The Growing Edge
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The Growing Edge is a blog of the Office of Church Growth.
Recent posts
- Job Well Done!?!
- Lenten Discipline
- Upcoming Event: NCD Team Training | PresbyGrow
- The Light Shines in the Darkness
- Top Six Tactical Mistakes a Church Makes- Rebuttal....sort of
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Job Well Done!?!
Through our office (Office of Church Growth) we have the opportunity to work with a number of churches trying to navigate the new cultural landscape in which they find themselves. If you have to ask what new landscape I'm talking about, that's a whole other conversation. Trust me, though, the world has changed and as much as we might lament it, there is no changing back.
It occurs to me this afternoon that we may have done too god a job over the past couple of centuries training and teaching people, Presbyterian in our case, how to be church and what it means to be Presbyterian or Christian. It used to be easy. We all knew what church was or what we thought it was supposed to be and were happy to operate under this common understanding of ecclesiastical life. We were in ways, like the fleas in the video below. We were trained to live in the glass (church and cultural norms) and operate under the boundaries and rules (Presbyterian Polity and corporate traditional worship) the glass provided. So much so, that now the glass has been removed (culture change-modern to post modern; demoninationalism to post-denominationalism) we find ourselves still confined to forms and functions of the past. Even our offspring have become trained in our ways and have difficulty seeing life beyond the glass.
Think I'm wrong? Consider this, I can imagine a church with it's stone walls and fixed pews would, were it without a building for some reason, set itself up just as it had when there were four walls to enclose it. Chairs would not be in a circle or new configuration but in rows facing forward just as it had been. People would also gravitate to the place where they "normally" sat. We are creatures of habit after all.
The problem is that there are fewer and fewer fleas. To compound that we won't leave our comfortable "glass" house to find more fleas or even break ranks and realize that we can move beyond our comfort zone and be the church in ways that we could have never imagined being in the past. No necessarily good news for a world thirsting for spiritual meaning but wary of all things institutional.
So maybe the question we need to think about today is, "Is it ok to consider new forms of church that don't look, act, speak, sing, dance, talk like us or want to do the same things we have historically done? Can we make room for that or must we tell them to confine themselves to our "glass?"
Discuss...
March 9, 2011
Lenten Discipline
Every year the same question, "What are you giving up for Lent?" Over the years, I've given up soda, sugar, carbs, exercise (ok, that lasted for 12 years...it was a long Lent!) and other stuff that was designed to help...
September 2, 2009
Upcoming Event: NCD Team Training | PresbyGrow
The answers to these questions can be found by examining the end purpose of your discipleship training. The "Can I Get a Witness?" New Church Development Team Training Conference will focus on discipleship that is intent on: via www.presbygrow.net
August 31, 2009
The Light Shines in the Darkness
"The Light shines in the darkness but the darkness has not overcome it." John 1:5 I woke up early the other day to go for a run. It's becoming a habit of mine to do this, although I generally loath...
August 24, 2009
Top Six Tactical Mistakes a Church Makes- Rebuttal....sort of
I recently came across this post by Bill Easum (Bill Easum's Post) on the top 6 tactical mistakes a chruch can make. I thought I would share my responses in hope you might join the conversation. Please go and read...
August 24, 2009
Run the Race!
However, I consider my life worth nothing to me, if only I may finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me—the task of testifying to the gospel of God's grace. Acts 20:24 Recently, my wife,...
July 21, 2009
No Time Like the Present
There's always an excuse. We all have them. I've been trying to get this blog started for over 6 months. I'm a procrastinator by nature but it's time to just get going. At a conference I attended a few months...