How many ministers are actively working on the 20th century?

[grumpy rev]

Commandment 11
Thou shalt not use loaded, negative questions; it is rude and always stops communications dead.
Therefore, thou shalt not use questions such as:
...Are you still beating your wife?
...Are you still hiding your wedding and funeral fees from Rvenue Canada?
...How many church consultants show up drunk and produce reports filled with expensive platitudes?
...How many ministers are actively working on the 20th century?

[Worship Warrior]

OK, but how would you phrase the question so it unblocked communication!

[wally]

One important word that Mary uses..   "authentic"

I've been thinking about this word. Interestingly, being real or authentic in who one is turns out to be far more difficult in the 21st century than one has ever imagined.

The youth and young adults are constantly looking for "authentic" church. It has become so cliche that I am not sure if anyone can define it because in this age of segmentation, what is authentic for one group appears to be inauthentic for another. I think that by searching for "authentic" one is looking for something that touches her heart as being real.

The danger of this is that if experiences are not meaningful to one then, they are dismissed--not necessarily as not being real but as those that have little or no value to that specific individual. Take this further and you can be misled to search for reflections or images of oneself or those experiences which were meaningful to that person in particular. It becomes nothing more than a search for validation of self and reinforcement of one's being. This is the dangerous side. Often one finds a church which is "authentic" meaning it reflects his/her value, desire, want, behaviour, experience, and hope: it is all about "me". The whole rush to 21st century is so frustrating because many of us have seen this feeding of very selfish motives behind what we present as worship experience. This is what Stercus, Grumpy and the horse are kicking and screaming about.

But I am more with Mary. There is this "authentic" which is all about being spiritually mature and accepting who one is as a human being and living the life in a real way touching, accepting and sharing with others as Christians--not necessarily perfect Christians but ones with warts, brokenness and humility of knowing ones place in relation to God. In this I know Stercus and the horse, even Grumpy with all the world's reluctance, agree.

Stercus' point that liturgy (as the work of the people of God) is meaningful also need to be highlighted because I think that worship is essentially the work of all those who are present, not simply that of leaders.  When everyone participated and contributed with all their hearts, minds and souls, those who come for the first time are confronted with the Word that has become flesh dwelling among us. This work of God's people reflect those who gather--sadly this means that many who come are turned away because they only experience the work of strangers which offer no part for new comers. New comers find that there are no places for them to contribute and participate with  their gifts and talents; they are shut out until they conformed to the ways of those who have power and control. The liturgy in this case is owned by few and new comers find no avenues to contribute.

I am so glad to see Mary finally is able to take part in the liturgy of this church not only by being there but also by contributing and her participating being welcomed--Bible Study and all.

For me the struggle of building a 21st century church is not so much to be the hip church where the young love to come for being their egos inflated and massaged; their needs met without demands; their values validated, but a gathering in which everyone comes to work together to honour and serve God and love neighbours with all of one's might under God's will.

Here's a quote from NY Times which has nothing to do with anything we are discussing... "Casey (product manager at Google) mentioned (in Search Marketing Expo West in Santa Clara) that at Google there is a “solid separation between church and state,” i.e., product development and monetization. In some so called 21st century, this is what is actually happening as we speak.

[Worship Warrior]

Very interesting post Wally. I don't feel that we (Talkers) necessarily get at each others throats, rather, we do at times come from our personal definition of terms. For instance, when we talk about worship style we often think that traditional and contemporary styles are either good or bad, yet probably all of us have experiences both excellence and tragedy in both, and we most likely have our own preferred style. The question we really need to answer in every service we perform is whether or not we have opened the Word and made those present feel that we genuinely are concerned for each and every one of them. One of the key elements is whether we wrap the experience in terms people understand or whether we cloak it in the mysteries of ecclesiastical language we have learned in seminary.

I once interviewed members of a congregation on what they thought the layout in the bulletin was intended to do. Most people thought the minister just laid it out so they all knew what was coming next, and only a few saw that there was an implied liturgical structure, and only a very few saw it as teaching tool to help folks have a structured approach to worshiping God. The trouble many of us have is not recognizing our training in "proper" process at times prevents us from communicating more effectively with ordinary people.

Pastors who, for whatever reason, supply on a regular basis, will attest to each congregation having a unique form and structure to both service and bulletin. Even some congregations in multi-point charges, can have very different bulletins and service structure, the point being that we can't easily judge which is the more effective way forward. What we need to be concerned with is whether whatever we do brings more people into a relationship with God through the Risen Christ.

Authentic congregations exist to build the Kingdom and to save souls, and those are the only items on the agenda. Some measure success by numbers, and others by the strength of loving and open relationships within their communities, but unless these pass the sniff test of the visitor, they are not doing their job.

Some clergy take the concept of being set aside far too literally, and unfortunately some believe this makes them superior mortals. A few minister in large buildings, big enough to house their egos, and many people walk away from congregations that pander to their pastor when the needs outside cry out for help.

Younger people have many faults, but no more than anyone who has gone before. While we see more individual concerns and values, that only indicates how great our commission is to reach them in the name of Christ. For all their faults they have acute BS sensors, not just to religion but to every organization they interface with, and they are much more likely to reject anything contrived or hypocritical than past generations. Authentic organizations have transparency, and our younger people make themselves very transparent (Facebook, etc). They want that in return for their vulnerability, and they recognize ulterior motives in a second.

