It’s a sunny, Sunday afternoon. I’m stuck inside my head, as my thoughts turn to folks attending church today in person while many more like my wife, watch online. Others, are at home grieving the Blue Jays’ loss at the World Series. Then there are those for whom the thought of church doesn’t interest them but instead, evokes a variety of thoughts and images – many negative.
Sitting at the dining room table and staring out a large bay window, I write to people I’ve never met – articulating a renewed imagination of a relational God and a Christian community that doesn’t yet exist. For eight months now, I publish weekly articles exploring the essence of God’s nature, and God’s invitation to live into a covenant Christian community. Maybe four or so people I know read them. I appreciate the gift of their time to read my articles and indeed they support me from their corners of the country. But why do I do it?
The Prophet in Exile
I think of Jeremiah. Not the fire-and-brimstone Jeremiah of popular imagination, but the Jeremiah who wrote letters to exiles – people torn from everything familiar, trying to figure out how to make sense of their world and to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land.
Jeremiah didn’t write from a position of having it figured out. He wrote from within the exile, experiencing the same displacement and grief as those he addressed. His prophetic voice wasn’t about standing outside the pain pointing toward answers. It was about standing inside the pain, naming what was lost – daring to imagine what could be.
“Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce… seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf.” (Jeremiah 29:5,7)
That doesn’t sound like the voice of one who’s arrived – that’s a voice of faith in the wilderness, speaking possibility into absence.
My Pasture
Clearly I can’t compare myself to Jeremiah, but his lived experience causes me to reflect upon where I am. I retired from pastoral ministry (and as a public school custodian) four years ago after about three decades as a pastor shepherding small, church communities. I expected retirement would mean rest, but I wasn’t sure what my life would be like when I was no longer Larry the Minister Guy. Lots of retired ministers transition into a local church community with little to no problem yet, I feel homeless.
Pastorally Homeless
The institutional churches in my city of London, Ontario are doing good work – solid preaching, genuine community, faithful ministry. But when I sit in those services, I don’t feel like I’m in exile – it’s closer like being put out to pasture after outliving my usefulness. Someone who still speaks the language but doesn’t quite belong to the culture anymore.
I invested the last 15 years of my pastoral ministry leading a church I founded that intentionally avoided much (yet not all) of the institutional framework – organic, participatory, focused on people outside church culture. We had no building, no budget, no paid staff. Just people gathering around a family room coffee table, backyard BBQs, under trees of a local park, playing around in a school gym or serving in community projects – learning together, trying to follow Jesus in the mess of ordinary life.
When that community dissolved during the pandemic, I lost more than a ministry role. I lost my identity. My social network. My sense of place in the body of Christ. And now, at 64, I find myself isolated – still carrying a shepherd’s heart but with no flock, still believing in what could be but living in what isn’t.
Why I Write From This Place
Lately I’ve been wrestling with some cognitive dissonance as I write. How can I advocate for Christian community when I myself am isolated from it? How can I articulate a vision for what doesn’t yet exist? Isn’t that just empty theorizing?
Then I remember Jeremiah. He didn’t write to the exiles from Jerusalem, telling them what they should do from his position of comfort and clarity. He wrote from within the exile, naming the ache, validating the grief – daring to speak hope into the void.
I don’t think a prophetic voice comes from a place of arrival but rather as a fellow traveler. It’s about seeing what could be while standing in what is. It’s about naming the holy dissatisfaction – the sense that what we have isn’t quite what we were made for – and trusting that naming it might give rise to something new.
I write not because I have answers, but because I can see the questions. Not because I’ve created the community I’m describing, but because I’ve tasted enough of it to know it’s possible. Not because I’m better, but because someone has to be crazy enough to speak into the emptiness and see if it echoes back.
The Prophetic Imagination
Walter Brueggemann talks about the prophetic task as having two parts: critique and energizing. The prophet names what’s dying (critique) and imagines what could be born (energizing).
