We May Have To Make Some Radical Changes.

It is hard, if not impossible to be objective looking at something from within. Some how you have to back away, put some distance between you and what you are looking at, remove your experience tinted glasses and take a long hard look. That is what I have been trying to do for the past few years in looking at the church that I have been apart of for most of my life. I have also been looking at the greater religious world of which we are a part. The image I have of the church I read about in the New Testament and the image I have of the one I am apart of are quite different. I fully realize that they are separated by 2000 years of history, and the way certain principles were expressed then would be quite different today. That is as it should be. The image difference is not so much a doctrinal one, as in what we believe compared to what they believed, but it is a difference of how they went about doing what they were instructed to do. So much of what we do today is institutionally based; it revolves around what takes place at the “church building”. We worry and fret over getting our services just right, not to short, not to long. Keep things moving, don’t get bogged down. We do all of this because we want to “attract” people to us. Our programs are for the most part attractional, designed to get people to come to us. Our approach is get them to visit, influence them and somewhere down the road, hope to reach them for the Lord. It is a “Field Of Dreams” mentality, “If you build it they will come”. And have we ever built it. We have spent billions of dollars in wonderful facilities that we use a few hours each week. All of this and yet no generation since theirs has accomplished what they did. One other thing that concerns me is that we seem to have developed a separatist mentality. It is US against THEM. Some of this is due not so much to what we are against, but how we have conveyed that message. It has come across almost as an elitist attitude and not one of personal conviction as the result of a relationship with Jesus. We have not only isolated ourselves, but we have insulated ourselves against the world. We can retreat to the safety of our buildings to do our spiritual things and then when finished we rush home to the security of our homes. When I read my New Testament, I see a people on the go. They learned that from Jesus. He was constantly in and out of the lives of people that He came in contact with on a daily basis. Jesus then commissioned His disciple to “Go”, literally “as you go”, preach the Good News. It became a part of who they were, not just something they did in response to a command. Jesus used metaphors of salt, light and leaven to describe what His followers would “BE”. The New Testament letters seem to urge them to live among those who did not know God in such as way as to not get in the way of what God was trying to do. Jesus said we are to be, “a city set on a hill that cannot be hidden”. Another picture of what we are to BE. The sacrificial giving of the early chapters of the Book of Acts shows that there was urgency in what they were about. Something valuable was at stake. They were on a mission for God. I fear we are so steeped in our attractional approach to being the church that it will require a radical new direction to really be to our world what they were to their world. We are going to have to “move back into” the world, and rub shoulders with them. We need to let them see that we are real people with real personal needs and problems. We need to let them see that we don’t have all the answers, that we are on a journey ourselves. While we don’t have to participate in their sin we must find grounds on which to relate. We are going to have to let them SEE the difference that Jesus makes in our lives. Radical new direction may mean not looking at all like the church of today with its comfortable buildings and programs. It may be a store front in a not so nice section of town where people are free to come and go as they are. A simple place to gather, talk and relate. Or it may look like a nice lounge with media center, a simple gathering place with entertainment live and otherwise. I don’t know, but I do know we are going to have to be creative to reach the world in which we live. What we are doing is not working in a significant enough way to reach the world. So, what do you think?