I was driving from one engagement to another in the autumn of 2003, when I realised it. I was alone with my thoughts, my prayers and a restful sense of God’s Spirit. The early morning hours still hid the rays of the sun from the silent Dorset countryside. Then slowly the night receded to reveal the dawn and the first glimmers of sunlight, warmth and life. As I contemplated the sunrise, a thought struck me that was both glaringly obvious and immensely profound - but first let me explain something that had been on my mind for some time.

|PIC1|Increasingly I have been challenged by the fact that we do not ‘go to church’. Now you might think I am being pedantic, but the reality of both the Old and New Testaments is that whilst we are encouraged to meet together as believers, to share common purpose, to worship together and to hear God’s word together, that is not the sum total of our relationship with God. We meet together not to ‘do’ church, but because we ‘are’ the Church. Each of us, in our own lives as a Christian, is part of the wonderful, exhilarating body of Christ, no matter where we are or what we do. All that our lives involve is touched by the reality of our relationships with God and with one another. When we serve the marginalised, we serve Christ. So whilst we may ‘go’ to a meeting or ‘go’ to a specific act of worship together, we ‘are’ the Church, wherever we are and whatever we do.

I think this raises a huge challenge for us - and gives us a fantastic opportunity. God’s Spirit is with us always. In the words of Psalm 139, there is nowhere we can go where God is not. That means every second of my life belongs to Him. I can choose what I do with those seconds but the fact remains that time is given to me by God that I might give it back to Him in service. I was part of the Church on the train that morning. My wife is part of the Church as she works as a nurse practitioner in her surgery at this very moment. Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, you are part of His bride.

|TOP|The challenge is, do we reflect that? Do the people I recognise on my daily trip to work see in me something of His love? Am I living my life as the owner or as the tenant?

I’m convinced that the people we meet in our everyday lives will be deeply affected when we allow the reality of the Kingdom to flow through us and touch them where they are. They may well never come to ‘church’ but the ‘Church’ has come to them - in and through us. And the wonderful opportunity of becoming part of God’s family, irrespective of who you are, where you are from or what you have done, somehow involves us picking up the gauntlet of primarily ‘being’ - and not just ‘going to’ - Church. Of course we must still meet together with those who love God and do many of the things we do now. But our motivation must come from the reality of who we are as the Church, not because we want to become the Church.

And that brings me back to what hit me on that early morning journey through Dorset. We all use the terms ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’. Yet the reality is that the sun does not rise or set - in fact the sun doesn’t move at all. The beauty of the sun rising and setting is real, but what actually happens is that the earth moves. And that paradigm shift is what shaped much of the scientific understanding we now have. That simple realisation created a different view of the world that still impacts our lives. Such a paradigm shift is needed for us as we consider ‘church’; one which turns the world upside down as we realise the depth of the impact of being the Church all the time, everywhere.



Malcolm Duncan



[Reverend Malcolm Duncan is the Leader of the Faithworks Movement, and previously worked as Head of Mission at the Evangelical Alliance UK.]

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