Current Tunage: Underoath – We Are The Involuntary
Hands in the air and love at our sides.
There’s gotta be something bigger here -
With the beating in our throats,
And the tremble in our grip,
This can’t be it.

I’ll come up, I’ll come up for peace,
I’ll come down, I’ll come down for truth,
I’ll give in, I’ll give up for you.
The floors are shaking
And we’ve lost our step.
Oh Lord, have mercy on us all.

Married life is incredible. It’s been a touch chaotic – we haven’t had time to breathe slow in about two weeks now (though the promise of my soon-coming reading week offers some relief). Amidst that chaos, however, it’s been refreshing and ultimately revitalizing to both our lives. Not just for the obvious reasons, but also the less-obvious, less-overt, less-easy-to-detect. I think we’ve both been feeling somewhat spiritually complacent for some time, and though I can’t speak directly for my dear wife, I can speak from our discussion. All this is to say: we’ve both been so overwhelmed by (first) wedding planning and (second) adjusting to marriage and each other’s constant presence that it’s been very difficult to “find” (read: make) time with God. We’ve been working on solutions together, the two of us, and I’m really enjoying the direction we’re heading now, though it’s still early in the process of implementation.

Marriage is a blessing in so many ways, and I think I (for one) am finding that the chiefest is that it presents an ideal, piercing, persistent opportunity for accountability – particularly in the form of discovering that, when married, sin is rather almost impossible to hide. When you live in such close quarters and intimacy with someone else, you can’t escape from those things you’ve so often overlooked in the name of self-charity or self-preservation over the years. It’s a beautiful thing, and further concretes my earlier suspicion that one of God’s big ideas with marriage was that it be a primary component of many believer’s sanctification.

Along those lines – those newlywed, newly-relocated, new life lines – we’ve found and begun “plugging into” a local church. I suppose the biggest news (or at least, the most newsworthy portion of this news) is that it’s not a Brethren Assembly. Steph and I have both grown up and continued to be members of Bible Chapels that are associated with the open Plymouth Brethren here in Ontario. It’s kind of what we’ve always known, and we both treasure and love many things about it. So, why haven’t we just settled simply into one here in Pickering? I’ll attempt to answer.

The night Steph and I met, we were in the company of many dear mutual friends, and following the prayer meeting (which was our reason for being there), about half stayed around for the “afterparty” – during which we, who were all in some way or another associated with the Brethren, talked about the Brethren – what’s worked, what hasn’t, what’s wrong, what isn’t, and so on. We shared stories and observations and experience and we were there until 2:30am. Steph and I love the Brethren, but both of us (even then) were asking ourselves “Why do I?”.

I’m about to paint in some broad strokes, so bear with me. This isn’t an attempt to typecast or stereotype, and certainly I’m aware of many exceptions. Regardless, to keep this from becoming a sort of mind-dump, I’ll attempt to keep it brief:

We love a lot of the Brethren’s “big ideas” – autonomous local churches that are elder-lead, interdependence between local churches, being Bible-centric (which necessarily results in being much-more-importantly Jesus-centric), the importance of Worship being both solemn and energetic, loads of friends and friendly folks who love Jesus, etc. There is a lot to love.

We definitely do not love a lot of other things we’ve seen over the years. This really isn’t the place to name them all, and I’m not going to. No system is perfect, and no system of ecclesiology (church) gets it “right”. It’s not really my intention to criticise the Brethren, because really, that’s where my roots are – that’s what I was “raised on”.

So, you’re wondering: If I’m not going to criticise, what am I going to do?
And who the heck am I? What makes me think that I have anything to offer?

Stay tuned.