I was speaking at the YMCA carol service last night. This is what I said….

Last week I did a really embarrassing thing. I gave a teddy bear as a gift to a man! I have never done it before and don’t plan on ever repeating the experience. The reason was he had had a dream about a teddy that I think was very significant and contained a profound message from God. I don’t want him to forget it so thought this gift would help with the remembering.  

So what has this got to do with the question we are considering tonight, Y Christmas?

Well there are a couple of things. Firstly, dreams are vital to the Christmas story. Matthew chapter 1, verses 18-24 says,”This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit. Because Joseph her husband was a righteous man and did not want to expose her to public disgrace he had in mind to divorce her quietly. But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said,”Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit”…When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him…” The wise men are warned in a dream not to go back to Herod having seen the Christ child (2:12) and “When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him (2:13).” How different it would have been if Joseph had discounted his dreams and blamed them on too much cheese the night before!

Secondly, giving presents makes us vulnerable. I felt really embarrassed handing over my gift and was incredibly anxious about the reaction I was going to get. That’s because there is always the potential for rejection when we have invested in giving something that shows how much we know and care about the person who’s receiving it. God gave us the ultimate present that first Christmas.  The gift of His son wrapped in human flesh. He knew us so intimately and cared so passionately for us that he gave us the means of having eternal life and an unbreakable friendship with the creator of the universe. But Jesus did not come in glory as the King He is, but in weakness, emptied of His power and totally dependent on His parents to meet His most basic needs. The divine could not have been more defenceless! But also, just like every other gift we’re given we can choose not to receive Him and reject the person who has made the offering. I remember my Dad telling me when I was a child that you don’t just get a present but you actually have to receive it.What does that mean? I think it means wearing the silver necklace when you like gold, displaying the ornament even it is not exactly to your taste or putting on the hideous reindeer jumper that has been lovingly knitted for you to wear at the annual Boxing Day curry buffet! It’s the same with Jesus – we can receive Him into our hearts and begin a relationship with Him that transforms us into the best version of ourselves that’s possible or we can go it alone and dismiss Emmanuel, the God who is with us (1:23).

And finally celebrating Christmas is about remembering. For many of us Christmas is a difficult time of year because we remember experiences that have left us wounded and disappointed. We are aware of people we’ve loved and spent Christmas with in the past who are no longer with us. And I don’t think we have to deny that and pretend everything is as it should be when our reality is very far from what we want or would choose. However, Christmas is about remembering that no matter how difficult our circumstances God is present. He is not distant, wagging a finger and telling us ‘I told you so’ when we mess up. He is a God who identifies with our weaknesses because He has been human and lived our frailties. But as well as coming near, Jesus is God, our Saviour. He did not stay a baby. He became a man who preached about a new age where there will be justice and peace, no more disease, death or despair. When we truly receive Him as a gift our problems don’t just disappear but He is able to bring goodness and positive change in the midst of our attempts to overcome them.  

Y Christmas? It’s simple – hope. Hope that God does not leave us or forsake us. Hope that another, better world is possible. Hope that we can be transformed as we confront our fear and brokenness. So this Christmas having understood why, take the risk, make some space and invite God’s hope to be born afresh in you.

Thanks to Jonny Baker for the photo.

I went to see Top Hat on Friday evening to celebrate my husband’s birthday.  It was a wonderful show and a real feast for the senses.  But I realised a short way in that I was feeling strangely disconnected.  Having watched so much singing and dancing on the TV, it didn’t seem real.  I felt like a distant observer rather than an engaged participant at a live event.  In this regard, I am not alone but a victim of our culture.  That is according to two fantastic authors who have influenced my thinking greatly, Gerry Arbuckle and Mike Frost, both of whom I got to hear ‘in the flesh’ last week.  Arbuckle talked about our propensity for tourism as consumers and Frost how we excarnate or pare down to the bone our experience of life and community such that they remain superficial and transitory.

