Second Gathering

by
Mark Brians

Next week Saturday, October 10th, a group of us from the Hawaii Anglican Network will arrive on island to visit with our friends on Maui. We will have a time of fellowship, a few meals, a time of prayer and a service of Holy Communion. It will be the first time we will have gathered on Maui since this summer when I flew over for the baptism of Charles Jones. I hope and expect it to be sweet.

In what we are doing we are taking our cues from the acts of the apostles in the earliest days of the Church: building and sustaining a network of missional partnerships that are anchored in interpersonal love and in common prayer.

A my friend Alastair Roberts has argued (across his various publication platforms), the early church operated as a kind of living internet of nodes, centers, mendicant teachers, epistles, letter-copiers, letter-carriers, etc. One can think of the “load” laid on the early Christian network for something like Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians to circulate not only through the different house groups in Galatia but across the Christian community. How many hands passed things between them, how much currency was exchanged, how many Roman triremes were procured for passage, how much extra wine and oil did Lydia have her serving folks buy for the large readings held in her home (e.g. “Oh, a new letter from Paul —quick! Lucretia and Ismene, go and tell the butcher we’ll need and extra rack of lamb tonight”).

With all of our smallness as a network and with all of the story (both the glory and the pain) that lies behind us, our approach to the future of Anglican Mission on Maui (ours and others’) is to develop similar patterns of life and ministry. It is our hope to build something akin to the communities to whom Paul always closed his letters with fond greetings, as in Rome…

“…Greet Philologus, Julia, Nereus and his sister, and Olympas and all the Lord’s people who are with them. Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the churches of Christ send greetings” (Rom. 16:15-16).

And our hope is that, like the Roman church of Paul’s original audience, we would see the Lord work mightily in our mutual love and affection; in the very unity of His People “crushing Satan under our feet” (cf. Rom. 16:20) and exalting the Cross of Jesus in our midst.