Matt Canlis, an Anglican pastor, has some good friends who appear with him in the video Godspeed. Some are rather famous: Eugene Peterson and N. T. Wright (whom he calls “Tom”). Others are not so well known, at least not outside Aberdeenshire, Scotland: Alan Torrance (with whom he started a “wee kinda group of men” to read the Bible together), Mr. and Mrs. French, and Colin Presly (who’s head elder of the church in his village). All of them have been Canlis’s teachers.

While Canlis was finishing up seminary, Peterson, one of his professors, gave him advice on becoming a pastor. “Go find a fishbowl,” he said, “where you can’t escape being known.”

Peterson knew, says Canlis in Godspeed,

if I really wanted to walk like Jesus, I had to slow down. I was like, “Eugene, I’m in. I’m sold, Where do I go to learn to become this kind of person, this pastor?” He smiled and he said, “You might have to go further than you think. You might have to leave America.” And I thought, “That’ll never happen.”

Of course, happen it did, and Canlis relocated to Scotland, where the people of St. Andrews, Pitlochry, and Methlick taught him how to be their pastor. You can watch the 35-minute film Godspeed, at Vimeo or at the Godspeed website, and hear for yourself the simple, soft-spoken lessons of the locals. For instance, there’s the kilt-wearing Torrance, whose wisdom comes from a first-hand understanding of the small-community environment that Jesus lived in and from reading the Bible with fresh eyes.

Of course, Peterson and Wright share their wisdom along the way, too, with Wright mentioning another resource for understanding the value of living a slower, village-paced life: Koduke Koyama’s Three Mile an Hour God. In his collection of essays, Koyama writes that when we allow God to lead us through the wilderness, “our speed is slowed down until gradually we come to the speed on which we walk—three miles an hour“:

I find that God goes ‘slowly’ in his educational process of man. ‘Forty years in the wilderness’ points to his basic educational philosophy. Forty years of national migration through the wilderness, three generations of the united monarchy (Saul, David, Solomon), nineteen kings of Israel (up to 722 BC) and twenty kings of Judah (up to 587 BC), the hosts of the prophets and priests, the experience of exile and restoration—isn’t this rather a slow and costly way for God to let his people know the covenant relationship between God and man?

Jesus Christ came. He walked towards the ‘full stop’. He lost his mobility. He was nailed down! He is not even at three miles an hour as we walk. He is not moving. ‘Full stop’! What can be slower than ‘full stop’—’nailed down’? At this point of ‘full stop’, the apostolic church proclaims that the love of God to man is ultimately and fully revealed. God walks ‘slowly’ because he is love. If he is not love he would have gone much faster. Love has its speed. It is an inner speed. It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. It is ‘slow’ yet is is lord over all other speeds since it is the speed of love. It goes on in the depth of our life, whether we notice or not, whether we are currently hit by storm or not, at three miles an hour. It is the speed we walk and therefore it is the speed the love of God walks.

(Kosuke Koyama, Three Mile an Hour God, SCM, 1979)

[photo: “Forested Path 2,” by aetherspoon, used under a Creative Commons license]