Eating our veggies (part 2).
I heard someone say once: The good news about church is … its like family. The bad news about church is … its like family.
I like Anglican church. Its like family. I know its gentle ways. I know its goodness. I also know what it is to be ‘confirmed” into an agnostic state at 12, to go an Anglican school, live in an Anglican college, and find the faith so gently hidden, whittled down to traces so gently positioned, that I, and all my peers, seemed to miss it.
That’s costly, missing God for years. I needed to go looking well outside its tea and scones. Maybe local family is a deeper question there.
I also know that the deepest thing I saw for 20 years, happened back in Anglican church. Buses pulled up outside that place, 3 nights a week, bringing people from all round the state, to the renewal. The ‘Toronto blessing’ had landed in Vic in an unlikely, faithful little church. We were in a good penty church by then, old school in its depth. But even there, some of us travelled across Melbourne a couple of nights a week, for the deeper presence in this little Anglican church. Solid preaching and worship, then they’d push the chairs back, for a few hours of gentle prayer ministry. A third of the room rolling in joy and laughter . A third lying still, or deep in tears. And how deep it went. A third chatting. Sometimes carried people who couldn’t stand, pinned to the floor, out to their car at midnight. And good old tea and scones served out the back. Packed every night – every night at least half were new people, by the show of hands.
It was a bit controversial in Vic Anglican circles (much less so in the UK, where a third of the churches were opened up in renewal).
But when we discussed that season, as we started a new prophetic meeting (affectionately dubbed ‘fruity Friday’) a couple of years ago, the fire just rolled in again. We were soon all lying on the floor, weeping, (or touched in flames of joy).
Even churches that aren’t into 5 fold models of leadership, don’t aspire to go after all of the things of the Holy Spirit, can be training grounds. So, recently, I learnt a lot about God, and myself, and even the prophetic, at the local Anglican church. We’d landed there, looking for a safe place. (Sometimes you need that – but that’s another story.)
They didn’t really do spiritual gifts– just avoided those passages - but a couple of us were asking questions. Do you want this word that is stirring? They wanted to be biblical, so after a couple of years of discussion they opened up a regular section for spiritual gifts in an evening service.
The drawn out process was not comfortable, but grounded me in making a biblical case for the gifts, and a fuller experience of the Spirit, which is really the point. It was gradually influencing some.
The expression was a 6 week preaching series on the Holy Spirit, and a regular 5 minute window each Sunday night, for the next couple of years (“We come now to the part of the service where if you have a spiritual gift, a word, a prophecy, a tongue, some gift of healing, that you feel to bring, now is the time”).
If you missed that 5 minute window, you missed it for the week. The tightness of that constraint was actually good training. It was like a narrow beach you could surf from just the right angle.
It taught me to move quickly when the impression of the Spirit came, to collect thoughts and scriptures quickly.
Some people got healed in those windows. At 7, my daughter started to have visions in those moments when the wind of the Spirit gently blew. I learnt to watch her for the counter attack in those times as well – new openings can be contested.
God would often – almost invariably - place something on me in that window. I resisted it once, feeling it wasn’t right to go up every week, wanting to create more space (there was a little flow of others). But the conviction about missing it was worse- in that place it seemed He wanted me to move with it each time (that can change in different seasons & places though).
They also opened up a prayer and praise night, which was often deep and powerful.
We also ran a small group, which looked a bit like ‘fruity friday’, improvising our way into deep things. We probably needed that extended freedom.
I met John Steele at that church - passionate Anglican minister preaching on the baptism of the Spirit - and he taught me a lot, in a year of meeting in his home.
We left that safe and sturdy Anglican church when the assistant pastor left to go to Tassie – we knew our 6 years there were up. God even let us know when they would go – they had asked us to pray into their 5 year plan for staying there, but before we all left the car park that night, Deb and I both heard something; the year they would actually go, only 18 months later. It unsettled them at first, and it wasn’t what we wanted to hear either, but it panned out that way.
Church reformation is good. Returning to biblical forms of leadership is very good. Being open to the Holy Spirit is excellent. But even when some of those principles are in question, the local fellowship can still be a family, a key place for growth, at least for a season. We pushed into some teamwork, in spite of the clergy-laity divide. We stepped on each others toes occasionally in that process, but we sorted it out, and growth happened.
So, just an example, that even when some things don’t seem fully optimal or released in all we value, even these forms of family can be places of reciprocal blessing. They might be giving us vegetables when we wanted icecream. Or we might be advocating for meat and wine when they were serving bread and water. Or a bit of both, shared meat and drink. Either way it can be good.
