Brian Wilson from TCH in Tassie
I’ve mentioned it before, but I constantly get people saying to me “It’s all well and good setting up a network of household congregations in an urban setting in the UK, but here in the Aussie ‘burbs we don’t live in such proximity to other people.”
Well they don’t quite put it as eruditely as that, but you get the point. The rationale behind this viewpoint is that if you live closer to other people - and in the UK we could hear our student neighbours burbing, drinking, and playing death metal at all hours of the night (I vacuumed the carpets around 6:00 in revenge) - you will befriend them more readily. Anyone who has lived in a city knows that this is not the case. You only have to visit a high density city from a less densely populated area to realise this. There you are “oopsing” and “sorrying” your way up the High Street, sashaying around thousands of people coming the other way, avoiding stepping on toes, and all they are doing is ignoring you. They slide past you with all of the practised ease of ants on a trail. They have learned the art of living and moving in close proximity to many other people without actually having to engage with them. Over time, if you stay in the city long enough, you learn the art yourself and before long you no longer see the people, just the path you are going to take to pick your way through them.
This is all by way of saying that if you think suburban household congregations are problematic then you are going to have real trouble with The Crowded House network in Tasmania, Connexions. It is headed up by Brian Wilson, a good Aussie bloke who I met in Sheffield, and who spent last Sunday with us at The Local having arrived in WA to conduct some training for the Reformed Churches of Australia. Brian began a network of household congregations prior to getting connected to TCH, and he runs an effective biblical and missional training program. The really interesting thing about his group however, is that his setting is semi-rural. Tassie, for those not in the know, is the least populated state of Australia. Here at The Local we are on the fringe of suburbia and semi-rural, but they are deep in semi-rural heartland. Two acre allotments is the go. But they run household congregations the same way urban and suburban TCH groups do; living life as extended family networks and bringing your non-Christian friends into your networks of Christian relationships.
The Connexions websiteis worth checking out. For a start it is a really nicely designed site, but more importantly it has some interesting stuff, not least of all their photograph collection, which clearly shows the earthiness and “normalness” of Christians living life together. It’s not the proximate nature of the people doing church that matters as much as their desire to share their lives together. Who was it that said the definition of hell was proximity without intimacy?
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