Losing Faith in Church

Below is a great commentary on worship I found today on from jordoncooper.com. It is called "losing faith in church".

Jordon says:

On Sunday, as I was behind the pulpit, church stopped making sense to me. It wasn't the sermon, I was reading some announcements but I felt that I should not be up there. The service opened amazingly but here I was, grinding it to a halt making mention of some church administration. It stunk. Not only that, the worship service seemed to sputter a bit. The worship leaders were good, there was a lot of people there but I was dreading going up to talk after that.

When I did go up, I looked out and people looked disengaged. Before the service, Wendy had gotten some Coke, Diet Coke, and Ginger Ale from the upstairs for after the service. I could see it on the back counter. I am not sure why but I just asked everyone to get up, chat with someone and go and get a pop of a coffee (we seemed to have neglected the tea drinkers). Everyone got up and almost everyone in the church went and got a pop or a coffee. I was expecting the feedback to be really negative after church and in this mornings church board meeting but everyone sat down and we had about 30 seconds of pop cans opening (if we could time them, I think you could almost get a hand bell choir sounding thing going) and the whole demeaner of the place changed. Body language changed, people were sitting up, the kids were quieter and the entire mood of the entire church changed.

It hit me while I was taking the icy trip home that by tightly integrating the sermon in with participartory worship and adding the announcements in, no matter how creative... we were stopping some natural flows in how we interact and worship with God in church. The artificial break between worship and teaching allowed people to change gears a bit mentally and I thought engage a little more with my sermon.

The discussion with the Board was interesting. I talked about some pretty radical changes in worship for our rural church. I talked about how the medium is the message and the wineskin and how our wineskin is 100 years old. Or as Eugene Peterson says, a cracked wine bottle. No matter how well you care for a heavily used medium or wine bottle, you are going to get the occasional nick in it and it may be cracked.

I think we get caught up doing church services instead of worship. We get stuck in our medium and it becomes our message. We say that the Amish don't use technology, of course they do. 1860's technology. They were doing okay and they got stuck in the 1860's. A friend of mine said his church was doing great but they got bogged down in the early 1990's. Most evangelical churches bogged down in the 1950's and now that medium is becoming a message. I heard a leader of an evangelical denomination use what God had done in the past as a reason for why they should survive in the future (I was hoping for some vision). All I could think was that this was the denomination that was trying to reach Bob Dole.

The other thing I talked about on Sunday was Leonard Sweet's images statement of the "Swinger"

There is a new theory among physicists about how the swing works. Previous theories revolved around the principle of "parametric instability," which pivoted the action of swinging at the middle of the arc, and the rocking forward into a higher center of gravity. Physicist William Case, while watching how children actually swing, has now posited a new principle which physicists call "driven harmonic oscillator." The key to the swing is not in the middle of the arc, but at each end of the arc, where and when the swingers at the same time lean back and throw their feet forward.

That's my image statement. As a historian of Christianity, I want the church to lean back–not just back to the 50s, but all the way back through 2000 years of history, all the way back until we're, in the words of that Sunday School song, "Leaning, Leaning, Leaning on the Everlasting Arms." But at the same time and I do mean simultaneously, we must use that energy and power that comes from "learning to lean" to kick forward into the future and Carpe Manana.

I may remember the pop cans opening but all the feedback I got from the weekend all had to do with Len's metaphor. I think I must have used it before but this time the Holy Spirit had it and kind of drove it home. It was kind of cool. The board was still talking about it today.

A lot of good things came out of Board meeting today... the church is going to make soda available and we liked our "intermission"... we all have a growing dislike for our photocopier and it is time to call in the mob to make a "hit" on outdated office equipment, the Board also lead with a servant's heart on some issues in our community, we are looking forward to our town wide ALPHA blitz... and we are cooking up some sacred cows and expecting some excellent hamburgers.