Bringing Light

Synod continues to excite me. This time through Kevin - an amazingly creative, generous, and inspiring man. He has little patience with those self important people who pontificate on religion, and posture with religious mannerisms. He does, however, have great patience with people who seek faith but do not understand. His particular passion is for those who are bewildered by, afraid of, or pissed off at, the institutional church. He longs to engage with the faith of people who have no use for the formal Christian structures, but who nevertheless live faithfully before God.

And so Kevin is leaving the cradle that has nurtured him, to launch out into an unknown future. He is an ordained minister of the Methodist Church. But has been given permission by the church to take the Christian faith out of the institutional church into a post-modern world: a world where formal religious practices make no sense; the world where people meet together in coffee shops or pubs to seek answers to life’s complexities; a world that does not want to learn the religious songs and rituals in order to find God as defined by the Church. Kevin is to lead a church that does not sing religious songs, or gather for religious revivals. They might meet in a coffee-shop, will most likely have meetings on-line, and could seek ways of serving the community by touching the lives of single mothers, lonley old people or stressed extacy users.

Kevin is following John Wesley, Methodism’s founder, in his affirmation that “the world is my parish”. Please pray for him. And rejoice that my cynical heart has melted just a bit more.