Dear Friends
I don’t suppose there were too many ‘Health and Safety’ regulations way back in the first century. I doubt there’d have even been such a thing as a ‘voluntary code’.
But for those involved in the church’s first construction sites, ‘hard hats’ were pretty much obligatory – certainly if you recognized to any extent the authority of apostles such as Paul. He didn’t offer ‘hard hats’ as an option. “Wear them,” he exhorted: “because you’ll need them.”
Yes, I know he was talking about helmets rather than ‘hard hats’; and that he was using the imagery of the battlefield rather than that of any ‘brownfield’ or ‘greyfield’ development: but the point remains the same. The work of the gospel is variously described, in terms both of conflict and construction: but however you choose to describe it, you need your ‘hard hat’ head-wear.
I lived on an ‘active’ building site for close on 20 years. Well, not actually on it, of course, but bang next door: clean the windows, and they’d be clarted with dust all over again by the end of the day. The fence between us and the site might as well have been non-existent.
So I know full well that it’s messy out there on even the best construction sites. It’s dusty, dirty, dangerous work that goes on. There are diggers and ‘dozers and dozens of different contractors involved in a long-term development project.
Bosses and ‘brickies’, planners and plumbers, roofers and riggers – well, the list goes on and on: there’s a whole load of people involved. And all of them every-way different: some noisy, some nutty, some probably, too, more than a little bit nasty. But each with their own part to play in this major construction project.
View the plans, check out the large-scale 3D model of the whole completed project, and … well, it looks not a little impressive. Clean streets and classy homes, with ample gardens, great communal space, and the whole place landscaped to perfection. Impressive, attractive, and just waiting to be lived in and enjoyed.
But that’s emphatically future, of course. Checking out the here-and-now across the fence from where I lived, it looked more like the wrong end of a bombing range. To the untrained eye it was little short of chaos. Rubble, and rubbish: puddles and muddle and mud-laden vehicles scattered all over the place; and random mounds of earth and sand and gravel, interspersed between the piles of wood and building blocks. The local tip looked positively salubrious by comparison! This was more like chaos.
And because the church is a global construction site, the here-and-now state of that site is often precisely like that. We’ve seen the plans, checked out the Bible’s ‘3D’ model, so, yes, we know what it should be like, we know what it’s meant to be like, we know what it will be like. But, for the minute, it can all look a bit of a mess.
Well, the Lord is OK with mess. That’s the heart of the gospel, and that’s the start of the Bible. The Lord can take the shapeless, empty darkness of our lives and make from all the mess we somehow manage to create – He can make from all that a pure, renewed humanity, stunning in its beautified perfection.
That’s what’s slowly taking shape across the Lord’s construction sites. But midway through the project, unless you knew some better, you would never really guess that that’s what’s going on. It often seems quite messy, and a million miles from what the plans suggest that it’ll be.
Which is why we need the ‘hard hats’ on the building site, the ‘helmet of salvation’ as it’s put by Paul: because we need to ‘keep the heid’, as we say up here in Scotland, and keep clear in our minds the nature of salvation. While the foundations are already secured, and the final result is assured, salvation is meanwhile no more than a ‘work in progress’.
It’s rarely neat and tidy, and more often than not it can seem like a bit of a ‘bourach’ (you see, I’m slowly learning the Doric!), but amidst all the dust and disturbance, there’s a work of the Lord taking place – and to Him at least it’s not just a work taking place, it’s a church for His praise taking shape.
And I hope that that will be your perspective as you read in this Record the Update from the Transitional Leadership Team. We’re a Jesus-owned construction site, and He, our risen ‘Project Manager’ and Lord – He knows what He’s doing, and as step by step we press on with all the work which He has given us to do, the church which He desires that we should be will bit by bit be slowly taking shape.
Yours in Christ’s service
Jeremy Middleton