Rolling Up The Sleeves

Last week, I screwed up my courage and told my husband that I have had a leading to start up a church. Not exactly a church, because I'm not going to call it that, but a thingie instead of a church. Sort of a thingie like a meeting except not really a meeting, and not as noisy and hyper as a church, but cleaner and honest and transparent-like. Pastored, but without a pastor. You know what I mean? Something kind of like that.

"It's about time," he said, without looking up from the book he was reading.

I blinked. "I beg your pardon?"

"Church is TSFW [family code word for Too stupid for words]. Meeting is insipid. You could do something better than that." He looked up then. "I want to be in the band."

So I guess there's going to be a band.

He wasn't finished. "You always do what you think you're supposed to do. That's not living. The work you do during the week is not you, that's just what you do to help the family make money. All this Quaker committee work, that's not you either. You have to have passion about something that you do. You've been pulling toward something for a long time and not doing it. This church thingie thing is more like the real you. It has that ring to it. So just do it."

He still wasn't finished. "Don't try too hard getting it all together. Way will open."

This from the man who never attends meeting.

So okay then. I guess I'm doing it.

Ideas always come to me as a whole, beginning and end and middle, all at once. Usually, there is a long period of nothing, like an unrest, but then, it coalesces all at once. It's apparently a personality type-- intuitive thinking as opposed to linear thinking. This is always difficult, because nobody else can see what I see, and there is not much transition zone to it.

It's this way with the church thingie idea. I've been trying to make notes on what I see so that I can communicate it to others when the time comes. Finding words for the concepts isimportant.

I ordered two books from Chapters to build on this. First was Emerging Churches by Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger, because it was recommended by Aj on some website somewhere. And Brian McLaren's The Secret Message of Jesus. I got some language from them, and some ideas became more clear as I compared one thing to another.

The next step looming ahead is to tell my meeting. I get kind of a cold sick feeling at the pit of my stomach just thinking about it. I am clerk of two main committees and two other committees. I know that my donations to the meeting make up over 10% of the revenues, and I'm going to need that money to start up my own church thingie, so I can't continue it. Also, my kids currently make up 25% of the children's program.

I'm going to have to screw up my courage again.