the cave of Adullam

Today I conducted a funeral service.

Nothing unusual in that, of course. It's a fairly regular occurrence.

Except this time there wasn't a large crowd of folk at all. Less than ten, I'd have said. So no singing, for instance (they didn't wish to brave my singing a solo!).

The man who'd died lived alone. An only child, who'd lived with his parents while both of them still were alive - then lived in their house when both of them passed away.

No relatives.

And being a quiet, retiring man, accustomed (from birth, I suppose) to amusing himself, he didn't have many friends. Just two, in effect. A man and his wife, though the man having died some while ago, it's really just been the one.

I didn't ever meet the man, so I can't really speak about him much at all.

He seemed to have been a man who was quite content. He didn't need, and therefore didn't seek, the company of others. And didn't feel the poorer for that lack.

He was kind, I believe. Thoughtful and more than generous towards this couple whom he knew and who had taken the man very much beneath their wings as it were when his parents died.

Content and kind and comfortable. How many would feel quite honoured by an epitaph like that!

And yet ... and yet...

I felt a certain disquiet about the way his life was lived. And I think that that sense of disquiet had to do with the nagging feeling that I had that the man was a graphic picture of so many different congregations' lives.

Content with themselves, getting on with their lives on their own. Kind in all sorts of good ways, as well, I don't doubt. And comfortable, too. Making ends meet and covering costs and everything looking quite good.

But just a bit too solitary. Ploughing a lonely furrow. Just doing their own thing.

And that's not either right or good.

I'm conscious of this in the wake of all that went on there at big church a couple of weeks ago. So many different people and so many congregations left upset, confused, disturbed. Deeply, deeply troubled; and concerned to find appropriate ways to channel how they feel.

But lacking the means to do anything other than struggle along all alone.

There's a need, that is, for some way of embracing these folk. Creating the ties of a communal life, across these congregations' lives, with the burdens being shared by us all.

There are too many 'only children' around in the way our congregations work. Content and kind and comfortable, no doubt, but too much on our own.

There's that need for a radical communal side to the way that we move things forward in these days. And a need with that for a clear and a God-given leadership now to emerge.

A bit like the cave of Adullam all over again. Where all who were discontented, in debt and throughly disaffected, gathered around a young man none too popular in the circles of officialdom.

David.

The man who'd bring in a new and better day.

The cave of Adullam.

That's very much the picture that the Lord keeps giving me.

A place within which, and a person round whom, this growing crowd of discontented, disaffected folk could gather with expectancy and hope.

So one of the things that I'm doing these days is speaking with folk, by e-mail and phone, and by every available means, to see where this 'cave of Adullam' is now to be found and what it will look like for us.

Some recognisable focal point: and some sort of natural leader.