A week from now, I'll be on a plane heading out to South Africa via the UK. Joyously, it will be to meet with many of the brilliant minds of the church to discuss issues and confront challenges both within and without in the coming years. It's terribly exciting to think of the people I'll be rubbing shoulders with, the voices from all over the world and the renewed vision and zeal for the Kingdom that will arise from this family gathering.
People around me have been getting excited as well, and hurriedly asking me what else is left, how am I doing, what's going to happen. Churches have been asking me how I can help liaise with them on their attempts to connect with what will be happening in real time, while I am there, and they are here.
Sadly, however, the only place where I have barely heard a peep is my own home church. My elders keep telling me that prophets are not welcome in their own hometowns, so this shouldn't surprise me at all. And it doesn't. Yet, for the past year, it has astounded me at the profound ignorance and apathy that has gripped my local family about this congress, about the issues and about what the rest of the global family is thinking and doing. For a church that claims that it is missions-minded, it has obstinately chosen to navel-gaze, choosing not to participate in where we are going, what we are thinking and who we are becoming, staying in its time-warped and ethnocentric views of the world. Sigh.
Some of these other churches and people cannot believe that my church hardly cares that I'm going. They tell me how they wish they, or someone from their congregations, were going, and how they'd give eye-teeth to do so. I can believe it, sadly.
So it's slightly bitter-sweet, my getting on this plane. The family that greets me on the other side looks to greater things, and His greater glory. The family I leave behind will likely hardly notice I left, and likely will not care about the greetings and urgings that our relatives will urgently send back with me from Africa.
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