off-road

Sometimes coming back after a week away it's a case of having to hit the ground running.

Today, the way I've been feeling, it was an effort simply to hit the ground! But it's always good to be back.

There wasn't a lot of running, though! It was pretty slow and laboured.

The way my old Hornby Dublo railway set used to be (and still is, I think). When I hadn't run the engines for a while, they had to be teased and cajoled back into their normal running mode. They'd go a bit, then stop a bit and then I'd need to reach across and give the thing a push and get it on the go again.

I don't suppose they make them quite like that these days. But I felt a bit like that. A Hornby Dublo engine being set to work again. Stiff and slow and cold. With sudden bursts of energy. And then relapse. And gently bit by bit being teased and eased along the track by God himself.

Trackside always. Which is just as well.

I was thinking a bit about the whole analogy, I have to say. My being like an old Hornby Dublo train set. Or even a new one, I suppose.

The whole business of staying on the right tracks. And round and round the same old boring circuit all the time. Is that what living life and following Christ and serving God is really meant to be?

For sometimes that's exactly what it feels like we have made it be. An endless round. Safe (in the main - if you went too fast the engines could come off the track). Routine. Predictable.

Hardly what I see in Jesus Christ. The One we aim to follow.

My heart lit up the other day on hearing that the sort of new Scalextric sets they make allow you now to deviate from off your own set track. It's all now digitally done. And you can move from lane to lane. No longer just set tracks (or 'ruts'!) in which you're stuck.

That sounds a little better and I fancied that. But even that's a far old cry from how it's meant to be. Jesus was an 'off-road' sort of guy who didn't stick to all the tar-macadam roads of our traditions one small bit.

And certainly didn't just go round and round the same old boring circuit every week.

Not that I'm saying I do. It's just that it sometimes feels like that! And today I probably needed that. Just to get me going once again. Preparing orders of service. Choosing hymns. That sort of thing.

There was a meeting as well at night. I sometimes think it's one long round of meetings, too. Part of the 'Hornby Dublo' circuit that we chunter round.

But the meeting was good. A chance to talk, to toss things round and sort things through and hopefully get things clear.

We were talking about leadership. About how we change the structures to create the sort of leadership we seek.

I've thought for a while that part of the basic problem that we have is simply this. We're trying to fit a 'bottom-up' style of ministry into a 'top-down' view of leadership.

The problem that we have, I think, is simply with the sort of working picture that we have of 'leadership'. We think of it too much, I fear, in terms of pure 'control'. The guys who hold the reins. Power.

It's crossed my mind for long enough that that's just not the way that Jesus sees or does it. Not at all.

I think we have to re-think, right from scratch, exactly what we mean and understand by leadership. In other words, it's not just the structures we have to address. It is in fact the meaning of the thing. The model, or picture, from which we start.

It's really quite radical! Off-road living.