I am currently on sabbatical, which is three months of study leave and not meant to be holiday, however, one of the great joys of stepping back from my normal daily routine for a season is that I am able to spend more time with my wider family, which has been a great joy for me.
We have just spent a few days in Norfolk with our eldest daughter and our ten-year-old grandson which has been an absolute delight. On Wednesday afternoon after school my grandson put his gaming console on the television and instructed me that we were about to compete against each other, which horrified me. I sat with a kind of compact steering wheel in my hand with buttons to press and was given literally two minutes of minimal tuition, then we were off. I confess to feeling hugely relieved as I crossed the finish line and was chuffed to bits that I came fifth. I felt guilty five minutes later when I beat him and I was off the hook, thankfully. Please don’t misunderstand me, my grandson was most gracious in defeat, but has a fairly short attention span and wanted to move onto some other game that was way beyond the skills and knowledge of his dinosaur of a grandad.
This experience made me realize that my grandson, over fifty years my junior lives in a completely different world to me. I remembered buying a copy of Colin McRae’s rally game way back at the beginning of this century and marvelling at being at the cutting edge of technology. A couple of years later I bought a Porsche racing game and that was even better, but looking at the modern games consoled, my grandson enters into a world that I don’t understand and the are times when it is difficult to differentiate between what is real and what is computer generated. The experience was yet another reminder that the world of 2023, is very different to the world when I was growing up, and my mind boggles when I try to imagine what the world might look like when he is an old man.
At the same time as spending time with my family, I am studying the work of mission in the Christian Church through over twenty century’s and as I reflect on the ministry of Jesus and the early Church, I have to understand that the mission of the early Church was restricted to a fairly limited geographical area with very different challenges relating to a very different social and political time. Some words of one of Charles Wesley’s hymns echoed around in my head when I was accepted as a candidate for the ordained ministry. I quote the words of the second verse of the hymn “A charge to keep I have” the second verse reads.
To serve the present age,
My calling to fulfil.
O may it all my powers engage
To do my masters will.
I often wonder about serving a modern world that looks so very different to the one I knew as I was growing up, I might well have had my moment of glory when I beat my grandson at Mario Cart racing, but he is more tuned into the modern world than I will possibly ever be. Yet in that moment sitting with a remote control in my hand knot quite understanding what to do, I became aware of the challenge of the twenty-first century Church to be relevant to a world we do not always understand.