Small Is Getting Bigger

I just got back from, Toronto and a weekend with a group of about forty Baptists called “The Gathering.” They first came together twenty years ago as a protest and alternative voice in face of the hijacking of McMaster Divinity College by a dogmatic theological perspective and administration. It was a joy to be with them.

They have sustained over the years and in the process have built an experience of dwelling and journeying together on the margins of power and privilege. They are an “Abrahamic minority,” one of those small groups through which God’s world-overturning purpose is served.

The great plus of being a small Christian group is that it’s possible to operate in an immediacy of love, littleness and forgiveness that big structures make so difficult. There is perhaps a spiritual law that the less you have in terms of power relations and status the more the new way of being human desired by God may be experienced. It’s an air or breath of freedom which it’s possible to breathe at these “little” levels, but much more difficult to find in the office complexes and complex offices of big organization.

My dream is that one day the church will consist entirely of such minorities, linked without hierarchy, but by word and by love.

The election was never far away. Its consequences for the whole world are acutely felt outside the USA, rather than the tit-for-tat of plumbers and polls that dominates inside it. Here is another, this time political (and in many ways peculiarly Canadian), sense of powerlessness, but, also again, a sheer hope and trust that a new human way will finally emerge the winner.

I presented on what might be called “archaeology of the cross,” going back through the layers of what the cross has meant over the long course of Christian history. From a symbol of victory, to an icon of divine violence, to a body of human pain, to an abyss of compassion. The image of the cross is a barometer or mirror of our most crucial humanity, struggling with itself as the Shepherd seeks to lead it out into a new creation.

So, go “Gathering”! Greetings from Wood Hath Hope and, for what it’s worth, I think you’re on the way!

Tony