Weaving connections: Janine's thoughts #4

Juggling mess, hope and trust

Churches, even traditional ones, do exist in messy places.
As a bunch of Tasmanians in a crowd, reportedly, of 1 million, we found ourselves in a very strange place. The Notting Hill Carnival was an explosion of noise, colour, movement and, above all, people. It was a celebration of West Indian music, food and culture. Some of the colourful floats were sponsored by local businesses, but many were clearly the efforts of community groups, including at least one church.

We allowed ourselves to be taken along with the crowd (sometimes you had no choice!) and stopped,looked, listened and felt. At one point we stepped out of the crowd and into the relative quietness of the local Anglican church. A small band of elderly people were providing refreshment and an oasis of calm. This servant people were also ready with brooms, buckets and mops to clean up after this giant party was over.

The differences, in both style and service, of this church with the South Ashford Baptist Church were superficially large, but at the core of their sense of mission much less so. Service to the community was at the core of both places.  Both had elements of servanthood that were expressions of their life of faith. The degree to which the party goers in Notting Hill or the families of Ashford recognise the role of the church in the services provided is not entirely clear. The biggest difference between the two situations seems to be, not so much the nature and size of the service provided (an annual clean-up and a multi-faceted children's service don't have that much in common), but the level of engagement of the congregation with that service.

Even there, I am not clear about the form of engagement for each congregation.

The Notting Hill group were prepared to get into clearing up the mess left behind by the, mostly young, people, but were they engaging in the messiness of the lives of those young people? The Ashford congregation supported the service and trusted the leadership of The Willow Centre to continue to provide the service. The points of engagement were not entirely clear. To what degree did the congregation touch the lives of the families attending the centre?

While my visit was brief, the privilege of helping out in the active movement session for young mothers and their toddlers was great. It was messy, noisy and unpredictable but a humbling experience. Being alongside, even briefly, E and his mum and the other mums and young children allowed me the smallest glimpse of the larger vision held by the leaders of The Willow Centre. We embark on such missions and sometimes God grants us glimpses of where we are called to go. While the congregation grieved, to some degree for a mission that had moved beyond them, they had embarked on that journey in trust and still trusted that more would be granted. The yearning for the almost, but not yet mission was palpable. Trust was held by the congregation but it was thinning. Yet I was reminded that God leads us to God's mission already out there in the world. That hope and trust have already gone before us was strongly embodied in E trustingly holding the hand of a stranger as we all danced and sang together.

What a grace moment!