Working in the ministry, I realized I am starving--not spiritually, I have found places to be fed spiritually. But I am starving for authenticity. Now there is a difference between being wise in speech. I believe I have to be careful in how I word things so I am not accusing or saying something that is unbiblical. Yet there are times I want to just look at Scripture and say, "What in God's Name was God thinking when this was included int the canon?" There are times I look at Scripture and want to ask, "Is God really calling us to the extreme of this?" There are times I want to say, "I am tired. I don't feel like giving my best right now." or "I am struggling. I am struggling in my faith or struggling to exist right now." Yet there are not many avenues for this.
I am also struggling with the Church. As I have stated in my last post, there are churches which love their building more than people. I am starving for a congregation who says "this is who we are--no, we are not what we were in our glory days, no we are not perfect. We are on a journey to be more like Christ. We struggle with what that looks like." Right now that is not what I am finding. Our churches are defining success by how many people attend, how magnificent our building is, or how many people we have on staff. I am not sure these are Kingdom issues. So how do we as Christians recapture authentic lives, authentic churches?
OK, I'm not a Christian, but I just have to comment from my own personal experience. My first boss - after having moved to NYC - belonged to a United Church of Christ congregation that had sold it's church building (prime Manhattan real estate - 55th St & Broadway) to a developer to concentrate on what it considered to be it's core mission - Christian service. Soup kitchen, prison ministry, etc. etc. Their services were held at a sympathetic Roman Catholic church in the neighborhood. After the minister died, the congregation began to change (as it turned out to a more diverse, Afro-American membership - ironically, drawn to the church precisely because of it's more community centered programs). They - for whatever reason - felt increasingly uncomfortable with having their services at this church and began clamoring for a church of their own. They eventually succeeded and now have their own church building with very few of the outreach programs that originally drew them to the church....I dunno, people are really very primitive...a sense of place - as in a particular place of worship - sometimes is just as important as "the message" (or more so)
ReplyDeleteI agree that the sense of space and place is important. I am not saying that churches should sell their buildings and meet wherever they can find space. I am saying our call is to love God and love people. If anything preempts that, we are not being who we are called to be. Our priorities need to be in order.
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