Ships

Ships
The conversation following yesterday's post is great - keep it coming; I'm percolating thoughts about instituion, authority, etc., and will post more soon. For now, the thought that is top of my mind is that in all our discussions of Church, we shouldn't forget that the church doesn't exist as a holding state for Christians, but as a living expression of the love of God for the world.

A very long time ago,  I was a singer and musician in my professional life, and only a theologian in the privacy of my own head. The other way round from what I do now. I loved the music world, and I was good at it. I felt I had been born to sing and play. I never understood why, when I walked out all alone onto a big stage, people would just stop and listen. It didn't seem to be anything I did, exactly. It was a kind of magic, and as I learned to spin the magic, I just loved this performer-audience relationship more and more.

I grew up on the singer-songwriter tradition, which was somewhat out of fashion when I recorded my first album, and then suddenly came back into fashion again (lucky for me). So I recorded a few songs by other people as well. One of them was a song called "Ships", written by the sweetest man whom I had met somewhere or other, and who taught me all sorts of stuff about playing jazz, changing forever the way I played guitar, and the way I thought about the relationship between faith and music.

Ships was a song, really, about the Church - or about that comfortable and terminal state that Christians can get into when they forget that they are called to be the Church in and for the world, and start to believe that their calling is going to Church. Tim, who lived by the sea, thought of this like ships that come into harbour and then never go out again. Ships need to harbour - they need to offload, re-load, go into dry dock to dry out and be mended, refurbished or brought up to date. Their crew undoubtedly have a good time while the ship is in the harbour. But neither ships nor sailors ever come into harbour just to stay there; for a ship, a harbour is a necessary, but always temporary destination.

Ships are quite safe in the harbour,
there's no danger at all
Ships are quite safe in the harbour,
But that's not what ships are built for.