Soon and very soon

Hello friends,

I've started and walked away from this thing a dozen times in the past week. A lot as been going on over here. Work with the schools has gone well. Our normal Tuesday meeting at Cavendish Road school wasn't as big as it normally is. The majority of the kids that show up are year 11's who are in the middle of exams. But a youth worker from the area named Ben showed up and grabbed some kids out of the play ground to have a meeting with. We went around telling our stories and giving testimonies of sorts so it ended up being a great meeting.
Wednesday night we had a bible study over at the Ware's. Normally we watch Rob Bell videos and they'd be finishing up the series with the last one except there was a problem locating the DVD. I'm sure I'm not alone when I say I'm glad we didn't find it. Jamie lead a brilliant discussion on the Forms and Functions of the church. He started by asking us what we thought the function of the church was. We said to Love, to Worship, to create Community, Heal Brokenness, Forgive, Invite. We noted that these are all Functions we know the church is supposed to preform. These are the results we want. The Forms being the rituals and acts we do to try and achieve these Functions. We discussed how the church has become a sanctuary for Forms and lost it's purpose, it's Functions. We are more concerned with How we do things than Why. But Jesus came to get rid of this mentality. He came to free us from this form thinking and tells us to stop worrying about the letter of the law and strive for the spirit. The Pharisees we in love with Forms, carrying out the letter of the law and then some. But these laws were created to carry out Functions, they exist for the sake of their purpose. The minute they stop preforming their Function they are useless. Yet the church would rather hold on to a Form they're comfortable with that is no longer relevant to the context of their world, than try something new that carries out the Function of the original law. We talked about how under this new freedom. We are allowed, invited even, to be creative with the way we preform the Functions we are asked to participate in. Living under this revelation is living under a knowledge that what is in the heart truly is God's biggest concern. If we seek Him first He will be faithful and lead us in the right path. There's no need to cling to tradition because it's comfortable and safe. We make the bible and especially Acts and the Epistles into a book of forms to follow. But Acts is a recording of what happend, not nessesarily what should happen. And the Epistles were written to a specific people at a specific time to achieve a specific end. When we look at the advice in these letters we have to look behind the command to see the Function they are trying to achieve, not the Form prescribed for the particular situation. There is much we can learn from them but it's not a manual by any means. Unfortunately, the most important Function of our church today seems to be carrying out a Sunday service. This is an important and good thing but it's just a small part of a larger live of service to God. It is also unfortunate that we pick and choose the parts of the bible we like to follow and call the things we don't like "cultural" and the things we like "essential". We went a bit deeper than this and covered a lot of ground like, what about believers who are more concerned with Forms than the Functions they were created to preform- when it's time to wait for them and when it's time to cut loose and move on. It's very encouraging to see so many people seeking the true heart of God. The people here are so wonderful and full of earnest seeking.
The Lipscomb team gets here in less than 42 hours!! I'm really excited for them to fall in love with all the people and things here that I have. We certainly have enough planned to keep them up so that they can get to bed at an hour conducive to offsetting Jetlag. They'll be arriving at 6am after 30 some odd hours of travel and we'll be keeping them up till 8 or 9 that night. I know I didn't make it that far the first day I was here. I fell asleep on the front row at a worship workshop. Hope everyone's summers are going well. Prayers always help. Love you all.

Robert