Discovering church-ness
Our home group which is self the team calls is a special club of people with whom we discover church-ness. Very beautiful things are happening with these purebred Rotterdammers.
This is how we learn to pray together. I'm not very good at that,' says a local resident who has only been with us for a short time. It doesn't matter, it will come naturally,' another responds. And we make the rounds. 'Just say thank you for this evening', that can be enough. After a few weeks, we are used to it. And one of the teammates even takes the lead. 'Who will start?' 'Me,' she says firmly. And after a short prayer, she points to the next: 'Now you!'
One evening, one of the attendees says she has doubts: "Does God really exist? Someone who was baptised a year ago knows what to say to that. 'It's like the wind; you can't see it, but it's there.' And it's enough to remove the doubt. So beautiful to see our neighbours helping each other to be disciples. They barely know the Bible and are comfortable asking 'where that story about that castle is' (by which they mean the temple), but they have a heart of Go(u)d.
Yet honesty dictates that there are also plenty of things going wrong, at least in our eyes. The not-so-rosy side of our group is undisguised. A married man brings an introduction. 'Did you see them sitting footloose under the table,' someone asks us after that particular evening. And indeed, he is simply tying up a relationship with another person, nota bene in our house.
Another teammate stays away regularly. At one point, he no longer allows his wife to attend. And then it turns out he has fallen back into an old habit: drug use. It does not help him, but he cannot stay away from it. And that also hinders his wife.
Then we lost our oldest group member. He suddenly fell seriously ill and - partly because he had smoked so incredibly much throughout his life - he died within a short time. With that, our group of eight ward residents and fellow believers was ... halved within six months.
It is discovering church-keeping in its Rotterdam way, or biblically speaking, in its Corinthian way. For although Paul makes it clear in his letters that all kinds of things went wrong in this Greek congregation, 'as bad as it is even among the Gentiles', he still loved them: 'My love goes to you all, with whom I am one in Christ Jesus' (1 Corinthians 5:1 and 16:23). That is what we recognise in our wonderful team!
Carolien and Hans Euser
network leaders, Intercultural Church Plants (ICP)
