Not sure where I stand on this guy… it would be very difficult to stay somewhere were I never received any blessings in the form of encouragement, fulfillment, purpose, or fellowship. But at the same time I think it is impossible to search out a place that will deliver blessings and then go there. The first problem is my own discretion; I don’t even know how to choose good blessings for myself. The best things in my life I certainly did not give to myself. If someone doesn’t think they have any blessings and they don’t have anything to be thankful for, then there are probably other issues at play. That said; I do believe that the local church should be a place where God’s people can be blessed in dynamic ways that are usually mysterious to everyone, including the person that is blessed. That is to say that your blessings should not amount to a health and wealth gospel that you can pile up in your garage and show all of your friends. But perhaps that comment goes without saying. I guess I struggle with this one, I would say that I do expect to be blessed but I also expect the blessings to come after I have suffered for a while and maybe it will seem like a long while to me. I think this is one of those conditional promises of God that works out in strange ways.

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When was the last time you were truly inspired? Last Sunday (mountain biking with my brother), and November 16th.

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Well there is definitely a well known formula. Dan was telling me a while ago about a new trend in Nashville, where non-Christians write and record Christian music because it sells. I don’t know man; I have a hard time connecting with much of it anymore. Maybe I am all jacked up and my heart needs to be tenderized so I can appreciate its obvious praiseness again… but I just really don’t listen to it if I have a choice.

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Tradition
Fellowship
Family expectation
Guidance
Obligation
Sense of involvement in something bigger than yourself
Purpose
Community
Fulfillment
It’s a commandment
I don’t know anything else
Responsibilities
Commitment
Desire to serve
Friendships
Respect
Positive influences for ourselves or our children
Teaching
Help
Knowledge of God
Corporate worship experience
Communion
Entertainment
Good music
Reenergizing atmosphere
Meet chics
Meet dudes
Find a spouse
Example to others
Like to use their equipment
Like to help with something
Funny skits
Dancing girls
Basic needs support
Share burdens
Pray
Petition prayer
Ask advice
Outlet for talents
Desire to be needed
Desire to belong to something
Biblical knowledge
Bible explanation
Wisdom of elders
Meet interesting people
Feel like you are doing God a favor
Need forgiveness
Want to know if it’s all true
Believe the church can help people you know
Questions about God
Questions about the Bible
Spiritual atmosphere
Like to be around Christians
Something to do
Want to know about the afterlife
Need the support to stay clean
Accountability
Like to talk about churchy stuff
Like the respect of being a “godly” person
Want to know who God is

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I think this depends on how you answered the question “why do we go?” Much of the church experience seems to be a fairly academic, informative, encouragement session. If we are ready for what they are offering than I think it can have a very beneficial presence in our lives, regardless of how routine it is. But I also believe that many messages and church experiences become repetitiously trite because we did not do anything with last weeks information and encouragement. There is still a pick me up, but it is much smaller each time. Eventually it becomes a reminder of the way you might have felt at one time, and even that feels good after a week of forgetting. So week after week we start to think it is the service that is getting us through. We get the same information, but without any real points of action for us to jump on. Or the things they give us to do are fairly well prone to an occasional failure. Read your Bible every day, pray every morning and evening, witness to someone, invite someone to come to the next event. Any failure in a week is viewed as a back sliding of sorts compared to the week before and we need another pick me up. Then you become kind of committed like a spiritual AA junkie. You need the service each week like an AA member needs their meetings in order to survive. This allows you to remain functional, but you are hardly thriving.

I also believe that all of the weekly information is an overload without any draining outlets in between. I think we have so much information that it is overflowing our experience and we start to gag on the incoming information each week. I believe that our life experience is kind of like our capacity or a container and the information that we put in it is like water. If you keep pouring information in, eventually it fills up the container of experience and it either spills over with new information or pushes out some of the old information. I believe this makes for an information heavy spiritual life that is not given near as many stretching experiential moments compared to the information filling moments. We need a chance to do something with what we have been told. Take time to enact the last truth you have accepted. Do the risky thing that allows it to become a part of you. Once you find yourself in the middle of a new messy experience because you acted on a previous truth, then you will be ready for a new truth to help with the new experience. But if you are given all the truths before you have the matching experiences it will be too easy to dismiss them or take them lightly, but since you have heard you think you know and this traps you from ever really knowing by taking the mysterious risk of doing.

