Why "rewire" the church? Church has been at the centre of my identity. It’s formed me, frustrated me, deeply angered and hurt me, guided me, and protected me. Some of the most challenging ideas I have ever met, far more radical than the lawn meetings of my student days, have come from the theologians of the church. There has been a sense of connection to the tradition and wisdom of millennia. And, inevitably, the frustration of tradition hide-bound. I remember singing the words of a hymn one Sunday morning, “nothing changes here...” and one of the youth group muttered sotto voce to his girlfriend, “God, you can say that again!” What worked for our parent’s church doesn’t necessarily work for us. I notice it often doesn’t work for them anymore, although older people are sometimes more gracious about their frustrations! Life changes, we change, and constantly need to reassess where we are going.
This little church on the web is modelled around the metaphor of an old and treasured house. It's the house our parents lived in and inherited from someone we never knew. The house is strong and robust, but needs rewiring. Our ways of thinking and being need to change to make the house liveable and practical. Otherwise it will be a burden, not a base camp for life.
Hungry?
We were talking after church. I suggested to a friend who is struggling to lose weight that we have evolved as creatures whose natural environment had frequent periods of starvation. Food was often short. We are not evolved for an environment where food is plentiful, and where exercise is optional. We are designed to eat as much as we can. So the discipline of losing weight is against all our genetic heritage.
She said, "We have also never learned that being hungry is OK."
This struck me as quite an insight. Hunger is bad. It's drilled into us. My generation was told to leave nothing on our plates, "Think of all the starving children in India!" The notion that hunger might be good for us is utterly foreign.
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