A Web Designer, a big shot Marketing Manager, and a Priest, are all sitting on a roof together drinking beers. No it’s not the beginning of a bad joke, it was my Thursday night. These guys are all my buddies and they happened to be in Cape Town last week. The Web Designer and I already live here. The Priest was in town to organize his visa to go overseas for a holiday, and the Marketing Manager was shooting a commercial in and around our beautiful city. We all go way back and so we decided to head out for supper that evening to the ‘Royale Eatery’ and catch up.We enjoyed a supper of over sized burgers with exotic toppings; a particular specialty of the establishment. As we ate we found out about family developments, job stresses, recent joys and sorrows, and plans for the future. Feeling rather bloated after our meal, but not yet ready to call it a night, we headed upstairs to ‘The Waiting Room’. It’s a cool little bar which you can only reach from a retractable steel staircase on the main street. Once up there you find yourself in three cramped rooms each set at odd angles to the others and connected by a series of passageways and narrow staircases of the kind you’d find in a JK Rowling book. It is part of its charm, but we decided instead to head for the deck on the roof, away from the noise and squash.
The Web Developer
At one point, in a gap in the conversation, my Marketing Manager friend says, “I have a question guys. Where are you at in your spirituality, your thinking about life and God?” He actually asked a much better question but I can’t remember the wording.
The answers to this went on for quite some time because we all seemed to have a lot to say. Some of us were in better places than others. Some of us were blossoming it seemed as we tried to better connect with God, while others of us felt as if there were a wall in the way, or just a distinct absence of anything more. The beauty of it was the vulnerability and honesty with which we spoke, and the ways in which we were able to support each other and push each other on.
As good as all this was, I knew my Marketing friend had to be up the next morning for a big commercial shoot and so I stopped the conversation at one point and said that maybe we should wrap it up and get to bed. He was the one who turned around and said, “Don’t you move. This is church man!”
The Marketing Manager
Church is the people you can speak to about this stuff. They may be in your church, but I think often they aren’t. I know when I used to work in the church these conversations never really happened in earnest with people from my church but rather with a select group of friends who I had journeyed with for longer periods of time; people who knew me. At one point in the conversation one of the guys even said, “I wish I could speak with this kind of honesty in my church, but I just can’t. It would scare the crap out of most people.” But if this isn’t what church is really for; carrying each other through life and pushing each other towards God, then it seems to be little but a show.
We didn’t do any specifically ‘churchy’ things.
We didn’t sing songs together. We could have. We are all musicians and love our music so making sweet music and pointing it at God would have been a pleasure, but we didn’t need it to have church; to ‘be church’.
The Priest... believe it or not:)
Did we have communion? No. Not specifically, but we did share a meal and grow relationship around a table. You’ve heard me say it here before; that I think eating meals together is a big element missing in our communities and from our communion in particular.
There was no expectation of the way things should happen either, or how long things should last. Consequently we were there until the wee hours of the morning, not really wanting this thing to end, because it nourished us and energized us.
So, impromptu church is now my favourite kind of church. I’m on the lookout for it: those opportunities to connect with mates, share our wounds, and push each other towards God. Because I’m not ‘attending church’ in a ‘church building’ at the mo; these impromptu church gatherings sustain me like nothing else can. Come to think of it, even when I was a pastor working in a church these moments where church just happened would be the memories I held on to while formal services, with their predictable liturgies, often blurred into one another.
Obviously these little gatherings can’t provide everything, but for now they are oases in the desert which I steel myself to reach.
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That was a sweet evening! I found it tremendously helpful – both in renewing friendships and also in hearing where others are at.
I also felt free to be completely honest with where I was at. I don’t feel I can do this around 99% of Christians, whom I expect to not listen well, and set me straight, biblically.
I like the thought you close with, and I wonder (with Pete Rollins) if the church which is emerging is the desert in an oasis of shallow spirituality, Christianese, and commercial worship music. Perhaps some of us are being called to leave the place of easy nourishment (and fast food spirituality) and head into the lonely sands, away from the noise, for the sake of Christ. For it is in the desert the God calls us to depth and dependence, to working out our faith with fear and trembling, in the place where we need him most (who needs God in an oasis?).
And sometimes, in the sand, we find an oasis, which is completely different from the oasis we left, and smaller, and not glamorous, but there is life there – and community.
Loved the insight into an evening service! I agree with you that “formal services” blur into… well I am not sure what they blur into actually. It is however the informal gatherings of people who are growing in their love of our Lord and King which gives so much more energy, life, real community and real Christian food.
I do think there is still a helpful place for “formal church” but I wonder if church doesn’t happen “by accident” more often than we realize nowadays?
Hey Rob… thanks for commenting. This is my old site though. There is much more current stuff over at http://www.unlearning.co.za. Please come visit. Peace.