i’m starting to think sometimes that church planters don’t so much want to plant a church to spread the church, but sometimes to escape the faults that the church down the street has fallen into. and i completely understand that…i’m guilty of it at times. i don’t so much want to work to fix anything or disciple anyone, but just merely start from scratch believing that my strategy and style are cooler and better and more relevant and will last longer.

but here’s the thing. yes, you wrote what i’ve been thinking for a bit now. vision is good, but Jesus is better. Don’t forget vision and goals, but if Christ is not at the center of it, and yes…presently as well as down the road…then its just another country club church, only with a more hip, searching, probably-fair-trade-coffee-drinking clientele.

so yes and amen. when you plant a church…whenever and wherever, i want to come visit.

(this comment posted from one of those 20 million iPhones)

I guess what I’m saying is that we need to clean up the transfusion process. We’ve got a great product; often times it’s just covered in our filth. We ought to sterilize the equipment (which I suppose would look something like cleaning up the sin in our lives since we are indeed His instruments) and check the purity of our product against a perfect match (the Scriptures). I don’t know if we can do much more than that: increase Christ’s blood and decrease my own (Jn 3:30). Also, forgive my poor metaphor. I hope there is a shard of truth that can be salvaged in the midst of my babbling.

Also, in response to jrs:
I agree that nature does indeed proclaim the works of the Lord (Rom 1:20, Ps 19:1-6). However we often treat nature similarly to how a Chicagoan treats the noise from the elevated train that runs next to their apartment. In infancy, I’m sure that the nearly-deafening noise of the L would often upset our Chicagoan, causing him/her to devote their attention to it every time it passed by. As our Chicagoan would mature, they might ask others about the noise. These “wiser” elders would reply, “It is nothing to trifle with. Pay no heed to it and soon you’ll forget all about it. Now go play with your toys.” So the cycle begins, the L would continue to pass by the apartment and our Chicagoan would grow stronger and stronger in their resistance to the L. Now in adulthood, our beloved Chicagoan can fall into the deepest of slumbers as the L passes by and never bat an eye. It is in our Chicagoan’s ignorance of the uncomfortable and playing with toys of triviality that our problem lies. Even though the stones cry out (Lk 19:40) our hedonism can always find a way to drown it out–allowing us to rest easy…for now.

I agree, there was a gradual paradigm shift to get things where they are. I don’t think most people set out to see how “we can screw this Christian thing up.” But it is what it is now, and I do think it’s time for a not-so-subtle reality check about where we’re at.

And I knew someone would call me out on the “production values” of God. As a believer, I understand nature is a demonstration of God’s power–and it speaks loudly. But for most people, I think God on a loudspeaker each night, shooting meteors at the Earth, with plagues and locusts and all that stuff–that would get their attention a bit more. Just like Jesus could have come in power and authority as a King waging war, but was a humble servant. Our methods of attraction are a bit different than God’s.

my thought would be to call us back to understand the things we forget so often. in the movie pulp fiction, a character named butch hops into a cab to get away from a fight he just won. in his conversation with the driver, he tells her that his name is american, so it has no meaning. it’s just a name to him.

but it does have meaning. we may not directly imply meaning or even worse lose the meaning over time, but things started out on purpose. the service christians gather weekly to perform is a service to god, not themselves. in german, they keep the clarity in the word “Gottesdienst,” or “god’s service.”

so in all that, my thought to yours would be an echo: figure out why we consume what we consume and remember how it is really supposed to be.

Right on. Great analysis.

The Church is meant to be a community – a community that shares a public life, not “similar” private lives. These services that we call “church” today were meant to be times where “the Church” would come before God as a community that shared this public life and worship the one who adopted them into this new body. Today that is hardly the image that anyone sees (nor can see). Our identity is with our country and we shape our lives through it fundamental ideas: there are “conservative” Christians and “liberal” Christians; if our Church is not “growing” then we are not doing something right, we need to “market” our services better somehow. “Church” has become a prolonged meeting of those who do not share “life” in any real sense and thus will fail to function like a true body.

We must see that the Church is not a part of America’s story (or should not be), but that America should be a part of the Church’s (God’s) story. We must be a separate people that do not stand on what America values (individualism, capitalism, postmodernism) but rather on the life that God values and wills (a life live out of love).

The Church is like a living, breathing organ; constantly growing towards maturity and therefore always living in a degree of immaturity.