Every wondered how two people can look at the same passage of the Bible and come away with such different applications? Take Scot McKnight’s little quiz (he calls it an interactive assessment). You might be surprised. [take the hermeneutic quiz]
In the twenty-first century, it’s not God who’s dead. It’s the church. Or at least conventional forms of church. Dead? you say. Isn’t that overstating the case a bit? Indeed, churches still abound. So do pay phones. You can still find pay phones around, in airports and train stations and shopping malls-there are plenty of working pay phones. But look around your local airport and you’ll likely see the sad remnants where pay phones used to hang–the strange row of rectangles on the wall and the empty slot where a phone book used to sit.There are under a million pay phones in the United States today. In 1997, there were over two million. Of course, the death of the pay phone doesn’t mean that we don’t make phone calls anymore. In fact, we make far more calls than ever before, but we make them differently. Now we make phone calls from home or on the mobile device clasped to our belt or through our computers. Phone calls aren’t obsolete, but the pay phone is–or at least it’s quickly becoming so.
Similarly, the modern church is changing and evolving and emerging. To extend the analogy a bit, no one is saying that the pay phone was a bad idea. Most people would agree that it was a good idea at the time-it was an excellent way to communicate. But communication was the goal, and pay phones were merely a means to an end. The modern church-at least as it is characterized by imposing physical buildings, professional clergy, denominational bureaucracies, residential seminary training, and other trappings-was an endeavor by faithful men and women in their time and place, attempting to live into the biblical gospel. But the church was never the end, only the means.
-excerpt from The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier by Tony Jones
According to Forbes, 3.8 million Americans are in commuter marriages and the number is growing. Since 2000, 30% more Americans had long distance relationships where their work kept them apart for days at a time. Forbes says that technology has fueled the pattern:
But while innovations like e-mail, video chatting, instant messaging, Twitter and Second Life have increased the volume of Internet chatter, they haven’t necessarily made long-distance relationships any more successful, Guldner says. Communication’s quality, he says, has always meant more than its frequency.”Information technology has definitely led people to believe that long-distance relationships will work more than in the past,” says Guldner. “Whether that’s true is the big question we’re dealing with right now.”
-from PSFK; Piers Fawkes
This gathering conversation; emergent(s), house churches, new church plants—what Barna called Revolution. I can’t help but believe that among these growing numbers are a ton of libertarians and former young church leaders who have reacted to the personal pain of having their ideas, philosophy, etc., dismissed by the current crop of (boomer) church leaders.
But there’s some history that might reflect on the above paragraph.
Through the 1980s the baby boomers were the ones pushing for change. Many today are not old enough to remember and the ones who could remember may have forgotten the rabid resistance by a generation of World War II leaders against the change being lead by the next generation of leaders–young, upstart baby boomers. There were other transitional movements at the time, it just so happens the following come to mind for me. There was strong resistance over the push to allow reading from the NIV and NKJV in the public assembly along with (their)KJV. Another issue was the right to attend the assembly in informal attire. No more ties and dress shoes, or at the minimum the option not to wear them. It all seems silly now but at the time it was serious, so much so that many churches divided over such issues, especially the version controversy.
Paradoxically, the boomers (who are the current crop of church leaders) now practice their own version of resistance. And then on another rung there are the ultra conservatives somethings making statements like, “I’ve never changed my view on anything,” thinking faithfulness is found in a statement like that.
Think about the evolution of small group ministries from its inception until now. What happen to small groups? What has become of this ministry today? Would it be fair to define small group ministry as a robust group of young believers who are actively engaging the missing? Or would we see a small group of Christians who passionately pursue intimacy and nurture in relationship. With all that said, I remember a very talented parachurch group that traveled across America offering training in small group evangelism. Small groups were being herald as the solution to church intimacy and church growth. The prospect was exciting.
The most creative idea I heard that weekend was the empty chair concept. We arranged our chairs in a semi-circle and the group leader sat an empty chair in the middle of the circle. He then emphasized the importance of filling the chair with one of our friends or neighbors in the coming week. This was my first experience with the empty chair and it pumped me up. But not only me, everyone was encouraged to think, “friend.” The session ended with a rally cry. And we kept it very close to our heart: “they might not come to a church building but they’ll come to your home.”
It’s been almost twenty years now. And I find it unfortunate that this may have been as close as we came to establishing a missional goal for small group ministries. If so, at some point in time we lost our way. Most small groups I’ve been involved with have become a home bible class study with no concrete evidence to offer that would show our care and concern for the people Jesus misses the most. And few have shown a concern for building relational intimacy with other believers. Maybe the format is not conducive to the accomplishment of those things.
Small groups never took off because of the natural tension that exists between nurture and evangelism. Nurture comes natural, evangelism does not. I can remember the dialogue—should we incorporate nurture groups and evangelistic groups as one or should we form two separate groups? There was never clear direction on this so we went with what came natural–hoping we could be evangelistic without being intentional.
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. –Antoine De Saint Exupery
In many churches this Sunday “preachers” will stand before an assembly and preach on a topic they gave their week, their blood and their sweat for. It’s what they were trained to do and in most cases it’s what they like to do. But sad for them—preaching isn’t what it used to be. All those homiletic techniques they slogged through while in school and practice Sunday after Sunday is slowly losing traction.
In the last five years we’ve seen the demise of the three point lecture. Who would have thought this time-tested gem would go the way of the cute acronym? Then there’s the bulleted list. People just don’t seem to like them anymore. Maybe it’s just other people’s list they object to. Now they want to make their own.
As if paid staffing issues aren’t enough, the “rules of cool” seemed to have morphed overnight. Just when you threw your overhead projector in the trash bin. Just when you shelled out what seemed like an obscene amount of money for that miniscule-lumens LCD projector the savvy pew sitter grew tired of bulleted outlines and PowerPoint notes. It’s not what they want—but they sure seem to like pictures. Just don’t expect to put up a nice blue sky, flowery stuff you can order in packages every six weeks. No, they want pictures of nature at its mysterious best. And anything mundane, missed, forgotten, even ugly. They also want to see all kinds of people. They want to hear stories they can relate to from the people they know and don’t know.
Normal. Messed up.
Extraordinary folks.
So hand over the microphone; the assembly wants a fresh retelling of the Grand Story in the context of real lives.
Yes, I commiserate with the modern day preacher. If it weren’t so downright refreshing, it’d be worth a cry.
I like your Christ; I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ. –Mohandas K Gandhi
The most heinous and the must cruel crimes of which history has record have been committed under the cover of religion or equally noble motives. –Mohandas K Gandhi
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