January 2007 Archives
Brad Hightower asks if we're offering people the church or the kingdom:
What the church offers is programs and teaching. In other words, the church offers people church. The real problem with the church in America is that we convert people to church and not the kingdom. BUT if we in the home church, simple church, organic church simply convert people to daily, authentic church as opposed to weekly superficial church, we are merely re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titantic. The problem with the mainstream church, and I believe the mainstream church is on its death bed in America, is that church life does not necessitate authentic spirituality and does not model the life in the kingdom. Life in the kingdom is living daily filled with the power of presence of Jesus Christ through the daily imitation of Jesus Christ in community...
We do not baptize people into the Church, we baptize people into Christ. We are offering people a daily relationship with the living risen Jesus Christ. Jesus is alive. Jesus is powerful. Jesus delivers. Nothing short of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit will deliver those around us.
The whole post is worth reading and re-reading.
odyssey: When the Church trades its language:
In her book Teaching That Transforms, Debra Dean Murphy quotes Adam Nicholson, saying:
'Language which is not taut with a sense of its own significance, which is apologetic in its desire to be acceptable to a modern conciousness, language in other words which submits to its audience, rather than instructing, informing, moving, challenging, and even entertaining them, is no longer a language which can carry the freight the Bible requires.' If language is shaped, Nicolson goes on to say, by 'an anxiety not to bore or intimidate,' then 'it has, in short, lost all authority.'
Churches that cozy up to the Walmart language or lure folks with images of Hummers in an effort not to bore, have lost the authority of the gospel, the call to discipleship, and make their "guests" more discerning consumers who are happy they shopped at our "store" and have turned their congregations into trendy vendors of religious goods and services.
Are we to become "peddlers of God's word like so many"? (2 Cor. 2.17)
From the Letter from Birmingham Jail:
In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? I am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson and the great-grandson of preachers. Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.
There was a time when the church was very powerful in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.
It is so easy to think that the Church has a lot of different objects - education, building, missions, holding services...The Church exists for no other purpose but to draw men to Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became man for no other purpose. It is even doubtful, you know, whether the whole universe was created for any other reason. (C.S. Lewis)
From Jim Kallam's book Risking Church:
Too many churches focus more on the organization than on the organism. Of course, the church is both organization and organism, but in many cases organization gains top billing...
We think that if we listen to the experts and put into practice what they've done, their plan can work for us. We want ministry to be explained in terms that allow us to function as technicians, managers, or building contractors. We want a blueprint to build from and a list to check off as we accomplish each item.
I want something different. I want the leadership of our church to be about creating an atmosphere, an environment where people can fall in love with Jesus. I don't want technicians who can run a program. I want agents of love who will spread the life of the Spirit throughout the church.
Skye Jethani asks some tough questions at Leadership Blog:
Have we, like our processors, become Crypto-Christians? Seeking survival and fearing irrelevance, have we clothed our faith with the forms of our American culture to the point that our Christianity has morphed into something entirely different - a folk religion altogether consumerist in spirit and content? Like the Kakure of Japan, are we holding so tightly to our faith we cannot sense that it is already slipping between our fingers?
By replicating the practices of the nations has the church, like ancient Israel, yielded its imagination to the idols of our day? By heavily adopting cultural forms, like the Kakure, have we forgotten the central teachings and practices of the apostles? Was Walter Brueggemann correct when he wrote, "The contemporary American church is so largely enculturated to the American ethos of consumerism that is has little power to believe or to act."?
From The Forgotten Ways:
We can’t seem to make disciples based on a consumerist approach to the faith. We plainly cannot consume our way into discipleship. All of us must become much more active in the equation of becoming lifelong followers of Jesus than what consumption can produce. Here’s the problem at least as I see it; consumerism is detrimental to discipleship and church growth in its conteporary form is almost completely built on a consumeristic model. That’s just one of the reasons why we must move from it to a more missional model that values the centrality of discipleship in the central element in the equation of church.
