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Parachute '04


It was my first Parachute and I can't say I was really there. I didn't go to any of the concerts and I didn't hear any of the seminars or workshops. What I did do was sit in a stall, chilly one day, hot the others, and very wind and dust blown the whole time.

It was an experiment to take Spirited Exchanges to Parachute and it felt a bit odd to be setting up a stall in the Global Missions Tent. Our neighbours were such well established bodies as Interserve, the Church Missionary Society and the Overseas Missionary Fellowship but also included the Christian Heritage Party, Destiny Church (a new generation of politicians proclaimed their black shirts), and various other entities and acronyms. Nobody else was about leaving church.

We set up our stall under the title of A Churchless Faith. Jenny had commissioned a designer who created a stunning banner. I want a place where I can be real. Value my questions and doubts. Please respect my journey, don't say I've gone off the rails These and similar sentences caught the eye of people wandering past. I was fascinated to watch the faces as people read our banner. Some looked baffled, some suspicious, some intrigued, and for some it was like a light coming on. You could see them seizing on these ideas with recognition and relief.

Those facial reactions pretty much represented the verbal reactions of people who stopped to talk. For some the idea of faith outside the church was outside their comprehension. Others could only assume that Spirited Exchanges must have an agenda to lure people back into the institutional church. And if it didn't, it ought to.

Many people were interested and intrigued. They'd never heard of this venture but they all knew of people who had left church for one reason or another. Some of these took our literature which included newsletters and stories written by church leavers.

But there was the fourth group of people, those for whom the bells rang and the lights flashed. These were the ones who were hanging on in church but only just; the ones who had left, but nobody seemed to notice or care; the ones who felt themselves driven out; the ones labelled troublemakers or backsliders. Some of these spent a long time telling us their stories. We heard grief, anger, cynicism, yearning, loneliness, hurt, confidence, courage. Many of these people were stunned to discover that something like Spirited Exchanges exists. Someone is actually attempting to understand and support them.

A couple of themes stand out particularly for me. Every single person I talked to knew someone who had left church, or who was unhappy with church to the point of considering leaving. They might not agree with the approach that Spirited Exchanges takes, but no one could deny the phenomenon of people leaving churches. At the moment it seems the churches most commonly respond in one of two ways. They pretend it's not happening and focus on the ‘positive' things that are going on; or they blame the leavers. The feeling grew in me that churches have to find another response. Blaming people or ignoring them doesn't make them more likely to stay in church. On the contrary they are likely to leave with increased bitterness and hurt.

The other theme came into focus through a conversation. One guy who read our handout picked up on the phrase some need freedom to explore the questions without being given the answers. He was puzzled. ‘Did you say without being given the answers?' Yes we did. ‘But … surely you don't mean to imply that there aren't any answers?' Well … it depends on the questions. It seems that for some people Christian faith is all about neatly packaged answers to pre-selected questions. If that's the case, no wonder people leave churches. Grown up faith needs to do its own exploring.                   


Adrienne Thompson

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