Dear St Luke’s | An invitation to come All In ~ Matt Way

This weekend is Palm Sunday, and at St Luke’s we’ll be gathering for our All-In service. This, of course, is one of those moments where the whole breadth of our community gathers to worship together. I believe these services are a tremendously important part of our church life, but it is worth saying plainly, not everyone finds them easy.

Recently, the PCC spent some time reflecting on these services together. It was a helpful pause for thought. And what follows are some of my own reflections, shaped by that conversation. Again, it feels worth saying plainly that as I’ve been wondering about this, I’ve felt really challenged, and what follows contains some of that challenge. I also know that not every Thursday afternoon feels like a good time for challenge, so if you’re not up for it today, feel free to come back to this another time.

Small print aside, here are my thoughts:

From time to time I hear a question about our All-In services, sometimes gently, and sometimes more directly: “What am I getting from this?” Without a preach, without exposition, application, and a seeming loss of depth, it can feel like there is less to take away. It’s an honest question, and in that sense it’s a good one. But, I do wonder if there might be another question worth holding alongside it: namely, might there be another way to receive?

One of the gifts of St Luke’s is our increasingly intergenerational life. The church remains one of the few places in our society where people of all ages and stages gather around a shared hope. But that kind of togetherness is not easy.

I’ve spent the last eight years, since becoming a parent, trying to work out how to spend meaningful time together as a family. And the truth is: it is very rarely entirely mutual. This is particularly apparent when it comes to holidays. Just as I’m getting ready to sit down with a good book and a stiff drink, my pesky family and all their needs surface. Joking aside, there is a tension. What nourishes one person doesn’t always nourish another. Time together, if it is to be real, almost always involves some level of sacrifice.
And the same is true in church. Life across generations asks something of us.

In the gospels, there’s a moment where children are brought to Jesus, and the disciples try to turn them away. When I read it, it’s easy to see it as yet another obvious misstep by his ragged band of disciples. But if I am honest with myself, I find it to be an uncomfortably understandable instinct. I too seek to prioritise and protect my ever so important grown-up work, to keep things focused and minimise disruption. But Jesus responds very differently. He tells them to let the children come, not to hinder them, because the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Put another way: what looks like interruption, Jesus says, may in fact be the point.

At different times, the church hasn’t always found this easy. Like the wider culture, we’ve sometimes drifted toward separating people by age and stage, creating spaces where things feel more efficient, more focused, more “productive.”

But in recent decades, there has been a growing sense that something important was being lost. The emergence of the ‘all-age church’ movement clings to the conviction that faith is not formed primarily through the acquisition of information, but through belonging; not just through teaching, but through participation in a shared life. Our All-In services seek to be one small expression of that rediscovery.

If you’ve been to one of these services, you might have heard me say that we are trying, for a moment, to lay down our wordy intellectual selves, and our relentless analysis of the gospel, that we might put it into practice; that rather than talking about our reconnection we might allow ourselves to be reconnected.

Because, at the heart of the Christian life is something far more demanding, and far more beautiful than simple intellectual assent.

In his letter to the Philippians, Paul describes Jesus like this:
“Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant…”

The term often used to describe this divine self-emptying is the Greek word: kenosis. And honestly I cannot think of many things more counter-cultural. Everything around us tells us to maximise our own benefit: to play the system, to have things our way. But this way of the Christ moves in the opposite direction altogether. At the heart of the gospel is the assertion that life in all its fullness comes not through grasping, but through release.

So, roughly once a month, in a small and imperfect way, we are trying to practise that. We lay down our usual modes of receiving, and ask how we might receive differently. What kind of life might become possible as we let something go?

One more time, it’s worth saying plainly: this isn’t an easy exchange. But perhaps that’s the point? There is always a Good Friday before an Easter Sunday.

And talking of Easter; here’s my favourite part, and absolutely where the magic happens. Every time I have managed to lay down my professional-Christian, vicarly pursuit of the kingdom in purely adult terms- every time I have made space for the children in my life- I have found that it does not simply make a way for them, but reveals the way for me too. In every act of release, in every small relinquishment, we are drawn further into the upside-down life of the kingdom of God.

Because Jesus calls those who would receive the kingdom to come like children. Not simplistic, but open; not naïve, but present. Ready to trust, to wonder, and to belong.

So when I say it’s All-In this weekend, I mean we are trying to make space for you all.
But I also mean that we are trying to make space for all of you.

Not just the parts that want to understand, or the parts that seek clarity, but those parts that sit in awe of the mystery. Not just the composed, capable, put-together adult self; but the more vulnerable, sometimes silenced self within you that is still learning how to trust, how to receive, how to be.

As Jesus said, whoever takes the lowly position of a child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.
So I am inviting you to come All In. To lay down all of yourself, and find out if there might be life on the other side.

And if that sounds like too much for a Palm Sunday weekend, that’s ok. Take your time. The invitation will still be here.