“If we who care about the Church and its farflung ministry were boldly wise, perhaps we should give much greater incentive to work with youth than we give to the management of a big ecclesiastical organization. But we cannot do this, or anything remotely similar, unless we have a revolutionary change in our own vocational values.
“Once we begin to alter our conception of what the Church is, viewing it as intrinsically missionary — not merely in Africa, but in every part of the life of the West as well — we realize that we have hardly begun to see what our major task is.”—Company of the Committed, page 89
<idle musing>
If he saw this as a problem in 1960, I wonder what he would think of megachurches! This goes nicely with the Out of Ur post from yesterday: "It is our consumer-mentality that causes us to think we need buildings."
</idle musing>
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2 comments:
JPS, Scot McKnight had an interesting post on this not long ago with thoughts from Dan Kimball who changed his view on the efficacy of a building. Their building has been useful to their community in a number of ways both for emergency and on a regular basis. And we find our building both a boon and a blight. So I kind of feel a love/hate for it; it has its problems and not payed off, but is definitely being used for people and in missional ways.
I noticed I hadn't linked you. Lost my old blog to a robot, but still hope to get it back. It had the links. A friend recently helped me find access back to it. (while it still exists; I hope to get it back, but if I don't pretty soon, it may be gone).
Ted,
I noticed that your blog was gone and saw from Scot where it had moved to. I changed my link.
As to the building, yes, it can be a blessing—and a curse. I was involved in a small church start-up years ago that was going well—until they decided to build. From then on all the energy went into the building and the church not only didn't grow, it shrunk. People burned out on the building and dropped out. So, in that case it was detrimental.
If you look at the Out of Ur post that I linked to, it is an answer to Dan. In the comments, Dan answers. The interaction between the two is a model of how Christians should interact.
James
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