grace, and tonnes of it

i went to a prayer meeting and it was about grace.

How apt. As I'm writing this, my anger is subsiding, and I'm letting grace do its work. Here is the incident.

I put my clothes in a drying machine, and I left it there. I returned at the end of the cycle, and my clothes were replaced by someone else's. I guess what happened was, someone replaced my clothing with his/her...

I felt angry, and a many, many things were going through my mind about what to do. Should I dump it in the toilet, wet it? Should I throw them all away somewhere, as a lesson for the person not to mess around with other people's clothing? 

Well, it was so childish thinking about it, but I still did. Vengeance and pride can be very dangerous to handle. Oh well. In the end I just left them at the top of the machine, and after I was done, put them back in the dryer... 

Vengeance is the Lord's. I pray that the Lord have mercy on that person... 

And grace again.

This one is much more serious, and it concerns my relationship with an institution that I belong to, the church, namely, FCBC. First of all, FCBC is a wonderful church. Great people, great leadership, bold vision, with the guts, faith and love to do it. The problem might just be myself and my own perception. Here's how it goes, and it starts with who I think I am. I like books, I like apologetics, like philosophy, reasoning and arguing, in things intellect. I'm not exactly fun-fun, but I can be... But I know that what brings people to Christ is the relational and the emotional aspects of connecting to Jesus as saviour. I get that. And FCBC is really big on that, because as far as I know, bringing people to Christ really requires that relational/emotional stuff. Its just that... I've never been exactly big on that, meaning - I'm not exactly that socially/emotionally-adept, and the way I handle people is kinda different, meaning, I prefer small-groups, less than ten perhaps, and I want to focus on who these people are. And I want to talk, engage them, engage their ideas, because I think that a large part of Christianity is also knowing who God is, who Jesus is, and why they should be confident about their faith, in knowing what Christianity means, and how it faces up to challenges... 

I'm fearing that the nature of church hierarchy in FCBC - being essentially a vertical hierarchy with strict chain of commands - might make it difficult to respond to certain types of changes, especially tech-wise. Meaning, that since everything flows from the top, changes might not be reflected in time by the time it reaches the top from the ground. Besides, I am beginning to realise that some churches are not meant to be democratic, meaning, that there are some individuals who are thought to be... exceptional. While I do agree that some people are anointed and appointed by God for church leadership... hmm... this is an incomplete thought, but I think people can see where its going. A thought experiment would be: if a very high-up pastor does something ethically wrong but not criminally wrong, and if that person does not admit mistakes despite being wrong and even goes on to justify leadership through previous anointing, will there be means to... remove the person from authority? 

One of the things that I never really stopped wondering was whether Christianity supports authority or not... 

One of the threads here is that, when more people become more aware of the transformative power of infotech to change the modes of engagement, how will it change the way churches function? Open-sourced Sermons? Where believers flow from one congregation to another, depending on the sermons? Right now the network of churches is kinda disparate - meaning that every church does its own thing, oblivious, not really knowing what other churches are doing, because there is no need to. maybe with LoveSingapore, then more churches become involve with one another, and there is some communication, but still, for day-to-day stuff, churches are a social institution serving the spiritual needs of the community... I mean - thats a more technical perspective. Is it possible to conceive of a *super-church*, where there are no longer boundaries between different churches..... like a *hive* of some sort... specialisation into *workers* who do the work of evangelism and community outreach, *musicians* - worship specialists...

Oh shucks. I am becoming incoherent. Better stop now.. the point is, there is a dissatisfaction about being in FCBC that I haven't found a way to resolve. But if I truly grasp that: it was never about me, or how I feel, but about how God wants to do something through me - reach out to people and do some other stuff - then it ought to have settled things right? I do *get it* but some other thing feels not quite right... Lotsa scary thoughts, but just stopping now to do some other work...

Grace.