Around the 20^th of May, BikeMovement Asia participants were in a rural village just outside of Ubon, Thailand. It must have been a Saturday when we biked out there from Det Udom and arrived dripping with sweat, but in good spirits. This part of (northeastern) Thailand struck us as extremely hot and treeless after the cooler mountains of Laos, and I remember that morning seeming like that same ol’ hot Thailand. The shade of the cow barn, where we parked our bikes, seemed oddly inviting. I remember anticipating a mildly miserable day. We were told we’d be helping to mix and pour cement, both of which I’d done before, but never in such heat. Turns out though, that we were pouring a floor and the building was already roofed – which means it was at least twenty degrees cooler than working in the direct sunlight. Regardless of the shade to work in, the lively villagers to engage, and the delicious food they kept asking us to eat – they killed two ducks for us to eat! – I got sick and didn’t really think about much except drinking and sleeping that day. So most of this is retrospective, and maybe – consequently – a little rosier than the way things actually are/were, or maybe not.

I remember there being about thirty people in all. I kept being introduced to friends and family. I was usually told whether each person was a believer or not. I remember huge piles of sand, rock and water – I held the hose for a while. And then we ate duck and slept upstairs – they drudged up rice mats and pillows for us all. I had to climb down a rickety ol’ ladder about three times, in the dark, to use the bathroom that night (see mom, I’ve taken to heart what you’ve always said about drinking water when you’re sick – and dad, they don’t have proper saltines here). And the next morning I remember feeling quite a bit better. I was in that state after a day of sickness, when you start to say to yourself, ‘wow, I sure feel better, but I don’t want to get excited too quickly, because I sure don’t feel like runnin’ a marathon yet.’ And then I remember we gathered for church. We met Skip and Carol Tobin for the first time that morning. They had just returned from a trip to Cambodia and we, thankfully, we able to spend the better part of Sunday with them at their home. Carol, sort of spontaneously it seemed (not because of her presentation quality or quantity, but because of the way the pastor asked her to say something and she answered, ‘alright’) talked about Abraham and how he wasn’t always a faithful man. She reminded us all to struggle to be faithful in a distracting world. And something about vultures.

But those details aren’t really why I started writing about our time in the village outside of Ubon. I wanted to talk about church - in its physical and non-physical representations. Last summer, I talked with a lot of people about church buildings. At one point, I started asking the question, ‘what if we forgot about the building?’ Some other cyclists were concerned with church being practical – and by that they meant relevant to our everyday lives. We considered what it would be like if church were more, for us, than a gathering on Sunday mornings. It came up for me again, this summer, because of two things. First, final preparations are being made for the BikeMovement USA DVD and all these issues come up on that documentary. Second, that little house church in that village outside of Ubon had a conversation, the Sunday that we were there, about how to get more folks to attend their Sunday morning gathering. Apparently there are about two or three core families that are the most consistent attendees, but even so, many of those people find it hard to make every Sunday work – especially during rice planting season. Last summer people were throwing around ideas of church almost every day that we rode together. How can we re-imagine church? What if church were people gardening together? What if it were people living together in a house in a tough neighborhood trying to act like Jesus? What if church were a community of people who decide to travel together and be shaped as they are touched be the world? What if it were a group of dancers? What if it were building a fire in the woods? What if it were skipping the building, and cycling on a Sunday morning? My question, in the context of this heavy discussion on people attending the Sunday morning gathering in this village, became: what if church is people gathering together to pour concrete – even on a Saturday?

Couldn’t the day before (when we’d poured concrete together) count as ‘church’? It was an amazing communal accomplishment. We poured that floor – and mixed all the concrete for it – buy lunchtime on that Saturday. And the people who gathered to help us – the people from those church families. They had found time to help their neighbors. They had found time out of their busy schedules to gather together as neighbors and friends to live life – and I might argue, to live as God’s people in the world. Most of these people were Christians, but as I mentioned briefly before, there were ‘non-believers’ there too (aren’t we always trying to get new people interested in church?). I heard ‘testimonies’ in that space on Saturday, although they weren’t shared during the allotted ‘testimony’ time on Sunday morning. The woman of the house talked repeatedly about how our coming there, to assist with the floor was an answer to prayer – she thought they’d never get it poured this year; they didn’t have enough help. Thinking back, that Saturday morning floor-making may have been a really nice, and creative, model of church.

This is getting long so I’ll just end by proposing that we keep thinking creatively about our experiences of church. How can we, most effectively and faithfully, join together in community to live as God’s people in the world? That’s not necessarily rhetorical.

Posted by Tim Showalter

This entry was posted on Friday, June 15th, 2007 at 6:25 pm and is filed under Asia07. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.