Where’s God…Monday to Saturday?

Paul writes – One of the fun books I like to flick through from time to time are the “Where’s Wally?” series. The aim of reading them is to try and locate Wally among a myriad of people and objects. Now Steve Taylor and a few others are embarking on what I imagine will be a fascinating experiment to “find God”.

First published in 1987, Where's Wally? is one of the most recognisable children's characters in the world, with over 45 million books and 36 million individual issues of a collectable part works sold worldwide.

One of the passages a number of us (from Canada, Australia etc) have been sitting with for over 12-months is Luke 10: 1-12. Some of us have used “Appreciative Inquiry” as a way of listening, inquiring after God, and thus discerning God’s Kingdom work. Another practice has been to take Luke 10: 1-12 as we’ve gone about the activities of our day, and as we’ve intentionally though of ourselves as “sent” by Jesus, in the same way that he “sent” the 70/72 ahead of him as he journeyed toward Jerusalem.

The particular verse that I went to as I read Steve’s post was Luke 10: 11b which Eugene Peterson translates as a question: “Did you have any idea that God's kingdom was right on your doorstep?”

I’ve mentioned many many times on this blog the importance of the practice of corporate discernment. We can’t join in on what God is doing (i.e. mission) if we can’t locate God.

Here’s a section of Steve’s post:

“…I am starting a 4 week series on the Kingdom of God... My aim for the 4 weeks is to help us become better at finding the Kingdom in our ordinary and everyday lives as Christians. I am writing to ask if you would be willing to be part of a public experiment. And for the next 4 weeks, make a commitment to keep an on-line journal in which you write a paragraph each day on Kingdom signs that you are noticing in your everyday life and work. Your journal, and those of 4 others in the church, would be advertised and placed on our church website. (I will also invite anyone who wants to in the church to join us, but I want a few examples to get us all going).

And people would be able, during the week to read and follow. Once a week, I would ask you to pause, to read back over the week and to write a summary paragraph, an overall discernment, a wondering about overall themes that might be emerging…”

You can read the whole post here, and from it, link to three people participating in the experiment. The discernment questions are adapted by Steve from a paper I wrote last year, and I in turn adapted and expanded on some questions that Rowan Williams included in his wonderful Silence and Honey Cakes: The Wisdom of the Desert / Where God Happens: Discovering Christ in One Another (US edition).