Friday, November 04, 2011

family faith: at Halloween/All Saints part 2

One of the members of team Taylor went “peace-treating” this Halloween. They were keen to join the fun. And be with friends. Others in the family were uneasy with the very concept of trick-or-treating – that sense of expecting a handout.

So a healthy discussion ended in “peace-treating.” They would knock on doors and speak peace to every home. (Yep echoes of Luke 10:1-10!) To practically embody peace, they took along a collection of peace quotes on paper, which they handed out. They are into peace in a big way, so this was a perfect fit with their personality. It meant that rather than get, they would give – verbal peace, the presence of peace, a peace quote.

So off they went and had a great time. It seemed a creative way of practising faith in our world today. It brought to mind some quotes by Miroslav Volf, which I used in the chapter on gospel/culture in my The Out of Bounds Church?: Learning to Create a Community of Faith in a Culture of Change.

“’Gospel’ always involves a way of living in a social environment….”

“[T]here is no single proper way for Christians to relate to a given culture as a whole. Instead, there are numerous ways of accepting, rejecting, subverting or transforming various aspects of a culture….” Miroslav Volf, “Soft Difference. Theological Reflections on the Relation between Church and Culture in 1 Peter.” Ex Auditu 10 (1994), 15-30.

(This is another entry (P=peace-treating) in dictionary of everyday spirituality. For the complete index of all entries, go here).


Posted by steve at 08:01 AM

5 Comments

  1. How did people respond? Did they get peace back? Or did people give them peace sweets?

    Comment by Duncan — November 4, 2011 @ 2:11 pm

  2. Did anyone get peaced off? So asks the media and communications intensive. :>)

    Comment by Duncan — November 4, 2011 @ 2:12 pm

  3. I like it, subversive way of offering something different to what people were expecting, nice one team Taylor

    Comment by Geoff — November 4, 2011 @ 5:41 pm

  4. Love this idea 🙂 … looking forward to 31st October 2012 so that we can put it into practice here. Thank you.

    Comment by Nel Shallow — November 10, 2011 @ 10:31 am

  5. Thanks Nel. I’d love to see a pic of what you do 🙂

    steve

    Comment by steve — November 10, 2011 @ 2:03 pm

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.