It ain't where you live...

One of the reasons that I think I struggle with my current church experience is that I can't help comparing it to the experience of living in pretty close Christian community. This isn't something that I've done recently, but every couple of years from 1989 to 1999 I swapped 'normal' life in the UK for an overseas placement with a number of different Christian organisations. Ostensibly, I suppose, I was a missionary... but, to be honest, I don't really remember much 'missioning' going on. Most of what kept me busy was spending time with other Christians... and looking after some pretty broken buildings. 

To get an idea of some of the kind of places that I've lived, you have to start by thinking of something that ends in 'camp': Scout camp, summer camp, holiday camp, I'm not sure why I... camp. If you've ever been on one of those and can conjure up the creosote-scented, cobwebby, dusty, camp-firey, outdoors toiletty, early-morning-sunny, arts and craftsy, enormous saucepanny kind of ambiance, then you're on the right track. 

Add to that buildings that were originally built for a completely different purpose; schools, hospitals... a prison (no... really!) with plumbing from the ark, allotments and communal drying lines in the garden and a rotting car chassis nestling in a hedgerow... libraries with shelves that had bent far enough to rest on the books beneath, computers that ran on coal. Add a few bunk beds, put two (or more) people into each room, and chuck in a 'worship room' with a honky tonk piano, and you'd be even closer.

If you want, add some local flavour.

One house I lived in in France had superb cooks who could rustle up the most astonishing food from what looked to me like three bits of limp lettuce and a radish... that was, at least, until the local health inspector came to visit and closed down the kitchen because it had an open drain running through the middle of it...

The place I lived in Canada switched off the oil fired boiler in the summer and heated water for 40+ people with an enormous stove in the basement... Cutting up forests with the chainsaw was fun. Feeding the yawning, firey maw when it was 35 degrees outside and 98% humidity was less so. That house also had enormous double glazing that had to be removed every winter and stored in the attic... One autumn, as we were getting it back out of storage, one of the rotted frames gave way and the entire double window pane dropped out and fell towards my head... it's the only time that I've ever known the intervention of someone unseen who shoved me off my feet and 15 feet backwards out of the way.

Put simply... the places were dumps... but... (and it's a big but)... they were our dumps... Not 'ours' in the sense that they belonged to us... but 'ours, in the sense that every corner of them had bits of us invested in them. 

A few years ago, I went with The Wife (who wasn't yet The Wife) to one of the places that I'd lived. Before arriving I waxed lyrical about it to the point, I think, where she thought she was about to land in some fantasmagorical Christian Disney Land.

Then we arrived, and she saw the overgrown garden, and the drooping deck, the cracked panes in the front door and the peeling tractor... then we went in, and she saw the sellotape holding the windows together, and the 70s panelling in the hall, and rather than wonderment... all that was etched on her face was disappointment.

That day, I saw the place that I had loved through the eyes of a stranger... someone who had nothing invested, who had no memories attached to it... and it struck me that I could also see it that way, as a decaying, dirty, outdated hulk of a building that was only being preserved through the desperate efforts of a group... except that the garden was one that I'd sat in several nights a summer with a few friends drinking a beer and watching fireflies... and the dropping deck was one that I'd helped a team to build about 10 years before... and the cracked panes in the front door happened when we were removing the storm porch one spring... and the hall panelling had taken me and two others so long to sand that we'd come out looking like snowmen...

... and it struck me that whatever I felt about the place, the real reason that it was important to me was not because the place itself was great... Instead, it was because every corner; every wall, every floor, every enormous saucepan, every toilet seat, every loft ladder told me about times that, without any kind of agenda other than seeking His Kingdom, God, and others, and I wrestled with together, and with things physical and spiritual... and grew closer together as a result. 

Now, I'm a romantic old soul... with a penchant for deep relationship, honest conversation, teary music and the sensory overload of the past... and so, like the example of the summer camp that I mentioned at the top, I'm sure that nostalgia has something to do with how I remember those times.

But if I'm trying to define what it is that will make 'Church' something that really keys into who I am, I have to be looking to create the kind of God-me-others memories that come about through action, together, in pursuit of the Kingdom...