Longmire RANTS without the RAVE!
Erwin McManus said: American Church is not loosing its influence in our culture because less people are attending, but less and less people are attending because of the influence that Christ is having in the American Church.
Forgive the RANT - Philip Longmire
BUT Church…
We are no longer sought after or even seen as a viable option to spirituality...it seems we are no longer the preferred flavor in this world of secularism and pluralism.
- We have lost the ability to transform cultures and change worlds.
- Our influence has not been taken from us…but we have given it away.
- We have become the church of pancake feeds, bickering controllers over traditions, kings of tattered walls and broken down castles.
- It feels odd to be part of the minority, to be part of a remnant of people left in the church that believes Jesus is God and did what the Bible says he has done.
- It feels weird to have to define what church I align myself with…I’m not part of the church who has left the traditional teachings of sacred scripture. That claims that Christ was something other than the Son of God
- It isn’t that the world has become more secular, it is that the we the church have become more secular.
- It is an odd day to be in a religious institution that has left the very thing we were started to promote, Jesus Christ.
I’m not speaking of any one denomination…it just seems the church as a whole has lost its ability influence the world it serves.
What does it take to produce the future Paul's, Peter, and Timothy's of the next generation?
The Planter: Phil, it takes people like you who do not have to survive!
posted by Bob Carder @ 2:59 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
This will be tough to articulate in a comment, but:
I totally agree we have given away our influence, and I think we have done it in a number of ways...
1. We have fatally become just a subculture OF our world rather than a counter culture to the world.
2. We have reduced Christianity to a set of moral rules and a set of political motivations.
3. We wrongly believe that people aren't interested in digging deeper into their faith and we can only keep them around by talking to them in sound bites.
4. Jesus is now the ultimate self help guru who can get you off drugs, clean your laundry, get you a job and make you middle class.
5. We have taken anything offensive out of the Gospel message. Don't react to that word to quickly, slow down and think about it...
6. We start one age group too late. In my opinion we miss a great opportunity in youth groups to show these kids, who are hungry for counter culture, radical expressions of ANYTHING, how their faith can give them that.
How Jesus through THEM, not their parents or their pastors or someone else, but through THEM can radically impact the world and the lives of REAL people. Challenge them, stretch them. We are missing the boat here...
Sorry I have rambled on so long. I hope to dialog - so I am stopping my monologue!
Peace,
Adam
I think evangelicalism is by nature a subculture - like every 'ism.' Everyone lives in a subculture - even Jesus did. We can't help it. What I'm about to say may be misunderstood, but I'll take that risk.
Destroying the evangelical subculture will rob the world of the evangelical contribution. Like every subculture, it will change in response to changes in the world, and the world will change (to a lesser extent) in response to it.
The challenge isn't to get rid of the subculture because if we succeed it will just be replaced by another one - Emergent subculture, discipleship oriented subculture, or whatever.
The challenge is to be able to recognize, celebrate, and encourage the work of God outside our subculture. This is a challenge primarily to our theology rather than our church paradigms. God is not limited to working within our subculture. He is 'the light that enlightens every person.' (John 1:9)
Is God working in the Roman Catholic Church? Is God working in Mecca? Is God working in the homosexual community in your city? Is God working among the poor? Among the rich? In the bars and pubs? At First Baptist Church of wherever? When God works, what is it that he's trying to do? What did he send Jesus to do?
People may not always be responding to him or even know how to recognize his work, but that is where true disciples and spiritually mature Christians will be able to help. We have to learn how to help people respond to what God is doing within their subculture.
It's not so much about being more obedient in a legalistic sense (substituting caring for the poor for no drinking or something like that). It's about being more faithful - full of faith. It's about learning to love God and love others. It's about worshiping God in spirit and in truth (the Father seeks such worshipers).
We don't need to transform cultures and change worlds any more than we need to build the church. The idea that we do is a unique perspective of American evangelicalism, which we've transported to other parts of the world. Rather, we need to learn how to live in relationship with God through faith and trust, learn to love, and learn that God is a lot bigger than even our biggest boxes.
I hope that's clear, but somehow I doubt it!
I'm still listening. Great conversation thus far.
What if the church actually believed the mandate to make disciples and then made them as a personal act of obedience?
I find it hard to believe that we can worship etc, without obeying the supreme mandate of the Great Commission (Make Disciples who make disciples - teaching them to obey all things..) I mean if we had been living out the personal implications of obeying the Great Commission mandate we wouldn't be in the mess we are in as a church.
We need to go back and be the Church in society as a present Church who is personally present "involved" in the lives of all, the reached and unreached.
1. Church need not be something that is excluded from the rest of our lives.
2. As the Church we need an all-of-life-under-God-approach! We must break the back of our dualism in the Church. (Church is separate from the world). We must become the Church in the world and do so even at the expense of our Sunday so called most important gathering -if that is what it takes. Being is always more important than doing.
I agree with you, Bob. Especially the part that being church needs to penetrate every part of our lives. Our faith/relationship with Christ needs to influence every decision we make.
I also believe that making disciples is really what we need to be about. At least it really simplifies life and ministry!
What we need to guard against is turning disciple-making into a new type of legalism. That's when even disciple-making can become it's own subculture. Disciple-making is primarily about helping people learn to live by faith, love God, and love others.
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