So in this season of advent when we celebrate God taking on flesh, becoming so enmeshed in human existence that He shares our vulnerability and must rely on others for His very survival, I am convicted of my own detachment from the beauty and the mess I too have been called to embrace and embody.  Even the Christmas story itself has become so familiar that it loses the power to shock and astound.  But as I have prepared a service of advent for Kingston University and a prayer room at the YMCA, I have begun to be struck and challenged afresh.  Think of poor Zechariah!  He and his wife Elizabeth had given up all hope of having a child.  But when an angel tells him that she will bear him a son, he is made dumb for his cynicism and disbelief!  Or put yourself in the place of Joseph for a moment, promised in marriage to a teenage girl only to discover she is pregnant!  What must he have felt and what would have been the reactions of the community around him?  Yet having been visited by an angel in a dream, he believes Mary’s account of an immaculate conception and accepts her as his wife.  The nativity narrative has been romanticised and sanitised so that the meaning and sheer audacity of God in His intervention in human affairs has been utterly lost.

So how do we recover our wonder at the divine mystery, as well as truly indwell our humanity?  Well as my counsellor always says, the first step is to become aware!  Having done that I would suggest the next might be to intentionally choose to be present and then not run from the inevitable insecurities that arise.  As I am told Rudolph Bahro said, “…be insecure in order to be adventurous.”  In this we truly model Christ.  There can have been nothing more insecure or adventurous to allow Himself to be born to a Jewish virgin, under Roman occupation, in an animal shelter.  As Jesus allowed himself to be emptied out for our sake, so we can face our own emptiness. In so doing, we find space for the real gift of Christmas – Emmanuel, the God who is with us. 

Last week I went down to Pickwell Manor in North Devon to do a session on communicating your story to a group of pioneers learning to apply the principles and tools of social enterprise to their missional activities.  It is always a brilliant five days as we hear from successful entrepreneurs, have teaching on devising mission statements, writing funding bids and evaluating impact, as well as sharing community together in a beautiful house situated in a stunning location.

This residential forms a module on CMS’s pioneer mission leadership training course.  In addition to having the opportunity of sharing my skills and expertise with 2nd year students at Pickwell,  at the beginning of the week I was in receipt of teaching on my 3rd year module about pastoral care.  We were looking at death and bereavement, not a subject I was particularly looking forward to exploring!  However, as we shared our experiences of loss, read poems and found passages from the Bible that included how Jesus responded to grief and sought to prepare his friends for his own imminent death, we began to recognise a cycle of death and renewal that is constantly at work.  This is evident in our individual lives, the natural world with the changing seasons and in the communities to which we belong.  Even positive changes in circumstances such as marriage, having children, moving house or being promoted involve a loss of the familiar and a challenge to security.

Yet our Society seems obsessed with avoiding pain and removes any evidence of death as quickly, quietly and professionally as possible. We don’t know how to talk with those who are suffering and rarely confront our own mortality unless we are forced to do so.  But what we began to appreciate afresh this week is that you can’t just push grief away.  It remains unresolved and manifests itself in other ways – depression, addiction, obsessive behaviours, relationship breakdown and long term ill health.  While we have become very successful at prolonging life, by colluding in a corporate denial of death our experience of living can become superficial and meaningless.  It is only as we give space to the hurting that healing can come and we once again glimpse the newness that is possible on the other side.  Through the process we are able to grow in self awareness and appreciate what really matters.

Many of us in Devon this week have experienced the grief and frustration of seeing that things are not as God intends, the pain and rejection of being misunderstood in seeking to address this and the isolation and loneliness of choosing to set out toward an unknown destination in search of something new and authentic.  Sometimes it’s hard to watch the struggle.  We want desperately to remove it and deliver them from the soul searching and inevitable heartache that accompanies it.  Yet as I stared into the flames of the wood burner before leaving Pickwell yesterday, I was reminded of the biblical story of Meshach, Shadrach and Abednego.  They were thrown into a furnace for refusing to idolise their king.  They went through the fire but it did not consume them and the on-lookers observed four persons present in the furnace rather than three (Daniel 3:25).  Maybe God could have spared them the trial but instead went through it with them and saved their lives.  He does this, I think, because of my least favourite verse in the Bible, “…we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. (Romans 5:3)”  I don’t believe God wants us to suffer but if we can allow Her to take our losses and disappointments, She can use them to develop all that is good in us and reveal new and exciting possibilities.  But this does not happen in isolation.  It happens through hospitality, in community, and this week, at a mansion in North Devon!

It’s that time of year again when an eclectic mix of B list celebrities head for the jungle.  As I watch them cry, squeal and bitch their way through the experience, I remember when I broke my leg and had to spend a whole week in hospital when there was not much else to do but immerse myself in ‘I’m a Celebrity Get Me out of Here’.

