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It is no secret that the world is screwed up. No, not just in a general way that we can avoid by moving to the country or joining a monastery. It’s in your face. It’s screwed up in a way that won’t let you get away from its stink. But can we attribute all the discomfort to the world being “screwed up” even though it’s obvious that it is? A significant amount of discomfort comes from change. To be more specific, a significant amount of discomfort comes from change that we don’t want to face. I speak from personal experience. The change I don’t want to face is the change I avoid until I have no other choice but to change. The world has faced such change in many forms. From the medieval to the modern era, from agricultural to industrial society, from general knowledge to specialized knowledge, change is the one thing you can count on. The question is, can we make the needed changes to not just survive but thrive. Basically, flexible people will while inflexible people won’t. Our beliefs and how we hold them is what makes us flexible or inflexible. There is a difference between the church as the body of Christ and the church culture. The Lord always upholds the body of Christ. It can’t fail or be destroyed. But the church culture of America is another thing. It’s already dead. It just hasn’t been buried yet. It hasn’t grasped the reality that serving a LIVING God in and of itself means that change is part of the equation. No, not change as in changing the basic tenets of the faith in Christ as God in the flesh, His redemption through His shed blood, the sustaining power of His Spirit or the eventual swallowing up of death in Life. These things are not changeable. But how they are expressed is! Not only that but they must change. No, that doesn’t mean we can just express the faith any old kind of way without regard for the vehicle of expression. We can’t join Christ to just any cheap form of expression. Yet the timeless and rich truths of God in Christ are supposed to be adapted to any culture, any situation. That’s what real missionaries have always done. But the church in America has lost this missional outlook. And America, a country that is known for sending missionaries to different countries, now needs missionaries sent to it, because the state of Christianity in America is a pathetic thing to behold. In the face of that screwed up world that I was talking about, the church is clueless on how to handle it. It basically tries to hold on to old ways of confronting the world. Not only is the world not listening but it’s downright hostile to the church, and it has every right to be. The world may be in need of Christ. It may be full of the rankest of sinners. But it’s still part of God’s creation and as such it cannot rid itself of the awareness of God, however imperfect. Yes, it tries to deny and erase that awareness. But it can’t. And it is because of that awareness that it knows in its bones that the crap offered by the petrified church culture is not coming from the Life of the Vine (Jn. 15:5). One need only go to the Bible (imagine Christians actually reading that in a meditative way for a change) to see the apostle Paul becoming all things to all men in order to save some (1 Cor. 9: 19-23) or Peter in the book of Acts submitting immediately to the Spirit’s persuasion that the door was open for all men to enter the kingdom of God instead of just the Jews. Flexibility. Instead, in our church culture, we still have an abundance of “our way or no way”. It doesn’t happen often, but every now and then I run across a book that puts into words what has been in my heart for a long time. It’s like running into a person you’ve seen every day for years only to finally get into an intimate conversation and find that you both have many of the same passionate interests. The book is entitled Present Future: Six Tough Questions for the Church by Reggie McNeal. Here is a line from the book that really floored me. Not because I didn’t already know it but because it’s the first time I’ve read it publicly. “A growing number of people are leaving the institutional church for a new reason. They are not leaving because they have lost faith. They are leaving to preserve their faith.” (p. 4 of Chap. 1 – New Reality Number One: The Collapse of the Church Culture) If that statement doesn’t have an effect on you as a Christian, you need to check your pulse. The dirty family secret is that there are thousands of Christians who’ve left the institutional churches precisely because, if they didn’t, the church would snuff out the faith they are trying to build the same way the public schools snuff out reading ability even though that’s what they’re there to teach. McNeal is not just some critic on the sidelines. He grew up in church and is still part of leadership in the Southern Baptist Convention. And you can’t get more “churchy” than Southern Baptists. If your faith in the living God finds the institutional church a cramped space, this is a book you need to read. God has always been in the business of doing new things while a large segment of people who claimed to follow Him put most of their energy into keeping alive things that needed to die. Flexible Christians are around. They just can’t find a place in the very place they should be at home. But there’s nothing new there. Any of the prophets would say, “What else is new?” Check out this book. Buy one for your pastor. It’s that important.
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