Monday, October 17, 2005

6 issues facing the church

Over the last week, Len Hjalmarson has been blogging on 6 issues that he sees facing the church - especially the emerging church - although certainly not exclusively.
1. What is the Gospel
2. Leadership & Authority
3. The Text and Context of the Conversation
4. The Community of God
5. Discipleship and Spiritual Formation
6. Religious Pluralism

Why is is that only the emerging church tends to raise these questions? I wonder if it a lot of us are not just afraid of the questions, but afraid of the answers.

Todd Hunter, the one time National Director of Vineyard, USA, now President of ALPHA USA. is quoted as saying:
Here's a strong statement: most evangelicals… are addicted to church culture. Take away their Sunday service, their bible studies, prayer meetings, and five-song worship teams and they start having withdrawals quickly. I would suggest a time of at least a year of not doing the 'normal' church stuff. For us, during that time of detachment we only did a few things together – ask hard questions and eat. Those were our corporate disciplines.

And I thnk the really sad part is, we confuse all these activities for real church: we replace community with meetings; transformation with bible study (which in the majority of cases is more about a teacher teaching than getting into the Word); worship with singing songs.

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