Heading to a conference tomorrow. It is a “Dreaming Day” for the future of Churches of Christ.

It has been three years since the last time we got together to discuss anything, anything at all, let alone what we dream to be.

This realization has motivated me to reflect on what my dreams are for what I am doing. As a result there have been some strange thoughts running through my head. As a result, I hope the following makes sense.

My mission, my motivation, for what I do, comes from a deep sense of love that I have experienced. A love that has been so profound that I can only call it ‘of God’. It has arrived at many moments, from many places, some expected and some unexpected but all have shaped me into the person that I am today. I have found that the only way I can express a response to this experience of love is through Christianity, trying to make sense of this experience using a history of people’s experiences of God as a way of finding myself in the story of my own life.

This does not mean that other expressions of faith, religion or even expressions of Christianity are any more or less right than my expression. This does not mean that my expression cannot inform or challenge other expressions, or that my expression cannot be confronted and changed by other expressions. I don’t think anybody has the complete handle on what life is supposed to look like, or how God is found in the midst of it.

All that said, 5 years at Ormond Church of Christ has at times be an experience that has left me feeling more removed from my own ‘denomination’, my theology doesn’t seem to fit, my personality doesn’t seem to fit and my vision for what the Church could look like seems like a foreign concept. The thing that I love/hate the most is that the very theology and expression, and investigation of that theology, that seems to put me outside of the Churches of Christ circle, is found to be completely relevant and easily communicated to those outside of the church.

The things that cause me to feel loneliness and isolation, out stepped-ness within my own denomination, are exactly what I find the non-church community responding to.

It is a wonderfully painful place to be sometimes. I can only imagine how many other ministers and ex-ministers feel exactly the same.