Nomad Extra 16: Simon Hall and Revive

Nomad found themselves in Leeds again recently and so thought they’d catch up with Simon Hall for a little Nomad Extra bonus interview for you. Simon is a founding member of the Revive community, which started out as a group of young, arty adults, looking to do church and mission differently.

The thing that really stood out for me, as Simon was telling us his story, was how over the years the community has adapted to many internal and external changes. They started out with a vision, but they weren’t slaves to it, and they’ve allowed God and each other to shape and reshape community life.

I’m the sort of guy who likes a plan, so I felt really challenged by Revive’s flexibility and openness to change.

I’ve often been guilty of limiting the Spirit’s role to that of Comforter, but I’m increasingly seeing that a key part of what the Spirit does is to act as the Unsettler. It’s the Spirit who keeps us on our toes, keeps us moving, changing and adapting, if we remain open to him. 

In response to this, I’ve built in a weekly prayer slot where I lay everything before God, all my plans and agendas, and try and be open to the fact that God might want me to change something, or indeed give everything up, and do something else.

Ruth Holgate and the spirituality of silence

This month’s podcast is a little different as rather than simply an interview you’ll hear me reflecting my daily experiences of a five day silent retreat before discussing it with our interviewee Ruth Holegate.

The BBC documentaries The Monastery and The Big Silence really impacted Hannah and me (follow the links to check them out on YouTube). We’ve had a fair amount of teaching and encouragement in the spiritual disciplines, but silence had never been mentioned. We then saw Ruth Holgate speak on the subject at Greenbelt and we both felt a prompting to give it a go. So we signed up for a five day silent retreat at the Jesuit Spirituality Centre Loyola Hall. We were slightly anxious that we couldn’t really afford it, but then lo-and-behold we got a tax rebate that paid for it exactly!

It was a remarkable five days. To our surprise neither of us found the silence itself especially challenging (apart from the one hour corporate silence in the evenings!). Instead the challenge came from what God was doing in us as a result of us committing ourselves to finding him in the silence.

The sense of stillness, peace and God’s consistent presence with us was profound, and something that neither of us expected. In fact we both felt quite low when we had to leave, I think fearing that we’d lose this sense of closeness when we got back to the busyness of our lives.

We were both challenged in deep ways as God put his finger on a number of personal issues and as he clarified the mission he was calling us to. But perhaps the biggest challenge was committing to this contemplative lifestyle back in the ‘real world’. Life is pretty frantic, and is only going to get more so with a baby on the way! But we feel God is calling us to model this lifestyle for the increasingly pressured, stretched, drained and fractured community in which we live. 

God's Grace

As we walked back up the stairs having enjoyed a mince pie after the carol service a phrase unexpected popped into Hannah’s mind, ‘into your hands I commit my spirit’. At the time she had no idea why she’d had that thought, but two days later sitting in hospital having just been told by a consultant that our baby (due in March) had died, we realised that as we walked up those stairs God had received our daughter’s spirit.

Faith is rarely a journey of certainties; instead it is a journey of trust. Like everyone, me and Hannah’s faith journey has had its ups and downs, but through it all we’ve come to trust in God. We can’t comprehend him and often fail to understand his ways, but we do trust him. Most of all we trust that he is good. For whatever reason the world he made is no longer good in the way he intended, but God himself is good. He doesn’t always protect us from the pain of living in this imperfect world, but he always accompanies us through the pain, seeking to reveal his goodness.

So we prayed. We prayed that God would protect us from any feelings of anger or bitterness at Grace’s death and we prayed that her short life would lead to love and peace. We asked God to reveal his goodness.

Over the two weeks following that prayer God revealed his goodness in ways we’ve never experienced before. We had an intense sense of his presence and deep sense of his peace. We saw his goodness in the miraculously quick labour, and even in the midst of the sorrow we experienced his joy at the birth of our daughter. We’ve seen God’s goodness through the loving actions of his people, through the many texts, cards, emails, phone calls, visits, flowers and meals. And we’ve seen his goodness in the deeper love we’ve developed for each other and for our friends and family.

Obviously we would never have chosen to go through this painful experience. But we can now see that the pain we felt was a small price to pay for the time we had with Grace. And this pain was far outweighed by the wonderful experience of God’s goodness.

Life is a gift and God gifted us with Grace for just under 27 weeks and then he asked us to give her back. But our daughter lives on. We believe that she lives on with God in heaven, and we believe that she lives on through the love and peace her short life produced.

