Serving God in a sterilised gown

I visited a friend in hospital.

He was in the infectious ward. I gowned and gloved up before entering his room and gowned and gloved down when leaving.

Sometimes I did this three times each visit as I was ushered out of the room while doctors and nurses did their thing and ushered back in again when they had finished. I wasn’t to transmit any unwanted bugs in or out.

It started me thinking. Have I been serving God in a sterilised gown? Have I been serving his people in surgical gloves? Has it all been sanitised and safe from any unwanted contamination? Am I more eager to cultivate relationships with people who I perceive (in my and culture’s terribly faulty judgement) may enhance my social status?

I recently heard of someone who was about to buy a house in Cringila. I was aghast. Every repressed racist, elitist and classist instinct roared to the fore and began to bubble to the surface. I tried to mask my middle class sense of superiority with measured equilibrium. I thought I’d become good at that, after a lifetime of practice. But, according to an observer, I failed badly.

To the geo/demographically challenged, who may think I’ve just spelt gorilla incorrectly, Cringila is a suburb directly downwind from the Port Kembla Steel Works.

It is home to a kaleidoscope of cultures, a large number of welfare recipients, a high proportion of resettled refugees and has never gone close to being home to an Anglican church-plant. In fact I don’t think it’s on the radar of any church plant plans by any mother church or major denomination while new church plants are popping up all over the middle class suburbs of the Illawarra.

Why would a Christian buy into Cringila?

Father Damien would have. He served the lepers on the island of Molokai and didn’t return home in retirement to a hero’s welcome and a nice middle class cottage in the neat, manicured Belgian countryside. He didn’t have a death wish. He railed against the first symptoms of the disease on his smooth European skin. But who was going to reach and teach and serve this colony of lepers?

Has my ministry been all too sanitised? Have I served at a safe distance from any threats to my middle class sensibilities and my antiseptic twentieth first century evangelical sub-culture?

Why are we planting more churches on the North Shore? There’s one in every neighbourhood.

Why are we planting more churches in the Shire? There’s one in every street.

Why are we planting more churches in the centre of Wollongong? There’s one on every corner.

I heard a justification for one of the newer Wollongong plants by one of its members with the words, “there aren’t any decent evangelical churches in Wollongong.”

Is traversing suburbs and sub-cultures to plant and preach, and to shepherd and serve, like FIFO miners, really a good church planting principle? Is that how we identify with the host culture we are hoping to reach? What college or conference has ever, or would ever, teach that as a sound missiological principle?

What about my own backyard? Am I seeking out people in my neighbourhood who are different to me and whose ways of living I don’t understand and are even a little frightened by? Am I inviting them over, to cook some meat and to chew the fat? Do I know their birthdays and blessings? Have I heard their stories of displacement and despair? Have I taken the time to understand their pain of brokenness and betrayal?

Or am I too busy to build relationships and celebrate friendship with people who may not share my cultural background, core values and Christian convictions? Am I prepared to go the whole nine yards with people who may struggle with serious mental health issues and whose living skills and life choices may rattle my cage?

Am I guilty of the pointed satire in Adrian Mitchell’s poem?

The Liberal Christ Gives an Interview

I would have walked on water
But I wasn’t fully insured.
And the BMA sent a writ my way
With the very first leper I cured.

I would’ve preached a golden sermon
But I didn’t like the look of the mount.
And I would’ve fed fifty thousand
But the press wasn’t there to count.

And the businessmen in the temple
Had a team of coppers on the door.
And if I’d spent a year in the desert
I’d have lost my pension for sure.

I would’ve turned water into wine
But they weren’t giving licenses.
And I would’ve died and been crucified
But like – you know how it is.

I’m going to shave off my beard
And cut my hair Buy some bullet-proof underwear
I’m the Liberal Christ
And I’ve got no blood to spare.