My fifteen year old daughter Mary Ruth and I went shopping on Christmas Eve day. Mary wanted to get her mother an electric screwdriver as a stocking stuffer. (I would have opted for perfume but what do I know?) Mary went on line on her laptop to find the screwdriver and the Target that still had one in stock. When we got in the store I started looking for the hardware aisle and taking charge said, “I think it’s this way,”
Mary Ruth accessed the store’s website on her iPod touch, found the item and said, “No, Daddy, it’s in aisle 34.”
I said, “How do you know?” She rolled her eyes, held up her iPod touch and using the in-store GPS app headed for aisle 34 with her out of touch father in tow.
It seems as if the church is wandering down aisles familiar to us but out of touch with the emergent culture. Like the servant of the Lord we might feel we labor in vain spending our strength for nothing, working twice as hard as we ever did and seeing fewer people in the pews. For those of us who remember the good old days of denominational loyalty, when people attended out of a sense of duty and entertainment value was the last thing you’d look for in Sunday morning worship, we may indeed identify with the one deeply despised, abhorred by the nations, the slave of rulers and be discouraged to the point of despair. But when like the servant we remember our cause and reward is with God it is not too light a thing that we should remember the remnant, the faithful few who remain and proclaim the word that is a light to the nations and salvation to the ends of the earth. And I’m thinking it’s a good thing to have a daughter with an iPod touch otherwise I might have had to ask for directions which means we’d still be at Target looking for aisle 34.
The great commission told us to, "Go...." We need to go into the emergent culture and bring Christ's message to it, not sit back in our mostly empty pews in self righteous pride that we are the faithful remnant. We need to engage the emergent culture. We need to communicate Christ's message, not just proclaim it. We need to meet people on their turf, not just unlock our doors, and wait for them to come to us. We can't expect them to learn our culture and our style and become just like us, so we can comfortably worship together and keep our denomination just as it has been our whole lives.
ReplyDeleteI agree completely and our pastoral staff at Calvary has stopped coming to the office and instead works in public spaces so that we can have daily conversation with those who are not “members” of Calvary. But not all the boomers and pre-modern folks have died yet and they still occupy our pews and our call is to minister to them as well. It’s not “either or” but “both and.”
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