Church

St. John the Evangelist, Albany Western Australia

I’ve always thought of church as a perilous place. Anything can happen. They don’t call us Bible bashers for nothing. Church feels a bit like a giant football pitch where anyone gets to play—even if you’ve skipped training and have no clue how to handle the ball. I’m a big fan of letting everyone have a go—speak, serve, get involved in the life of the community. But that kind of wide-open liberty does come with a few pitfalls. Even Jesus, if you read the Gospels, was surrounded by plenty of rookies. So the trick is to stay both watchful and gracious—and maybe wear some padding while you’re at it.

Most of us sense the tension in church life—the constant pull between “heaven now” and the hard truth of our brokenness, our ongoing need for a saviour. I’ve often felt the unease of being part of a church that, as theologian Gordon Fee once put it, lived in “heavenly overdrive”—claiming too much of heaven’s reality too soon. He pointed to Corinth as the classic example: a church trying to grab hold of it all at once, what he called “over-realized eschatology.” On the flip side, others build their entire faith around the fallenness of the world. So which is it? Do we strap on the Superman cape—or settle into Clark Kent mode for now?

I’ve drifted between both extremes: congregations where worship looked like laughter in the Spirit and full-on laps around the auditorium, and others where it was the hushed, liturgical rhythm of the Catholic mass. Small wonder so many people wonder what “church” really is meant to be.