Flexibility

How flexible are we?

Most of us like some routine in our lives and because of this we are able to keep track of our time and make best use of it! When I was first a Christian I learned a couplet that ran"Only one life and that soon past . Only whats done for Jesus will last"

One of the most inflexible thing in most of our lives is "church"! We have a tendency to "have church" rather than to "be church' So thinking of the passing nature of our lives, can we in the church be inflexible?

I mentioned in one of my other blogs that I attended church every Sunday, sometimes twice or three times, ever since I was 16! Then of course there was "mid week meeting" which was another time we always "had ' church..

In the last year since joining with others to begin Mosaic in Lethbridge, I have learned something about flexibility in Church life. In the last few weeks we have had to skip our usual Saturday gathering, because of events that we were involved in , a birthday party (mine) , an outreach event that had no songs and very few prayers, and a wedding This week we had to stretch a bit further and actually have our gathering on Sunday morning. This was hard for us because it interrupted our usual pattern! But, it was great ! We had a great meeting and having lunch afterwards and fellowship into the afternoon was not a chore!

We have a smaller church , around 25 , and we are all on Facebook. This helps us to be flexible and to change meeting times and places with minimum difficulty. There is something good about this because we don't have to be tied to a time or place to express our membership and life in the Body of Christ., and our particular expression of the Body.

Its important to "not forsake the assembling of ourselves together" but at the same time in the New Testament the Church met "daily" and "from house to house" so they were also very flexible in their way of doing the work of the ministry. The variety of places they met, the day of the week they met, were all subject to their ongoing pursuit of preaching the gospel wherever and whenever they could . They seemed to manage it without Facebook to help !

Its great to have a place or a centre to work out of and I know its in our future , but its so easy to become a slave to a time and place and location, and to believe that having church can only happen at those specific times in that specific place.

Being the church is so important that when we find ourselves with one another, or in an evangelistic situation with those who are not Christians, there are opportunities for prayer and ministry to them and to our brothers and sisters. So often healing does not happen on Saturday Night at our regular gathering or on Tuesday at our Training Night... its there we actually hear what has happened as we have been out in our world "being the church"

Flexibility was a mark of the lifestyle and ministry of the New Testament... lets keep as flexible as we can!