State of the Evangelical Church

Check out ths post at Tall Skinny Kiwi.  Click on the link to the Star-Telegram article it references, and then cut and past the link to the Sally Morgenthaler article found in one of the comments on the post.  Any thoughts?  Frankly, I found the whole thing disturbing.

Comments

[Boyink]

But by 1998 something had shifted. The set-up crews weren't looking quite as fresh as they once were. Why would they, playing "portable church" 52 weeks a year, year after hopeful year? Of course, they were waiting for the "promised land"—the gleaming megaplex their pastor had envisioned on those 20 farm acres south of town.

Ouch. Reading that I feel a bit, well, stupid. Stupid for thinking - that the time - that we were involved in something fresh and unique, only to see now that it was so formulaic that this author can so accurately describe it without having been there (unless she was undercover? ;)

Overall though - Sally's article does a great job at articulating many of the reasons for our exit from the big church. When the cry from the pulpit changed from "Bring people to Jesus" to "Bring people to 'big church name" and outreach efforts weren't "Bringing Jesus to Romania" but rather "'big church name in Romania" it was our time to exit in search of something more focused on the Gospel.

However I'm worried that the formula is being re-worked again at the small church, just on a smaller scale. Maybe not so much intentionally, but things necessarily change with the acquisition of a building and I think some of our initial energy and passion for bringing Jesus to people is getting redirected to the material concerns.

Howevever - what's really hitting me hard at this particular moment is a more personal challenge. I've been far too comfortable at letting whatever church I'm in handle the evangelism, and not taking personal responsibility for doing my part to help further the Gospel. I need to change that, and that's a bit frightening.

[Ed Schief]

It's so easy to give away your power to evangelize, give the weight of it to what amounts to a system. Real evangelism is scary and comes with no guarantees. And there's such a push everywhere to sort of codify and define exactly what 'church' means.