Monday, December 19, 2011
"Reach"ing Balance
Douglas Groothius:
There is a real chicken-and-egg thing that goes on here, not to mention outreach being absolutely vital to a church when people are no longer culturally driven to participate, but I cannot help but note that if we do not work as diligently to produce maturity as we do to produce participation that soon there will be nothing for anyone to participate in.
Further, if we do not find real Christian maturity and nurture it, what we will be calling people to participate in will so radically drift from what it is supposed to be that I will wonder if we can any more be called Christian.
Groothius is right - we have to worry about ALL those thing.
The church should be concerned with in-reach (teaching and formation) and outreach (mission) and upreach (worship), not just upkeep!Well said and I have no doubt there are any churches so moribund that upkeep is all they concern themselves with, but I have to say most churches I know these days focus on outreach and a very shallow form of upreach and almost entirely neglect in-reach.
There is a real chicken-and-egg thing that goes on here, not to mention outreach being absolutely vital to a church when people are no longer culturally driven to participate, but I cannot help but note that if we do not work as diligently to produce maturity as we do to produce participation that soon there will be nothing for anyone to participate in.
Further, if we do not find real Christian maturity and nurture it, what we will be calling people to participate in will so radically drift from what it is supposed to be that I will wonder if we can any more be called Christian.
Groothius is right - we have to worry about ALL those thing.
