I'm just back from church at The People's Church in Toronto where the speaker was Bruxey Cavey, the long-haired, brilliant, unconventional, and very funny pastor of The Meeting House (the main branch of which is in Oakville, ON, a suburb of Toronto). It was great and the thing that particularly blessed me was that even though Bruxey was really far out in appearance and in some of his humor, that the largely elderly audience really ate him up.

Something else I like is that there isn't any sense of rivalry between the churches. My sense is that people at People's were thinking, "Here is someone God is using, through a dramatically different style, to reach a different audience than we do here. Great!" This is the way the Body of Christ is supposed to function!

While I'm on a spiritual theme, I wanted to mention that I've been trying out a new (well actually it's quite old) method for reading the Bible. The idea came to me as a result of a post I read on The Evangelical Outpost. The method is simply to take a book of the Bible and read it twenty times at a normal rate of speed. That's it. (Well, we need to want God to speak to us and pray for illumination, etc., but that is basically it.)

So this morning I decided to try it out. I was riding the subway to church and I decided I'd begin to plough through Ephesians as I had opportunity, then start over when I got to the end, then start over when I got to the end, and so on...

(Let me say before going further that the method I had been trying, by fits and starts, was to read through the Bible, but fairly randomly. I'd read a bit in the NT, then switch to the OT for a while, and so forth. Also I'd jump around in the various genres: a bit of history, then some poetry, then an epistle, a gospel, or whatever. I was trying to mix it up so that I'd not get bored with the same old same old. But it wasn't satisfying. Once in a while I'd come across a line or a verse that would strike me and help me somewhat, but it all seemed pretty superficial.)

Anyway, as I was saying I started to read Ephesians. The first thing I noticed was how my mind really didn't want to settle down on the text so that I could read it quietly and meditatively. Outside thoughts kept intruding. I was struck by the fact that in our loud, fast, jumpy culture which forever is hitting us between the eyes with new stimuli, that it really is hard to get into a quiet enough state to, for want of a better term, "hear the voice of God."

Be that as it may, I persevered, and by the time I was into Ephesians 4 (it was a long ride) I was starting to sense a change coming over me. A quietness, a certitude. "Yes, of course," I thought. "Isn't this what we have been told to do again and again in scripure? Soak in the Word, meditate on it, let it sink it, and prayerfully seek to obey it."

Faith comes by hearing the Word, the Bible says, but we Western Christians think we JUST DON'T HAVE TIME to spend much time in it. Our lives are too crazy. Too much to do.

Or we feel our brains are fried from all the stress and we look for ways to unwind (such as slumping in front of the Idiot Box with one hand in the popcorn bowl). Maybe after we get all calmed down, we think, then some way, somehow we'll feel up for a bit of Bible reading just before we douse the lights. (This at least has been an accurate description of my life on many occasions!)

The bottom line is, I think I see that the method of just jumping into a Bible book and letting its message crowd out all the blinking lights and honking horns and bizarre phenomena of our modern world, is for me, the way to fly.

I'll let you know how it turns out.