Office Space

Sorry friends, I know it's been a while since my last post, maybe even long enough for you to notice the lack. I have been consumed lately with a big paper for my Christianity and Postmodernism class. I want so badly for it to turn out well, not for the sake of the grade, but because the problem that I'm working through is something I honestly want to figure out and revise. It's due on Thanksgiving Day (here, not there) so the clock is ticking down. I needed a break tonight though. I've been reading Dunn all day and my head is so full of Paul...sarx, pneuma, soma...and I don't even know Greek! But, an update is long overdue, so here goes...

It's been about a week ago now since I found myself walking towards the security desk of the Telstra Building, looking around anxiously. A few minutes of indecision before I found the folks I was supposed to meet, and we all headed up to the 24th floor. It was then that I found myself in a conference room way, way up in one of the tallest skyscrapers of the Central Business District, Melbourne, sitting down with Telstra execs, a postal worker, a drummer, and a city councilman, trying not to look as out of place and silly as I felt. What were we all doing there? Having church, of course.

David Wilson, who teaches one of my Kingsley classes on Wednesdays, also runs a number of cell churches throughout the week, including one that meets on Friday's at lunchtime for business people. I told him I was interested in going to one of his house churches and this was the one he directed me to. It was altogether an interesting experience. First of all, as a kind of side note, everyone except me and one other person was male. That may not sound like a big deal, but I have been going to Houghton for 2 years now, so it's pretty safe to say that I've gotten used to a different ratio. Secondly, I was the only American. That was interesting just in terms of what they had to explain to me. Like one of the things that was referenced in discussion was a big court case that's going on in Indonesia where an Australian woman got busted for bringing in some kind of drugs, which she claimed were put in there after the suitcase was out of her hands. That's commonplace enough, except in the country she was bringing them into, they deal out the death penalty for a crime like that, so its gotten a lot of media coverage. This is a specifically Australian concern b/c a lot of people travel into that area for either business or just on holiday, and so suddenly every tourist or business person has to wise up to the fact that they could easily find themselves in the same situation. All of this had to be explained to me, as an outsider. Just an observation on the whole "in-group, out-group" thing.

Anyway, they were talking about the book of Ecclesiastes because, as David explained to me, it's a book of wisdom which they find to be applicable to their place in the business world. It's highly informal, and nobody is exactly an expert biblical scholar, but they did come up with some surprising insights and ways of looking at things. At one point, they were talking about a verse that is about obedience to the king and how there's a time to just shut up and take orders. They were applying that to a corporate setting, to team projects they had been on where someone can start out with good insights, but when they start constantly shooting down everybody's suggestions, they probably should just shut up for a while and learn to just take orders. Or how when you're trying to make a suggestion to your boss, you can only push things so far before you need to just lay low and let him make his own mistakes. Mmmmm...contextualized scripture, it does a body good.

The interesting thing was though, that because the nature of the group was so specific that because I was not in the know, not just about Australian things, but about corporate things, I didn't feel like there was anything that I could have added to the discussion b/c it wouldn't have the same immediacy of application. Although you could argue that it was my fault for allowing myself to be intimidated, you could also say that it was the nature of the group itself. I do feel like it is a valid risk when forming "special interest" churches, outsiders will probably not feel as welcome or even necessarily be able to function. For example, my mom has functioned in a corporate setting all my life, so I have picked up a lot of the lingo and ins and outs of things just from listening to her talk about what's going on at work. What if I had had no knowledge of that whatsoever? I think one of the things that's pretty hot in postmodernity is forming these kinds of cell churches that really fit the needs of one or the other marginalized groups. I'm kind of reading a book on that right now, and I've got a lot more thoughts on house churches and the book specifically, but really can't write them out tonight. Someday, maybe.

It was an undeniably uncomfortable experience, but I'm glad I did it, if for no other reason than to add another dimension of experience to some of my other cell church experiences that I've had in the past. So many thoughts, so little time before the movie starts and I get counted absent...