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I think the Church is simple, but doing church is very complex. The church environment in America is kind of like this science gone awry cross between a family business, a family, and corporate America. You are never quite sure how you should treat it in any given circumstance, until you get your hand slapped… and then you know the family did not belong in that place or the business did not belong in that other place. I suppose it will be the impossible to escape circumstance of every culture that is evangelized to find some way of carrying out Christian principles and mandates (doing church) within the context of their own culture. Is our culture more or less conducive to doing church correctly, I don’t know. It seems very imperial to me right now, and my current backlash of individuality… is that just the entrepreneur in me? I think that the basic tenants of the church are pretty simple, the great commandment and the great commission. Doing them to anyone’s satisfaction seems to be the complex part… hence all this discussion. I am sure that someone can come up with a more Biblically accurate and theologically sound definition of what the Church is and what it should be doing. There sure are a lot of books published on the topic each year.

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I can’t remember. Who is that an indictment against… the church or me or no one? Many times I have struggled with the guilt of just not feeling it or being apathetic or cynical about going to church. It’s one of those things that requires commitment and discipline to pay off. It’s like working out, you don’t always like it, but the more you do it the better you become, bit by bit, and when you look back someday you are transformed. Like a savings account. That is what I have been told anyway. And I suppose I buy that and I even believe it. For me, the problem is that the church seems to keep demanding me to have an emotionally charged spiritual transformation upon their request each week at the designated worship time. Many times I have been encouraged to “go to that broken place before God right now” this usually comes after a couple of songs and some sound preaching on brokenness. The last time it happened I immediately felt that old familiar conjuring mindset falling into place. I knew how to get emotional, I knew how to be moved or allow myself to be moved. Then I started thinking, “why am I here again”. Then I started looking around and seeing other people’s responses. I didn’t feel like them. Some of the things I saw happening, I didn’t even know how to feel like that. What would it take for me to feel like that I wondered? I know I have experienced something like that before. Is it just that this atmosphere is no good for me? Could it be that this is the perfect moment for these other people to get in touch with their brokenness before God, but not for me? They accepted the videos, music, scripture reading, the bands final pleas, and the mood lighting as some sort of a spiritual conduit to God? Or are they just more tender hearted than me to begin with. Why am I thinking about them and not myself, or forget myself, I am supposed to be thinking about the awesomeness of God right now. So this is my usual thought process in the middle of what looks like a transforming moment for others. The last transforming moment that I had was at the end of a week of doing all the same things I usually do in a week but having them all end in some sort of emotional beet down for reasons I don’t even now understand. That weekend I spent about two hours walking around my neighborhood in the middle of the night running all the restlessness through my mind. Then I had this strange moment of peace were I was confronted with my simple responsibility before God. Trust Him and be obedient. That was my moment, and it was better than anything that I have ever experienced at a church service.

I started hanging out a bit at Catholic church that’s near me. They run the place different than what I am used to. The hours of operation are longer and they have this very long opportunity after a service to linger in their building. They have one room that is all full of candles. I think you are supposed to light a candle and pray for someone. I went in there for a while and started thinking about people in my life as I watched the different candles burn. I was there long enough to loose track of time… it felt really good. I didn’t care how long I was there. I sorted through some things. I think I even prayed sincerely for some people. Not sure what that has to do specifically with transforming, but somehow it seemed to fit.

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No. Programs I will translate to ministry for the church members, local believers, and those people who are comfortable going to a church on their own or with a friend. Missions would refer to anything that is for people in or out of our community who would not have a natural occasion to come in through the church doors. I really don’t think we get how big this is. I believe that, for the most part, the local church is so saturated with its own up keep that it really doesn’t have time or resources for anyone else. I know the whole think outside of the box phrasing is as trite as trite gets, but I don’t think the church has any idea how to think outside of the church grounds. All events, outreaches, small group ministries, and activities are designed to do one thing. Get people to come to our church. Once they are here it will be impossible for them to not get saved, grow spiritually, and someday invite their friends to do the same. This is hardly a missional mindset. Again, I am stealing much of the thunder from the Westwinds CD series. If anyone is interested, let me know and I will pass it on (I’ll try to find it online or get permission to put it online). Todd thinks I may be indoctrinated, perhaps, listen to it and let me know if I need to be rebalanced.

