Someone with whom I discuss the nature of the Church — the publisher Jay Howver, if I remember correctly — linked me to this thoughtful post from New Zealander Paul Fromont.

Still intermittently lurching through The Shaping of Things to Come - working its content into my thinking between the end of the activities of a day, and my eyelids falling like blinds across my eyes. One image (pp.85-86) that has stayed with me these last few days:

The image of a “billabong” — “an Australian term for a pond or lake that was once part of the bend of a river or creek but which has been cut off from the flow as the river slowly changed direction.” Frost & Hirsch use it to talk about generational changes that happen in churches. “Where once their parents or grandparents were part of a church that was like a flowing stream,” now the current generation are feeling themselves to be “trapped in a stagnant backwater” — a lake or a pond within which life is slowly being choked off.

I remember a story being told of a tribe of people who lived on the bank of a river, and the river was either dammed or diverted by another tribe further up the river. It seemed to be making a similar point, but I can’t remember the detail or in which book I read it (was it Mike Riddell, Douglas Coupland…?). Has anyone read it (based upon my poor description), and can they point me to it?

Anyway Frost and Hirsch’s reference to the billabong struck me in this way. Life, culture, and the world around seems to have moved on well ahead of church, moved in new directions, are grappling with new contexts and issues, meanwhile many churches are stuck, passed by, remote, and unable to bridge the culture and gospel divide. The gospel is rendered ‘life-less.’ The ‘gap’ grows bigger by the day and like a billabong over time, the church shrinks, people leave and new people with a nose for ‘death’ don’t come. The ‘flow’ of the Spirit is in all of creation, the flow continues, he/she flows in places many churches have long lost touch with.

I guess something else I wonder is how present and active the Spirit of Life is amongst ‘our’ (generic) gathered life as church. Not to imagine that he/she is not present, but more to wonder if a “billabong” church stuck effectively in the past loses an ability to read the Spirit “wind,” an ability to sniff the “scent of God”? Not sure that “if” they lose that ability, “how” they lose it? How do we get “stuck,” “cut off from the flow as the river slowly changes direction?” Perhaps as E. Glenn Wagner has said, the reason is that “we have forgotten what it means to be the church and to do ministry.” Perhaps there is more of the Spirit outside of the church, active in the world outside the ‘four walls,’ and perhaps like Jericho it’s time for the walls to come tumbling down!

http://prodigal.typepad.com/prodigal_kiwi/2004/01/billabongs.html