MattGlover.com

This is the continuation of a paper that was written for my Supervised Theological Field Education paper in 2006, called “My Operational Theology and Model for Theological Reflection”.

I’m happy to answer any questions if you’re happy to ask them…

 

Towards the end of secondary school, I had a strong faith in God, but was a little tired of the Christian community. I had been sent to a Christian school and was involved heavily in the youth ministry of my church. However, I still played competitive sport and worked at the local K-Mart, interacting with people who I was drawn too but who would never come to anything that happened at my church. The season of eighteenth birthday parties arrived and I went to them all. Most of the time I was the designated driver – once I was the counselor when somebody else drove and ended up killing themselves and a passenger when they hit a tree. This was life in all it’s brutal reality and seemed to be more real than many of the lives I could see being lived out in my church.

The arguments that consumed our church meetings turned me off church politics entirely. They left me with no doubt why people didn’t come to church, but also made me wonder what sort of God these church people knew? It didn’t seem to be the one that my shadow and I had come to know so many years ago, nor the one that I was learning more about as I devoured the Bible and as many studies as I could.

So I prayed this prayer.

“God, help me to feel what real people feel. Help me experience life as real people experience life.”

Sounds arrogant, I know. But God answered it spectacularly. Within a few months I was thrust into the world of Melbourne University with out knowing another soul in my course. My girlfriend of 18 months dumped me and got engaged to somebody else. I was told to leave the youth ministry of my church and never come back, and relationships within my family were tense. Without knowing it, I was being placed in a world where I was forced to be with the so-called ‘real people’ and began to see life through different eyes.

During my time at university, I didn’t have a lot to do with church. I still went, but didn’t engage with much and wasn’t invited too anyway. My senior pastor at the time was great and stood by me, encouraging me to stay faithful despite the mess that had happened with the youth group. There’s was never really any danger that I wouldn’t stay faithful to God, but faithful to church was not really a priority. The people I became friends with weren’t Christian people. I didn’t go to any of the Christian groups on campus for any length of time, but instead found myself friends with lots of gay students, gamblers, drinkers, smokers, and drug users.

I liked these people. I didn’t do what they did nor did I want to. But I liked being with them as I sensed a genuineness that I hadn’t encountered before. This became my mission field and my mission was simply to be a Christian in their presence. By the time my honours year came around, there was one other Christian who had become part of the group. She shared a similar journey and outlook on life to me. She also shared a good deal of the infatuation I had for her and we became a couple. And still are to this day!

I finally stopped attending my church entirely so I could go to church with my new girlfriend. She went to a church because of its geographical location, rather than anything else, so I found myself in a conservative, wealthy, Baptist church – quite foreign to anything I had experienced before. There was a need for somebody to help with the youth ministry, which I put my hand up for and within five years was the youth pastor on a full time basis.

Before ‘entering’ ministry I had worked for five years at the Dulux manufacturing plant in research and development. It was a melting pot of characters, race and religion and for those five years, they were the people I spent most of my time with. They were interested in the youth work I did with my church, which in turn led to some great discussions about faith. Yet the only time any of them came to church with me was when I got married – somehow the wealthy, conservative, Eastern suburbs church didn’t seem the right place to invite an uneducated, foul mouthed factory worker…

Continued tomorrow…