That woman is a super hero

"Set up signposts to mark your trip home.
Get a good map.
Study the road conditions.
The road out is the road back.
Come back, dear virgin Israel,
come back to your hometowns.
How long will you flit here and there, indecisive?
How long before you make up your fickle mind?
God will create a new thing in this land:
A transformed woman will embrace the transforming God!"
Jeremiah 31:21&22 The Message


I thought I needed to take note of the path I am traveling as I will be coming back this way one day, but I am now wondering if this is my return journey and that is why things are feeling so familiar.
I have a memory like a sieve and I seem to be like this with movies especially. When watching Hancock with she who is 12, I said I reckoned there was something about the wife which made me suspect she was a super hero, and I amazed said 12 year old who said she hadn't seen that coming first time she watched it - I felt chuffed coz she is really into films. So I told Ben that night and he told me we had all watched it together a few months before. It was really familiar but I hadn't remembered it. Rather annoyingly I did the same thing with The Usual Suspects and declared a guess at who-it-is, only to figure out in the final scene that I've seen it before, having now ruined it for those I was watching with.
Of these paths I am now, some of them feel familiar. This time I am taking note of the landmarks.

The Contemporary English Bible presents the last line like this...
"I will make sure that someday

things will be different,

as different as a woman

protecting a man"

I like that kind of new thing - a lot. The question I am wrestling with at the moment, is can the new thing be a lay person leading a church?
I am finding increasing numbers of like minded souls, but they all appear to be Ordained, or Candidating, which is more than little worrying as I have been avoiding that particular lifestyle for 25 years now. Surely a lay woman can lead a church? What is Ordination anyway? What are Sacraments? I really really struggle to see why some can and some cannot.... but as I said when I was 21 in my final Local preacher interview when the wicked Leo Osborn asked if I thought this was an initial step before ordination, I replied, 'no, I don't have magic fingers to wave over the bread'. I still don't, but I do long to share the bread.

Then there is the proper good news in these verses, the bit I need to really focus on....

It is God who does the creating of new things, not me. What a relief for everyone.

this is not a cul-de-sac

I went to work today and did my duty, and then I bumped into a young man from the church I grew up in, and I knew he is now a big proper grown up, and was an VentureFX person, so for some reason the first thing I said was 'how do you know when what you are doing is church?'
Not a usual way to start a conversation with someone your little brother was in Youth Group with!
But Ric Stott is a star, and took my musings seriously, and of the many insightful things he said, the one which is still with me this evening, is that exploring the question of what church is, or is not, is not a cul-de-sac.
So I will carry on asking this question, including the place of worship.
Which others at Methodist Conference are also asking - including Martyn Atkins in his General Sec report, and indeed is an issue the Missing Generation Report is also highlighting. And then there is all the stuff on pastoral theology.
All of this is crucial for me as I muse on the new church I long to be a part of