October 2006 Archives
The Church is the only institution which, without irresponsibility, can expend all its resources on great and lavish outbursts of compassion. It is ordained to give itself away, yet without loss. The Church, above all earthly symbols, bears the responsibility of declaring in the outpouring of resources, the utter dependability of God. To preserve its life is to lose it. (Robert Lupton, Theirs is the Kingdom)
Henri Nouwen wrote:
Often we hear the remark that we have live in the world without being of the world. But it may be more difficult to be in the Church without being of the Church. Being of the Church means being so preoccupied by and involved in the many ecclesial affairs and clerical "ins and outs" that we are no longer focused on Jesus. The Church then blinds us from what we came to see and deafens us to what we came to hear. Still, it is in the Church that Christ dwells, invites us to his table, and speaks to us words of eternal love.
Being in the Church without being of it is a great spiritual challenge.
Thanks to Mike for sending me the quote.
From Eugene Peterson:
American pastors are abandoning their posts, left and right, and at an alarming rate. They are not leaving their churches and getting other jobs. Congregations still pay their salaries. Their names remain on the church stationary and they continue to appear in pulpits on Sundays. But they are abandoning their posts, their calling. They have gone whoring after other gods. What they do with their time under the guise of pastoral ministry hasn’t the remotest connection with what the church’s pastors have done for most of twenty centuries.
A few of us are angry about it. We are angry because we have been deserted…. It is bitterly disappointing to enter a room full of people whom you have every reason to expect share the quest and commitments of pastoral work and find within ten minutes that they most definitely do not. They talk of images and statistics. They drop names. They discuss influence and status. Matters of God and the soul and Scripture are not grist for their mills.
The pastors of America have metamorphosed into a company of shopkeepers, and the shops they keep are churches. They are preoccupied with shopkeeper’s concerns–how to keep the customers happy, how to lure customers away from competitors down the street, how to package the goods so that the customers will lay out more money.
Some of them are very good shopkeepers. They attract a lot of customers, pull in great sums of money, develop splendid reputations. Yet it is still shopkeeping; religious shopkeeping, to be sure, but shopkeeping all the same. The marketing strategies of the fast-food franchise occupy the waking minds of these entrepreneurs; while asleep they dream of the kind of success that will get the attention of journalists.
The biblical fact is that there are no successful churches. There are, instead, communities of sinners, gathered before God week after week in towns and villages all over the world. The Holy Spirit gathers them and does his work in them. In these communities of sinners, one of the sinners is called pastor and given a designated responsibility in the community. The pastor’s responsibility is to keep the community attentive to God. It is this responsibility that is being abandoned in spades.
From the introduction of Working the Angles written by Eugene Peterson
From Speaking Out of Turn:
This past Sunday as I walked to the podium to preach for our fourth service I prayed a prayer I've never prayed before, "I'll take it from here God. If you wouldn't mind, I'd like for you not to be involved in this one. I'd like to see what happens when I do this by myself."
I stood up. I preached. People were visibly moved by my words. People laughed. Afterwards those in attendance shared how much my words meant to them. People made decisions to become followers of Jesus.
The only problem was God wasn't involved. And it appeared it really didn't make that much difference.
TheChurchYouKnow.com is poking fun at the silly ways we try to be the church, but for a purpose:
We intend to stimulate, to question, and to provoke - hopefully in love - the Church, because we love the Church. This love compels us to question some of the characteristics and practices we see in much of the institutional church. At the end of the day, we are trying our best to be faithful to what God has put in our hearts, and respond to the journey that he has us on as it relates to the Church, His body...
Our passion is to see people come into the freedom, joy and peace of intimate relationship with Jesus and fellow members of His Body. We realize this can happen within literally any of the structures or systems found under the umbrella of Christendom. At the same time, we believe most of the systems and structures create stumbling blocks to this goal of relationship with Christ and His Body - and these are what we hope to draw attention to.
Be sure to check out the videos.
From A.W. Tozer:
It is now common practice in most evangelical churches to offer the people, especially the young people, a maximum of entertainment and a minimum of serious instruction. It is scarcely possible in most places to get anyone to attend a meeting where the only attraction is God. One can only conclude that God's professed children are bored with Him, for they must be wooed to meeting with a stick of striped candy in the form of religious movies, games and refreshments.
This has influenced the whole pattern of church life, and even brought into being a new type of church architecture, designed to house the golden calf. So we have the strange anomaly of orthodoxy in creed and heterodoxy in practice. The striped candy technique has been so fully integrated into our present religious thinking that it is simply taken for granted. Its victims never dream that it is not a part of the teachings of Christ and His apostles.
From Leadership Blog:
Christian leaders have to admit this is the system we have put together. We can't build churches that advertise "tons of ministries to meet your needs," then be surprised when people expect us to continually meet their needs. (Kent Carlson)
From Leadership Blog: Out of Ur: Pastoral Ambition: Does success chip away at our souls?:
I am convinced that personal pastoral ambition, and a pastoral ethic centered around productivity and success is brutal to our souls and destructive to the souls of the people we lead. I believe there is a better way. But it requires us to walk right into the messiness of our own ambitious hearts, ready to die to those ambitions. We must become skilled at detecting the odor of personal ambition, then flee from it as if the church's future depends on it. For I believe it does.
From The Body by Colson:
Ask about the local church's role in the world, and most Christians immediately begin hauling out mission statements, actions plans, and strategy schemes. They are already lacing up their Nikes, asking, "What should we do?"That eagerness is wonderful, [but] we need the Big-picture view of the body, alive and vibrant—the holy, presence in the world. For the church's role in the world is not a series of independent items on an action checklist.
Instead, the church's role (what it does) is dependent on its character (what it is) as a community of believers. What we do, therefore, flows from who we are.
This character oriented perspective is totally foreign to our achievement-oriented society, however, where we look at what people do rather than who they are. And it goes against everything in our consumer oriented religious culture, where we pick and choose churches on the basis of fellowship [personal clique's] or outreach programs or music or location or convenient parking.
Rarely do we hear believers say, "I decided to join this church because of its character as a holy community." Nor do most choose a church on the basis of it capacity to disciple and equip them for ministry.
Yet that should be our very first consideration. If the church is the body, the holy presence of Christ in the world, its most fundamental task is to build communities of holy character.
From Preaching As Though We Had Enemies:
God has not promised us safety, but participation in an adventure called the Kingdom. That seems to me to be great good news in a world that is literally dying of boredom. (Stanley Hauerwas)
