Making church your life - or life your church.

Now here's an article (long but very worth the read) that will stretch your thinking a bit. It's from Len at nextreformation.com. In the article Len calls us to some radical steps in order to help the church see itself as a living community of faith 24/7 instead of a group that meet together once or twice a week.

Here are some excerpts -

I take my cues for this article from Mike Bishop’s article of 2002 that appeared at Next Wave online. Mike astutely observed that the deeper problem in the Sunday church paradigm may be rooted in our Greek way of thinking about culture. Unlike the Hebrews, the Greeks divided life and culture into categories of sacred and secular. In postmodernity, we are learning anew to question such assumptions.
What does it mean that "all life is sacred," and how will that impact our use of meetings versus "doing life" together? What does leadership look like in a community of friends (if we can even use the "L" word any more...)
"The way many evangelicals worship contributes to a secular world view or at least fails to challenge it. By worship I mean: gathering of people, singing hymns, praying, reading Scripture and hearing a sermon. By secularism I mean a world view wherein God is relegated to the edges of life." (Mark McKim)

One of the challenges we have had to face as we worked through a more incarnational and holistic approach to gathered life was dealing with traditional expectations based on our churched culture. We wanted to move from doing church to being the church in all expressions of our life, but we had people coming to us who were expecting to come to a “home group” or “bible study.” They expected to experience a “service” where various components were prepared and then handed to them on a platter.
But in our paradigm, we thought that description better suited a theatre or an audience than a gathered community. We were not interested in staging a performance, and we weren’t worried about who was in control.. our desire was to celebrate our life together.
The classical elements of a gathering are these. Many faith communities believe they must hit each point in order to have a valid gathering:
* worship (ie singing and meditation)
* word (teach/preach, response maybe)
* sacrament
* in all this, a hierarchy (positional authority) and an order
* an ethos of activity focused on a stage, with little space for reflection
But if the center is not the gathering .. if the focus is life 24/7... and meetings are secondary and not the end but one means of building life.. if a teaching need not be wrapped up with a neat conclusion in 20 minutes, but instead can be more like a learning conversation.. if defined leadership can fade into the background in favor of a real community.. things can begin to follow a different path.

While I don't agree with Len on everything - he really pushes the idea of a time of "detoxing" from church as we know it now - I do think that many of the things he is saying are very important for us to wrestle with AND to begin to act on. The way we currently 'do" church does reinforce the idea that faith has very little to do with everyday life. We meet away from society for a very contained period of time to think about Jesus and His call. We then re-enter the "real world" and live there until our next escape into church. We have to make structural changes that help people to live out their faith in every expression of their lives. We have to begin to see our lives as "church", our activities as "worship", and our friendships as "evangelism.

Len continues...

Isn’t it odd that we call our worship gathering a “service,” but less readily term our daily acts of service “worship.” We have inverted the priesthood and made it something truly divorced from life. We made something sacred into something secular, relegating it to the margins of life.

These are thoughts worth thinking - and implementing. Read the article and let me know what you think.


Link

Note - Len also refers to an article by Mike Bishop that can be found here.