Still haven't found what I'm looking for

This year marked a quiet and very private revolution in my life. Perhaps the change I'm thinking about doesn't really deserve the appellation 'revolution', but it still felt like a radical step to do what I did - with my family in tow.


For 25 years I had been part of a splendid company of people called Kristent Fellesskap, or Christian Fellowship, in Bergen, Norway. This church, with roots in the so-called house church-movement, had been my spiritual home, fostering great leaders, providing great friends - in many ways living up to the ideas I have had about what really constitutes a church that God and people can value and affirm as genuine: an agent of change in society at large.


I was introduced to this group of believers at the tender age of 20. I had only just moved away from my childhood home, looking eagerly forward to becoming independent, more mature, but also to finding ordinary Norewgians truly on fire for Jesus. Inwardly I was yearning to be a part of something that was truly a church, and not just a place where you happened to worship regularly.


And I believe to this day that God supernaturally did lead me to getting in touch with people sharing my faith. But I found more than that at the time. I also found people who weren't overly christianese in their behaviour or conversations. In other words, what I discovered was people who quite naturally could spontaneously worship Jesus in private homes when gathered for a night of fun and friendship, but who also could watch a film together on a Friday evening - and still not lose their authenticity or sanctity.


They were genuine when worshipping, and they were genuine when shopping. All of life seemed imbued with a quality that both impressed me and attracted my attention. These were people who certainly didn't compartmentalize their lives. They saw all of life as important and worthwhile, and they didn't distinguish between Sundays and Mondays. All of life was worth sharing and enjoying, and the Jesus they believed in was a Jesus who wanted to be as equally involved in the purchase of a house as in the worship service on Sunday morning.. 


And so we were taught to believe in and live an everyday existence where Jesus was alive to you all seven days of the week. We prayed together just about everywhere, we shared a laugh together, we went joyriding together, and we embraced the bitterer facts of life as when attending a funeral of a nine month old baby.


Twenty-five years down the road much had changed, of course. The church I had known then had mulitplied in number, but still my perception was now that much also had been lost in the process. I was no longer as involved in church life as I had been. I'm too much of the shy and introvert person to want to make my presence felt in a sanctuary housing 900 people. I have always felt much more comfortable and at home in small-scale cell group settings, or in the campfire atmosphere where love and experience are shared easily and naturally at a pace of your own preference.


I had also by now got myself a family with my wife and three children as our own miniature church. And judged by personality and the nature of our common and individual pursuits, we no longer found a two-hour worship service, partially in English, the natural gravitational centre of our spiritual life. For some years we had gradually been feeling this increasing, irresistible pull towards a kind of fellowship where relationships matter prominently, and where even the quiet in the land can be seen and heard.


I am still very much aware that church, and the fellowship believers share, is a matter of knowing and expressing Jesus. Period. It's also very obvious that church is not a society consistsing of people only sharing the same interests. Church is the people Jesus has called to be his very own, exclusively, who are devoted to spreading the gospel, constantly pushing the borders of his Kingdom influence. Church is still to me much more than figures, or cosy after service-coffee. Church is meant to be an expression of the Jesus who is very much alive.


When choosing, then, to be a part of a new fellowship, and not (officially) of Christian Fellowhsip, I didn't do so because I had finally grown tired of the same, old faces. I still love and appreciate the host of people who have chosen differently: to stay and work for the progress of the gospel in that church. But for myself and my family, I must honestly say that I still haven't really found (the full extent) of what I've been looking for. And I believe with all my heart that the best way forward, is to relinquish some of the old ways and ideas - and pursue in congress with some old and new acqaintances answers to this question:


Howe do we best live out the gospel life in urban Norway in 2011? I still haven't found what I'm looking for, but I do hope I, and we, will.