Why Church, IV: The Question

Emerging Church Deathmatch

I acknowledge and decry the reality that many traditional Christians are so attached to their existing institutions for their own sake. Buildings and professional clergy and budgets and mission trips and Easter musicals, Sunday worship and all that carrying on are often not seen as tools for God’s mission in the world, but rather the ownership and use of those things becomes God’s mission itself.

Is it at all sane to suppose that I can walk into that world and be with people in that context and teach a re-valuation of those religious and cultural trappings without doing away with those trappings?

Do I stand in the pulpit and say “but you know, folks, really, being a Christian is about how you live your life every day of the week,” or do I say, “Aha! No more going to church on Sunday! Let’s see you be a Christian now!”

I have always heard people say “it’s really about what you do every day,” but it never really was. Maybe it’s because they didn’t have a theology for it. They really didn’t; they just said it but never explained why.

These idols are tough to beat. +Alan suggests that “some things may well be evil for a time and for certain reasons”: check out that reasoning here.

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