What was fascinating about my stay in Kingston Hospital was how quickly we established community on the orthopaedic ward that I was confined to.  Similarly impeded was a woman with a broken hip, another had a fractured pelvis, one was being treated for a displaced shoulder and another lady suffered a shattered elbow.  None of us had been snow-boarding or sky diving but had tripped over shoes, fallen running for a bus or slipped on the stairs.  Having felt neglected for hours, one evening we took matters into our own hands and decided to make ourselves a cup of tea.  What was fascinating is that it needed all of us and despite each of our deficiencies, together we were able to accomplish what alone would have been impossible.  Never has a cuppa felt so rewarding and tasted so good!

For me this is a graphic illustration of the body that is the church as articulated by Paul in 1 Corinthians chapter 12.  We are all broken yet have our part to play in creating the beautiful whole which is the bride of Christ awaiting her ultimate consummation at the end of time.  And in this community we are a reflection of God Herself.  Genesis 1 verse 26 says, “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our own image, in our likeness…”  Yes, at the heart of the godhead there is unity in diversity. 

A brilliant artistic interpretation of this idea of the trinity – God who is 3 persons in one – Creator, Redeemer and Companion is contained in ‘The Shack’.  The author William P Young explains why this potentially problematic doctrine is so crucial, “’If I were simply One God and only One Person, then you would find yourself in this Creation without something wonderful, essential even.  And I would be utterly other than I am.’  ‘And we would be without….?’  Mack didn’t even know how to finish the question.  ‘Love and relationship.  All love and relationship is possible for you only because it already exists with Me, with God myself…unless I had an object to love – or, more accurately, a someone to love – if I did not have a such a relationship within myself, then I would not be capable of love at all?…The God who is – the I am who I am – cannot act apart from love (p.101-2).’”

So we too love and form community because we are made for it.  We cannot help it.  That does not mean it isn’t incredibly difficult and people won’t frustrate, annoy and hurt us.  However, “three is the magic number, calling us out of individualism, insisting on relationship, I to you, We to another, Trinity seeding networks, Until all the cosmos joins in…” (from grace pocket liturgies p. 94)  I know this to be true because I found it in the most unlikely of places, watching ‘I’m a Celebrity’ with a cup of tea made by an ensemble of the hindered and the lame, rejoicing in what was possible when we gave what we each had in service to one another. 

My friend Karlie sent me these beautiful words today and it is almost as if she has put into poetry what I was trying to communicate in prose last week.  So this is our prayer, for fellow fools and dreamers!

Yes we are still fools

Yes we are still dreamers

Who else would keep looking at desolation

and in the end

only respond by imagining beauty?

Who else would stay in manure and wait for seeds

because they remembered a rumour of fruit?

Who else would reach right into the deepest pain and fear and try to love there

 even continue to try when hope dies

 and love’s flame flickers in the cold wind of selfishness?

May we be saved all the more

from the false sanity of comfort

and numbly knowing all the answers

May our questions old and new

be transfigured into

the kernals of graced dreams

and grow our deep rooted imagination

of creation healed and whole

And in our becoming begun again

May the ancient first fruit of inspired hope

nurture enough new foolish wisdom

to go on living the love that makes no sense

by Karlie Allaway

22 October 2012

Thanks to Jonny Baker for his photo entitled ‘hope’

What is the difference between exercising the gift of prophecy and being a prophet?  I believe that anyone can receive divine insight and revelation if they are open to it and it is a gift the church needs to remain attentive to God’s plans and purposes.  However, to be a prophet is a unique and troubling calling.  This is because it is not just about speaking out the message God has laid on your heart but a prophet actually becomes the message.  It is not a job you shed when you get home at night and take off your uniform or tools of the trade.  Hosea was commanded by God to marry a prostitute to symbolise Israel’s unfaithfulness and Isaiah gave his sons some bizarre names (Isaiah 8:3) to reinforce the word God was speaking to his people!  This is why Jesus is the ultimate prophet, “…the word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth (John 1:14).”

