BLOGGING TOWARD SUNDAY…

There is a lot of talk today about the “emerging Christianity,” and I suspect that most people, hearing the term, need it defined.  Marcus Borg recently described this as a movement from convention to intention as the reason for being part of a church.  Here’s what he meant…most of us grew up in a time and culture when it was understood that everybody would be a member of the church…it was conventional…it was what everyone did, what everyone expected. 

I think back to my elementary school days, and I can’t think of a single person who didn’t go to church!  That was the expectation of our culture, and as long as that was true,  mainline denominations did well.  They were a safe and respectable way of being Christian.  Well, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that is not true of our society today.  That expectation is no longer in place, and so mainline denominations like ours have declined sharply.  Over half of our country does not attend church….over half of Union Grove does not attend church, only half of our membership, for heaven’s sake, attends regularly.  It is not conventional anymore!

Borg says there is some good news in that!  The good news is that very soon, the only people left in church will be here by INTENTION rather than CONVENTION!  We’ll be here because we want to be, because we recognize our need to be, rather than because it’s just the thing to do.And when that happens, great possibilities arise for the church of JC… opportunities to really be an alternative community….learning together, and teaching each other about how to live into a deeper relationship with the LORD, rather than the lords of culture.  And I find that tremendously exciting.  It’s like a story I heard a preacher tell one time.  He said that he preached his large congregation down to about 100, kinda like separating the wheat from the chaff, the men from the boys, or the conventional from the intentional….and then the church exploded…because they got down to the real business of the church….transforming people.

Filed under: Blogging Toward Sunday