I have spent this early morning (when perhaps I should have been training or doing something else) reading a few blog posts and tweets. There have been a couple of good ones today.. talking about why we don't go for exponential growth in churches.. this tweet..
"So many write on principles for successful churches. Hardly ever do they mention intimacy with Christ, dying to self & loving the unlikely."
I have a dilemma. I want to write about some of these things. I sort of feel that I have something to say about church with people who aren't like me, or in fact who are not like each other. I want to talk about the difficulty for my ego of having a church which is bursting with potential and yet not quite there yet.
But its really hard when the people you are talking about are real. Its really easy to tweet into the ether about loving people who aren't like us until this people are concrete real people with ether unique smells and sounds.
Maybe this stuff was easier when all we had was books. Things only got written after a modest amount of time and editing- reflection and space were possible before committing accounts of interaction with real people. In these instant days it feels like there is no appropriate pause.
And so I am left with a dilemma, do I say things that might hurt the very people I love, or do I say nothing and leave the writing to those who perhaps don't have the privilege of doing the living?
A week today, when all the furore has ebbed and the markets have bottomed out, our nation will awake to the sounds of bugles and church bells as we commemorate 100 years from the start of the Battle of The Somme. I am an historian by background, and the Somme for me is emblematic of a human tragedy that need never have happened. My reading of it is this: we began a war from a variety of odd alliances and murky motivations, capped off finally by a sense that no-one had the will to stop it. In order to give the war effort impetus, posters, propaganda began to be bandied around about the enemy, about what they would do to children and how they needed to be stopped. It worked as a recruiting effort- young men, boys, and women all joined the war effort. They joined as an act of patriotism, tinged yes with fear, but also a sense that it might be the right thing to do. They joined from across the country- but at the heart of the front line forces were thousands and ten of thousands...
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