I awoke this morning knowing what today was.
Today was the funeral of my Great Uncle Samuel John Potts.
Any funeral is a sombre occasion and I always manage to find the bright side with my Dad. We're a couple of jokers.
We roll up to the Lake Open Brethren hall with a plethura of cakes, sandwiches and usual lunchtime snacks.
The mourners begin to pack in at 1230 a small but steadily growing feeling makes itself known to me that with my I'm slowly falling back in time.
As I'm waiting outside with my Dad welcoming in faces my Dad knows, that know me but I have no apparent memory of, I'm asked if I want to be a pallbearer.
Suddenly this is real.
Before I get the chance to gather my thought and assess the situation I'm holding a coffin on my shoulder with my father infront of me shuffling at a speed that is hardly break-neck.
Then I'm in the counter-culture that I haven't known, but is so familiar to the rest of my family.
Open Brethren. An hour of hymns, 'words', and me standing up and reading a 4 page memorial piece that my father composed.
Spoken not musical.
But my point in all this being...I experience a christianity that most probably couldnt be any further removed from what I saw today. It felt as though I had taken a trip to the 1930's.
As I sat in the room I was just thinking...how can this particular form of christianity possibly reverberate with todays culture?. How can the approaches of a dated hymnbook and translation of the bible possibly grab the attention of those who really need it?
When you have nothing in the bank, your wife has just left with the kids, you don;t give a sh*t about who 'thined thoust on ther sabbatheth day..eth'.
Haha.
But such is life. People relate to what they are comfortable with.
If that is their comfort so be it.
My job is not to get everyone into my church and make them believe the way I believe, but to show them the works that God has done in my life since the acceptance and living out of the redemption granted by Jesus' death on the cross.
Frustrating...but c'est la vie
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1 comment:
Thanks for writing this.
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