Wednesday, April 11, 2007

apathy: church culture?

it is a funny thing to have been working in the church for 8 years and beyond that, growing up in the north american church culture. i have come to this idea lately that the church is obsolete because north americans today don't give a crap about some "organized religion." but this easter we did something that if never done in church, is rarely done in church, and that is a tattoo. it was awesome! it was extremely exciting, and we received a ton of local media attention! the service itself went off great and commitments were made as a result. now, only three days later i sit in my "office" pondering the reason i think little will change even though we had what i consider one of the most culturally relevant easter services ever. it is not the world, but the church itself. my church? possibly, though i have more faith in my team than that. but i mean the church universal that created this cultural tendency to see church as a place where we get stuff and where we see God as this cosmic vending machine or a genie who does whatever we want. sadly, i think we, the church, are apathetic in our views of God, hell, the lost and the church. we don't care enough about God to believe what his Word says or obey him. we don't care enough about hell to fear it or keep others from going there. we don't care enough about the lost to pray for them and seek them out. in fact, the way most christians act, we might as well tell them all to go to hell. and we don't care enough about the church to realize that it is the community of believers, the called out ones, the bride of Christ. we just don't care. i blame the consumer mentality that we have created inside the church. Christ said that unless we hate our families and our lives, we cannot be his disciples. that sounds like the exact opposite of what we, the apathetic church of america, have created. so, how do we change this paradigm of laziness? good question.

1 comment:

dan said...

a couple thoughts:

1.) i totally agree with the idea behind the apathetic americans you're talking about. i think part of the problem is that we've become so concerned with being relevent we've lost our distinctives. we've forgot our mission so people come along and see us just trying to be cool. (now i think that your whole tatooing gig was sweet and solid so i'm not talking about that) but how much of church is based around the concept that we need to be an attractive venue.

2. i think we need to be asking ourselves some questions about what the distinctives that we need to be pursueing are and what really makes up our mission? to answer these questions is to take a step foward in finding a purpose to rally around, that doesn't imply we just act cool...

3. studying the book of matthew, one of the themes in the book is the rejection of Jesus' message by everybody other than the disciples. it's almost like the text is pointing to the fact that tons of people will reject the message and not be into following where jesus is taking us.

4. just curious if Ohio State is even going to have sports teams next year after Flordia made them look so silly that all the good players left??