Making Things New

This morning I was in the church office photocopying and dropping off 20 pages on "l'apparence des français" (the physical appearance of the French) that I found yesterday in Gérard Mermet's Francoscopie 2005: Pour comprendre les Français ("to understand the French") (Larousse: Paris, 2004). This is a useful book by a French sociologist about how the French and France actually are. It is very helpful in getting a broader picture of tendencies here, which is very helpful for me as a non-French person. I'll certainly have some blogs about different tendencies in this book.

I did research on "appearance" for an intervention that Pastor Serge will give this coming Tuesday as a panelist on the theme "la tyrannie de l'apparence et le bienfait de l'apparence" ("the tyranny and the blessing of the appearance"). This reminded me that I love to do research and even had the dream job of being a research assistant during my studies at Wheaton. While I don't have a lot of time for outside research, I would like to help from time to time with certain pertinent issues.

Getting back to "spiritual formation through creativity" in Doug Paggitt's Reimagining Spiritual Formation (Zondervan: Grand Rapids, 2003), here is his section titled

MAKING THINGS NEW

And so we have moved into our future with the idea that the Kingdom of God is synonymous with the creativity of God. We have sought to live our lives with imagination, cleverness, inventiveness, and ingenuity. A worship gathering at Solomon's Porch will include bits of the familiar rhythms of more traditional worship. But it's important to us that the elements of our gathering reflect the experiences of our community in our day. (p. 136)

Our worship gatherings almost feel like great improv--the band plays from memory, not from sheet music, and the sermon is created as it comes, not read from a written text. Someone may spontaneously share a brand-new poem or song. Communion is introduced by a different person each week, and there's no set script. Post-sermon discussions ae free-form conversations with no agenda but to stay reasonable close to the subject at hand. (p. 136)

We never know quite where the night will go. And yet in this freedom, this sense of moving ahead without knowing exactly where God will move things, there is security as there is in the best kind of lovemaking: a time of finding new surprises in a comfortable place, of the deepest intimacy, of resting secure in the knowledge that our efforts will not be rejected. (p. 136)

We have found ourselves trying to figure out the most fitting ways to do particular things in our community. This applies to the arrangement of our space, our efforts of spiritual formation with children, our preaching, and our attempts to live as good neighbors. When we moved into our current space, there was a tremendous amount of remodeling needed to make the inside and outside of the building habitable. For three months, people...worked nearly every day tearing down and putting up walls. We painted and redesigned lighting. We planted new flowers, laid sod, and trimmed bushes. We would say to one another, "Here we go again, making the world better one building at a time." This served as a means of motivation, but also as a reflection of the belief that we join in the activity of God by making all things better. (p. 136)