Wow! It's been well over a year since I last posted to this blog. It's been over a year since I posted to any of my blogs so I'm not sure there's anyone out there who'll even find this to read. That's okay, I guess. I'm not sure how regular I'll be posting to this, but I'm planning to make an effort. It's not really a "resolution" because, in my experience those don't really work all that well.
I think one of the reasons I quit posting was I'd run out of emotional energy on the topic of how messed up churches are. After 22 years working in churches it felt like I could "talk" forever about how screwed up the church had become. Then I got sort of comfortable at a church and was enjoying my new job and all that concern about how churches need to do better sort of cooled down. Not that I think the Christian church has finally got it's act together. Trust me, it doesn't. There are still lots of problems with the organized church.
Still, it's the organism God designed to be his representation here on the earth. And there are some really dynamic Christians in some really awesome churches who are doing some incredible things in the name of Jesus. There's a lot of change happening in the church...and there's also not a lot of change happening in the church. I guess that's the nature of such a large and diverse organism. Some of it's changing and growing and some of it's atrophying and dieing. You know the old saying... the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Why post now, then? Well, for the last couple of years (since we moved to Colorado) my wife and I have been attending this church. We enjoyed it well enough and even got involved in some leadership stuff. But we never felt compelled to become members. I can't explain it except to say that every time we got ready to join there was some nagging feeling that it wasn't for us. We finally decided that it didn't make any sense not to join if we weren't going to go anywhere else. So we started visiting other places. We still helped in leadership and from that vantage point we started to see some things from the inside that concerned us.
Now, let me stop right here and say that we're not looking for the perfect church. We don't expect there not to be skeletons in the closet and we certainly don't want to stand in judgement on any church that's striving to follow God's lead. But we do recognize there are some churches that are doing it better than others.
Anyway, in the process of looking we started to realize...as we gained some distance...that, although the pastor of the churche we'd attended was saying all the right things, most the people in the seats weren't really doing much in response to his urging. It was weird, frankly. This pastor is a fine preacher and his messages were dead-on in terms of having a heart for the lost, reaching out to the community and being service and mission oriented. The messages just weren't catching on in the seats. That was perplexing to me because I always believed that leadership shapes the direction of the church. But here was a leader who seemed to be taking the charge but very few were following.
Maybe this is a broader problem than I realize. Maybe there are lots of fired-up, enthusiastic, mission-minded preachers out there in front of catatonic crowds. Maybe there's more to this leadership thing than just sharing inspirational messages every Sunday. Maybe the root of the problem still rested with leadership but at a much deeper level. A level most people couldn't see. What we discovered I'll share in my next post. And I promise not to wait a year before I share it...
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