I was planning to write a completly different blog about technology and live streaming … instead I was playing the piano and got distracted thinking about one of my favourite pieces of worship music, Oceans.

I spent most of my childhood, and a decent part of my teenage years living in a small village called Tollesbury on the Blackwater Estuary. Like a lot of people in the village I spent a lot of time sailing, with my dad, the local Sailing Centre and with the Sea Scouts. I spent most weekends on the water. When I was old enough I would often go down on a Saturday morning, and if the tide was right would slip out of the creek on the first of the tide. There was often barely a ripple on the water as the mudbanks slowly disappeared and the creek filled. I also remember sailing with my grandparents and anchoring in Hamford Water, the setting for Arthur Ransome’s Secret Water. There was a particular peace about those places, but also a sense of mystery. The landscape was constantly changing. Channels which were safe at high water could become mud a few hours later, and unless they were marked it was not always obvious where they were.

Of course, the water wasn’t always peaceful. I can also remember sailing down the river in a small yacht with a group of friends in a Force 8 gale. We were doing our Chief Scouts Challenge and were barely in control, eventually we realised the only sensible option was to get into a creek, moor the boat up, and walk home. We had to return later to recover it. It was terrifying and exhilarating at the same time, and a reminder that however well you know the water, there are times when the conditions are simply bigger than you are.

I think those experiences have always shaped the way I hear the opening words of Oceans:

You call me out upon the waters
 The great unknown where feet may fail.

The image of being called onto unfamiliar water has appeared repeatedly in the way I have understood my own faith and particularly my call to ministry. I have written about it before. When I began training I wondered whether the image actually needed reversing and I was stepping into the boat of the institutional church. More recently I wrote about walking on water badly during a period when I had very little idea what was going to happen next.

There have been times when “Spirit lead me where my trust is without borders” has been exactly the prayer I needed.

However, over the last few years I have become increasingly uncomfortable with how individualistic our language about faith can become. We talk about my faith, my relationship with Jesus, my calling, my spiritual life. There is nothing wrong with faith being personal. We are each different, and part of being the church should be recognising and celebrating the different gifts, experiences and ways of encountering God that we bring.

But we are called to be a community.

That is hardly a new idea. Wesley was deeply suspicious of what he called “solitary religion”. His language of social holiness is often used today in relation to involvement in social justice or action in the wider community. Those things certainly grew out of Methodist discipleship. But I don’t think that was entirely what he was getting at. For Wesley, holiness couldn’t be practised alone. Faith was formed through relationships, through worshipping together, praying together, challenging one another, caring for one another and being accountable to one another.

People met in societies, classes and bands. The Christian life was personal, but it was lived with other people.

I think some of that has become harder for us to hold onto in a culture which encourages us to think of almost everything in individual terms. Even faith can become something I possess and practise for myself, with church becoming one of the places I choose to go in order to support it.

You can hear that individualism in a lot of Christian worship music too. We gather as the body of Christ and then spend quite a lot of time singing I, me and my. When I look in the title index to many of my music books I can’t count the number which begin with “I”.

That doesn’t make those songs wrong. Sometimes I need to sing Spirit lead me. But what happens when the prayer becomes:

Spirit lead us where our trust is without borders
 Let us walk upon the waters
 Wherever you would call us.

Suddenly I hear something slightly different.

As the church we are being asked to engage with our communities in ways which can feel unfamiliar. For many congregations the instinct is still to think primarily about how we get people into church, especially into Sunday worship. Yet some of the most interesting things I have seen happening seem to be moving in the other direction. Churches becoming involved in community organising, warm spaces, food projects, repair cafés, schools, campaigning, Pride events and all sorts of other places where relationships are formed without any guarantee that people will ever appear in church on Sunday morning.

That is not separate from our life as a Christian community. If Wesley was right that holiness cannot be practised alone, then the question of who we are in relationship with matters. It cannot simply mean relationships with people who already think, worship and believe much as we do.

Going out into the community can be uncomfortable because we have less control. If we genuinely engage with a community, we do not get to decide all the questions in advance. People may tell us that the things we think are important are not particularly important to them. They may tell us that something the church is doing is creating a barrier rather than helping. They may be suspicious of us, sometimes with very good reason. We may have to listen before we speak.

Growing up around tidal water taught me that you cannot simply decide when and where you are going without paying attention to what is happening around you. You need to know the tide, but you also need to watch the wind and the weather. One of the skills you quickly learn is to notice when a gust is coming, to watch for changes on the surface of the water, to pay attention to the sky and to keep adjusting as the conditions change.

We often talk in church about discerning where God is already at work in our communities. I wonder whether we really mean it, because that requires this kind of attention.

It means noticing where relationships are already forming, where people are already caring for one another, where people are resisting injustice and where something new is beginning to emerge. It means recognising that we do not create the tide or control the wind. We learn to notice what is happening and respond to it.

Sailing can, of course, be done single-handed. In a small boat it can be enormous fun, and there is a particular satisfaction in managing everything yourself. But the further you go and the more difficult the conditions become, the more obvious the cost of doing without a crew becomes. People sail around the world single-handed, but they need extra equipment, careful planning and an extraordinary amount of energy to do the work that would otherwise be shared between several people.

Running before that Force 8 gale was not a story about my personal courage. There were several of us in the boat and we needed each other. We had to keep watching what was happening, respond to the conditions and eventually recognise together that continuing was a bad idea. Finding somewhere sheltered, tying up and walking home was not failure. It was the right decision for the conditions we were in.

I love a good bit of historic naval fiction, reading about ships of Nelson’s era has helped to find a way to make this analogy fit the church a little better. The helmsman couldn’t see everything, and was not expected to. They had to rely on others to keep a lookout, report what lies ahead and draw attention to changes in the wind or sea. The captain was responsible for making decisions, but a good captain did not make decisions in isolation. As well as lookouts there would be a navigator to plot the course, a sailing master who could advise the captain about the weather and what the ship was capable of doing. When approaching a new port, it was, and still is, common to take on a pilot with local knowledge of the waters, tides and weather. The captain may have carried most of the responsibility but safe passage depended on the knowledge and attention of the whole crew.

That seems a much better image for the church than everybody attempting to sail their own boat alongside one another.

It also changes how I think about community engagement. What if some of the people who help us read the conditions are not already part of the church? What if our neighbours can see changes that we have missed? What if people outside our congregations understand the local waters better than we do?

If we really believe that God is already at work in our communities, then listening to those communities has to be part of our discernment. We may discover that the route we had planned is not open, that the wind has changed, or that something is happening somewhere we had not thought to look.

I still hear Oceans personally. The image of being called into unfamiliar waters still connects deeply with my own story and with my call to ministry. There are still times when “Spirit lead me” is exactly the prayer I need.

But increasingly I also hear it as a prayer for the church.

You call us out upon the waters.

Perhaps part of that call is learning that we do not have to sail alone. We bring different skills, we notice different things, and sometimes the people around us can see the change in the wind before we do.

And maybe the question is simply whether, together, we are paying enough attention to where the Spirit is leading.