Tuesday, March 01, 2005
More On Church Trends
As I have been looking into the trends in churches, both self-help, and Emerging, there are voices on the opposite side of where I have been looking, or at least people that see good things in the changes. This, this, this and this are my previous posts on the subject, in chronological order.
Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost admitted yesterday that he just does not like church, but then quotes Eugene Peterson as to why it is necessary. I tend to agree with Joe on this one, with the possible exception that I actually am smarter than...oh never mind, it was a vain attempt at humor. (HT: Allthings2all) I have been known to call Christian institutions "a necessary evil." Church always has been and always will be a mixed blessing. Martin Luther once said, "The church is a whore, but she is my mother."
Where I have difficulty is when the church becomes an idol. This is such an easy line to cross. We concentrate on building the church, so we pay more attention to it than to God. For immature Christians in particular, it is so easy to confuse the institution with God. Back in my Young Life days some of us had a joke 'testimony' -- "I was a sex-addicted, drug addled wastrel until I accepted YOUNG LIFE into my heart...." As I have matured, that is not much of a joke anymore.
Movements, by the very fact that they are labelled movements, scare me in this regard. People become involved in the movement, instead of in the reason the movement was founded. For example, as Blogs For Terri mentioned today, the Philadephia Inquirer did a piece over the weekend on the Terri Schiavo reaction. I was interviewed for the piece, but did not make the article. The reporter was looking for people that thought Terri a 'symbol.' I told her I did not think there was anything symbolic about it -- this was just a woman whose husband was attempting to starve her to death. The reporter was more interested in the 'movement' around Terri than in Terri. That's the kind of thing that scares me.
Thus, I have no problem when someone like the journey points out similarlites between the Emerging Church movement and the 'Jesus' people of the late 60's, stating that they think good things are happening in the EC movement -- no doubt. But when they lament the death of the Jesus poeple movement, and hope the EC movement does not do the same, I have a problem. Movements need to die. We need to harvest the best from them and let them die, before they become a thing unto themselves.
Old friend Transforming Sermons points to a post from Dignan's 75 Year plan on the EC movement and concludes that maybe on some level politics is a matter for the pulpit. This is all part of the 'relevancy' that the EC group seeks so carefully. Of course, Chirst is relevant -- He has to be. There is nothing wrong with preaching to your audience -- it's what you preach about that can be the problem. How we present the message can and should change, but the message itself can never.
I love this post from Rebecca Writes. She admonsihes us to "Know Our Dead Guys"
There are a couple of things that are vitally important in all of this. Firstly, we can not and should not ever discard the old simply because it is old. And be very, very careful when you rephrase it in modern language that you do not destroy its meaning. Secondly, we cannot let our desire for success, or our passion for a movement, override our desire and passion for the Source, the Creator, the Alpha and Omega.
A 'dead guy' had some good thoughts -- Again from "Devotional Classics".
Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost admitted yesterday that he just does not like church, but then quotes Eugene Peterson as to why it is necessary. I tend to agree with Joe on this one, with the possible exception that I actually am smarter than...oh never mind, it was a vain attempt at humor. (HT: Allthings2all) I have been known to call Christian institutions "a necessary evil." Church always has been and always will be a mixed blessing. Martin Luther once said, "The church is a whore, but she is my mother."
Where I have difficulty is when the church becomes an idol. This is such an easy line to cross. We concentrate on building the church, so we pay more attention to it than to God. For immature Christians in particular, it is so easy to confuse the institution with God. Back in my Young Life days some of us had a joke 'testimony' -- "I was a sex-addicted, drug addled wastrel until I accepted YOUNG LIFE into my heart...." As I have matured, that is not much of a joke anymore.
Movements, by the very fact that they are labelled movements, scare me in this regard. People become involved in the movement, instead of in the reason the movement was founded. For example, as Blogs For Terri mentioned today, the Philadephia Inquirer did a piece over the weekend on the Terri Schiavo reaction. I was interviewed for the piece, but did not make the article. The reporter was looking for people that thought Terri a 'symbol.' I told her I did not think there was anything symbolic about it -- this was just a woman whose husband was attempting to starve her to death. The reporter was more interested in the 'movement' around Terri than in Terri. That's the kind of thing that scares me.
Thus, I have no problem when someone like the journey points out similarlites between the Emerging Church movement and the 'Jesus' people of the late 60's, stating that they think good things are happening in the EC movement -- no doubt. But when they lament the death of the Jesus poeple movement, and hope the EC movement does not do the same, I have a problem. Movements need to die. We need to harvest the best from them and let them die, before they become a thing unto themselves.
Old friend Transforming Sermons points to a post from Dignan's 75 Year plan on the EC movement and concludes that maybe on some level politics is a matter for the pulpit. This is all part of the 'relevancy' that the EC group seeks so carefully. Of course, Chirst is relevant -- He has to be. There is nothing wrong with preaching to your audience -- it's what you preach about that can be the problem. How we present the message can and should change, but the message itself can never.
I love this post from Rebecca Writes. She admonsihes us to "Know Our Dead Guys"
There are a couple of things that are vitally important in all of this. Firstly, we can not and should not ever discard the old simply because it is old. And be very, very careful when you rephrase it in modern language that you do not destroy its meaning. Secondly, we cannot let our desire for success, or our passion for a movement, override our desire and passion for the Source, the Creator, the Alpha and Omega.
A 'dead guy' had some good thoughts -- Again from "Devotional Classics".
C.S. Lewis will be remembered as one of the most important Christian thinkers of the twentieth century. He was born in Ireland in 1900, and the major part of his adult years was spent as a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, where he taught medieval literature. It was in 1931 that he was “surprised by joy,� Lewis’s own description of his conversion to Christianity. A brilliant scholar and writer, Lewis used his talents to reach thousands through the printed and spoken word.
He and a group of friends (including J. R. R. Tolkien, author of Lord of the Rings) gathered once a week to share their writings. During those years Lewis produced his famous work The Screwtape Letters. In the early 1940s he delivered talks on various Christian topics over British radio. His fame grew throughout Great Britain and spread to the United States. Out of those talks came the book Mere Christianity, a penetrating work on Christian apologetics. Countless Christians point to this book as an essential part of their faith journey. If sales are an indication of popularity, then C. S. Lewis—even thirty years after his death—is one of the most popular Christian thinkers of the twentieth century. In the following passage Lewis discusses the question, Is Christianity hard or easy?
The Reason the Church Exists
May I come back to what I said before? This is the whole of Christianity. There is nothing else. It is so easy to get muddled about that. It is easy to think that the Church has a lot of dif¬ferent objects—education, building, missions, holding services. Just as it is easy to think the State has a lot of different objects—military, political, economic, and what not.
But in a way things are much simpler than that. The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human be¬ings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden—that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time.
In the same way the Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into 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 pur¬pose. It says in the Bible that the whole universe was made for Christ and that everything is to be gathered together in Him.
