sustain:if:able kiwi

a missional church?

I arrived home at midnight Saturday, after 8 days speaking in Melbourne and Adelaide, looking forward to being with family. I was also looking forward to being with my Opawa church family, just sitting among them, enjoying others lead and preach.

Sunday was Mothers Day here in New Zealand. In today’s world of widely varied family shapes and experiences, it’s a service that needs to be handled with care. Part of the Sunday service included this wonderful prayer written by my partner, plus the giving of flowers to all the women in the congregation, as a way of acknowledging the fact that mothering is as much an action as a title, that we can all mother in a variety of ways.

Just before the sermon, 2 men walked down toward the front and grabbed the remaining flowers. It was so well co-ordinated that at first I thought it was a scheduled part of the service. But no. On the way back, past me, one of the men stopped.

“Are these flowers going to be used for anything else? If not, can we take them and give them out to the homes around us.”

And off they headed, to knock on doors, and give a flower to people in our local and surrounding community, in the name of the church. They returned with stories of welcome and of relationships that will be followed up.

After the service, the person who secured the flowers was ecstatic. She had felt really strongly that rather than get 100 flowers, this year she should get 150 flowers. “That’s the Spirit of God,” she exclaimed, as we told her what had happened.

I am honoured to be part of a community where worship flows so spontaneously and naturally into mission, where the future of the people of God is indeed among the people of God.