andi oakes

It's hard to believe that Easter has once again been and gone and thoughts are now turning towards the summer.  It just doesn't seem like a year since I was making plans to head off to Nashville.

Easter has left me with more than little sense of unease this year.  Over the last few years I have had the privilege of leading the worship at the combined Holy Week services in my home town.  I really love these services.  The thought of us all getting together during Easter to celebrate what Christ won for us is just so inspiring to me; but to be honest, this year, more than others, I felt we were missing something: people.  Now don't get me wrong, relatively we had some great crowds in the church, with the last night probably pushing the 600 mark; but in reality...that was a pretty poor turn out when you bear in mind that, like every other average town of our size, we have our fair share of churches, with almost one on every street corner.

So what's happened? What's happened to us that we struggle to gain any sort of combined momentum during one of the greatest Christian celebrations of the year?  

So here's my theory: we've gotten just too darned suspicious.

It's a constant source of amazement to me at just how suspicious we can get within our little denominations.  We're constantly buying into the false idea that “We are the only ones who are doing it right”.  My work takes me in and out of many different churches, and I see the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) undertones of exclusivity every where I go.  There seems to be a deep vein of suspicion running through our modern Christian experience, and the longer we fail to dig it out, the more fragmented we appear to become.  And I have a feeling that this suspicion is being fuelled by the worst of all emotions: Fear.

It's fear that drives us to unwittingly encourage the suspicion of each other.  Perhaps we're so afraid that some of our church members might decide to go the church down the road for whatever reason, so we foster the notion the “we are the only true guardians of truth”, when in fact the church down the road are thinking the very same thing.  The real difficulty with this kind of fear driven suspicion. is that it can cause us to eventually turn in on ourselves as we begin to suspect that the person next to us may be drifting from the “true path”, which leads us to treat them differently; and believe me, I know what it's like to have those suspicious eyes give me the third degree because I'm longer going along with everything the religious crowd says is right.  But the logical conclusion of this culture of suspicion is that it can also eventually turn in on ourselves to the point where we even begin to castigate ourselves to the point of unhealthy and, in fact, actual health damaging guilt.  

Point your finger in any direction and you'll find four pointing right back at you.

I think that this fear inspired suspicion is the very thing that has the potential to unhinge our current church experience, and that may not be a bad thing.  The old ways look tired to me.  I don't know about you, but I'm hungry for a new expression of faith in this world.  A faith that embraces people for who they are and what they can become, not what “we” say they should be.  A faith that doesn't claim to have all the answers but accepts that life is a journey of exploration, not a lecture theatre where all you seem to learn is just how bad you really are.  A faith that isn't all about people fitting into a pre-defined immoveable model, but that is flexible enough to cope with people's basic humanity, in whatever form that takes.  A faith that doesn't write someone off as being a “waste of a life” because they happen to struggle with something that simply seems inconceivable to us.  A faith that doesn't engender a constant disappointment in people who are broken, but simply celebrates the life that God has gifted us with and seeks to help those who are lost in the crevices of a world's system where the default setting is “self-destruct”.  

The fact our town struggles to get a mere fraction of the Christian community together for an Easter celebration is surely an indication that we're badly in need of some kind of change in direction or thinking because, let's face it...if we really believed that we actually had real life in the church, then there wouldn't have been a building big enough to house us all.