A couple of years ago I had to write a personal mission statement for the mission spirituality module on the pioneer mission leadership training course I am doing with CMS.  I revisited it this week and was struck by what a difficult calling I have and how unfair it is that I can’t pick and choose where and when I exercise it!  In this short articulation of who I am and what God requires of me, I talked about being a pearl in the oyster.  Here is found beauty and value but it is only formed out of the discomfort caused by grit under the shell.  Suffering depression has caused me to experience firsthand the good and pure that is forged out of the pain and struggle of facing your demons in the darkness and desolation of a barren internal world.  And in the same way I don’t enjoy grappling with my own shit, I really don’t delight in making others feel ill at ease either.  But I cannot, will not, stay silent and remain content with the way things are when I know that God’s desire is for something so much more creative, life-giving and satisfying.  It is unfortunate but it is true that getting beyond the status quo to the abundant life God wants for us requires confronting the defence mechanisms and addictions which have numbed us to the reality of our brokenness and the distorted view we have of God and his creation.

Sometimes I get on my face and beg that it weren’t so because it feels it is not the message that is being rejected but me!  I am blameworthy of the discomfort my provocation brings and it would be easier to keep quiet, withdraw into my shell.  Yet, like Jeremiah, I feel compelled to point out the disparity between what is and what could be because I care so passionately and hope so desperately.  However, reading Isaiah 45 I came across a sobering response to my desire to relinquish my vocation, “I’ve singled you out, called you by name, and given you this privileged work…I form light and create darkness, I make harmonies and create discords…I, God, generate all this.  But doom to you who fight your Maker- you’re a pot at odds with the potter!  Does clay talk back to the potter: ‘What are you doing?  What clumsy fingers!…Are you telling me what I can and cannot do?  I made the earth, and I created man and woman to live on it.”  God doesn’t just live in the light but forms darkness.  He doesn’t only smooth things over but where appropriate makes waves.  Like Job before me, who then am I to question Him and his ways?  So I will once again allow his love to heal my wounds, his faith in choosing me stiffen my resolve and his strength in this earthen vessel give me the hope and courage to keep doing his bidding as I rev up to go lob another grenade!

As well as having to use a well-known saying to make a comment about Englishness for my next assignment on the pioneer mission leadership training course, I am required to re-write a biblical story or passage for a sub-culture that I have observed and sought to engage with.  I have chosen to attempt a paraphrase of Colossians 1: 13-22 for my pagan friends.  This is because when I visited a pagan group in Kingston a few months ago, one of them mentioned that they used to meet in a pub with ‘a nice picture of the Green Man’.  Having done some research into the myths surrounding this figure, I had an idea of Jesus as the green man, a pagan symbol of spring and rebirth, present and involved at creation suffering death and resurrection so that we can enjoy life free from the threat of endless winter and futility.  I have, therefore, used a passage which relates Christ’s involvement ‘in the beginning’ (Gen. 1:1) and goes on to talk about what he accomplished for us through his death on the cross.  I have avoided the use of a masculine pronoun for God because this alienates those who acknowledge the feminine in the divine and it is perfectly consistent with scripture to assert that our deity is both male and female (Gen. 1:27). I have also tried to redefine what are well known theological concepts contained in the passage in a language that will resonate with pagans and other spiritual seekers.  So here goes…

The divine spirit whose breath brought forth life in the cosmos has rescued us from the never ending darkness and barrenness of winter.  Rather than the constant chill of death on our bones we can again be dazzled by the brightness of the sun and revel in the warmth and verdant lushness of spring.  This has been actualised through their only offspring, the very incarnation and embodiment of the deity who gave birth to the universe and all that is in it. He was the green man there when it all began, both seeing and participating in the divine act of creating newness and beauty out of nothing – whether tangible in the physical realm or supernatural and invisible requiring second sight to be perceived.   Everything was made for him and he ensures the life force is constantly regenerating the earth’s vegetation, sustaining animal existence and securing human diversity. 

The creative inspiration who initiated all this delighted in giving everything to their heir and planned that we might know him as our own personal spirit guide.  Then we too could have eternal access to the source of all fertility and goodness.  However it could only be achieved by allowing that very offspring, so loved and integral to the continued existence of life on earth as well as that beyond our current experience and understanding, to be sacrificed and die at the hands of the creatures that were made to channel the life-giving energy which set it all in motion.  This was necessary in order that the human capacity for insatiable greed and a rampant desire for domination, which pollutes and distorts our relationship with the natural world and one another could be neutralized and eradicated once and for all by the son’s resurrection.  A definitive moment in time, this event inaugurated a new age characterised by the hope of rebirth for all who seek him out as their guru leading them into all wisdom, peace and reconciliation.

