They Like Jesus, but Not The Church...

Flowers from my garden. Just because.
Book I've been reading. Just because. And it's made me think.

I've been thinking about what it means to be a church. Why it works, and mostly, why it doesn't.This post is a way for me to unscramble my brain around the issue. I'm giving fair warning: It could be messy.

The thing is: the world is changing. We don't live in the time of industrialization; the assembly line is passe. We are in a new time. They call it the post-modern era. Just saying, "post-modern" makes many right-wing conservative Christians cringe. They think of moral relativism, and the new age movement, and they warn about the dangers of engaging emerging ideas.

And they've been left in the dust.

Church has become irrelevant to many from the ages of 18 to 35ish. Not Jesus. Church.

It used to be that every person you met on the street went to the Baptist church, or the Methodist one, or the Lutheran, and depending on the community,there were the Catholics. Church, and Judeo-Christian values were central to the community. But I think that time has passed. The traditional Judeo-Christian ethic used to be a centralizing, community building force.

But now, church seems like a waste of time. It's hierarchical, patriarchal, and cliche-ish. And if it not, it sure is perceived to be. The post modern world has deconstructed the notions of clergy/lay-people, christian/non-christian.

So how can you be a community of Christ-followers when the old model of "doing church" doesn't work? And how do you create a culture within the community that is relevant to a generation who thinks differently? Some people say that church is for Christians. And that is true. But the CHURCH, the organic community of Christ-followers, is still the bride of Christ and the representation of Christ's love to the world. So it's not a just about Christians. It's about telling people who don't know, that there is a God; he loves them, they can know him. And doing it in a way that matters. Doing it in a way that is relevant and authentic.

So there you go.. Part 1.