God is indeed good!

Tim

Nomad Spirituality 01: Moving into the neighbourhood

Christmas seemed like a good time to add something new to the Nomad Podcast portfolio. So welcome to Nomad Spirituality.

Every once in a while we’ll be uploading a meditation to help you reconnect with Jesus in the midst of your busyness. This month Dave is leading a reflection on the significance of the incarnation.

So turn up your iPod, close your eyes and let yourself drift away. It’s our Christmas gift to you!

Thanks to the guys at proost to putting us onto the background music. It’s from Grace’s latest album ‘Landskapes’. The track is ‘Skape’ by Electrik Café. Check it out at proost. 

Chris Sunderland and Earth Abbey

Nomad is on the road again, this month making their way down to Bristol to meet up with Chris Sunderland.

Chris is involved in many Jesus-inspired community enhancing projects such as Agora, but we wanted to speak to him about Earth Abbey.

Earth Abbey is a dispersed community who are committed to lives lived in harmony with creation. So after we’d had our creation theology straightened out by Tom Wright, we thought Chris would be the perfect person to show us what it means in practice.

I loved Chris’s phrase ‘the spirituality of soil’. His community talks about soil, soul and society. He believes that soil is common to all humanity (e.g. working the soil and eating from the soil) and thus can form a deep human and spiritual bond.

I can see a lot of truth in that. God is an earthy God. He did after all make the earth, he walked on the earth, formed humans out of the earth, came as a human to live on the earth, and will return to live on the earth again. It seems pretty clear that we’re now largely estranged from this earth, with little idea of how to live in harmony with it. So I love Chris’s idea of forming communities to figure out together how to better come into relationship with the earth, and in so doing connecting more deeply with each other and with God.

Tim

Immanuel – God in us

Christmas is a great time for a pioneer. A big part of a pioneer’s job is to discern what makes a particular culture tick, and then finding starting points for sharing the gospel. Christmas is one of those few occasions in the year when everyone is thinking and doing pretty much the same thing. That’s not to say, of course, that everyone has a very positive experience of Christmas, far from it, but it’s pretty hard in our society to escape its reach.

The message of Christmas is nicely encapsulated in one of Jesus best known titles, Immanuel – God with us. The Message translation brings this home nicely with its rendering of John 1:14 ‘The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood’. A transcendent God became immanent in the person of Jesus.

But of course God is no longer with us in this physical sense any more. Instead, something even more remarkable and unexpected happened. God is no longer with us; instead he is now in us. When Jesus ascended he sent his Spirit to dwell in his followers. God moved from transcendence to immanence and then to a depth of intimacy never experienced by humanity before.

This new intimacy with God, however, brings with it a great missional responsibility. Whereas previously Jesus himself demonstrated God’s love for the world, now we are the bearers of that love. With God’s Spirit dwelling in us, we are called to ‘move into the neighborhood’ and embody a life lived in relationship with God. Now we are God’s gift to the world!

So as a pioneer, my job – and all our jobs – is to prayerfully consider how we can be God’s gift to our community this Christmas. Jesus is our model of how we should go about this, and more than anything else he partied and told [often cryptic] stories about God’s coming kingdom. So our job as Jesus’ followers is to throw parties, not just for our friends, but for those people we know about who are hurting this Christmas. So me and Hannah, for example, will be throwing a party for our street and at Sycamore House, and inviting those people we know who are on their own to join us for Christmas. And we’re also thinking about how to creatively tell the story of God’s coming kingdom.

So as we prepare for Christmas this year let’s make time to prayerfully consider the missional implication of the amazing truth that God is now in us. 

Mark Powley's Consumer Detox

This month the podcast finds itself in Leeds and the abode of Mark Powley, founding member of the Breathe Network.

The network’s strapline is ‘Less stuff, more life’, (one of those strapline’s I wish I’d thought of!) The network’s aim is to encourage us to live more simply. Not in a monastic kind of way (no offence to our new monastic listeners), but in a positive, smart 21^st century living kind of way. 

It’s a great interview (even if we do say so ourselves!), and one which has deeply challenged me. Since the interview, for example, me and Hannah have made a ‘digital detox’ a central part of our Sabbath observance, and already we’re feeling the benefit. It’s amazing how much more space for life the detox has produced, and how it has influenced the rest of our week.

So tune into the podcast for loads of encouragement and advice on resisting the relentless pull of consumerism and embracing a simpler, more life-enhancing lifestyle.