Stepping outside the campsite.

We leave the barriers to tent-making ministry and move towards Hugh's view of the possibilities. Over recent years, there has been considerable emphasis on reordering worship spaces within church buildings. Perhaps we need to considering a wider notion of reordering church ministry in its fullest sense, but this perhaps takes a significant experience or happening of a spiritual kind grounded and earthed in today's context.

Take Wesley's Heart-warming experience. For after Aldersgate, we find a shift from a more static to a greater dynamic view of the church in Wesley-but this is not a shift away from ecclesiology. It is a shift toward a more organic and functional view of the church. The concern after Aldersgate is not with life rather than form, but rather with life and with life-nurturing form, with how to enliven the whole.

Hugh within his 21st century Anglican context is beginning to set out some similar possibilities. His mirroring of the Gospel words of John 3:8.

The possibilities

• We never know when a new, vibrant wind will blow through our tired lives and structures; so there is always room for a realistic hope and confidence in humankind and in God
• There may emerge one or more bishops and others with a sense of what is possible in this sphere, and start a ball rolling
• When we get tired of postmodernism and start again digging around in the muck and muddle of human possibility, the mystery of God and the promises of the Gospel, we may see developments we cannot now dream of.

In the Uk's Daily Telegraph on Wednesday of this week, Prof David Williams one time Chair of Mathematical Statistics at the University of Cambridge, discussed the evolutionary theories under the title God is Subtle. He writes

"God is subtle" - far more subtle than we shall ever fully realise. I believe God planned for intelligent life, but not specifically for Planet Earth on which humans live. Past evolution in no threat to belief in God. However, future evolution necessitates profound reappraisal of the ways in which Jesus and Mohammed are regarded by their followers. Human evolution has hardly begun"

The possibilities of the 'subtle God' energising and re-energising humankind beyond that which we can possible imagine has biblical president.

Tent-making ministry allows the church to dream and evolve an ever present age ministry that can truly serve alongside our 'subtle God'. in the words of Oscar Romero, "We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest."