Come holy spirit...

Tonight a small gathering of key church leaders will meet for supper, prayer and discussion about how best to deal with our financial crisis brought to a head by the world's financial crisis. As I noted earlier, when we came to do ministry with this struggling congregation the endowment fund gave us a 7 year window to turn things around; now that whole fund has been cut in half which means 7 has become 3 at best. It would be very easy for us to become like this old Benedictine convent on the Isle of Iona: beautiful, broken down and abandoned.

I sense, however, that now there is finally the energy and need to make hard choices: we can begin to find a way to be the church God is aching to be born rather than one trapped in the 1950s - or 80s - or 1700s! But three things need to happen before we can hear what a still speaking God might be saying:

+ We're going to have to learn to PRAY together - not a long suit here - but an absolute necessity.

+ We're going to have to explore God's imagination in scripture rather than rely on conventional business bottom line thinking. A corollary is that we're going to have to give up any illusions that we possess a monopoly on wisdom and learn to trust God in a whole new way.

+ We're going to have to trust one another in a new way, too. No more insiders vs. everyone else, no more information hogs, too.

It should be interesting tonight... which is why we're starting with supper together. Not only is it one of the only ways to get busy people together, it evokes the Messianic feast and Christ's table fellowship, too. Then we'll pray, share some insights and see where the Spirit leads. I'm hoping for something wildly creative - new/old with lots of tradition and creativity, too - in the spirit of Tommy Emmanuel's reworking of "Classical Gas."