On how we're shaping up as a church, or, entering the kingdom of heaven like a child

What does it mean to do church, to be the church? How would you reinvent it if you got the chance to start from scratch and weren’t stuck with all the inherited traditions, structures and frustrations? What’s worth hanging on to, and what isn’t? I know none of these are new questions, and there’s reams of great writing out there that answers them in profound and interesting ways.

Our first two years in Buckingham of praying, meeting together, relationship building, ground work, outreach and listening to our community felt very slow, we didn’t have much to show for it. Important work was done and it had us primed to blossom into life. We moved here a year ago and since then it’s snowballed out of control. Over the past year we’ve been shaping and reshaping, with lots of trial and error, reforming, regrouping, trying to work out what we're doing here.

None of it is sexy, new or exciting in terms of strategy. Much to our disappointment, it all looks very ordinary from the outside. A Sunday morning meeting. Junior Soldiers. A toddler group. A Home League of sorts. Community Care Ministries. It’s all been done before. They’re the things our community have asked us for. They’re contextually appropriate. So we’ve had to get over ourselves.

And God is at work in beautiful ways. Those old tools can still be effective. On the days when I want to throw in the towel, and over the past year there have been plenty, these beautiful people have reminded me why I do what I do, and why I want to keep on doing it. They’ve taught me the gospel all over again, reminded me why Jesus is worth pursuing with everything I have. Told me with passion and tears in their eyes of what life was like before and what Jesus has done for them and why there’s no going back, with no desire to compromise, because what he gives in return is infinitely worth everything that he asks us in exchange.

We’ve found ourselves with a child-majority congregation. We’re passionate about discipling these kids, and their families, helping them encounter God, breaking generational cycles of dysfunction, growing in transformation, into the likeness of Jesus.

Which sounds much more poetic and spiritual than it feels.

Our Sundays are chaotic, exhausting. Sometimes I come home and just want to shut myself away in a darkened room. Sometimes we’re buzzing about how lovely it was and no one wants to leave.

We spend a lot of time learning how to climb trees, how not to hurt each other, what to do when we’ve hurt each other, how to do conflict well. Children and adults. We get through a lot of accident forms. We chat through parenting strategies, getting it wrong and doing remarkably well. Our outside space is such a gift from God, a real pressure release valve after trying to keep focused and engaged all morning. We get through a lot of wet wipes and we do a lot of painting. 

I think our cross at the front of the hall gives a true reflection of the kind of church family we are.  Messy, colourful, loud, gathering together to centre on Jesus.

One of the best sound bites I took away from Forge church planting training (it’s a game changer – do it, you won’t regret it!) was ‘Meeting without eating is cheating’. We take that seriously. We eat a sit down cooked meal around one table every Sunday. It’s getting harder and harder to fit us all in, but it’s a non negotiable for us now. No one is willing to give it up. We’re learning how to use cutlery, how to chat over the dinner table, how to eat vegetables, how to sit and wait for other people to finish. We’re learning how to count how many of us are here and how many plates we’ll need to lay. We practice keeping our cool with each other as we misunderstand the vision for squeezing us all in around today’s table configuration. We eat a lot of birthday cakes. We are blessed with some of the most generous hearted, giving people, passionate about celebrating each other.

There’s not a lot on a Sunday morning that feels reminiscent to me of any other Sunday meeting I’ve ever been to. It’s noisy, and frequently I wonder if anything is going in for anyone. Are the adults all just busying trying to stop tiny spidermen from shooting webs at each other, preventing children from running out the back door, and breaking up worship ribbon sword fights? There’s a lot of disciplining and modelling, and trying to capture back wondering attention. Do we all long to go deeper in worship and have undistracted time in prayer and depth? Undoubtedly.  And we make space for that at other times and in other ways. But are we all learning more about the kingdom like this? Without shadow of a doubt. Worship, Bible story, praying in family groups. Our heart is that everyone would not just learn about God, but encounter him and know him. Be changed by him.

