As Director of Gillingham YFC I get to go to the Fraternal each month. Strikes me as a weird old term as it refers to brothers in some description. Three of the church leaders on the fraternal are women so I’m not sure how the term works! It surely should be changed.
Sometimes fraternal can be dreary as we take 2 hours to decide who will read from the Bible in the Good Friday open air witness. Today, however, we started to hit another plane and I was sorry that time forced us to stop.
We had all noticed a massive influx in church of people from different churches. A lot due to the NHS and schools and such recruiting abroad in African nations and South Africa. The question came from one church leader ‘How do we make church relevant for these people?’. I immediately bit my tongue and did not say anything like ‘It would be good to start by getting relevancy for any people.’ I did not think that would be helpful.
After some discussion I tentavilely asked whether we get a little too stressed in church as we feel that we all need to do the same thing at the same time to be church.
We think of church as family. If I think of my family we rarely do everything together and at the same time. Tom will be on the playstation, Beth on the computer, Joe cycling his bike, Sarah preparing school work and I could be reading the Guardian. Yesterday we only spent about 40 minutes all together despite the fact it was a Sunday. But … none of that stopped us being a family. We were not just a family when we ended the day with a BBQ, we are a family whatever we do.
Surely, the same is true of church. We need to be more inclusive and open in our thoughts of what church is about. If we all do different things does it stop us being church? Should we start to feel threatened or should we start to celebrate the wonder of our diversity in Christ?
The Shiny Headed Prophet 
Hello! Your writing about the idea of family has made me smile a lot – hurray! I was in a meeting last night with the other lay leaders of my church and we were discussing what on earth God is saying to us about the brick walls we keep hitting whenever the whole body comes to worship together. And we figured that this very idea of doing different things, on a theme, all at the same time is really what He’s saying to us here. We’ve only ever tried it once (last September) and it was loved but lost in the anglican mentalness of Christmas and Easter and the million other doing things we like to tie ourselves up with….. Thankfully He has managed to remind us of that experiment and how cool and quite possibly achievable on a weekly basis it is. We now need to pray it into action and get on with it – I’ll keep you posted on what happens?
Hello! Your writing about the idea of family has made me smile a lot – hurray! I was in a meeting last night with the other lay leaders of my church and we were discussing what on earth God is saying to us about the brick walls we keep hitting whenever the whole body comes to worship together. And we figured that this very idea of doing different things, on a theme, all at the same time is really what He’s saying to us here. We’ve only ever tried it once (last September) and it was loved but lost in the anglican mentalness of Christmas and Easter and the million other doing things we like to tie ourselves up with….. Thankfully He has managed to remind us of that experiment and how cool and quite possibly achievable on a weekly basis it is. We now need to pray it into action and get on with it – I’ll keep you posted on what happens?
Thanks VixI really would be interested to hear what happens at your place. Glad I made you smile too!