"What have I just been to?" I asked myself as I pulled into the road. I wasn't complaining; I had really enjoyed the Big Church Night In, I was just not sure what it was.
It looked, for all the world, like a concert - the tickets, the wristbands, the tables overloaded with merchandise, the cool musicians emerging from the smoke and lights, with their bow ties and skinny jeans. It was all there - the bounce, the atmosphere, the energy, and the crowd, beckoning for the inevitable encore.
But if it was a concert, I don't think it was all that certain about it. It seemed to want to be something else. At several points, those ultra-cool musicians told the crowd that it wasn't really that at all. It was about worship, they said, about lifting our voices together, and about being, well, church.
But I don't think it was - not because it was loud and didn't end with 'tea and coffee'; not because there wasn't a notice sheet, a stern handshake at the door, nor a million kids running around with flags, and not because it was on a rainy Tuesday night instead of a good old Sunday morning. Nope, not for any of those reasons. It wasn't 'church' because it was obviously a gig, a concert, a... performance - and that, I think, is something else.
Oh Matt, you old-fashioned stick-in-the-mud. Get with the times, Grandad - church is changing. It's about more than a structure, a building or a 'service', you old fuddy-duddy.
I know. I would give up the world to see our church explode the way Rend Collective did last night. It was life, it was passion, it was loud, it was enormous, it was great - and the musicianship was extraordinary. I'm not saying we shouldn't change with the times - actually our young people ought to be on stage far more than we are - and they should be as loud and as passionate and as brilliant and as holy as they can be while they're up there. That's the kind of church I want to see. I hope they were watching. I hope they were inspired.
And yes, the church is about people, not buildings. I get that. I've been getting that for a long time. I'm just not sure that you've got 'church' wherever you've got lots of Christians together. I think being the 'called-out' assembly (ekklesia) is more than that.
It might have been that I was surrounded by strangers. I had ended up taking two of our young musicians who wanted to be right at the front and so, when their friends arrived, I had found myself naturally drifting towards the wall where the other grown-ups stood. It amused me that we were all a bit like parents at a children's party.
Anyway, hemmed in by people I didn't know, it didn't feel much like church. We're taught so often that the best model of church is family, and for me, worshipping together as family seems like the best way of doing it. I found myself missing that, missing them, in the middle of Phil Wickham's ethereal vocals and misty blue smoke. I felt, sort of alone.
I think the tension probably exists in my head. I grew up believing and teaching people that being on stage, worship-leading if you like, was much more about being a signpost pointing somewhere else - our goal ought to be to become invisible in the light of the One we're pointing to. I don't think anyone on stage last night would disagree with that - they all said it, pretty much. But the crowd seemed to be applauding them, cheering them and chanting for more of them, when they slipped off the stage at the end of their set. I might be wrong of course, but if this was church, and that was a worship band, then that's actually quite worrying.
The rain spotted onto the car windscreen and soggy leaves flew up as I drove away. What's clear is that we've all got slightly different ideas of what church should be. This is a bit of a journey for me too - after all, for a long time I wanted to be one of those cool musicians. I'll be honest though, I think I'd rather just be a signpost, whatever that means.
No comments:
Post a Comment