Saturday morning spent reading the paper at Moyna Jayne's while having breakfast. What a civilised way to start a weekend. Then for various reasons we found ourselves in one of our old stamping grounds - Whiteinch.
What used to be Whiteinch Baptist Church is now, of all things, an antiques auction room called Great Western Auctions, run by Anita Manning, auctioneer, of BBC Flog It! fame (pictured). So went in to have look cos there was a sale on. And there standing at the back, with TV cameras and all the other paraphernalia were the team from Flog It! Now I know of church buildings that have been converted into night clubs (at least two in Aberdeen), a garage repair shop, a furniture warehouse, restaurans, or flats, or even a small church converted into a family home. But an antique auction room? What does that say about the life expectancy of traditional expressions of church now considered antique?
When I went to Partick Baptist Church in 1976, the Whiteinch church had just closed and most of the membership joined the fellowship at Partick. Some of them were memorable characters, people of a generation now gone. As Whiteinch Baptist Church closed, these good folk, many of them getting on in years, were some of the first to feel the finality of sociological changes brought about by urban re-developments, secular affluence, changing social habits, and that crisis of confidence that has since seeped deeply into the mindset of Christians used to privileged respect from the wider society, and not used to being marginalised by more powerful and persuasive voices representing a quite different kind of gospel.
The presence of a TV crew in a former Baptist Church building, recording an episode of daytime TV devoted to discovering we can get money by selling pieces of our family or personal heritage, was an irony not lost on me. Somewhere along the line, that part of us that valued the past, respected our heritage, and relativised money in the scale of values, has been subverted. In a neat reversal of Jesus' words, selling granny's china and grandad's medals becomes an act of secular wisdom, a pragmatic realisation of resources, which can go towards the new flat screen telly.
Store up for yourselves treasure on earth, for where your treasure is there will your heart be also. Don't store up treasure in heaven - you might never see it.
But then again. Maybe it isn't such a bad thing to let things go that are no longer useful, or that used to be important in the life of a previous generation. If there was an edition of Flog It! that specialised in helping us to trade in on, and change into usable currency, some of our religious practices and ways of being Christian and approaches to Christian community, what would we be prepared to flog? What in our traditional ways of doing things, should be let go so that the resources they tie up can be used differently? What is now antique about the way we represent Jesus to the world? What would contemporary discipleship look like?
If we could relinquish our hold on granny's china (or its ecclesial equivalent), I can become quite cheerful about the prospects for Christian witness. If as Jesus disciples we actually live within his teaching, act out of a character formed and transformed by habits of following Jesus that are somewhere near the values of the Sermon on the Mount, and speak and act out of a world-view that has Calvary in the background and the empty tomb in the foreground, then we might just be strange enough in our lifestyle, character and conversation to attract attention. And when Christlike living gets the world's attention, witness happens!
Another fab post. I'm away to think about what I would get rid of......quite a lot I suspect! Loving the hat photo again by the way!
Posted by: Margaret | October 23, 2007 at 08:14 PM