For a while I have subscribed to Mucky Paws … great creative liturgies from Roddy Hamilton. I found this catching my eye this week in particular … a challenge to remember what it’s all about!

The passion of Christ is something the church is invited into… not just to try out like a new dress… but to identify with… in other words to be marked with… This Sunday of the passion of Christ is the time to betaken back to our original identity… to be in communion with the suffering of the world…

The success of a church however is usually described through numbers… a growing community… an enhanced sanctuary… a tea bar and a coffee bar… ten bible studies and hundreds in our youth groups…

But that is success only by worldly standards… The word ‘success’ is not a gospel word… it is not in the vocabulary of heaven… it is a word never found on the lips of Jesus…

Success can never be used of the church… so hush your mouthes you doom merchants of the church… Anything we do it can only be marked against how we identify with the suffering of the world… how much this community of faith-people… is in communion… shares the passion… the suffering… of the people of Palestine… Syria… Peru… Korea…

This is a passion that takes us out of ourselves… our local community… and places us… side by side… with those globally… invited into our suffering as we are into theirs…

How much do we partner people… not from a position of power… but in the place of pain… sharing the suffering enough that it becomes part of who we are… Living any other way as the church… simply bloats us with numbers… that brings a comfort that is closer to the high priest in Jerusalem… than the saviour on the cross…

This passiontide… we bring ourselves back to our primary identity… to carry that cross… and share in the passion… that is very real in our world today… In sharing in this suffering of the world… we come face to face with Jesus Christ…

You can subscribe here if you wish.

It’s been a little while since I have given a placement update … which is poor of me as SHP is the main format through which my time at St Stephens will be reflected upon in the weeks after Easter.

A lot has happened … nothing particularly out of the ordinary, but a lot. I mentioned in my last update that a reflection I had was that parish ministry is quite crammed and there needs to be a lot of discipline exerted if you wish to achieve the stuff you set out to do and not be deflected by a lot of good but other stuff. For me this is meeting with those outside the church regularly, and I have been able to develop a loose timetable around parish stuff that still allows that to happen. That does mean I am catching up on other stuff in the early hours of the morning, but that is sustainable for a few weeks.

I have to be careful how I share this next reflection, but I am not criticising anyone at all here, but I am noticing that St Stephens is like many other churches I have attended as far as distribution of workload goes. I reckon about 20% of the congregation do something like 80% of the work. I see the same people at events and various planning, PCC and other meetings. We have planned a creative Palm Sunday evening service … and again the people involved in the planning and running of that are the same people I have seen at other things.

It seems that getting a lot of people involved is a challenge because of busy lifestyles and other commitments; I have no right to criticise or challenge that. As I said, I am not making a judgement but merely reflecting on an observation. I do  think it’s a model of church that we need to be careful of. There are many ‘post church’ people around who have been burnt out by the inherited church 20:80 model and so quietly left the building!. There are a few people like that that have passed through the gathering, stayed a while and then moved on to another church.

One of the values of the gathering is one of inclusivity and on our about us/vision page you may find the following line: We believe church is about participation and engagement of the majority, rather than being consumerist and led by a few specialists. We find the reality of that to be a real challenge, and in many ways we still aspire to that value, but I think we are moving in the right direction; even if quite slowly. One thing we are learning is that it is easier to produce something or take on a task when we know what is fully expected.

I’d be interested …. is this other peoples observation of parish life, I mean the 20:80 thing? Have others noticed that? What do you think the reasons are? Is it a matter of people being too busy, or is it more a case of needing to make it easier for people to become involved? Are there any answers or is this a simple case of ‘that’s just how it is’?

One of the things I have taken on or committed to do more in Lent is to receive a daily meditation thought from Richard Rohr. I loved his thinking in The Naked Now so Sister Diane, my spiritual director, suggested I might find the daily meditations ‘useful’.

Todays daily meditation, which I read to season my thoughts and outlook throughout the day, talks about perfection and imperfection. It reminds us that the western mind is obsessed with logic, fact and proof in its dualistic make-up; whereas the eastern mind is happier to sit with mystery and paradox.

In the west we think of perfection as the elimination of imperfection … whereas Rohr suggests today that perfection is, in fact, the ability to recognise, forgive and include imperfection. 

I’m going to carry that with me today – and I reckon that is an amazing image of how the church should, and could so easily be – a community that recognises, forgives and includes imperfection.

On Sunday I spoke at the Mothering Sunday Eucharist at St Stephens. Quite an enjoyable experience and I think probably a first as I’ve not spoken at this service before. I took the text of John 19:25-27

Standing near his cross were Jesus’ mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the follower he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, “Dear woman, here is your son.” Then he said to the follower, “Here is your mother.”From that time on, the follower took her to live in his home’.

I wondered why Jesus did this. I mean … we know he had brothers and so logically, according to the local custom, they would have looked after their mum. There was no need for Jesus to worry about her welfare. With that support in place I found myself asking, ‘why is Jesus doing this?’ Or … ‘what is the gospel writer wanting us to hear?’

I’m not entirely sure – I rarely am – but I make a suggestion that Jesus here is reframing and reinterpreting what family, and therefore relationships, are all about. I wonder whether Jesus is redefining what family is for those who follow him; and by that I mean ‘the church’. I wonder whether he is saying that this is now greater than a blood tie.

It’s as if he is saying that we are all to be family to each other … to mother each other, to look out for each other, to care, to love, to protect each other.

I then started to dream … what would churches be like if people acted like loving family to each other? I mean if they really did this properly, really really treated others as family … and embraced the different brothers, mothers, sisters, sons, cantankerous old aunts …. and so on. If that really happened … if we disagreed and loved, fell out and loved, enjoyed life together and had fun …. well I thought that might look quite good, colourful even (!), it might even transform a few places ….

…. and that might just be good news worth getting excited about!