Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Who Are We To Be?

Life gets busy and things fall to the wayside, things like blogs, but I am back. I wanted to go back to the first entry about the biggest issue facing the church. There is no such thing as one issue facing the church in America today, the multiplicity of issues facing the church is truly staggering. At the core of all these issues however I thing one thing rises above all else. There are many ways to say it, are we more concerned with doing church and not being the church, or are we so concerned with being the church that we lose sight of being Christ-Followers? In the world of the church, which I traffic a majority of my time in, we are all too often caught up in the trappings of what we think church should be, and therefore confuse our image of the church with the Image of God. I don't think God has particular interest in many of the things that we as the church fret about. I do think that God has great concern about the things we wave a passing thought to. In the end, when all is said and done, what matters most is living the life that God gave us through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and now empowers through the Holy Spirit. At its best our lives should be a grace-filled, love-oozing life patterned after the life of Christ. At minimum I think we all need to be able to say we don't know, and acknowledge that none of us has it all together, and we all do things that are in line with the verbal claims we make about out life.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Hmmm...who are we to be? I'll start with who we aren't to be. We aren't to be a church conforming to our media-massaged culture - tasting sweet but not filling, one of dumbing down the Trinity because "Father" isn't politically correct anyway, soft-soaping sacrifice because that makes folks uncomfortable, making church growth an enterprise for its own sake because we have a shiny new building to pay for.

Who are we to be? Could it be we're to be followers who believe what God says because He revealed it in scriptures? Ones who don't need to figure it all out because scripture revelation is enough? Ones who accept Divine Mystery without rationalization or composing our 7-second elevator speech explaining our theory? Ones who are forever changed, grateful, joyous, and motivated by the mysteries of God? Content that we can not explain it all, yet living our faith with excellence?