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I don’t really know about the church I am currently attending, every other church that I have been to seems not to. The church leadership was always leery about doing anything official with another church do to doctrinal differences. There seemed to be the continued concern that we differentiate ourselves from every other church around and this means we don’t do anything that would make it confusing as to who we are and who they are. We don’t agree on some very important issues and we do not want to send mixed signals to people in the community. Like anyone in the community would have cared or noticed anyway. When I worked with the youth group at my old church we would try to do something with neighboring churches. It took a lot more effort. Most of the youth pastors did not seem to have time to get together with other churches; for the most part we didn’t either. We would do one or two events a year with another church. We really had no connection with their week in and week out existence, just an occasional event. Even those few moments were good though. It’s amazing how much of a culture shock it was to engage a church that was two miles away. It’s kind of funny when I think about it. My old church was on a street with at least six other churches, three of them in a consecutive row. We didn’t do anything with them. One time a few kids from another church came to our youth group for a while because they didn’t have one. But that was initiated through kids hanging out at school; hardly an alliance amongst the spiritual leaders of a community, or maybe the kids were the leaders.

When I went on a missions trip a couple of summers ago to Atlanta I remember trying to bring up this discussion with the leadership of the inner-city mission organization we were staying with. They were all about overcoming issues of race and class, but when I asked him about teaming up with other churches… that seemed to be an insurmountable problem. He claimed that it was very difficult to align churches on issues and it was much more pragmatic to just do what you can with your own team of people. They were kind of like a spiritual gorilla warfare group. I believe that they did and continue to do a lot of good for the people in the community. The un-churched people were their focus and that is who they tended to. They would serve other churches in the area, go in and clean or whatever they needed. But they were not able to unify with them and team up on initiatives for the community on either spiritual or material grounds. This just seemed odd, since this groups greatest need was for facilities and support. Both of which the other churches in the area seemed to have in some way or another. But I was jus there for one week, what do I know?

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Sometimes, but who’s fault is it? How careful should the church be to stay clear of the law of supply and demand? Many churches orchestrate their style, teaching, and approach based on a certain amount of felt need. See a need and rise up to meet it. Is this a bad thing? It can be an entry point into people’s lives. The middle class church often struggles with what that entry point is for the common American. They have everything, so what can we offer them. The biggest problem or demand of Americans seems to be for purpose and fulfillment. The church has tried to offer the solution, or is it just a solution panacea that Americans do not deserve. People want a reason and a meaning for their existence. I believe the Church has an answer for this, but the solution may not be something that can be packaged up in a Sunday morning service. Perhaps we are too willing to trade people’s anxiety for church duties, responsibilities, and your own slice of the eternal fulfillment pie.

I used to think about my anxiety concerning life ambition, career, work like this. “I want to know that I am contributing to something good and important even if I can’t see the benefit or feel anything in the process.” I am pretty sure that I even said that a few times. I believed that ministry, church service, missions, and other forms of God work could give me this assurance and that would be good enough for my existence. Well, maybe I am just insatiable, but it wasn’t and its not. What I want is this mysterious knowing and exchange with God Himself. I don’t even want to call it a relationship with Him, because that terminology has become trite for me and I don’t really know how one goes about relating to God anyway. I think being broken has something to do with it, and it seems to take a while.

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If the streets are the local community I would have to say that we are probably not. Some churches have a specific call to be intimately involved with their immediate community environment, but I think most churches are more concerned with their own affairs than those of their community. I think it is safe to say that most communities would not notice much difference if the local churches in the area closed their doors and stopped having services. I would also contend that most churches keep their membership so busy with the duties and demands of the official services, events, and building up keep that there is little time or energy left for the surrounding communities. The members who are most excited about being involved in the efforts of the ministry are likely to be the most occupied with the responsibilities of the local church. I would say that most church leadership hours are spent with the concerns of the local church and not those of the surrounding community. Many events and programs developed by the local church are intended to be for the community, especially youth programs, and I do believe that a lot of good comes from them. But we still deal with the community on our terms. We are going to hold a service or event at our church at this time, okay now how do we get the community to show up. I have not experienced much taking it out into the streets, except on missions trips maybe when I went to some foreign place and took it out into the streets of territory occupied by other local churches.

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