For the times they are a changin'

You've heard the ironic saying, 'There's nothing permanent but change' well suprisingly the times they are a chaning - it's no use hankering after that comfy old chair - we need to take courage, climb out of our boxes and reaquaint ourselves with the sheer brilliance of Gods love.

Sometimes, its not until we remove ourselves from the familiar patterns of our lives that we can see how restricted we have been - how hemmed in!

I think Jared's painting calls us not so much to 'out of the box' thinking but out of the box 'climbing' and then seeing

Edward de Bono demonstrated 'out of the box thinking' through the 9 Dots. The task is put this way - join the dots with four straight lines withiout taking your pencil / pen off the page.

The vast majority of people see something in the diagram that is simply not there - a perceived boundary or box that encloses the task within the immediate square discribed by eight of the nine dots

The solution however requires a person to literally 'think outside the box' - by extending three of the four lines as below, you can complete the task quite simply!

Are we so 'churched' that we genuinly find it hard to 'see' or even 'survive' outside of the four walls?

Why is it when we think about evagelism, it's so often about persuading people that the 'box' is such a fab place to be - do we really want to perpetuate a process the result of which is another generation of Christians who look at the church and wonder 'how did it come to this?'

Why do we insist that we need to spend so much time in the great sub-culture we've created, rather than connecting fully with our communities made of people who God loves and to whom he wants his church to minister.

Do we look at ourselves sometimes and whilst we know the truthes in our head are not often experiencing the freedom?

In the workplace you often hear people saying 'once you've been trained - use it or lose it - I wonder if the longer we leave 'it' from when we first believed, the less confidence we have that God's spirit will actually use us in any significant way.

But what is 'it' I hear you ask and by suggesting we might not be doing 'it' or even feel confident enough to do 'it' even if we got around to 'it' I feel slightly afronted!

Well I think 'it' is why the times they are a changin' and I hope you will help me to decide what 'it' really ought to be and how we start doing more of 'it' together, out there where we spend the vast majority of our time with the even more vast majority of people

Gareth

Ps. I know this much 'It's' certainly not rocket science!!