i recently wrote an email in which i took a short deviation and inserted a paragraph or so of my thoughts on "church." afterwards i came to the realization that while i have thought about the topic and had numerous conversations about it, i haven't really put my thoughts down in written words. i given myself a premature new years resolution of starting to write a book on the topic of "church." so i might make a few post here and there along this topic. and don't be surprised if i ask to interview you next year. i don't want to call this part 1 because it isn't really. it's just a part.
many years ago i felt called into ministry. at first i thought my calling was into youth ministry. i got involved with Young Life for a few years. Young Life is an amazing ministry aimed at taking the gospel to the lives of high school and junior high students. it would be considered a parachurch ministry meaning that it is designed to work "along side" of the church. Young Life will make the clear statement that they are not a church, nor is that their intention. their mission is to reach "every kid for Christ." they understand that their mission is to make students into followers of Christ and help them get plugged into a local church. this is often the hardest part of the ministry. Young Life is uses a weekly club meeting filled with messy games, crazy skits, loud music, and a short gospel message to reach students. but when kids come to know Christ and are encouraged to get plugged into a church it's difficult because the elements of club that the kids were drawn to are not found in a typical church. kids see a church where you have to sit and be still for an hour or more, and they want nothing to do with it. so most kids opt to stay in Young Life and struggle with growing in their faith, because Young Life is designed to expose kids to the gospel rather then help them grow deeper in their faith. this is where the relationship between church and parachurch becomes so important. if both ministries are doing what they are supposed to then evangelism and discipleship are being done.
i think i'd like to develop this both and idea of the parachurch needing the church and the church needing the parachurch. if you have any thoughts, i'd love to hear them.
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i'm not sure what the solution is, but that's something i experienced, but in a different way. i more or less grew up in church, so by the time i hit high school, i had no problem with sitting still for an hour and yadda yadda. i even looked forward to it for the latter half first 3/4 of junior/senior years resepectively. college hit, and i began to have problems. not things like believing, or falling into a bad crowd or any of those, but i had felt let down (always felt let down, and still do feel let down to a large degree - more on that in a minute) by the church in the arena of friendship and girlfriendship. i felt as if the church has continually conspired against me, especially concerning the latter: telling our girls not to date, reducing God to a cosmic matchmaker, but even with the former. it was/is hard to act how i act around the churched, despite the fact that i also am "churched."
anyways, blah blah blah yadda yadda, there came a point where i realized that what i wanted out of church wasn't church, or learning, but discipleship, friendship, fellowship, companionship. that ended my relationship with church, when i couldn't find it, or those who i thought i could count on to do those things with me kind of left me by the wayside. note, done with church, not done with Jesus.
so, for quite awhile, i was in a desert place, not sure what to do where to go and so forth. i want, still want, some place that i can call my family. a place of people who i can call up if i'm bored or having a rough time, they can call me likewise. we study, live, learn together, all of that. but we don't just bottle it in and hold it there (as a place i had been before had done), we try to spread it around, bring others in, grow.
so, to tie this in, and possibly stroke steve's ego, i don't think i'm entirely out of the desert, as i still feel lonely, and still want the one thing the church seems incapable of giving me, but i think i see satellite as a hopeful end to the desert.
as far as how this works for highschool, i have no idea. it's the reason i've never attended things like dare2share and acquire the fire and clever rhyming conference conference because they make christianity seeme like a 24 hour rock festival, and it's not. mostly, it's my firm belief that if you can convert a man, you have his family. which brings me to what i've been thinking of as viral or guerrilla christian warfare.
essentially, i'm not sure what it looks like, other than that it's exactly what Christ did: living life and "drafting" everyone you come into contact with, or rather, seriously evaluating who's in your sphere, and choosing so many to really work with, while avoiding the "christian project" cliche. it's still a rough idea, but i've carried this thought out to almost cult-level on paper.
those are my thoughts, all over the board as they are, but that's what you get when you request i comment you blog. :)
you made a common statement i've been hearing a lot, especially within our generation- "note, done with church, not done with Jesus."
where my thoughts are taking me is that statements like that seem difficult for me. i think that i understand most people to mean that they are done with church as western Christian do church(because that's all they tend to know) but what most often happens is people leave church altogether. i think this is the pre-verbial 'throwing the baby out with the bathwater.' in the cases of the people i know, that are willing to share, they want to remove themselves so far from church because of all the things wrong with it. they don't see the church as anything that can be changed. my hope is to start redeeming peoples view of church. why should we allow people to continue living with a wrong perspective of what the church is supposed to be. i don't think that leaving is the best answer. Luther never intended to leave the Church when he posted his 95 thesis. he wanted to call the church to action, but instead his protest led to something he didn't originally want.
those of us who feel like the church isn't doing what it is supposed to should stand up and call the church to repentance. the church isn't beyond redemption however, if no one is willing to seek change it will never happen.
going back to your quote. if we say that the church was established by Jesus,(something i'm starting to do research on.) but then say that we are rejecting what was established by him aren't we still rejecting Jesus? i don't have any complete thoughts on this yet. it's still something that i'm thinking through on an almost daily basis.
thanks for your comments. when i get into "book mode" i'd love to sit down and interview you.
With the way you say it, once could actually deduce that you're meaning the "parachurch" has become the "church," in the eyes of the youth who does not want to "sit still for an hour or more."
Maybe I feel that way because that's basically how it happened when I got back into "church"; the first thing I experienced at 4C's was High Impact which, I'm sure you'll agree, is radically different than what Big Church (or standard/bland/normal/vanilla church) offers. That's one reason why it was so exciting and new for me; contrast High Impact with the "church services" I'd been to: LDS and Catholic.
I'm digressing. What I mean to say is, maybe it is up to the person to define their "church" and not for church to be some universal nebulous concept.
What I said was response to your original post. Now I'd like to respond to your response to Cuyler's response to your original post.
"those of us who feel like the church isn't doing what it is supposed to should stand up and call the church to repentance. the church isn't beyond redemption however, if no one is willing to seek change it will never happen."
One thing that I didn't want to say at the Satellite meeting that night (because it really isn't the proper forum for my sometimes-brash opinions) is that people don't expect to HAVE to propose change for church. They don't WANT church to be "wrong." They feel bad when they're not enjoying church; guilty as if there's something wrong with them for not getting the full effect out of the sermon, the pews, the worship songs. This is what I think.
In addition to that, my own personal addition would be to say something like, "Who am I to want to rearrange church? Shouldn't the people in charge, that have been studying this kind of thing and going to school for it, know what they're doing?" Of course, the answer isn't always yes or no but to me the answer has become to make more of church than sitting in the building for an hour or more.
It's like you said about Satellite being the five-spoked wheel; the Sunday Night service isn't the complete definition of Satellite any more than Satellite is the defining definition of Church. But it is representative of it, which is where ALL of the confusion comes from, I think, when you ask things like "what is church?"
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