Friday, October 17, 2008
Finally Noticing
Keith Buehler at Mere O links to an extraordinary blog post:
As he points out the church first betrays us by making a pitch that is not terribly representative of the actual product. And that is deeper than "Gee, life is still hard when you becomes a Christian" - though that is am important part of the problem. The church appears to offer us a place to belong; instead we are so often reduced to grist in the mill of making the church grow. "Well heck, isn't serving the church part of Christ's plan for our growth?" comes the inevitable retort. Which brings me to my second point.
We are called to serve Christ's church, not THE church. So often, so very, very often, we come to church to be a part of Christ's body, both serving and being served, and we find we are a part of something else. Something that serves not Christ, that reflects not Christ - something that instead serves itself, reflects modern culture and in the worst of cases reflects and serves the ego and desires of the leadership.
And nothing supports my point here more than the very model we build churches on in this day and age. That people would become disillusioned seems inevitable, the question is how to respond to that occurrence. Operating on the prevailing cultural media models, you let them go - keep focusing on the positive, deepen the audience you do have, build critical mass.
And yet I seem to recall a mini-parable of Christ's - something about leaving behind the 99 sheep to find the lost 1. We so often interpret that parable to be about evangelism, but I'm thinking it is about those already in the fold - at least for now.
Why don't we form ministries to the disillusioned?
Oh, I think the answer to that is pretty simple - it reflects back on us too hard. You see, to really meet the needs of the disillusioned, WE WOULD HAVE TO CHANGE. We would have to take this whole thing a whole lot more seriously than we do. Which makes me wonder who would really be ministered to in a ministry to the disillusioned.
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Ignorance. Pity. Shame. These are all good descriptions of what she thought of Christianity. But the primary description that I felt coming from here was “betrayal.” She had been betrayed by the Church because they duped her into a belief not unlike that of the tooth fairy. When she discovered this betrayal, no one had a valid answer or excuse. So she left. She is now an unbeliever—a soon-to-be evangelistic unbeliever.C. Michael Patton points to an article saying 31 million are leaving the church. That is a hard statistic to find when you keep reading about the growth at mega-churches. Patton defines a "path" that people take when leaving that is, I think, overly simplistic - but his description of the phenomena is right on and I think the key is the word he invokes in the pull quote above - BETRAYAL.
As he points out the church first betrays us by making a pitch that is not terribly representative of the actual product. And that is deeper than "Gee, life is still hard when you becomes a Christian" - though that is am important part of the problem. The church appears to offer us a place to belong; instead we are so often reduced to grist in the mill of making the church grow. "Well heck, isn't serving the church part of Christ's plan for our growth?" comes the inevitable retort. Which brings me to my second point.
We are called to serve Christ's church, not THE church. So often, so very, very often, we come to church to be a part of Christ's body, both serving and being served, and we find we are a part of something else. Something that serves not Christ, that reflects not Christ - something that instead serves itself, reflects modern culture and in the worst of cases reflects and serves the ego and desires of the leadership.
And nothing supports my point here more than the very model we build churches on in this day and age. That people would become disillusioned seems inevitable, the question is how to respond to that occurrence. Operating on the prevailing cultural media models, you let them go - keep focusing on the positive, deepen the audience you do have, build critical mass.
And yet I seem to recall a mini-parable of Christ's - something about leaving behind the 99 sheep to find the lost 1. We so often interpret that parable to be about evangelism, but I'm thinking it is about those already in the fold - at least for now.
Why don't we form ministries to the disillusioned?
Oh, I think the answer to that is pretty simple - it reflects back on us too hard. You see, to really meet the needs of the disillusioned, WE WOULD HAVE TO CHANGE. We would have to take this whole thing a whole lot more seriously than we do. Which makes me wonder who would really be ministered to in a ministry to the disillusioned.
Technorati Tags:leaving church, disillusionment, minitry, change
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