rather frustrated. The sermon was about getting wisdom, but the question was about failing of wisdom and I had no immediate answer to the question.

Anyway, that experience and some comments made by Michael Spencer in his podcast (www.internet.com) about teaching styles in the church, somehow forced me to a realisation of the tension in which we as a community live.

The tension is that God has called us to do a "new thing" with no description of what that looks like or a map of how to get there.

One thing I do know is that our expression of community has to be very different to anything currently available in the contemporary expressions of church. Community, christian style, has to be very different to

• the pastor-centric authoritarian models common in Pentecostal circles
• the institution-centric model of the Catholic Church
• the pseudo-democratic approach of many mainline Protestant churches.

The style of worship also has to be different to what is currently practised in most churches.

I am very aware that what we do now is only a temporary arrangement,

On my best days, I welcome interactive discussion-style sermons. That's why each week I publish my personal reflections on each of the lectionary readings for the following Sunday. I also try to encourage a discussion on those readings in our facebook group.

I think that people learn best when we engage with Scripture as a community, working out together their implications for us. Unfortunately that is very hard work for the leader, and for it to work effectively, it needs the leader/preacher to really have their wits about them, providing guidance without completely dominating the discussion. If the preacher is not up to the mental/spiritual discernment necessary for the task that day, it's all too easy to fall back into the didactic rhetorical approach of just telling people the message for the day.

This all works well in a medium sized group, but how to do it in a much larger group? How do we engage in creative responses to scripture in ways which speak to the varying learning styles that people have? How do we structure our whole worship space to best use the gifts of all of our people?

There is a balance in all of this. We need some information in order to be able to contribute meaningfully to a discussion. There are times when the preacher has to nicely tell people that it's time to listen. There are also times when the best thing for a preacher to do is just shut up himself and let the rest of the community work it out together.

It's wonderfully easy when we have the capacity to just package up a particular format for each week, where people know that their role is just to absorb the anointing being imparted by the pastor.

I'm not so sure that leads to genuine growth in faith for anyone involved.

So we grope towards a new form of community. Some times it will be wonderful and other times less than ordinary. But it's all a part of the journey Jesus has called us to.