Location, location, location!

Time flies when you’re having fun and on Monday Ronnie and I celebrated our sixth year here in ministry at Rouse Hill. That means that Kath has knocked over five years and that we have been meeting as a worshiping congregation for about five and a half years. Like I say, time flies!
When we arrived I knew the seven people who were a part of the committee that appointed me and Ronnie didn’t know one solitary soul. We used to fight over answering the phone because for the first six months it hardly ever rang!

Now of course – and thankfully – things have changed greatly. It is rare to go shopping and not bump into someone that you know and a visit to Rouse Hill PS for Kath and I is a highly sociable occasion! Orange Go MAD caps, Kath and Pastor John are probably some of the better recognised figures – for better or worse - in the immediate community.

When planning was moving along for our possible move to Annangrove Road one of the concerns given was the lack of visibility. It was thought we would be out of the centre of town and also how would we handle the issue of having enough signage. This concern was voiced both locally and from the wider church and I think illustrates that while we like the idea of doing church a new way, we are still struggling to embrace it.

Eugene Peterson, in his paraphrase of the Bible called The Message gives a beautiful translation of John 1:14:

‘The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighbourhood. We saw the glory with our own eyes, the one-of- a-kind glory, like Father, like Son, generous inside and out, true from start to finish.’

Bible speak for this is incarnation or in plainer English, embodiment and in very real terms that is what we are about.

Last Saturday a small team from NWUC hosted our second annual ‘Live with Passion’ Women’s Conference. The organising team plus several others on the day ‘became flesh and blood and moved into the neighbourhood’. Who knows, perhaps in some way the ladies might also have seen a little bit of that ‘one-of-a-kind glory’ that embodies what followers of Jesus would seek to be a part of?

I have said before that many churches live with the 1960’s expectation that if you put up a sign with your name on it and have a building with good visibility and all the lights shining then people will come. Sorry, I don’t believe that to be true anymore. More importantly I don’t even believe that it is a true Biblical model of what we as Christ followers should be about.

We are the signs that people need to see. We are the buildings that will impress with our light and our stature. As with the team last Saturday people saw something that was ‘generous inside and out, true from start to finish’. That is the kind of advertising that I believe in.

Of those seven people that I got to know before coming here I am in occasional contact with just two of them nowadays; but it sure isn’t lonely anymore.

Cheers - John