I love my daughter! It's not just that she is a brilliant scholar and theologian; it's that she is an explorer - or maybe she is a guide to my own exploring. Whatever! In any case she recently noted that she was rethinking church (and truthfully, I really don't know what she was referring specifically to). But it got me thinking. Yea, church - the whole concept and set of practices we hold about church - needs a radical make over.
I am thinking that we need to turn it literally inside out. Let's just look at three simple aspects of church. First of all, what if we stopped thinking about going to church all together - I mean stopped thinking that it is some place we go. Because when we go inside the church building, we have entered into an exclusion of others - we have walls around us that hold us inside all safe and sound (not even noticing that in doing so we are walling others out). So what if we start letting church to come into us in a way that turns us outward, that tears down the walls and propels us outward toward others? What if?
And what if we stopped thinking of prayer as something that we do or even chose to do but rather that we got prayed. Richard Rohr says "prayer happened and we were there!" For years I have been thinking more like life lives us and that we are in service to the greater life force that flows through us. Well prayer is just like that. Prayer is our attempt to get out of the way and let the spirit of the divine flow through us and out into the world. What if we started getting prayed?
Then what if we stopped thinking that god was out there - as in anywhere other than everywhere, including every cell of you and me and everything everywhere? How might we act if there was no heaven apart from earth, no place to get to if we got it right? How would we act if we only had right now and recognized that we are inseparable from one another but were actually all entwined as one great living whole?
I want to be that church - that re-thought church!
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1 comment:
I love you too!
I was speaking specifically about a training being held at my church based on the UMC's current program, "Rethink Church." See a great YouTube video about what we're trying to accomplish here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l90eiNB7nMw
I still think the program falls a little short. For example, "what if church wasn't a building, but thousands of doors (note they are closed when pictured!)... so that whoever knocks..." wait! Why are we waiting for people to knock? "What if church wasn't a noun, but an active verb?" great! but "door" is still a noun, last time I checked. "What if church wasn't about Sunday morning/wasn't a place, but was an experience... would you come?" I give them real hell about that over at UM Communications! Come? You can't come to something you just said isn't a time or place but is an experience!!!
Anyway, the effort is there, but needs to be pushed even further. Like along the lines you're going. What if church is something we do, and something that happens in and through and to us. What if church is a synonym for transformation? What if the doors open, not to different experiences of church, but to different experiences of the Holy? What if we're not the only ones doing the opening?
Man, we kinda think alike. Wonder why.
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