This week I’ve been reflecting on the fact that how things are now is relatively new. It’s easy to point to technology and think about times when people wrote letters or used rotary phones. What’s harder is to remember that our way of life is constantly shifting. Big things that we just take for granted about who we are and how life flows are actually pretty temporary.
Being a pastor this extends to how religious life is expressed. I read an article recently about the growth of Christianity. The center of that growth is shifting from the US and Europe to the south and east, South America, Africa, and Asia. These pieces of information floating around in my brain have helped me to hone in on a sense of movement and change. Christianity started out in Israel. It spread in the Mediterranean, through the Roman Empire into all of Europe and crossed the Ocean to us with the conquistadors, missionaries, pilgrims, and others. I can picture in my head a wave moving over parts of the earth, changing and reshaping as it circles us again and again over time.
Our jobs as people who believe in a preferred future, a kingdom of God reality, or God’s dream made manifest are charged with the task of looking forward and capturing that momentum in our living. It’s an easy trap to want the same things for future people as the things that benefited me, but I have to remember that what was the right expression of God’s spirit in a past moment isn’t necessarily the right expression now. Without Sunday School, traditional worship, youth group, children’s choir, and summer camp I would not be the person I am today. Yet it’s not those things I love, but the way that the people I met through them and the lessons I learned in those places led me to know myself and God more fully. I have to remember that my grandmother, who was a deeply faithful person, did not attend a youth group. She never went to summer camp. Yet her life was full of lessons about self and God. I know my daughter’s experience includes some of the same pieces as I enjoyed, but not all of them and that’s okay. She is learning who she is and who God is in ways that challenge me to see God as more vast than I had before.
This is the beauty of our spiritual journey. To realize that God is ever calling us to what is next. God is bigger than the church, or our very language. And that is remarkable and exciting and hopeful. I’m grateful to be here in this place serving the Sellwood Faith Community as we experiment and learn what the next thing looks like. I know that there will be folks doing this kind of faithful work again and again as the future unfolds.
-Eilidh
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| The long view down the aisle at my ordination. |
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