It is amazing how taking a section of scripture we must have a read a hundred times and reframing it for a different audience or purpose brings it alive in new and startling ways!  I hope that maybe having read my paraphrase you too will feel able to celebrate the green man along with me and my pagan companions as we journey together towards experiencing more of Christ.

I am currently doing an assignment for the cross cultural mission module of CMS’s Pioneer Mission Leadership Training Course.  For it I had to chose an English saying, reflect on what it tells me about the culture and then think about how the Christian faith might interact with this. I chose ‘don’t count your chickens before they’ve hatched’. Like many enduring proverbs it contains a warning, in this instance not to be hasty in believing you have something of value until it comes to pass or is rightfully yours.  This saying seems to describe the cultural values of modesty in that it dissuades from boasting in something that is not certain and what Kate Fox in ‘Watching the English’ terms the English propensity for ‘Eeyorishness’.  This is a catch all term for our incessant moaning and gloomy demeanour that exemplifies, “our chronic pessimism, our assumption that it is in the nature of things to go wrong and be disappointing, but also our perverse satisfaction at seeing our gloomy predictions fulfilled…”(p.405). 

It was really interesting to see this particular aspect of our worldview in evidence as London has hosted the Olympic Games.  Prior to the start our newspapers were full of stories of things going wrong and not being ready from horrendous queues at passport control in the airports to a lack of properly trained security staff.  We had popular comedy programmes that mocked the most extreme aspects of political correctness involved as well as the potential for disaster that such a high profile event presented.  It was almost as if our collective consciousness was stealing itself for the disappointment of failure ahead!  Yet with the opening ceremony came a collective sigh of relief.   Finally we were able to feel pleased and proud of what we could achieve and actually started to enjoy and bask in the praise and envy of other less fortunate nations!  To top it off we found we were really quite good at competing, won a heap of gold medals, public transport did not grind to a halt and most surprising of all we could be quite warm and friendly to strangers!

So how then does this national tendency toward modesty and negativity give us an opportunity to share Christ?  I think it can present a challenge when put alongside Paul’s exhortation to, “live by faith (Hebrews 10:38)…Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see (Hebrews 11:1).”  However, it also reminds me of the story Jesus told that is recorded in Luke chapter 12, verse 16 of a rich man who has such a successful harvest that his barn is not big enough to store all his crops.  So he builds a bigger barn believing he will be well provided for in the future.  But that night he dies and never gets to enjoy the benefits of the wealth he has amassed.  This tale echoes Jesus’s teaching in the beatitudes, “do not worry about your life, what you will eat and drink…Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.  Are you not much more valuable than they? (Matt 16:25-26)”  Thus we see false pride and security in material possessions, whether real or just counted upon, should be resisted in favour of trusting God to meet our needs.

The challenge is, for us as the Church in the UK, to live like we believe it when we have so much wealth and privilege.  But I think it is just this sort of authentic lifestyle differential that will earn us the right to “give the reason for the hope we have” (1 Peter 3:15) to our English compatriots.

Traditionally August 1^st is Lammas, the festival that celebrates the first fruits of harvest.  This year I marked the occasion by attending the Lammas Festival in Eastbourne.  Organised by the pagan community, I had been invited to lead a team of local Christians engaging in outreach to spiritual seekers for the first time.  We had a fantastic time blessing people attending the event with free henna tattoos, Ruach and Jesus Deck card readings, as well as prayer for healing.  The response was overwhelmingly positive and we had so many conversations where we were able to bring God’s love and encouragement to those who were in real need of it. 

By the end of the weekend we had already been invited back by the organisers for next year’s festival and the team were planning to attend a similar event just a few short weeks away!  As I was packing up my tent, I really felt that I should give it away to this new team.  For me it was a symbol of the first fruits of my ministry that I was offering back to God.  I bought it seven years ago when I did my first outreach to Kingston Green Fair.  But now the season has changed, the Green Fair does not happen anymore and I believe God wants to use my experience to envision and equip other Christians to make the most of mission opportunities in their localities.  So what we’ve done in Eastbourne marks the start of a new emphasis to my work.  And I can honestly say it gives me far more joy and satisfaction to see others being excited and energised by what God is able to do through them in what is considered to be spiritually hostile environments than anything I could ever have done myself!

