Thursday, February 01, 2007
Cool churches and their lame brothers and sisters
So a lot of the blogs that I check out are of other worship leaders. I like checking out what other "regular joes" like me are doing at their churches. As I was perusing one of my favs, I was turned on to another discussion about churches being relevant, that was started by this guy.
I usually like these discussions about what works and what doesn't, and what the church should and should not be, but in this case I think it spun about out of control. The writer of the original blog, Andrew Osenga writes about churches being sketchy, and though he did his research about doctrinal beliefs and sermon content he's still pretty erked that churches are "lying to people to tell themt he truth" and maybe rightly so.
My real problem comes when people started making comments on this guy's blog. There's like 17 comments weighing in on whether or not churches should play secular music as a gimic or change logos to be about Jesus instead of the product they were initially selling and everything in between.
Who cares!? My call is here in Fresno/Clovis, to reach people with the gospel of Jesus, and God, the creator and innovator of all things has given us art and film and music as tools to reach a lost and dying world and to glorify Him, so that's what I'm going to do.
Are these conversations beneficial? Sure.
Should we spend time evaluating our methods and our effectivness? Absolutely.
But I worry that we can fall into the trap of raggin on other churches and how they don't do it right instead of being focused on the gospel. After all, non-christians aren't having discussions about whether or not churches are being effective. If they come, they should see Jesus. If it takes U2 or Jack Bauer to do it, then let's go for it.
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2 comments:
I seems that everyone has their own idea of how far is is far enough when contexualizing the gospel to our culture.
Everyone thinks that they are perfect and anyone who contexualizes more then them is a sell-out and anyone contexualizing less then them is a traditionalist-legalist or someone who doesn't care much about the eternal fate of others.
I've had so many conversations about this in so many ways! Sometimes i am really bothered by others who i see as watering down the gospel or careless traditionalists.
I'm sure there are people on each side of the spectrum that would see me as a sell-out or a legalist.
But in the end of the day i think that heavy discsussion is a healthy think. Some of the bad churches out there are the ones that believe the gospel but they either speak truth but can't relate OR relate but can't speak the truth.
I really liked Ed Stetzer's blog post a couple weeks ago called "Humble Missiology" where he talked about the good, bad, and ugly of trying to be relevant today.
http://www.theresurgence.com/ed_blog_2006-06-09_humble_missiology
Great stuff man!! I agree with you totally. We, as a church, need to stop lookin within ourselves and look towards our God for direction and leadership. Once we do that then we will see that it's the world that needs our help, not whether or not or church service is 'up to par' with our comfortable mindsets.
Thanks for the blog love man. I hope you enjoy the reads.
Shane
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