Journey mercies

Earlier this evening, I was in church for a church meeting, and the agenda was to talk about refurbishing the church to accommodate the growth in the congregation.

We had two architects who had experience in designing church buildings to help facilitate the discussion and meeting. It was interesting to see what kind of aspects that needed to be considered in developing a church building, and it was brilliant that the church leadership felt that the congregation should be part of the process. It made me feel ever more part of the heart of the church, accepted and valued.

We talked about what we felt the church building should be like, what kind of values it should embody and reflect. And I felt really glad to be part of a congregation that felt that it should reflect God-centredness, Word-centredness and community-centredness values. That the building should be practical and be a working-horse, yet aesthetically reflecting on God's beauty, but not portray pretentious affluence, because Jesus came for the lost, sick and the poor and no one should ever walk in through the church doors thinking they needed to dress better or be better just to be there.

We broke into smaller groups to discuss how the building should be like to reflect the needs of different functions of the church, ie the chapel where we worshipped God during services, the creche for minding children, the kitchen, the building accessibility, the communications (audio and visual) and outreach ministries. I found it particularly interesting to see who went to which discussion group, because it reflected their interest of service.

When I got back to my flat and thought about the meeting, I realised, the values we talked about the church embodying, the functions that it should be able to perform, the people that it should serve, was exactly what I wanted to reflect in my life. I was a little slow, but it then hit me that in talking about what the church building should be like, we were drawing parallels to what we should be like.

I thought it was a brilliant thing we did tonight.