Working Bee Theology

With our working bee this week it got me thinking. Have you heard the phrase, ‘Church is not a building, it’s the people’? There is a right sentiment to this phrase in the way it wards us off thinking ‘religion’ is limited to a building or that some how church is inherently holy or sacred or powerful. In fact church is the people is a wonderful insight from the Knox-Robinson era that reminded us of the priority of church as the people as they returned to the New Testament word for church which just means gathering, rather than building. But we can take this insight too far and miss our very creatureliness in the process. For the church is a spiritual reality, yes. However, the spiritual is not in opposition to the material. We are the body of Christ and bodies exist in a location, a particular place. Abraham was promised a people yes, but he was also promised a place. Adam and Eve were planted in a garden. The new creation is a garden city. Place is a part of our communal lives together, because people exist in time and space and groups need a place to meet to be a group. The care for our place (working bee as an example) sits under our stewardship of this creation that we were entrusted with the task of filling and subduing (caring for, not domineering). We are not a ‘too spiritual’ people with no concern for the material, nor are we those who obsess over the material. Rather in Christ’s resurrection, with the promise of ours to come, the material is redeemed and so we care for what God has cared for. Working bee at Dapto is caring for what God has entrusted to our care.

By Rev. Craig McCorkindale