canada...thoughts

We are home.

For the Olympics, we road tripped it. All the way to the middle of Canada and back...so, for all intense and purposes, we drove across Canada. Was a blast. Just our little fam...on the road. Jerky, spits, tunes, mountains, prairies, and some fresh understanding...

Something happened in Vancouver over those seventeen days that’s hard to articulate fully. The city came alive in celebration. Huge crowds filled the downtown all through the day and long into the evening. Hundreds of thousands of people lined up for hours at venues in a spirit of celebration. Police came in from across the country and spent most of the time in conversations together, sharing stories about recollections of being in their home towns. At one point, from what I understand, a team of police officers started to play road hockey with a group of people. So much of it was spontaneous as people connected, talked, and joined one another in celebration.

This was not the Vancouver I have been a part of in the months leading up to the Olympics. We were a grumpy city. Resistance to the games had grown. We didn’t like being told what we had to do and what we couldn’t do because this intrusive event was coming. The message that it would be best for residents to leave during the Olympics was one we accidentally took to heart with our 5000 mile road trip.

Then the games began. I’m not sure what happened. It was as if we’d been waiting for a long time for someone or something to call back to life an identity we’d forgotten. What emerged was more than just a big, seventeen-day party with people from all over the world. What took place was the release of a joy over being Canadian that seemed to have been suppressed for a long, long time. Among all kinds of ordinary people something submerged, but waiting for its opportunity, broke out across the city and throughout the nation. It was incredible to see first hand what was happening in vancouver, happen in manitoba, saskatchewan and alberta. The upsurge of life, joy and celebration among ordinary, everyday men and women is something I will never forget. I have long held a furious love for my country close to my heart. Every time I hear the national anthem...tears. But I was unprepared for the unexpected and unplanned surfacing of Canadian identity...i will write more on this later...needless to say, almost every event left me in tears.

HAVING SAID THAT...currently I have the privilege of raising money for Gentle Hands(if you don’t know what that is, check out www.gentlehands.typepad.com). This past 6 months, it has taken me to many different churches in Canada. AND, what I sense among them, connects me with this moment. A common thread runs through the conversations I’ve had with leaders.

They all share an underlying concern for their churches.

Some are denominational leaders, some solo pastors, some on staff at larger churches. They all are concerned for their denominations. On their watch they have experienced decline and have had to face both bad news and criticism about the future of denominations. I don’t need to repeat all the bad news - there are already too many critical people out there who relish that exercise. Another thread that connects them is their unapologetic love for God and the ways their tradition have been formed from the Gospel. Like the rest of us they’ve tried one model and program after another only to recognize that something much deeper than these technical fixes is happening. Something has happened at a subterranean level to the forms of church life that were so effective in the 20th century. These leaders know we are in a time when multiple narratives clash and compete to be heard in this strange new place where we find ourselves.

Alongside the daily struggle to guide their systems, these leaders have a firm conviction that God is not yet finished with them and their denominations. Strangely enough, I can feel that too! I believe we are coming through a long, dark tunnel into a time when many of these already written off churches and denominations are about to discover the amazing ways God renews. The wells are being redug. Don’t ask me how or to explain that in terms of what exactly that looks like...call it a gut feeling, a sense that something is shifting...like a coming earthquake you can initially sort of sense as though your equilibrium just a wee bit off.

Over these last weeks as I watched the crowds and the emergence of this other, submerged joy of being Canadian, my heart has begun to reprocess years of conversations with leaders in Canada. Connecting these two experiences there’s something which, for me, is important to say.

Just as this spirit that is Canadian found again a voice, churches are finding a voice also. The church is not going away! They’re a part of this other, deeper, fabric of Canadian life. Over the past decades many have lost their way. As a result of endless criticism, they have lost their voices, their spirit, sometimes their identity. Our Canadian DNA is quietly pioneering. Our bloodlines call us to a place of new discovery. Our character beckons us to forge into unknown territories with the dream of something that is more than what we have known. What is interesting is that it is not a revolutionary spirit with which we dream, but with a collective sense of possibility, of hope...which completely sets us apart from any other nation...a subject for another day.

I love that God’s Spirit always works in the ordinary as He calls forth a new creation among people who have forgotten their stories and lost their way. The Spirit breaks forth with new life among those who no longer have the answers and who sense that what they have are empty and don’t know where to turn next. These are the places where God’s future breaks out with celebration just when most are critical, cynical and can’t believe anything good can come from the old systems. Gestating in the church are the elements of God’s new future. He is speaking over the chaos, over the darkness, and calling forth.

That’s why I am facing today...and tomorrow...with more hope than I have had in a long, long, long time.