Travelling Light

One of the clear instructions Jesus gave his first disciples - as, for instance, in Luke 9 - was to 'travel light'. That seems to cause us some difficulty. We appear to like travelling heavily laden. We crowd the church programme with committees, workshops, reports and meetings. Sometimes I think that we need to just get on with being the church. One commentator (Richard Rohr) points out that: "he calls the Twelve to be dependent and needy, so they go as receivers and not just the guys with the answers - a very vulnerable and never very popular notion of ministry. Francis of Assisi was one of the few who took it seriously." Another commentator (Leith Fisher) helps to root this in our context: "The need for lack of 'baggage' for effective witness and mission is stressed more than once in the gospel. We carry so much deadweight from tradition, doctrine, practice and culture. How are we to let gospel simplicity judge, reform and energise us?" What a good question!