communion

We were chatting last Sunday night with the older teenage folk about the things that fill our days. The things that keep us busier than we probably ought to be.

One of my fellow leaders quite casually observed that in the course of a day he'd get about a hundred e-mails. That's after the inbuilt filters have tossed who knows how many others in the cyberspace bin.

A hundred daily e-mails. All of which, presumably, require some sort of reply. No wonder our lives have got to be so busy.

Instant communication may be great, but it also sort of speeds life up and means you have to run just that bit faster to keep up.

E-mails take up a fair bit of time for myself as well each day. Not a hundred. It just sometimes seems like that.

Today's been a case in point.

In the case of most it's been a help to have had that instant contact with the folk involved. Especially those who, physically, are far away.

Expressions of concern and care from people far away are wonderful encouragements - especially when they're not about a week beyond the time you really needed them, but there and then.

The immediacy's good. And I'm grateful to God for that.

It's a strange and modern phenomenon. But there is a real 'communion of the saints' out there in cyberspace.

There's a website I visit daily which is right along those lines. A group of folk who daily interact with one another there on-line. They toss their issues around, talk through their Christian faith.

Short little bursts, a sentence or two at most, with their thoughts, their perspectives, their hopes and their fears and their dreams. They encourage and challenge each other. They support and affirm one another. They try to understand. They're keen to learn.

They're honest (sometimes painifully honest) and often quite amusing too. (The whole thing day by day is kicked off with a simple, but perceptive cartoon).

I kind of feel I know them all and count it quite a privilege to have this open door into their daily conversation.

For them, this is church. Relationship is remarkably real, albeit it's not face to face. Probably far more real than a lot of other 'places' where there is a sort of 'face-to-face' dimension to it all.

They are a real community. It is a communion of the saints.

If you want to see what I mean just go to http://www.asbojesus.wordpress.com/: and check out the comments each day, as well as just the cartoon!)

Having said all that - and having spent some time today myself in cyberspace, communing with some scattered saints in far off distant lands (and some that are closer to home!) - there isn't any substitute for meeting face to face.

So - Thursday again - I was round at the school for the teachers' morning coffee break. Face to face with the ladies at reception. The chance to chat. To smile and laugh and do the things that words themselves can never well communicate.

Body language doesn't really work so well in cyberspace.

And then a chance to chat with Chris, the guy who leads the SU group. The sort of chat you cannot really have in any sort of electronic way. Trying to figure out together what we'd do this coming Monday when we meet. It being Holy Week and all.

It was time well spent, for all that it was short. Face to face, iron sharpening iron sort of stuff - as the book of Proverbs puts it.

I think my life is a mixture of all this sort of thing.

Communing with God, for a start. Which isn't yet a face-to-face sort of thing.

I know it was said of Moses that he talked with God as a man will tak with his friend face to face. But for the likes of me this is still a future thing, this meeting with the living God, actually face to face.

Communing with God is an important part of my daily life. Which sounds, I realise, really dreadfully pious.

Which it's not. It's more a case of simply staying in touch with him. And he with me. I think it's wonderful. Very real. Very relational.

But the best of it is yet to be. The face-to-face bit. That's still to come.

There's the communing out in cyberspace, with people whom I cannot see and touch, but whom I know are there. Not visible at all, but folk that I can visualise. And I value their love and their friendship, their wisdom, encouragement, help.

Today, as I say, there's been a lot of that.

But communing with people across and round the table, too. Here, over coffees and lunch. And in their homes. And out for a meal at night with a whole load of the men from here, and also some of their friends.

That's the sort of face-to-face communing which is what, I'm sure, God's heaven will be like.

'Church', I think, is getting re-defined. And rightly so. Not in terms of buildings and those public acts of worship. But more in terms of people and relationships.

Twice today I heard folk say that 'church' for them is not a thing that happens on a Sunday in the buildings here. It's through the week and every day and more about the chance to stop and sit and talk with folk relationally.

So they don't feel too bad about skipping a Sunday service for 'communing' with others, with Jesus himself both present and active right there.

That's 'church', too, so far as they're concerned. Relational, worshipful, restful. Honouring God, and enjoying the Lord, and meeting with him and sharing him with their friends.

Sure, I know the Scriptures say, Let us not give up meeting together. But that's what they're doing!

It just doesn't look like 'church' (the way you always thought 'church' should look like).

I mean, go to many 'churches' of an old, traditional sort and what sort of glimpse do you get of this brilliant thing called 'the communion of the saints'?

I'm not trying to knock the 'church', as for ages it's been. It's just that 'the communion of the saints' is an essentially relational thing. And often enough, the way such 'church' is done, you could go for years, decades even, and 'communing' with each other wouldn't figure even once.

The whole thing's meant to be relational.

And so I'm learning, I hope, to shape my days along those lines.