1. The collapse of the church culture.
- Wrong question: How do we do church better?
- Tough question: How do we deconvert from Churchianity to Christianity?
- Wrong question: How do we grow this church?
- Tough question: How do we transform our community?
- Wrong question: How do we turn members into ministers?
- Tough question: How do we turn members into missionaries?
- Wrong question: How do we develop church members?
- Tough question: How do we develop followers of Jesus?
- Wrong question: How do we plan for the future?
- Tough question: How do we prepare for the future?
- Wrong question: How do we develop leaders for church work?
- Tough question: How do we develop leaders for the Christian movement?
3 comments:
My question to all: What is the measure of Christ in it?
from T. Austin Sparks 1953 'Keeping Christ in Focus'
There is everywhere today an immense amount of definite or tacit admission of the failure of Christianity; the asking of the question: 'What is wrong with Christianity or the "churches"?' The would-be doctors seeking to diagnose the malady and prescribe the remedy are a growing multitude. Not all are mistaken, and if we seem to have joined their ranks, we do not think that we are speculating when we assert that that which is preached and taught has become - although largely unwittingly - detached from the personal significance of Christ Himself. The business of the Church and its ministry is not to propagate a system of Christian truth, but to bring Christ Himself, in the power of the Holy Spirit, wherever it goes and is. The Gospel as such saves nobody. Salvation is a vital personal contact and union with Christ Himself. Hence, and this is the crucial point, Christ must have a living organism in which and by which to make that contact and that union.
Christianity has become something almost entirely apart from the Person of Christ. It is a religion, a system, a philosophy of life, a set of ways, practices, and ideas. It is something that people enter into, take up, join, and choose. They come to Christ through the Christian system, but the Christ they come to is a denominational, sectarian, ritualistic, or evangelical Christ. The Christ that they know and believe in is the Christ of this or that connection and interpretation. Christ rarely now creates Christianity; it is Christianity that creates Christ.
The Church - that is, what is termed the Church - is now an institution. It has become the Church of historical production, of accidental or human production. It is a hierarchy of ecclesiastical, social, human, and arbitrary selection, direction, and government. As we know it, it is not "one body and one Spirit". The terminology of Christ as Head of the Church, and the Church as the Body of Christ, is employed, but it is all objective, and so largely in the realm of Divine Sovereignty; it is fatalistic in effect, rather than immediate, subjective, and essentially personal in the presence and authority of the Holy Spirit.
All this, which represents a vast amount more, indicates the loss of one inclusive and pre-eminently essential reality. That is an inward revelation of Christ as the embodiment of an altogether other order of creation; of a constitution which is according to a Kingdom that is not after this world, either as a whole or in any part.
sorry it is rather: 'Keeping Christ in View'
more coffee...needed
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