Jesus's teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did. If our churches aren't appealing to younger brothers, they must be more full of elder brothers than we'd like to think.
by Tim Keller in The Prodigal God, 14-15.
Who do you think we attract?
Who maybe SHOULD we be attracting?
Why don't we?
I find 3 words that Keller uses to be the heart of the problem he describes: "attract", "draw", and "preaching."
ReplyDeleteThe first 2 are action words describing people coming closer to us. The last, preaching, is passive.
Jesus attracted and drew crowds in his preaching, but he did it by going OUT to the broken and marginal.
In our world we attempt to draw and attract by inviting people IN to hear our preaching.
I think we attract good people, not necessarily buttoned down. People seeking to understand how we can leave our comfort zone to go OUT. I'll admit I am not good at the OUT of my comfort zone part.
Dude, does that not just make you want to abandon "church" as it currently exists? Forget tucked in shirts and sticky bun coffee, let's go make something happen.
ReplyDeleteOh, and my high score on xboxpaperplane is 149.228m. What's yours?
My high score is 189.669
ReplyDeleteCan't get close to that again though.
There are lots of things that make me want to go do something out of the box and different. But I'm also pretty intriqued with how to make that stuff happen where we are.
How do we do that?
I think it starts with people being real with each other. Having authentic relationships in the congregation where we can expose our weaknesses will prove that we aren't the 'perfect Christian' and we don't have it all together. I don't know if that's something that can be accomplished from the pulpit but small groups would be an awesome way to start! (like that plug? :-) )
ReplyDeleteI do believe that we are called on to go out, but we must not underestimate the importance of community. Unless we, as a Christian community, are nurtured and taught, we will not have the strength and courage to go out into the world beyond our community. It's just like the flight attendants who tell us when explaining the drop-down oxygen masks on a plane... put the mask on yourself before assisting others. We need the love and support of our Christian brothers and sisters.
ReplyDelete