Put it in the pages

Honestly.  I wonder just what the Apostle Paul would have thought of 20th and 21st century church.

I'm sure he would have had something to tell us.  


Yes, I know we live in a different culture, I know that our government doesn't overtly persecute Christians.  I know that.  I am talking about the things we obsess about in the Western church.  What clothes to wear on the platform.  Whether to use hymn books.  What version of the Bible to use.  What style of music to worship to.  Whether or not to just tell the undiluted gospel and minister to people's souls, or to do a social gospel and only minister to their bodies (never about both).  Who is the better speaker.  What colour the carpet should be.  

Fifty years ago the questions were different.  Whether to wear a hat or not in church. What colour the hymn books should be.  Hymns versus choruses.  Whether or not to go to the movies.  Whether to use music in church at all. Whether to wear makeup or not. Two piece versus three piece suits.  What denomination is the right one.

Hmmm.  I guess the questions aren't that different.


I was recently visiting a friend's blog ( Merge the Village ) and he had put a clip on it from a keynote speaker by the name of Francis Chan.  I'm including it here - it's about seven and a half minutes long and poses the question, "Does my life fit ?" It gels something I've thought for quite a while and couldn't seem to put into the right words.  Have a look -

What if - just what if - we could live life the way the people did in the book of Acts?  I'm not talking about the culture of the ancient Middle East here.  I'm talking about living in the moment, every moment, in touch with and listening to the Spirit of God.  Wow - wouldn't that be transformational not only to us individually but to the church - and then spilling out into the world around us ?

The people in our culture are just as broken - if not more so - than the people who lived in the days of the 12 apostles and so many others who lived in this lifestyle of dependence on God, like Dorcas, Aquila, Stephen and Philip. They all had families to feed too; they had stuff to do.  The things they did that are recorded in the book of Acts are those that transcended those mundane details.

The human suffering is just as real.  And it's not just limited to the people addicted to crack or selling their bodies on street-corners.  

It's in respectable living rooms, bound up in hopeless people watching soap operas and wondering if their lives could ever matter that much to anyone.  It's in church pews, stuck in empty religious tradition and "true lies" people tell to each other to keep them at arm's length, afraid of intimacy, afraid of rejection.  People so afraid that someone will judge them that they pretend to have it all together - and inside they're dying, crying, sighing.  Wondering if this is all there is.  Wondering where God went.

The answer is not in doing more, or in railing against the way the world is going to hell in a hand-basket, or in electing more Christians to office.  The answer is heart-based.  It's in allowing God in to those dark places in us and shining His light, transforming us from the inside out.  Accepting that He loves us - forgives us - in spite of our failures.  And living in that love, being grateful enough to spend time with Him and hear His voice every day, every moment.  

That's where the adventure begins.