FredMcKinnon.Com

It’s Spring Break here in Glynn County to I’ve taken a few days off of work so we can be together as a family.  We were hanging out on the beach yesterday and I read a great article from LeadershipJournal.Net called “The X Factor“.

“Most of the highly celebrated, experimental worship services launched in the 90′s to reach ‘Gen-X’ are now gone.  What have we learned from the rise, decline, and renewal of next generation ministries?” … that’s the headline.  It was a great read.

I suppose reading this article and Skye Jethani’s “The Divine Commodity” at the same time is creating a firebox where the slightest spark can ignite the inferno inside of me, that, for a bunch of reasons, sometimes thinks we’re “doing church” all wrong these days.

I’m constantly living in this tension … how to be relevant and attractive to those who need (and yes, even to those who have) Jesus Christ … and how to live the life that Jesus has for us, with authenticity and holiness.   How to take relate to this culture without being tainted by it’s filthy influence.

One quote in this article really pulled a verbal “Amen” from me … right out loud, there on the pool deck.

I feel that if we can see church as the people, and not just define church by the worship gathering, a lot would be solved in bridging generations,” Kimball said. “We could focus more on the older mentoring the younger, the older opening their homes and being sages and guides to the younger. Instead we focus so much on getting the twenty-somethings into the main worship gathering. But just sitting in a room for an hour and half looking at the backs of everyone’s heads does not make something intergenerational.

Wow.  You see, I have this desire that we all come together.  There is a time and place for “age-focused and preference-driven” gatherings, but I don’t think they should become the all-in-all for people.  Seems like God has something for us all to learn from one another.  But we don’t really accomplish that through our Sunday morning gatherings in most churches.  Like the quote above says, we come and look at the back of people’s heads and go home.

This needs to change.  How do we go beyond the corporate worship and lecture and become family?

1.  I feel that entertainment-driven corporate gatherings are creating weak Christians who constantly focus on what is “in it” for them.
2.  I feel that by constantly appealing to “preference” we feed the self-fulfillment monster and isolate those who don’t share the same preference.
3.  I think that we miss the building of true community when our church activities revolve around the big events where someone on stage performs for us.

Ouch.  There.  I said it.

Let the debate begin.