New rain and new wine

I managed to go camping during the wettest week this summer! I've been down in Somerset at New Wine, an annual Christian festival/conference, and it rained pretty continuously. Nevertheless I had a great time and had a chance to properly get to know some of the gang from St. Mary's, my church in London. In that very British way we knuckled down, barbequed in the rain and fortifed ourselves with much tea.

I was particularly excited because the keynote speaker at the morning meetings was one of my heros, Jim Wallis of Sojourners and Call to Renewal, who's been working for over 30 years to reawaken Christians to Jesus' radical teaching on social justice and nonviolence. In fact the dominant theme of the week, and the subject of many of the teaching seminars, was God's call to dramatically change our lifestyles and committee our lives to tackle poverty and injustice. On Tuesday there was a day off the usual program of worship and teaching, and a group of us went to a nearby housing estate and tidied people's gardens and cleared litter in the park (where we uncovered exciting treasures like burnt out motorbikes dumped in the undergrowth).

I haven't been to one of these big gatherings since the mid-90s around the time I first became a Christian, so it was a useful time to reflect on things I experienced back then. I happened to meet Jesus in the midst of a move of God sometimes reference to as the Toronto Blessing (since one of the first places touched was a Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship).

For the period roughly 1994-97 millions of people around the world had life-changing encounters with God. These encounters were often linked with physical manifestations, such as shaking bodies, crying, intense laughter etc. While this all seemed pretty bizarre to me and many other people at the time, in fact it is not that unusual. It seems reasonably that when God touches people powerfully, particularly when he heals them of deep emotional wounds, their bodies will react, because our minds, souls and bodies are intimately linked together. And there is a long history of people responding bodily when God is ministering to them. For example the Quakers were so called in the 17th Century precisely because they were seen to "quake" in prayer; Similar manifestations accompanied the birth of Methodism and can be seen at Pentecost (Acts.2) and elsewhere in the Bible. However physically manifestations are by no means necessary in an encounter with God. I've had dozens of profound times in God's presence, but only a few linked with manifestations, and obviously God can minister to people in quiet and stillness.

The thing that occured to me at New Wine last week was that the craziness of the Toronto Blessing period has given us real freedom in communal worship and helped us to accept unusual people. We can express ourselves to God in any way we like - in song, dancing, prostation etc. - and no one will bat an eyelid now. And having found ourselves doing strange, socially unusual things, like laughing for hours or rolling around the church floor like a billiard ball (as I did once back in 1995), we find it easier to be patient with the outcasts of society who don't act according to social norms. This is so clearly in line with God's character that I wonder whether it was one of his primary intentions with the Toronto Blessing: To remind the church, in this image obsessed age, that God embraces diversity and wierdness and we should too.