That is the nature of the 21st century, and guess what? that is the nature of the Jesus model from the first. Unless we strip away all the trapping and forms of what we consider "Worship rightly conducted". It's easy for us to condemn the society we live in today and bemoan the lack of values but let us not forget that the church, capital C, is the one that has stood still over the last few decades, losing its influence and the respect of society, crumbling under the hidden scandals of the past, and turning the cheek to the onslaught of secularism. That is the reality of the 21st century, and these are the conditions we must overcome if we hope to in any way, rise from the ruins we currently wag our fingers at.

P.S. I have just fed the horse, and his hoofness agrees with what I've written. In fact he claims I've plagiarized his regal musings.       

[wally]

Oh, dear, that royal steed of WW will be neighing for the rest of the year after he reads a new york times article on education and why it is failing because it addresses the very same questions that we have been mulling over on these pages.

WW, read it carefully. It has very interesting insight for those of us in a parallel institution called "church". Here is a taste

No professional feels completely prepared on her first day of work, but while a new lawyer might work under the tutelage of a seasoned partner, a first-year teacher usually takes charge of her classroom from the very first day. One survivor of this trial by fire is Amy Treadwell, a teacher for 10 years who received her master’s degree in education from DePaul University, a small private university in Chicago. She took courses in children’s literature and on “Race, Culture and Class”; one on the history of education, another on research, several on teaching methods. She even spent one semester as a student teacher at a Chicago elementary school. But when she walked into her first job, teaching first graders on the city’s South Side, she discovered a major shortcoming: She had no idea how to teach children to read. “I was certified and stamped with a mark of approval, and I couldn’t teach them the one thing they most needed to know how to do,” she told me.

Sounds like the very same troubles facing our graduates.
It has most of what Mary has suggested from the beginning of the fora on church growth.

[grumpy rev]

Could there possibly be a helpful suggestion in today's Lectionary Gospel reading, from Luke 13:1-9?
The owner of the vineyard comes across a fig tree that yields no fruit, and instruct the workers to remove it.
The gardener, however, offers to put manure around it and wait to see if it will then bear fruit.

All well and good, but perhaps there can be too much of a good thing.
Is it possible that there is so much manure being tossed around these days that the workers in the vineyard are finding it difficult to get a foot hold, let alone do the work of the harvest?
 

[MaryK]

I think we have a whole lot of people saying "eewwww, I'm not touching that manure".  I'm an M.Div. - I don't do that manure thing at all.

[MaryK]

and maybe this will help - what I find missing in many churches.

http://www.nytimes.com//2010/03/08/opinion/08douthat.html

[Split Infinity]

Our religious leaders no longer preach the renunciation of the world - from MaryK's article

Oh, my.

Very few churches would succeed with such a world-renouncing message.

I am happy to be associated (loosely) with a vibrant (but smallish) inner-city church.  They are actually quite open, even to gays, different theologies, the abject poor, drug addicts, prostitutes ... the list goes on.

Not the usual presbyterian church, I am sure.  But one that will probably succeed in it's context.

As best I can tell, they have made it into the 21st century.

Hurray.

[wally]

So, Grumpy, what are you covering up with your fig leaf?

[grumpy rev]

It isn't a fig leaf, it is a kilt, and a borrowed one at that!
So, Wally, what are you covering up with your manure?   

[wally]

as long as it's not just sporran, Grumpy.

Let's see...  If you lift up the first layer, you will find more of it until you excavate to the bottom layer which is about a knee deep... can't use the right word to describe it on such folksy forum as this. 

[wally]

Here's an interesting diversion, about losing control after growing so fast. Not what you think. It's worthwhile your browsing time.

[wally]

Here's an interesting view of Generation Next from Time Magazine... The generation gap between young and old....

[Worship Warrior]

But they are also unconventionally conventional. They are, for example, the least officially religious of any modern generation, and fully 1 in 4 has no religious affiliation at all. On the other hand, they are just as spiritual, just as likely to believe in miracles and hell and angels as earlier generations were. They pray about as much as their elders did when they were young--all of which suggests that they have not lost faith in God, only in the institutions that claim to speak for him.


I had already seen the report, but the part highlighted is essentially what this string is about.

"they have not lost faith in God, only in the institutions that claim to speak for him."

Put simply this generation is not convinced that the established church nourishes their spirituality. And I wouldn't be surprised the upper end of this study reached up into the 40 somethings as well.

The problem is that the established church tends to reject the last couple of generations and has failed to connect with the growing mass of the unchurched. Pastors have  pretty good job security in the PCC, unlike the vast majority of congregation members in the modern workplace, and we all know that many cover their distaste for evangelism with that old chestnut "We're not a business, we rely on the Holy Spirit to guide us forward". It seems to me that so many are stuck in the glory years of the 50s and 60s, and they actually believe folks will miraculously start coming back. The truth is more likely that those who are out there have never been part of a church to begin with, or they are people who left a church and have no intention of going back to what drove them out in the first place.

So, the topic still stands. How many ministers are actively working on the 20th century?