meditatio at the water's edge

In our entertainment-saturated culture, in our consumer drenched environment, I believe we must be vigilant against every temptation to make certain people into focal points for our pleasure. I think we might have to reconsider how we sing together. I think we might have to reconsider the way we approach teaching. I think we (the church) will definitely have to reconsider how we are arranging our chairs.

I think need to redefine many of the terms we use so loosely: worship, church, community, giving, teaching, and pastoring, just to name a few. Most of these things have become a reflection of a user-oriented, individualistic, naturalistic (by which I mean a life lived without God) culture. 'Worship' has degraded into singing songs as a group. Church has been reduced to an address and a one to two hour slot in our dayplanners (if that). Giving has been reduced to an (optional?) religious tax. Teaching no longer has much to do with learning. And pastoring has come to mean successful organizational management. Lord, have mercy!

Who is really the center of all this? We are. I think we must ask ourselves if we have turned the church into our own tower of Babel. Are we pursuing a way to make a name for ourselves under the guise of reaching for heaven? I fear that many of us are.

Dismiss me as a navel-gazer. Call me naive to 'the way the real world works.' But I can't help but wonder if our ineffectiveness in being the light of the world is a result of the fact that we have lost our sense of vocation. In our rush to be relevant and to 'make a difference', I wonder if we haven’t exchanged our God-given vocation for something more resembling capitalism? Souls and geography represent market share, etc.

What is the way forward for us? I think it will be for us to risk being seen as fools. To live as a nomadic community with no place to lay our heads (read, 'a building of our own'), so we can give our money to those we know who are in need.

There are many other ways we will be seen as fools; some of which I'm not even ready to consider right now. But if we are fools for Christ (and by that I don't mean weird in the superficially weird ways that some 'fools' are weird--in most cases, we might look weird to many in the church), we will be fools for the right reasons. Recklessly embracing the outcast, giving a voice to the voiceless, and sharing the table with 'sinners.'

I think that when we do this, we might start recapturing life with God at the center. Or maybe a better way of saying it is that when God is allowed to be the Center again, those kinds of changes will result naturally as we respond to the things we see God doing and the words we hear God saying.