Doing church as just church

Blogging from last week

I've brought a couple of books with me: books that 'should be useful' or 'good to read' kind of books, as well as all the wacky scifi (I like Cordwainer Smith) I have on the Kobo.

So tonight I sat down for a few minutes with Floyd McClung's 'You see bones – I see an army' that it seemed right to buy earlier in the year. I'd begun to read, but got no further than the first of the introductions that so frequently seem to get in the way (too many books have intros that make me put them down and forget them).

Anyway, he was talking about the things the church is intended to be, and I had a realisation that I've stopped treating Heyford Park Chapel like an Anglican church and have just been trying to treat it like a church that I'm there to serve & help to grow. There are still the rules, the heresies, the stuff that gets in the way of building a healthy community, but to a large degree they don't really matter that much. I'm confident that God will either deal with them as the time comes or we'll end up just doing the stuff God has called us to and the other stuff will fade away.

One of the fascinating things about starting the APEST teaching series is that the church our material originated from uses 'Go-Communities' – essentially smaller churches committed to changing the community they have been planted in, even though they are part of a larger (in their case, MUCH larger) church group. And HPC is just like that: we've been planted to change our community, even though we are part of a much larger church structure. The likenesses can be broken down after a bit, true, but it's an encouraging realisation.

And it feels like a small beginning, but somehow, with all these giftings being released and enabled in the church we are going to see it growing too. And that I am really looking forward to.