if you haven’t read the most recent comments on being the body (part 1), i recommend you do so before continuing onward. there are a lot of good thoughts, examples, and truths shared by so many of you.
two common themes which showed up and i’d like to discuss further are:
- we live in a consumeristic culture, so it’s difficult for the church to reach people in ways where they don’t feel comfortable or justified in “going” to church. some questions brought up in the book: since when is the gospel of christ comfortable? since when is confronting sin comfortable? grace is all encompassing and forgiveness covers all sin, as well as the fact we serve and worship a loving god, but the truth is god cannot stand to look at us if it weren’t for the cross. does this message get watered down? not necessarily from the pulpit or platform, but from the layers the church (local) adds in order to “bring people in” so they may be reached?
- the church’s call is to go and make disciples. in what ways do you see local churches obeying this call? is there too much emphasis placed on “saving people” and as RobP said in the comments, once any sort of commitment is asked or sacrifice is required, people bail out because they have been conditioned by society to get something out of every investment. do we also condition them by the bells and whistles and programs and not communicate the necessary sacrifice in being a christ-follower?
i lookl forward to reaing this book as i heard much about it. the second point you highlighted, the church’s call. the unfortunate thing (that ties into the consumeristic culture) is we tend to think our calling is to make converts. we must be reminded that our calling is discipleship.
consumeristic = converts
calling = discpleship
dig yer blog by the way, on my bloglines now!
I think Neil Cole (Organic Church) was probably right when he said we need to lower the bar on being church (organisationally, structurally etc) while at the same time raising the bar on discipleship. The interesting thing is that people in established churches will often resist both movements.
To respond to questiion 1:
I feel that a hard thing with the christian message, is that it is so different than what our culture is “preaching.” Christianity tells us we need forgiveness, the culture says that you need to love yourself and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. A lot of people just don’t feel that they need to be forgiven.
I don’t feel as though the message should be watered down, I think we, even as Christians need to be reminded how powerful and scary God can be.
I’m not understanding #2 converts vs disciples. Can you explain that a little? Maybe its just a semantics thing.
You can learn about Jesus all you want but until you make a choice to accept his gift of salvation, isn’t information on its own worthless? I’m sure there will be many well informed people in hell.
The bells and whistles shouldn’t be the issue. That’s a once a week environment. The demonstration of church and following Christ is on the personal level–being open to relationships, serving each other, sacrifice. I don’t think that’s something that can be communicated in full one hour each week. Its like on the West Wing(stay with me here)–didn’t all the really gritty work get done in the hallways talking one on one on the way to another place rather than in the formal meeting setting?
I just purchased the book and plan to read it while i am flying to California and the time i spend pool side.
Hi
G’night