Here’s my critique: Institutional Christianity in Canada – the Christendom model where church was synonymous with cultural power and moral authority – is sinking. We can prop it up, defend it, fight for its preservation, but it feels like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Many Canadian Christians experience this death as persecution (I see this amplified on X – Twitter). They cry that the church is under attack, that Christians are being marginalized, that we need to fight to reclaim our cultural influence.
But what if it’s not persecution? What if it’s just… death? The natural end of a particular way of being church that was never supposed to be the church’s primary posture anyway?
The early church was a countercultural community, not a power broker. It thrived on the margins, not in the halls of empire. It attracted people not through cultural dominance but through the compelling witness of how Christians loved each other and their neighbors.
What if the death of Christendom isn’t tragedy but opportunity? What if losing cultural power might free us to rediscover what Jesus actually intended?
The Energizing Vision
So here’s a taste of what I imagine – not from a place of having built it, but from a place of prophetic hope.
Small, intergenerational learning collectives
Not churches in the institutional sense, but communities gathered around tables where wisdom flows both directions – from Gen Alpha to Boomers to Silents and back. Where we explore together what it means to follow Jesus in post-Christian Canada, not by fighting culture wars but by embodying an alternative way of being human.
Communities sustained not by buildings and budgets
But by simple rhythms – learning together, eating together, playing together, resting together. Where Christian faith formation happens not through programs and professional clergy, but through the renewed minds of individuals joining with others toward the renewed mind of the community.
I imagine local, in-person gatherings
Christians who love Jesus but can’t find their place in institutional structures. People not leaving the faith, just leaving a particular kind of church structure that no longer fits.
I imagine something that doesn’t centre on me or any single leader
Instead it emerges naturally from the people who show up. Where we figure out together what this becomes, rather than consuming someone else’s vision. Do I have this? No. Am I living it? Not yet. But I can see it. And the seeing matters.
Why Isolation Doesn’t Disqualify the Vision
The prophetic voice often comes from the wilderness, not the palace. From the exile, not the homeland. From the margins, not the center. From a pastor from the pasture not yet ready to be a geriatric grazer.
Jeremiah wrote to exiles as an exile. John the Baptist proclaimed from the desert, not the temple. Jesus himself was often isolated – withdrawing to lonely places, misunderstood by his own family, without a place to lay his head.
I don’t think my isolation disqualifies what I say. In some strange way, it authenticates it. Because I’m not selling something I’ve successfully packaged and marketed. I’m not building a brand or platform. I’m a simple retired shepherd standing in the pasture, looking at the landscape, and describing what I see on the horizon.
Maybe no one’s listening. Maybe I’m calling into the void. But Brueggemann says the prophetic task is to “keep alive the promise” – to refuse to let the dominant culture have the last word about what’s possible. So I write. Every week. Many hours of reading, research, reflection and writing for a single 5-7 minute read, knowing maybe four people will see it.
I write because someone has to name what’s dying without despairing. Someone has to imagine what could be born without demanding certainty about how it happens. Someone has to stand in the pasture and dare to write letters about replanting ancient seed in fallowed ground.
An Invitation From the Pasture
If you’ve read this far, you might be feeling isolated as well. You may love Jesus but can’t find your place to belong in institutional church. Maybe you’re tired of the culture war Christianity that’s increasingly defining Canadian evangelicalism. Maybe you long for genuine intergenerational community where faith is explored, not just performed.
I don’t yet have a community to invite you into. I’m simply standing in the pasture looking over the landscape, naming what I see, hoping someone else sees it too. Jeremiah tells the exiles to seek the welfare of the city where they are in. To build houses. Plant gardens. Settle in for the long haul, because the exile won’t end quickly. But he also dares them to hope. To believe that God is present, even in Babylon. Even in displacement, community is possible. The future God imagines might look different from what they’d lost, but it’ll be good.
So for now I write. From isolation. Toward a covenant community where mercy and compassion is a foundational truth. With hope; participating in God’s creation vision toward making this world, as it is in heaven.