Seems Like God…

Okay, this isn’t a very original thought….

What is it that mainline churches, and by that I mean those churches/denominations that acknowledge the validity of a variety of approaches to the Divine, can offer “the public” to attract them into fellowship?

After all, if we’re saying that we’re not uniquely qualified to lead people into relationship with God; that others, using different tactics, different words – including exclusive words – can also do the job, why should people listen to us? Why should they want to be part of our community?

See? I said it wasn’t very original. How many times has this question been voiced in congregations large and small? More importantly – what is our response to it?

It seems to me that the mainline, inclusive church is stuck on the horns of a dilemma of its own making. It knows that it wants/needs to move beyond the “traditional”, literalist way of understanding Christianity, and yet it can’t quite figure out how to do that while still honouring its heritage.

And so it ends up forever staddling an increasingly wide divide between its past and its future; hoping that, before the gap becomes so wide that it falls in, that the past (read intransigent old people in the pews) will go away.

This, as anyone waiting for Great Aunt Matilda to die so they can inherit the millions she has squirreled away under her mattress, is not a very profitable way to live one’s life. Nor is it fair to Matilda, who spent a lifetime stuffing that mattress. After all, if her way of doing things was so bad, how come she was so successful at it?

So how do we balance our respect for Matilda with our need for change?

No one would expect a business to stand still, producing the same product in the same way that it did fifty years ago. Classic cars may be nice to look at, for instance, but would you really want to drive one every day? That doesn’t mean we lose our respect for a 65 Corvette convertible, far from it. We admire and respect the engineering that went into it. But we don’t propose to open a business building them and promoting them as the family car for the new millennium.

The same is true of our churches. We can honour/respect the traditions and those who hold them, that built the church in years past, while at the same time opening ourselves to new expressions of the Spirit of God as it moves amongst us.

And no, I’m not talking about cosmetic changes like adding a drum solo to the morning music. Nor am I talking about “alternative” services that take place on different days at different times – for most people “church” is what happens Sunday morning if it happens at all.

There are several ways to offer alternatives while at the same time honouring long standing traditions. Each will be as unique as the congregation that undertakes it. And yet each will bear some identifable hallmarks.

Over the next few articles, I’ll offer a few thoughts on some of these that I’ve encountered over the years.

More importantly, I invite you, dear reader, to share your story with others here, either by leaving a comment, or by emailing me directly. After all, its by sharing and learning from each other that we truly embody the relationship with each other and God that we’re called to.

David