Cheryl
A lay minister in the Uniting Church and working in the Victorian-Tasmanian Synod offices in Melbourne, Cheryl was the first among her colleagues to start a weblog. Her position in the Synod involves connecting with individuals and groups to explore alternative forms of Christian worship and community building, and she hoped that her blog would offer an new way of connecting with people she may not otherwise have the opportunity to meet.
Apart from information about upcoming events, meetings and the discoveries of useful websites and other resources for people interested in exploring new forms of worship and spirituality, Cheryl’s blog is also a diary of personal reflections. Her posts contain liturgies that she has prepared for use in different worship settings (often outside a traditional church setting, such as a prison or an art gallery), poetry she has found or has composed herself, or short prose on the daily inspirations and questions that find her at work (mostly found categorised under the title “random thoughts”).
Cheryl writes with both frankness and diplomacy, but always with a fierce honesty. She finds herself living and working in a denomination whose charity and convictions have raised and sustained her, while also being part of a new modern world that traditional religion is failing to speak to. She finds the courage to write of sense of godlessness in working for the church at times, while finding solace in the places that seem so distant from Sunday-morning religious life. And she designs for herself a project of religious re-programming, of finding faith beyond the trappings of the church’s public image, to even plead “God, rid us of God…” (Cheryl, 2007a).
Her audience feeds her a wide range of responses, and she receives messages from co-workers about her blog with some trepidation. She has been labelled a heretic, and that does not seem to offend her. Instead she replies, “[Christianity] is a story that’s formed me, and there are parts of it that define me better than anything else, but it’s not the whole of my story” (Cheryl, 2007b).
“Emerging church” is a tag Cheryl wears reluctantly, if only in that she finds such labels constraining (“definitions are so definite, and I’m anything but” (Cheryl, 2007b)). She accepts, however, that this is one tag that others place on her blog, if only in that it helps her connect with other bloggers who are exploring similar ideas, concerns and project undertakings. She finds she doesn’t quite fit in with the Australian emerging church blogging circle, and enjoys greater connection with like bloggers in the United Kingdom.
For this blogger, however, the best connections are those made with locals who contact her by phone or email at the office. Thanks in part to her online presence, and in part to a column she’s been given in a Melbourne newspaper, she has the opportunity to meet in the real world people who, like Cheryl, are finding the distance between church life and the real world more difficult to traverse, who are finding themselves on the margins of their faith community. That she is approached by these for assistance in finding a new way in living an expressing their faith, fuels her to keep writing with honesty, humility and vulnerability, and stay heretical.
