Even the trivial seems profound.
John Betjeman "Uffington"
Railway stations are hardly the quietest places. I know very few people who seek out the railway platform for a little solitude. Which makes it somewhat ironic to find this quote inscribed near the feet of the great poet at St Pancras. And so my thoughts have turned to just how full our world is with noise in all its guises.
Traveling on the Tube in London, I was struck by the inescapable presence of the media; it is routine nowadays for free newspapers to be distributed to the mass of commuters arriving at the station. What is it then that so many folk are exposed to as they travel to and from work? It would be nice to think that the media is offering serious accounts of the world in which we live, together with some limited but informed commentary. Unfortunately, it seems that these 'newspapers' are merely an extension of the gossip magazines, with page after page of trivia dressed up as serious news. Does it really make a difference to our world whether or not we are dressed à la mode, or if some musical celebrity is overweight? Do we really need hundreds upon hundreds of pages fed to us daily, adding more and more noise to an overwhelmingly noisy world?
Without being unduly harsh, I sometimes wonder to what degree the church contributes to the cacophony of voices competing for our attention. And to what degree, within the life of the church, we focus upon the trivial rather than the profound.
Our second week in the UK was something of a "talkfest" (which is not to suggest that the first week was particularly silent). The International Conference on Fresh Expressions and Pioneering (ICFEP) was a line up of Fresh Expressions practitioners telling us how wonderful their product was. At times it seemed more "advertorial" than conference, and it seemed to add to the "noise" without necessarily adding much else. Perhaps I'm being unnecessarily critical, but we're hardly short of people in this world eager to tell us what to think and what to do and how to behave, and at times it all seems more like a "cage of sound" rather than a sacred space in which to hear the still, small voice of God.
One of the questions discussed at ICFEP was "What makes church 'church'?" Personally, I was somewhat dismayed at the shallowness of some of the responses. Is church nothing more than gathering together on a Sunday? Regardless of how "holy" or "special" that may be, Sunday worship hardly constitutes the church! Equally, evangelism seems to be a pretty inadequate description for the life Jesus led, which suggests it's also an inadequate definition of the body of Christ.
On the other hand, the previous week was full of living demonstrations of what it means to be the church. In Ashford and St Paul's Way and the Bromley by Bow Centre there were concrete reminders that the church is not about noise, but about the bringing in of the kingdom of God. Where Christ is present, there is healing and justice and life in all its fullness. When the body of Christ is present, then those qualities are also real in this world. And somehow these spaces, particularly Bromley by Bow, created sacred space, a space with less noise and more room for God.
Somehow we need to free ourselves of the clamour of voices competing for our attention and focus upon the life of One whose very existence was focused on making a difference in the lives of those encountered.
Where do we find church?
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”
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