“What on earth is that thing on the beach? It’s about half as big as a bear.”
I snorted awake, fell out of bed and staggered out to stand beside my wife who was peering out the front room window. Shivering, realizing I was only clad in my short-handled Stanfield’s and without teeth or eyes, I immediately tottered into the bathroom to at least put on a pair of glasses. By the time I got back to the window, Linda had the binoculars uncased and was peering out into the light of a full moon.
“Why it’s a huge beaver, the largest I have ever seen,” Linda said. “It’s dining on what’s left of our swamp birch shrubs.”
“Quick, get the gun,” I lisped. “Last time that beaver was here, he brought his whole logging crew and clear cut all our aspens in a single night.”
“What’s the point?” asked Linda. “He has already harvested all our trees except the two paper birch on the bench beside the house and you have them wrapped in chicken wire. Leave him be.”
So that’s what we did. We shared the binoculars back and forth and watched as the big beaver pruned our swamp birch shrubs in the moonlight. Heck, they needed pruning anyway.
Later when we tired of our voyeurism and returned to bed, I started thinking about our history with the beavers on the lake. Twenty-four years ago when we purchased our cottage home on Lac La Hache, B.C., the deciding factor was the beaver and the loon floating on the calm water just off the dock. You just don’t get a better Canadian wilderness scene than that. It sucked us right in. Soon after moving in, we established a firepit down by the lake and the beaver used to visit us while we were sitting around it in the dark. He would float in noiselessly like a navy seal until he was almost at the shore and then slap his tail as hard as he could on the water. It was an act of controlled aggression but still it was kind of nice in a Canadian sort of way. Every once and a while a small tree would go missing from our place or from a neighbour’s and the beaver lodge over by the island gradually got bigger and bigger.
We never thought about it much until one spring night a fully loaded freight train was derailed on the other side of the lake. It was the beavers. They had built a big dam on a small creek into the lake and kept raising it higher and higher until the lake they were creating was several feet deep. This particular spring, the runoff was more than the beaver engineers had calculated. The dam let go in the middle of the night and the early morning freight train suffered the consequences. We kind of chuckled about that until one morning we awoke in the middle of a clearcut.
Beavers can do amazing things with their industriousness. They have the ability to build huge lodges, construct incredible dams, create enormous lakes, clear cut their neighbour’s land and hijack local trains. One example of their industriousness can actually be seen from outer space. A while back, the world news media was buzzing about the world’s largest beaver dam. It was first found using Google Earth. Apparently the dam, which is on the southern edge of Wood Buffalo National Park north of Fort McMurray, Alta., is almost a kilometre long. That is almost twice the size of the Canadian norm for mega beaver dams. Biologists estimate that it probably took at least 20 years to build. It was first discovered in 2008 but once discovered they have been able to track its development via NASA satellite imagery back to 1990.
Beavers are nothing if not industrious. That being said, a lone beaver’s industriousness doesn’t really amount to a hill of beans. Put a bunch of beavers working together on a project and what gets done can be seen from outer space. The beaver’s secret is community. And as I think about this, it causes me to ponder Pentecost, Christians and Christian community.
As I read my Bible, it seems to me Christians living, working and praying together in community is core to what Pentecost is all about. But it’s community with a definite focus. In John’s gospel, Jesus promises the coming of the Holy Spirit in the context of instituting a discipleship community of love and unity, “that the world might believe” (John 17:21). In Acts, the coming of the Holy Spirit results in a discipleship community of love and unity in Jerusalem “and to the ends of the earth,” that the world might believe (Acts 1:8; 2:46-47). In the Epistles, the Holy Spirit facilitates the discipleship community of love through the giving of spiritual fruits and gifts that the community “might be built up” and equipped so that the world might believe (Ephesians 4:12). The Holy Spirit of God is Christ’s gift to Christian community that the world might believe. As the gathered community of Christ or the church, first and foremost we are meant to be a missional community.
I do not want to get too prescriptive as to what gets done in and through the Spirit-filled community towards the world believing, towards becoming a missional church. But something has to get done and in the New Testament church it is usually something quite remarkable and radical. It’s the kind of thing that gets noticed from well beyond our own sphere, like Canadian beaver dams get noticed from outer space.
For those of us in our 21st-century comfortable conservative Christendom church pews, I think something radically missional like this is going to probably mean some pretty serious change in our thinking, practice and organization. In their book, The Shaping of Things to Come, Australians Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch challenge us to become a missional church: “What we propose is a reversing of the three mistakes made by the Christendom-mode church. The missional church, by its very nature will be an anticlone of the existing traditional model. Rather than being attractional, it will be incarnational. It will leave its own religious zones and live comfortably with non-churchgoers seeping into the host culture like salt and light. It will be an infiltrating, transformational community. Second, rather than being dualistic, it will embrace a messianic spirituality. That is, a spirituality of engagement with culture and the world in the same mode as the Messiah himself. And third, the missional church will develop an apostolic form of leadership rather than the traditional hierarchical model.”
