Solace Prayer

I went to the Solace prayer session on Thursday, and had some thoughts about what it means for our little community to be moving out into the wider world, and some hopes for what it might mean.

I hope that we remember our beginnings and continue to define ourselves as “church” as “people” and not a “place”, even when we have a place. This is easy when we are only a people with no place, but we must not let a place make us want to set relationship boundaries. When we have a building and a space to make our own, and we set ourselves up to use the space, I hope that does not make us "closed" to other people. I don't want us to get to the point that "Solace" means the building and not the people in it. Even worse, I hope it never happens that people feel unwelcome to drop in or to join us because we have let the fixed place also fix our self-image in a way that excludes people or is not open to change.

I hope that we remember our beginning, and that we chose to become a separate people in order to preserve all of the people entire, and to keep relationships intact. We chose to keep people, to keep doing what we are doing, to keep growing and to keep being accepting. We chose actual people over abstract principles – we will need to remember this in the future, when we grow into something more defined we don’t want to let that make us define some of us as “in” and some of us as “out”. Brian McLaren says: declaring who we are usually also means declaring who we are not. I hope that we can stay a flexible, accepting, people-orientated community.

Looked at in a certain way, this is quite a promising beginning for a community!