down-sizing

Like many who are reaching their age and stage in life, a couple I called on today have moved from their house to a flat.

They don't need the space and they can't any longer keep on top of their running the house and the garden they had. They've not moved far, just a couple of hundred yards at most along the road to a purpose-built block of flats.

'Retirement Flats'. A nice sounding name for a difficult stage in life.

The ethos of the place is really attractive. There's a wide open hall as you enter, bright and fresh and spacious, which gives you the feel of a peacefulness, calm and community. And the flats themselves have got all that a couple like this would need, and are well-finished, self-contained and secure.

It makes sense for a couple like this now to move.

But it does mean a sizeable bit of 'down-sizing'. Stay in a house for a few decades and you'll find there's a mountain of debris in terms of the 'stuff' that you've slowly and subtly acquired.

It simply doesn't fit into a neat and compact, two-bedroom flat. There's a need for some radical 'pruning'.

It's a necessary, painful, but helpful sort of exercise. It has to do with priorities.

You can't take everything. What do you really need? And what can you leave behind or give away?

I sometimes wonder if the life of a church can be like that as well. Bit by bit across the years the life of a church gets filled with all sorts of 'stuff'. 'Stuff' that maybe seems good at the time: but has maybe outlived its usefulness.

We get tired looking after it all. The business of keeping the whole big show on the road becomes in time an irksome sort of burden, for which we have neither the health nor the strength - nor even perhaps the very inclination to attend to it all.

There's a time in the life of a people when the challenge of thorough down-sizing kicks in. Getting back to basics. Simplifying our common life again. Addressing the things which matter.

I sometimes think that the main-line church in our western world has got tired and old, and is thinking in terms of 'Retirement Flats'. There's an awful lot of 'clutter' in the main-line western church. And we're less and less able, it seems to me, to maintain and sustain such a life.

There's a need to down-size.

As the psalmist suggests, there is in our lives a 'going out' and a 'coming in'.

The Lord watches over these stages in our lives.

The bright, expectant, heady days of youth, as off we go to take the world by storm: busy, energetic folk, with high hopes and great ideals and soaring aspirations.

And then - who knows just how much later on - the slower, slowing days which old age brings as step by step we make our way back in: weary, weathered, often rather worn-out by the path our life has taken us, and shedding so much 'stuff' which we have accumulated down the years.

Are there not these stages, too, in the life of a church? And if that's the case, then perhaps it's the challenge of the sort of radical down-sizing this couple have done which the church should be doing as well.

Getting back to basics. Simplifying our life. Shedding all that's excess to the call we have been given by the Lord.

What do we really need to be the church of Christ?