We’ve got more kids than adults, so it’s the adults who go out back to the smaller room during the meeting. We use the same structure in our adults Bible study every week. With each passage we look at we ask – what does this teach us about God, what does this teach us about people, is there a command to obey or a promise to keep, what do I need to do to put this into practice this week? Questions to help us feed ourselves from Scripture. We learn from each other, hear how God speaks to and through each other. It’s not one voice at the front giving the right answers. We get to hear from people who don’t know ‘the right answers’ yet, and I’m learning so much about God’s heart that way, gathering up fresh perspectives on old stories as the treasures they are.

One of the things I love most about Jesus is how adamant he is that the kingdom of heaven is for children. So often we act like God is for when they’re a bit bigger, they’ll get it more when they’re older. They’re the church of the future. But the truth is: there’s no junior Holy Spirit. God is at work in these kids lives here and now. They are passionate about fighting for good, for love, for justice, for hope, for God’s kingdom.

And it’s not just that God’s kingdom is for them too, but the key is that we have to be like them. To approach God like them. I’m learning a lot about entering the kingdom as a child.

We do church the way we do because we don’t want to just occupy our kids and keep them quiet for a couple of hours on a Sunday morning while the grown ups do the important stuff. They’re not just in holding bays until they’re old enough to be interesting. God is at work in them, teaching us through them. They are our leaders. God’s kingdom is revealed through them. The kingdom of heaven is like children sat cross legged on a carpet wondering, as they play with bits of felt. (We love love love Godly Play for helping our children, and our grown ups encounter God, hear from him, learn the stories, grow up in profound spiritual truths in simple, accessible ways. Also we love it because it’s calm and quiet in an otherwise over-stimulating day.)

The older children and adults together looked last week at the parable of the merchant and the pearl of greatest price (Matthew 13:44-45), and the kids did some amazing wondering:

Was the merchant a robber, did he try to take the pearl without paying for it?

He sold everything he had. Even his house, where’s he going to live now? – oh look, here’s an empty house for him! When we give up everything for God and his kingdom, he provides for us.

The seller when he bought all the merchants stuff, he didn’t have room to breathe anymore. He became trapped.

Did the seller regret selling the pearl? He got comfort, security, power. But no more sense of adventure, of life opening up in front of him.

Did the merchant regret giving up all his things? It was his great joy to swap.

The pearl seems so small, but it’s so precious.

Often we look at it that we are the merchant, and Jesus invites us to sell everything we have to come and follow him. To give up the security, the comfort, the shelter, and exchange those things for a life of adventure in following him, listening to what he’s asking us to do, following where he’s asking us to go. Comfort, security, influence, all sound like pretty great things to have. It’s what our whole world revolves around pursuing.

C.S. Lewis wrote the Narnia stories as an allegory, a picture of the kingdom of God. The Lion, Aslan represents God – The children ask Mr Beaver, ‘Is he a safe lion?’ To which the response comes, ‘Safe?! He’s not safe, but he’s good.’

They say the eye of the hurricane is the safest place to be.

We can chase after all those things on earth. But Jesus warns us,

‘Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.’  (Matthew 10:39)

I don’t know what you want for your life, for your kids as they grow up. Comfort, security, influence? God invites us into a life of adventure where we trust him to lead us into a story that’s about living for more than just ourselves, that invites us to give up those things and, like Alice in Wonderland, step down the rabbit hole into this topsy-turvy kingdom, where we have to enter as a child, where we give up all that our world deems as most valuable, for a pearl-precious kingdom. So small you might miss it if you blinked.

For me, following God’s call on my life as a Salvation Army officer, it has meant moving away from family, friends, relationships, jobs, university, to come and follow him. It’s brought me to places I would never have known to choose to go. I’ve found a life surrounded by love and fulfilment.

Sometimes the physical landscape of our lives isn’t any different when we follow Jesus, it’s the space inside us that changes, and he’s asking us to give up the thought patterns and ways of doing relationships that we’ve become attached to, the bitterness, the unforgiveness, the drama. And then we look at what we’ve handed over to him and realise that maybe the things we’ve were holding on to weren’t all that precious after all, but actually they were damaging us, and he was holding out something better, something healing and beautiful and whole. 

We are holding on by the skin of our teeth trying to keep with with what God is doing here. It changes week by week as more people join us, offer their giftings and share the ups and downs of life. It really is God leading the way here, and we're just along for the ride. And on the way God is saving me all over again. 

Pray for us.