happy birthday!

Last weekend we celebrated our anniversary - 160 years. Church anniversary is a significant moment for reflecting on who we are and what we are about, and this year, we invited Bob Mills, the City Centre Chaplain from Bristol to speak with us about what it means to be a church in the middle of a context where people come to work. In the same week, various openings have appeared to engage with institutions around us, with invitations to offer a chaplaincy ministry. Chaplaincy has been described as “loitering with intent”; being around, waiting to see what happens, responding rather than directing, meeting rather than organising. It’s one of those forms of ministry that sounds wonderful in theory and fits with much of the sense we have of our identity as a church; openness, responsiveness, hospitality and service.
But it is worth reflecting that although it can look very laid back, it is intensely demanding – demanding both in its variety of encounter, and the uncertainty of what will happen in any encounter – but also in its out-of-controlness. Chaplaincy is about going out from our building – and all that that symbolises – and meeting people on their home, or at least work or leisure ground. We do something very special in keeping our building open, and inviting people in. It offers a service, a space and a wonderful welcome. And it is the place where we stay in control. To go into other people’s territory is to let go of that control. If we are going to take this seriously – and I hope we will – it will ask a lot of us. It asks the church to let the members of the ministry team be out and about, rather than present in the building as much as we are at the moment. It asks people who are involved to give up time and go and meet people. It asks us as a church to take seriously what it means to enter space where we are not the ones who take the decisions, or the ones who can decide how and when things happen.
It is about incarnation. In coming to us in Jesus, God gives up control. God offers God’s own self into the space of the world, and the experience of being controlled as much as being controlled. There were those who, in the time of Jesus resented that; the sense that God was no longer under the control of the religious professionals, or, perhaps better, those who were committed to the institution of religion, and who welcomed in, rather than going out – who assumed that God did the same.
The incarnation is God’s refusal of that model. God’s presence to the world is not inviting us into the sacred safe space, but coming into the world to create in all of it the sacred space where meeting the centre of Life can happen. And it is without boundaries, such that God in Jesus gives God’s own self over completely enough to be executed.
I hope we will have the confidence to explore what it will mean to go out as well as to invite people in. I hope we will be able to take the risks – and so deal with the failures – that will happen, without blaming and without giving up. I hope that we can live with the changes that will happen if this is the path we take.
More than hoping it, this is what I pray for.