Thursday, February 26, 2009

spiritual resourcing or church as kings seeds

I blogged a few days ago about my vegetable garden. I contrasted the limited range of vegetables on offer at the local supermarket with the fantastic range of vegetable seeds on offer from Kings seeds. A blog comment also noted the Kings catalogue, and the way it stimulated teenage students they were working with.

A few hours later, I dropped a Lenten spiritual resource into a letterbox. For a joke, I wrote on the back “Opawa Baptist Spiritual resourcing centre” (or words to that effect). As I drove back, I thought about the different ways we at Opawa are resourcing people for Lent this year.
– a individual, at home resource, upon request
Bible days, offering resources to encourage lectionary reading
Life shapes, an evening course during Lent.
– flax spirituality, (still under development but we are tossing around a creative idea that takes us from Lent, through Easter, to Pentecost.)
– a number of emails, from churches in Wellington and Minneapolis, asking us for our Lenten (07) spirituality resources.

I wonder if some churches are like supermarkets – they offer a limited number of items, come to us, attractively presented, gently misted.

Then I look at Kings seeds – pick your own, grow your own, get your hands dirty, enjoy the catalogue in your time and space. I’d like Opawa to be more and more of the later – that there is not one way, one time, one place, come to us – but there are multiple ways for people to grow their own, and that our energy goes into being a producer of spiritual resource. I think we’re making progress and it’s a great joy to see so many different types of people taking advantage of our range of resources over the last few weeks. I also realise that it’s probably not either/or, although I suspect that generally, more church energy goes into the come-to-us models than the resource-from-us models. (This is another way of getting at some stuff in my (2005) Out of Bounds Church? book, in which I talked about the church as a “funder” of spiritual tourists.) Buy it hereoutofboundschurch.jpg

Posted by steve at 01:54 PM

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