Voyaging by Atomic Ice-Breaker to the North Pole | Or is MegaChurch™ Not Like That?

The ever-brilliant Believer magazine – the highlight of my reading month – carries a wonderful dual essay by Scott and James Browning about their respective trips to the North and South Poles with their mother.

Scott Browning’s piece on the North Pole trip is wonderful. He describes the utter non-place-ness of it. There are in fact many North Poles – astronomical, magnetic, geographic, instantaneous, and, over many years scores of brave explorers lost their lives battling through extreme hardships to try to get there. Scott travels with his mum in a Russian, nuclear-powered icebreaker, replete with strangely warm swimming pool. Because this journey, through a landscape absent of any geographic markers, to a place with none either, is so easy, the group are required to attend twice-daily lectures on the importance of their feat, and are constantly hyped up by notes around the ship reminding how amazing it is all going to be when they get there.

And, of course, when Scott does, he feels utterly lost. “Failing to believe in the North Pole while at the North Pole is to go from being someplace special to pretty much nowhere at all.” Between all time-zones and none, time and place collapse. In the eternal sunshine, it is like a sugar-white nirvana…

And it got me thinking back to Alan Jamieson’s work in A Churchless Faith. About moving from the ‘Cruiseliner’ faith to the small yacht. The destination is not the key. It’s the journey that counts.

If you sail toward heaven in a MegaChurch, will you really be satisfied when you get there? I don’t know.

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