Through our office (Office of Church Growth) we have the opportunity to work with a number of churches trying to navigate the new cultural landscape in which they find themselves. If you have to ask what new landscape I'm talking about, that's a whole other conversation. Trust me, though, the world has changed and as much as we might lament it, there is no changing back.
It occurs to me this afternoon that we may have done too god a job over the past couple of centuries training and teaching people, Presbyterian in our case, how to be church and what it means to be Presbyterian or Christian. It used to be easy. We all knew what church was or what we thought it was supposed to be and were happy to operate under this common understanding of ecclesiastical life. We were in ways, like the fleas in the video below. We were trained to live in the glass (church and cultural norms) and operate under the boundaries and rules (Presbyterian Polity and corporate traditional worship) the glass provided. So much so, that now the glass has been removed (culture change-modern to post modern; demoninationalism to post-denominationalism) we find ourselves still confined to forms and functions of the past. Even our offspring have become trained in our ways and have difficulty seeing life beyond the glass.
Think I'm wrong? Consider this, I can imagine a church with it's stone walls and fixed pews would, were it without a building for some reason, set itself up just as it had when there were four walls to enclose it. Chairs would not be in a circle or new configuration but in rows facing forward just as it had been. People would also gravitate to the place where they "normally" sat. We are creatures of habit after all.
The problem is that there are fewer and fewer fleas. To compound that we won't leave our comfortable "glass" house to find more fleas or even break ranks and realize that we can move beyond our comfort zone and be the church in ways that we could have never imagined being in the past. No necessarily good news for a world thirsting for spiritual meaning but wary of all things institutional.
So maybe the question we need to think about today is, "Is it ok to consider new forms of church that don't look, act, speak, sing, dance, talk like us or want to do the same things we have historically done? Can we make room for that or must we tell them to confine themselves to our "glass?"
Discuss...
I love this illustration Philip. It can be so hard to think outside of that glass jar, especially when it's all we've known. It's also a painful reality that those fleas are eventually going to die if they don't leave the jar. They will no longer be able to serve their purpose, the purpose that God created them for. I have to be honest and say I am very intimidated about the idea of change and how to go about it. But I think it is important for us to find a way to be creative and brave enough to consider new forms of church.
Posted by: Amy Locke | March 10, 2011 at 04:46 PM
Can't have those fleas going "off the reservation" now, can we? They might get squashed :-)
Posted by: Neal Locke | March 10, 2011 at 06:32 PM