The Petri dish of the Kingdom
In high school
chemistry I remember being fascinated by Petri dishes and agar plates.
Something about that little dish, with all its potential for breeding
crazy-wonderful or crazy-terrible little bugs and bits and pieces caught my
attention.
This week we return to
our (unfortunately) fast fly-through of Andrew Cameron’s book, Joined-up Life.
Last year we looked at how this book frees us from a dry, distant or
over-secular view of ethics. Rather ethical living is what oozes out of the
gospel. Christian ethicists are not pseudo-scientists in some dusty lab of
‘moral-living’. They are us, everyday as we make choices about whether,
what and why.
And as Christians we
have a beautifully rich freedom in making ethical decisions. We don’t have to
be tied down by conforming to what other’s expect. There is a bigger picture
than just consequences and laws when we choose what to do. Rather, the
Scriptures give us a rich range of wisdom for making good decisions in God’s
world. We have God’s own character. We have God’s created order. We have God’s
good fatherly advice (his commands). And we have the future hope to which God
is taking our world. All these help us work out how to live life best with what
we’ve got.
Zooming in on today’s
focus – ‘Life in Churches’ (chapter 34) – I love how Cameron describes the
church:
Each church is an
extraordinary project of Jesus-shaped community, a network of relationships in
which to learn endurance in difficulty while sill pursuing peace and love. In other words, [churches] become an alternative
school of moral formation, where people are apprenticed to different settled
habits and patterns of action and feeling, as expressed through various speech
acts, money acts and other acts.
Cameron is up-front that
many churches are not like this. But nevertheless, some are like this or
could be like this.
I take it then, that
our church family is a Petri dish. It is the relational space – whether during
the Sunday gathering or during the week – where we are to grow into
crazy-wonderful specimens of Christ-like men, women and children. People who
love others at their own cost. Who are quick to accept the blame. Slow to
anger, swift to serve. Culturing a new culture in our midst.
These new relationships
and friendships are the place to relearn our old habits of being dominating,
defensive or distant. To mutate from self-centred materialists back into
our true image as God-honouring, other-loving, Christ-images. And with the work
of God’s spirit even old dogs can learn new tricks.
So here’s to our churches being crazy,
contagious, bursting-at-the-Petri-seams examples of the new culture of the new
Kingdom.