Hmmm, I just realized that the last time I updated this blog was the last storm. What kind of theme is this? This snow, like last month's ice, is beautiful. But it come at time when my heart has turned toward spring. It doesn't fit my expectations.
Yesterday I was imaging recreating the United Methodist Church. (What do you do in your free time??) I find it easier to visual patterns, so I went into my pre-loaded graphics. Nothing fit. All the charts and templates, created for business models, follow existing patterns (Duh, my logical mind interjects). But we're reaching for something totally new. That's probably why there's more than a little hesitation about business models, even new ones, framing the way forward. I'm willing to fill in "dashboards" so that leaders can collect better congregational data, but I"m under no illusion that data is the portal to the future. (Even though one of my favorite authors, James Gleick, posits in his latest book that everything real is information).
Something is happening among faith-full people, some folks say "emerging," that doesn't fit existing models. Its just beyond, where we can almost touch it, but not quite. We can almost visualize it, but not yet.
Last Sunday in worship, several people shared things about our present reality that are beyond our little church's control. The earth's population is pushing 7 billion. Technology is offering choices to make our heads spin. We have access to more stuff, more knowledge, more experiences than ever. Shopping is coming to us, via social networking techniques, like groupon and open table, rather us going and searching out what we want. Inter-racial families are no longer unusual. We travel and bring back new customs and insights.
Phyllis Tickle says that about every 500 years culture experiences a sea change that forces faith communities floating on the sea to re-examine their boats. Alot of us get attached to the baggage while others start to scan for the horizon. We can't ignore what's going on outside the boat. (Tickle says that in the "tick-ups" to those sea-changes churches have an every five hundred year garage sale, emptying out our attics of what is not longer useful, and reclaiming things we'd tucked away and forgotten about.).
So no matter what size our own community is, population changes demand that we rethink how we use the earth's resources. And no matter what technology we prefer, what becomes normative in our culture will develop new communication patterns. (Did you know that in many work setting people text or use a social network to set appointments for phone calls? Unexpected calls are startling in some of these sites).
How will we share the gospel as more people get out of the habit of church-shopping? How can we take what God's given us to where people are instead of trying to attract them to where we are? How can we celebrate the diversity of cultures and customs enlivening our communities?
Because its not that what God's given us isn't needed any more. The gospel is not ours to tuck away in an attic hoping that someday someone will come along and dust it off. Some of the ways we've grown accustomed to offering it may become obsolete. But study after study (PEW trust, the National Study of Youth, Barna, ....) finds a growing hunger for spirituality, a way of saying that religious options aren't working for a god-hungry world. There's also a growing hunger to serve. To know that your life matters for something.
So welcome to the garage sale, as we share each other's best memories.
Welcome to the horizon watchers, as we live into God's ever growing kin-dom.
Yesterday I was imaging recreating the United Methodist Church. (What do you do in your free time??) I find it easier to visual patterns, so I went into my pre-loaded graphics. Nothing fit. All the charts and templates, created for business models, follow existing patterns (Duh, my logical mind interjects). But we're reaching for something totally new. That's probably why there's more than a little hesitation about business models, even new ones, framing the way forward. I'm willing to fill in "dashboards" so that leaders can collect better congregational data, but I"m under no illusion that data is the portal to the future. (Even though one of my favorite authors, James Gleick, posits in his latest book that everything real is information).Something is happening among faith-full people, some folks say "emerging," that doesn't fit existing models. Its just beyond, where we can almost touch it, but not quite. We can almost visualize it, but not yet.
Last Sunday in worship, several people shared things about our present reality that are beyond our little church's control. The earth's population is pushing 7 billion. Technology is offering choices to make our heads spin. We have access to more stuff, more knowledge, more experiences than ever. Shopping is coming to us, via social networking techniques, like groupon and open table, rather us going and searching out what we want. Inter-racial families are no longer unusual. We travel and bring back new customs and insights.
Phyllis Tickle says that about every 500 years culture experiences a sea change that forces faith communities floating on the sea to re-examine their boats. Alot of us get attached to the baggage while others start to scan for the horizon. We can't ignore what's going on outside the boat. (Tickle says that in the "tick-ups" to those sea-changes churches have an every five hundred year garage sale, emptying out our attics of what is not longer useful, and reclaiming things we'd tucked away and forgotten about.).
So no matter what size our own community is, population changes demand that we rethink how we use the earth's resources. And no matter what technology we prefer, what becomes normative in our culture will develop new communication patterns. (Did you know that in many work setting people text or use a social network to set appointments for phone calls? Unexpected calls are startling in some of these sites).
How will we share the gospel as more people get out of the habit of church-shopping? How can we take what God's given us to where people are instead of trying to attract them to where we are? How can we celebrate the diversity of cultures and customs enlivening our communities?
Because its not that what God's given us isn't needed any more. The gospel is not ours to tuck away in an attic hoping that someday someone will come along and dust it off. Some of the ways we've grown accustomed to offering it may become obsolete. But study after study (PEW trust, the National Study of Youth, Barna, ....) finds a growing hunger for spirituality, a way of saying that religious options aren't working for a god-hungry world. There's also a growing hunger to serve. To know that your life matters for something.
So welcome to the garage sale, as we share each other's best memories.
Welcome to the horizon watchers, as we live into God's ever growing kin-dom.
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