Stretching the envelope... out of our comfort zone

Brett led us today. Mother’s Day he told us about Mrs Wesley and her 19 children whom she would seek to devote and hour each in a week. It was said of her that if when had her work apron over her head while sitting on the chair she was not to be disturbed.
Acts 8 was the text today (esp. v26-40). The early church lived in the tension of still following some Judaic practices and still living very much in that space. Yet its encounters with gentiles and other strata of society with the Gospel took it out of its comfort zone and placed them in places that they might not otherwise certainly have been in. The envelope was stretched for them; don’t just stop at the Samaritans(half casts with their own temple, but go to the ends of the earth, at the time Ethiopia (Kush the upper Nile areas), and so an out right alien. Furthermore, a eunuch, some one distasteful and representative of a group. For Philip like others this was all less than comfortable and not something they might previously have considered.
He told us also of John Wesley, reading some of his journal on being called to street preaching, taking him well beyond his comfort zone, and stretching the envelope in amazing ways that the gospel reached the poor and raised people who would follow.
We heard too though of how Wesley was never happy nor content on street preaching, but he did it all the same.

Brett repeated often the phrases that still ring for us of ways in which God’s Spirit today may be stretching our envelope and moving us out of our comfort zone(s). Perhaps there are things, people, places we are being called to beyond our comfort zone, that stretch the envelope and yet have significant and unknowable results well beyond us.
I think there is something of this for the church today, it certainly sounds a chord with us on Highgate where the envelope has and is stretched. There is something of such tension that I think is necessarily a sign of the missionary congregation.

So where are we placed?
Take your body and place yourself on the street, take yourself among others in pubs, clubs, hospital, shelters, jails.... go beyond the safety of 'church' . We live and move daily in the public sphere. Our spiritual ;ife is as much shaped by where we place our bodies: "present your bodioes as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship."

Hans Frei , a theologian wrote
“… the embodiment of the Easter story’s pattern in our lives means… a new way of governing our bodies. That is how we are in touch with the story.”
(The Identity of Christ p171)