[ hold :: this space ]

A group of us met last night in St Kilda to talk about alt worship, post-church communities and to begin to articulate a little bit of what inspired us to seek this out.

these are a couple of things to remember from last night, rather than thought-through analysis:

- we talked about who we do this for… we don’t do it for the anonymous ‘them’, guessing what ‘they’ want. to do it for ‘them’ is another form of colonialism. I don’t think that the alternative to that is to do it for ‘us’ though… [the gospel is about finding a third way... about recognising the desires and longings and need for redemption that make up our common humanity]

- my current reality has no greater higher moral / theological / christian ground than anyone else’s reality… we can talk about the wide open back door of charismatic churches, but only if we also acknowledge the depth of despair, grief and exhaustion within many liberal churches…

- we have to make sure that what we’re imagining isn’t simply a reaction to what we’ve left. any form of worship / space / community that’s created around fixing the problems we perceive in that which we’ve moved from is going to be just as flawed and inadequate.

- we have all the time in the world to make something happen, but only if we keep working on it now.

Last night we started with trying to understand a little bit about what each other meant by some of the basic terms we used… alt worship, conversation, sacred space, community, evangelism, mission, etc. It’s not that we want to agree on them, more that we want to get a glimpse of the perspective each person brings. we have to trust each other. we also have to learn to trust ourselves.

We’ll be having a meal together again mid march. The invitation is open for anyone.