Just When You Think You're Getting It...

Unfortunately, this is impossible to avoid: this post is going to get weird.

I heard someone say recently that she feels like she's trying to quench people's thirst with her own. (That's using some poetic license, but her intent is there.) We have a church that has worked so hard to make a place where nobody wants to be. Structures have been built within them that reflect no-one's current desires. The path of least resistance has led us here. And?

There's kind of a shrugging acknowledgement of the condition of the church. There isn't a place for the 'other', for the 'too different', for the 'problem' people, especially for those people who are suffering the natural consequences of their own choices and actions. There is a dirth of the grace we're supposed to extend. I'm crushed because I just realised that I'm fully guilty of what I'm saying – the role of the Christian is to be the face of Christ to a hurting, seeking, struggling world. A world that we seem to have detached ourselves from at every turn. Rather we look for a place where we feel comfortable, established and settled. Silly, silly us.

How many opportunities do we miss because our brains are locked into set paths? Tons. Resistance to the new is problematic at every level. When we have the chance to interject truth into life, there is instead a church-wide knee-jerk reaction made at a mass media level. We have failed. We fail to achieve what we claim to want to achieve, and instead find success' surrogate. The wall and boundaries get fortified and reinforced until they are in danger of toppling down on us.

I'm saying that homogeneity is the rule of the day within the Church. And I'm saying that gives us the gauge to show us by how far we're missing the point.

I have a despair about postmodernism. Whenever the dice land, we keep throwing them again. I've begun thinking about what's after postmodernism. (Is post-postmodernism ubermodernism?) But we can't underestimate the value in the constant questioning. This is still a pendulum swing away from not questioning nearly enough. And, I guess the followups are, "Are we questioning enough yet? And if not, when?"