To get to the villages of the Greater Caucasus mountains in northern Georgia takes some effort. In the winter some of the roads are impassable and in the summer they are almost undriveable. The potholes are so deep and wide that in some cases it would be inadvisable to try them in anything other than a four wheel drive vehicle with a high floor clearance. These are small, remote villages but tourism is bringing cash to the region and so slowly these small villages are getting better roads.

In other parts of Georgia the main roads between key towns and cities are winding, following the contours of the mountains and they too are, in places, in horrible condition. So new roads are being built. These roads take no thought for going around a mountain and instead have blasted a hole all the way through the mountain. No more need to descend and ascend the valleys because new bridges cross the gorges and then blast their way through another hole in the hill. As a tourist jolting and lurching my way from one side of Georgia to another, I can see the benefits the new roads will bring, not the least of which is to my spine. But the new, fast roads are also destructive things. The land is scorched, dynamited, drilled and asphalted.

As I ran along a forest path I would come to a fallen tree, a muddy pool, a slide of rocks that obstructed the way. But each time there would be already be the outlines of a new path that wormed and worked its way around whatever the obstacle was. The footpath contra the road flows with the terrain and around the obstacles. The path takes the movement, the changes, the challenges and adjusts. It is not meaningless or aimless, there is still a destination in mind but on a path no dynamite is required, no tunnelling necessary.

I only came to be thinking about the distinction between paths and roads after reading this by Wendell Berry,

The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around. A road, on the other hand, even the most primitive road, embodies a resistance against the landscape. Its reason is not simply the necessity for movement, but haste. Its wish is to avoid contact with the landscape; it seeks so far as possible to go over the country, rather than through it; its aspiration, as we see clearly in the example of our modern freeways, is to be a bridge; its tendency is to translate place into space in order to traverse it with the least effort. It is destructive, seeking to remove or destroy all obstacles in its way. The primitive road advanced by the destruction of the forest; modern roads advance by the destruction of topography.

The World Ending Fire by Wendell Berry, loc 305

I was then surprised by where my brain went next with this observation: to discipleship. I began to wonder if in our contemporary churches we haven’t been far too keen on building roads at the expense of walking a winding and slower path. A non-Christian friend comes to church so we invite them on an Alpha course. Need some inspiration for your youth or church? Off to the summer conference we go. I travel roads, and I use these opportunities in church but in building our churches around these roads of discipleship we may at best miss the contours of an individual’s heart and soul or perhaps at worst be destructive because we are in haste to transport this person from spiritual place A to spiritual place B.

Perhaps also we do damage to our own churches, in the way a globalized market has made everyone’s shopping streets look the same, so has our wholehearted acceptance of these roads that our songs, our sermons, our courses and our conferences are the same. That might make it easier for the tourist or the trader but the last-time I checked Jesus didn’t command us to make either of those.

A kinder, more attentive and perhaps more fruitful way might be to walk a path with those who are seeking the Way. To consider each stream crossing, muddy pit, fallen tree and together consider what step to take. But this way is slow and can rarely be walked by large groups.

But who has time for that? We need to be careful of some false romantic notion of a world that has passed and will never be seen again. People look for the familiar, they travel the world and eat at McDonalds at every stop, they shop the brands abroad that they shop at home, they consume the same media in every time and every place. We are not willing to junk the cultural motorways just yet and we’re probably not in our churches either. We’re not because we’re desperate to move the needle of Christianity’s long and steep decline and a new road might just help us get there.

But just maybe we do not need one new big and shiny road but a thousand mountain paths.