This acknowledgement of God’s goodness and faithfulness by offering the first fruits is an entirely biblical principle.  In Exodus 23 verse 16 God instructs His people to “Celebrate the Feast of Harvest with the first fruits of the crops you sow in your field.”  But the book of James goes even further and likens us to the first fruits of the Harvest of God’s word, “Every good gift, every perfect gift, comes down from above, from the father of lights…He became our father by the word of truth, that was his firm decision, and the result is that we are a kind of first fruits of his creatures (James 1:17-18).”

Tom Wright helpfully unpacks this concept in ‘Early Christian Letters for Everyone’, “You bring the ‘first fruits’, the beginning of the crop, as an offering to God, (not just to demonstrate gratitude, but) as a sign that there is much more to come.  One day, God’s word will transform the whole creation, filling heaven and earth with his rich, wonderful light and life.  Our lives, transformed by the gospel…are just the start of that larger project (p. 9).”  Little did I know that in seeking to give the first fruits, I was also looking forward to God doing even greater things in me and through me for His glory and the sake of His Kingdom coming even more fully in the future!  What a wonderfully inspiring hope to consider as I recover from the exertions of last year and begin to make plans for the new academic year that commences in September.  This Lammas, it is almost as if I am offering myself afresh, “as a living sacrifice, to live and work to His praise and glory”.

A couple of weeks ago I went to a gathering of local pagans.  They very graciously allowed me to join them for their monthly discussion in a pub.  I was slightly apprehensive as I had all kinds of preconceived ideas about them casting spells and cursing those who crossed them.  However, what I encountered could not have been further from this misconception.  I found a group of people seeking to consistently live out their beliefs, caring for one another, generous and inclusive of strangers.  They respectfully listened to my experiences and opinions and genuinely wanted to encourage me in my desire to create church that is authentic community, encourages participation and fuels a Christ-centred spirituality that makes a positive difference to life and the environment.

What really saddened me was that the majority of those gathered had started their spiritual journey in a Christian church.  They recounted how their questions about faith had not been taken seriously, they felt controlled and constrained by a hierarchy that seemed dependent on the passivity of the congregation and experienced prejudice and judgement as they wrestled with issues of identity.  One of the problems they have with traditional church is that encountering the divine is removed from the ordinary and every day.  One of them said to me, “my beliefs don’t just make a difference for a couple of hours on a Sunday!” 

While I think we have come a long way and lots of us are Christians who seek to demonstrate the Kingdom is at hand 24/7, on Saturday I encountered an example of how there is still some way to go as our local ‘Churches Together’ put on a family fun day in the park.  It is fantastic that Christians got out of their buildings to bless and engage with the community.  But to go the next step, I think we need to be much more creative about integrating faith so that it is part of the fun and games.  I was in a prayer tent and it really had little to do with the rest of the festivities.  What was needed was an interactive prayer activity that engaged the children and gave parents an opportunity to help them participate.  I also found it disappointing that at 5pm all the bouncy castles were turned off to do ‘church’ i.e. hymns, a talk and people sitting in rows before the stage.  This could be interpreted as time to stop enjoying yourself because we’re going to focus on God now!  I know this was not the intention but could we not bounce our worship?

Today a friend sent me a link to a blog entitled ‘When believers leave the church’ (http://starfishhouse.net/blog/2012/07/uncategorized/when-believers-leave-a-ch…).  It says, “In 2005, George Barna, the most quoted Christian statistician, went in search of…‘leaving believers’ to discover who and what they were about. In his book ‘Revolution’ he describes them as, “the most passionate group of Christians he had ever encountered.” He continues, “A common misconception about revolutionaries is that they are disengaging from God when they leave a local church. We found that while some people leave the local church and fall away from God altogether, there is a much larger segment…who are currently leaving churches precisely because they want more of God in their life but cannot get what they need from a local church. They have decided to get serious about their faith by piecing together a more robust faith experience. Instead of going to church, they have chosen to be the Church, in a way that harkens back to the Church detailed in the Book of Acts.”

This is probably where I am at but at the same time I wonder why we have to leave.  Could we not have the grace and maturity enough to stay in relationship with local church and for it be informed and challenged by the more intentional, whole life discipleship we are seeking to model?  I would really like to hope so because otherwise we will see many more finding faith not just outside church but beyond the Lordship of Christ.