Last night I dreamed about a mentally unbalanced man, named Ray, who broke into my mother's apartment and decided to squat there. He was aggressive and dangerous and I could not persuade him to leave. I kept waking up then returning to the dream's sequels, and then finally he was gone, just leaving the keys in a wedge in the wall that I was able to pick up. Later, once it was clear he was gone, I was being interviewed by a young woman journalist, and I was describing to her the various influences of different kinds of Christianity on my life. I mentioned at first that I am not an evangelical, but then mentioned that this of course is a default statement that simply defines me by defining what I am not. So, I went on to mention that I had a lot of grounding in justice and peace through my connections with Mennonites and Quakers, but I had also spent time in the Charismatic and Pentecostal churches, giving me a grounding in spiritual life and gifts, and some time also with evangelicals, but more consistently with the Anglican and high Anglican traditions.
In other words, I'm quite a mess, eh?
So, here I am in a traditional Anglican parish where the people simply refuse to change and grow. I will not be surprised to see this church closed within the next five years, unless people really begin to embrace change. And they don't want to. Many live in lovely expensive homes. With tons of empty bedrooms. This is my message to those Anglican bourgeois householders: invite homeless people to sleep in your spare rooms, or sell your houses and move into something more modest. Right now, as things stand, you are disgracing the Gospel of Christ by living so selfishly when we have such a crisis of homelessness and housing in this city. And you call yourselves Christians! What a lot of nerve!
I know some of these people. Very nice and lovely people. Also very selfish and brainwashed by bourgeois values.
In my parish church they are talking about doing things to make our church more inviting to the changing demographic in the neighbourhood. This is a congregation made up largely of well-off white people Now we are surrounded by a lot of well-off Asians. Of course we want some of those well-off Asians to feel comfortable in our church. They could also be well-off blacks or Latinos, but they will still be well-off, so they will be able to contribute plenty of moolah to the church coffers. We will have token diversity, Asians and others mixed in with the usual white fold. And everyone will still be financially well-off. Diversity Anglican style.
It isn't that poor people aren't welcome in my church. I am poor, and have been made very welcome, and I am grateful for this. But I have it on authority that no one really wants to cross certain lines or boundaries in order to make us flexible and viable enough to actually grow as a Christian community. Apparently, very few people in the church actually see or visit each other socially. We only see one another on Sundays, usually, in the church. Which leaves us very little sense of what we are really like in the community, in our homes, families, careers, etc.
We have to start pulling together more as a community if we are going to survive this time of transition We are going to have to review and re-order our priorities, making Christ and his people more important than they have been. For those who chirp and protest that they still want time to see their families, well and good. By the same token, we are purporting to follow the same Christ who became very poor for us, and commands us to forsake, parents, children and spouses in order to follow him, as well as to forsake all, including our lovely hones and follow him.
Start sharing more, or lose everything. All of us!.
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