The opportunity to curate this narrative came along about a year after I read Darrell Johnson’s excellent book, Discipleship on the Edge: An Expository Journey through the book of Revelation. I knew immediately this would be the basis of my collection. If you’ve read the book you’ll know this collection owes heavily to Johnson’s work. As I began to work on the collection I frustratingly couldn’t find my copy, which was a pretty big deal because I always line the margins of my books with notes. I never did find it, and in retrospect it was a good thing; I feel less a thief. What remained from my previous year’s reading were distilled bits and pieces of wisdom I had integrated into my thinking and could now truly call my own. None of us get to where we are alone, especially writers.
As curators we were given unparalleled freedom. We were encouraged not to fit our narratives into any particular tradition but to create from our own particular tradition. I sometimes wonder if the good folk who suggested this didn’t thereafter feel like cat herders, but instead of herding cats they were herding artists. Meow.
Personally, at first this made my task a bit daunting. I don’t really know what my tradition is. I’m part of a very young denomination (Christian & Missionary Alliance), in a very young country (Canada) in an even younger city (Vancouver). On top of that my community is the young offspring of a “normal” church; we’re a gaggle of freaks and losers who meet in a nondescript building in a nondescript light industrial area. Once a week we get together and try to keep each other stumbling toward Jesus. If the church is God’s house, this is the lived in living room with crumbs on the floor and paint on the ceiling (literally).
In my community the stuff my pastor deals with during the week is, quite literally, life or death; people going into jail, people getting out of jail, restraining orders, overdoses, relapses, getting tossed on the street, getting off the street. That kind of environment has little use for BS. There is a certain level of honesty necessary if one is to stay alive, and/or see any kind of transformation. For example, at any given gathering instead of saying BS we would have just said bull****, because we all know that’s what we mean, and if we’re going to hedge on a word old Mennonite ladies use what else are we going to hedge on. It isn’t about being crass, it’s about being vulnerable before God, which means being honest with each other, which leads to the possibility of authentic transformation.
All of that to say my little mustard seed community figures out a lot of stuff as we go. Pretty much everything is up for grabs. I felt tradition-less and at first this intimidated me. Then I realized a lot of the specifics of what we do might frighten the holiness out of many church goers, but the core of what we do would be familiar down the ages; singing songs old and new, reading the word, engaging the word, sharing concerns, dreams, pain and victories, sharing meals, sharing the table in remembrance of Jesus. It’s in the availability of these core things that God shows up and as his children collide into each other trying to figure them out he appears like sparks of grace and love. In many ways we have been stripped down to only these core things, the other stuff is mild chaos we can never control or predict which means we are forced to embrace the mystery of our Creator who shows up in ways we can neither control nor predict.
Once I got to the fact that my tradition-less tradition is a tradition, all came clear. I could see the place, I could see the people and I knew this was their language in their place for their time. I know what I’ve curated doesn’t fit a lot of contexts, maybe even most contexts, but it fits our context, my community. I thank God for brothers and sisters like those behind Clayfire with the grace to let scary things exist. Correct that, with the courage to seek out scary things and the grace to encourage them to exist. My hope is this offering intersects with other scary communities who need to know it’s okay to be scary. My other hope is that, by being honest about our scariness, less scary places will see faces and places before they see just another scary place and that that will give them the courage and grace to let us exist.
