I am loving starting and ending my days during Advent by reading Maggi Dawn’s ‘Beginning and Endings’. As I thought it would, the whole concept of waiting has taken on a new meaning for me over this Advent and Maggi’s daily gems are a great and challenging addition to my day.

I have been made to think a lot, but was particularly challenged to think deeper on the 10th Dec reading which is still in the front of my head. The title for the day is ‘Redigging the wells’ and tells the story from Genesis 26 of Issac looking for land and water to sustain his flocks. I was challenged because as I have read those stories over and over I have got the image of these nomads moving around the desert in no fixed way, but ‘as the mood takes’.

Issac, however, re-visted and re-dug the wells that his father, Abraham had dug before him. from here I quote Maggi (p.49):

…One of the temptations of living in post Christian culture is to attempt to recreate church from scratch. In Issac’s story we have a picture of someone who goes back to the traditional sources and begins to dig for himself. He doesn’t rest on his father’s laurels, neither does he set out for new land. He finds the traditional sites and he digs. The result was he heard God’s promise for himself.

A I look ahead to what may be with a new community, I am fully aware that we have over 2000 years of tradition and practice to draw upon. My role as I understand it today is not to find and create new practices or just create newer and more unique ways of being church in order to create something new and accessible. My role, with these people, is to go back to the traditional sites and dig. As we dig we should look again at what we dig up and what we reveal. We should look afresh at what we uncover. We should take these ancient truths and chat about them. We should travel together with them and see what applying them in 21st century life is like and how it works. This is traveling together in a real sense.

It is so easy to get sucked in to new things, the endless need for creativity for creativity’s sake. The need to create new church to be seen as creating new church. All this stuff is good stuff with a BUT! But … if the creativity is not grounded in the ancient tradition we have then it will have little substance. Stuff with little substance, even church (!), will just not survive. It may look good, it may attract attention, but I am not interested in that; I want to be part of something with God integrity and sustainability.

Some of those wells have been covered for a while, and there is a lot of digging that probably needs to be done. When Issac dug he discovered something amazing – he discovered God’s promise first hand. He stopped standing on Abraham’s interpretation of the promise and moved on with God himself. He was able to see the truth in a new light, and in a way that meant something to him in his situation and his time. When we dig the ancient wells and look afresh like Issac then I think we are able to truly call scripture the living word of God.

As a community, when it forms, (and I believe one will) we will need to dig and be ready to discover that promise for ourselves. In a sense it would be a lot easier to just create and develop something we all like and are happy with. This will probably end up being something that satisfies our own frustrations with church rather than being rooted and bedded in God and Christian tradition. It is more likely to be something that meets our own needs rather than allows God to show us things beyond our wildest dreams.

I pray God will give us the ability to re dig the wells we need to re dig.