I have been much less vocal and less often in terms of blogging over the past couple of months. Blogging has been much less “communal” feeling for me as well. I noticed today that I haven’t received any comments in almost a month. I was a little disappointed in how little feedback there was in all the postings I made back in late November and all of December on the ideas in “Becoming the Authentic Church”, a booklet published by The Church of the Saviour that seeks to articulate how they are trying to live into some new structures, which still contain much of their “traditional” disciplines and accountability and notions of call, but are always seekiing and discerning new “structures” that might enable growth and provide new avenues for fellowship that tap into our need for living and struggling with a diversity of humanity; acknowledging our interdependence, and our need for reconciliation.

As I have become frustrated with a seeming lack of openness or interest to these ideas, and the difficulty of getting a hearing, and the disappointment I felt at the failure of at least my blog to encourage dialogue on these things, I have been asking myself what I might have done, or allowed to happen on my blog to make it less readable, less helpful, less energetic, less enjoyable, less inviting. The same sort of questions have been plaguing my sense of who I am in face-to-face social life, casuing me to ask if I might be emitting some sort of “dark cloud” of unapproachability; that this sort of “depression” constitutes itself as a WALL that keeps me in out of fear of some perceived sense of further rejection, or others out becuase of some sign I might be emitting , unbenownst to me, that I don’t wish to emerge from behind this wall. I suspect that this whole thing has come up out of the recognition that I have that I have to find some way, some people, with whom I feel I am on an adventure and with whom there is a sense of mutual accountability for this journey, and that we come together with the expectation that there will be discernment and the evoking of gifts and the sense of call that arises.

I believe we are made for such relatedness and total abandon to God, and that God has given us the church in which to accomplish this. When it is missing, and where churches fail to be the formative structure in which we incubate such a life together, we tend to grow sick and seek first our own protection and seek escape in “luxuries” or in “distractions” that do not satisfy us, which only exacerabtes our sense of isolation and need of reconciliation. When I don’t have this, such insecurities reign. It’s like our immune system: when our immune systems are down, we are more susceptible to various invading viruses. The church is the immune system for God’s people (or it should be). It enables us to withstand the culture; to resist the fiery darts of the evil one. Our desire is to find that place of gift and call and to throw that into the “pot” we share and around which we gather before God.