Emmaus or Damascus?

I don't often go around raving about books. Maybe its cos I really don't really have enough time to read as much as I should. But one person whose work has definitely inspired me recently has been Stephen Cottrell. I met him at a Fresh Expressions day in London and was quite impressed by what he had to say there, which made me notice when his name made it into the Church Times, a few times recently. For celebrating communion at the gates of Faslane, shining peoples shoes on Maundy Thursday and most recently, handing egg-timers out at the station to try and get frantic people just to take 3 minutes out of their hectic lives to stop, for just a moment.

Anyway as a result I pricked my ears up when someone recommended his book "From the abundance of the heart" which is subtitled Catholic Evangelism for All Christians. And I must admit that I have been impressed. It makes a lot of sense. The church in the past has spent a lot of time and effort on "Damascus Road" type evangelism, focussing on the sudden conversion experience, and those experiences are good and he doesn't dismiss them. But then he suggests that you try asking your people about their faith-stories, and see how it happened for them. Apparently 3/4 of Christian's stories are more like the "Emmaus Road" than the "Damascus Road", a gradual journey accompanied by others.

So we tried this exercise in Visions, and around that particular dinner table it turned out that we were all "Emmaus Road" people, with little Damascus moments along the way, but mostly a gradual journey.

Anyway he then goes on to suggest lots of practical ways of adopting a more Emmaus Road way of reaching out in mission. Some of the suggestions were challenging for me, as I realised that we aren't really getting alongside people as much as we would like to. I must admit I'd like to discuss it more with our folks and see what we come up with as a result.

Oh the other thing I liked about the book was his definition of 3 rather "churchy" words that pop up in the traditional creeds.
Holy, Catholic and Apostolic. He drew a little diagram with 3 circles and said that Holy was in communion with God, Catholic
was being connected to one another (ie more about community than about power structures), and apostolic about being present in the world (apostolic literally means "sent"). In order to be effective we need all 3, because each one on their own leads to a skewed view of life. (being stuck in holy huddles, or divorced from real life, or disconnected from the Source of all our power)

Makes a lot of sense to me.

Sue.