Discernment and Bread/Fruit for the Journey
Apologies to my faithful readers. Yes, I missed posting this on the right day. Better late than not at all!
We had a meeting of our local Community Life and Membership Committee this evening. On our agenda, among other things, was 1) an evaluation of the Shrove Tuesday Pancake Supper, 2) a review of the after worship refreshment supplies, and 3) a final edit of our local church brochure. Interestingly enough there were issues of food and/or healthy eating associated with each of these agenda items.
It seems to me that food has become one of the button issues in today's world. Is it a coincidence that we ended up talking about food so often in our meeting last night or is it a theological nudge?
One school of theological thought would claim that there are no coincidences; that because everything is connected, we need to pay attention to the so-called coincidences in order to discern what they might tell us about the call of God.
And so the question that comes to mind with respect to the various food references at our meeting is this: Is there something to be discerned about where God might be leading us?
I hope that you the reader do not take this theological reflection as an undermining of the decisions the committee took - it certainly is not intended that way, except to raise issues that came to mind during our discussion, but which were also niggling at me after our discussion. So I truly raise them as a question about whether there might be some theological discernment at work here.
The arguments pro and con are not new. In fact, they seem to come up in church
circles with regularity. They centre around cost, convenience and
conscientiousness. Cost is ever an important concern of every church congregation, as is convenience in a world where people and their time are stretched ever more, and conscientiousness is just another way of saying: faithfulness.
In our discussions the first issue we dealt with was a request for some healthier options to be made available at the Pancake Supper. Not much needs to be said about the positive reasons for this. In a world where we are constantly being alerted to the importance of healthy eating, the arguments for healthier options are obvious. However, there are also arguments against. One is the tradition of Mardi Gras - when rich, perhaps unhealthy foods are used up in order to remove the temptation of eating them during Lent. It's also about cost. How much more would it cost to offer healthier food and would we have to implement a quota system in order to control how much of the healthier food we would be required to offer? Of course there's also the "Why change a working system?" argument.
The second "healthy food" discussion at the meeting centred on whether real juice would be offered during fellowship time. It's actually a discussion we began a few months ago, but which never really came to a conclusion. Again the pro arguments are obvious, but cost and convenience are once again the main cons.
Ultimately the committee decided against the full healthy option in both cases, opting to continue the healthier choices that were implemented this year at the Pancake Supper.
As mentioned above, the decisions were made, and I'm fine with them, but my role as theological reflector cannot help but notice the irony or coincidence of having the issue of healthy food come up in one particular meeting of a committee which is not given at other times to any discussions about food. This led me to do some thinking about what it all might mean, and to ponder whether we were indeed being nudged by God.
Let's consider what some different choices might mean:
One change could lead to another. We could become known as the church which offers healthy food options. We could advertise a "new and improved" pancake supper with vegetarian sausages and fresh fruit to put on our pancakes. We could advertise our belief in making connections - connections with God, connections with others, connections between what we eat and how we live - where connections with God happens at worship while connections with each other happen at fellowship time and connections with healthy bodies are made because we offer real juice.
Okay, okay I'm dreaming here - but this is what mission is about. It's about discerning what kind of community of faith we are - what kind of community of faith we want to be and then making sure that our actions - both public and private, match what we say - "walking the talk" is another way to say it. It all starts with discernment - where and how is God calling us. What do we want people to know and learn about God because of the way we make ourselves known in and about the wider community?
We could be the "healthy food" church .That says something about God and ourselves and the connections between us.
We could be the "open and inviting" church. That says something too.
We could be the "warm and friendly" church. That's what most churches say they are, but visitors know very quickly whether it is true or not.
We could be the "affirming church". Do our statements - public and otherwise, written and understood, really tell that about ourselves. Do we live it?
We could be the "coffee cup and blue jeans" church.
We could be all of the above, or none of them, and be something else.
Just how would you describe your desire for your church? What does it say about who you are and who you think God wants you to be as a community of faith.
Those are the kinds of questions I'm thinking about this day...
Yellowknife,
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
So here I am sitting at Gate 42 at Calgary International Airport while fuel is loaded, some passengers are unloaded, and the remainder of us are waiting patiently and impatiently for the fog to clear in Edmonton. I am supposed to be chairing a meeting, but the scheduled start was twenty minutes ago - so no point in worrying about that.
Two weeks ago I was in a situation that is somewhat reminiscent of today's adventure, The one big difference is that the fog rolled early into Edmonton that day, so we sat in Yellowknife waiting to board - with internet and cell phone at our ready command to tell people what was happening, instead of sitting in Calgary waiting to head back to Edmonton.
