A church building doesn't simply place brick and mortar between its worship gatherings and the outside elements but it places walls between our worship gatherings and the rest of the world.
A church's walls are made up of much more than simply brick and mortar. They are built with such materials as tradition, isolation, ignorance, fear and apathy all of which provide a convenient way of containing and storing one's faith.
The church today is a Rubbermaid Tupperware container that is water and air tight that doesn't allow anything from the outside to come in and anything from the inside to get out.
2 comments:
Why would you work at a place you feel is so containing? I am assuming you work at a church.
That’s a good question. One that has been raised in my mind a number of times.
However, I think what I’m really getting at with these phrases is the fact that it’s the general church going populace’s mentality about what church is and what we expect it to be that create this containment. Not necessarily the institutional church. The church really isn’t a place anyway and thus leaving the church as a place of business wouldn’t solve anything. It’s not the building or the staff or the programs that are the problem. There are a lot of good people and good programs at my church and at many others. I work with great people with great hearts. They are as good as any one could wish to work for/with. The issue is the way we approach the whole idea of what church is supposed to be. It’s our ideas that have come to define church as a place and not a person or people or a way of living in fellowship with God with others.
It’s in these ideas the one could suffocate. It’s within this confinement that the Holy Spirit has lost His ability to move freely without having to consult with the board of trustees, the planning committees, the senior pastor, youth pastor, young adult pastor and every other kind of pastor along with every member of the congregation. We have created a sterile environment that has suffocated so much of the life that God intended us to have.
I’m sure you’ve heard the comparison between church and a football game. Real excitement/worship occurs at a football game. This stands in contrast to the somber gatherings we call Sunday morning service.
It’s not the building that’s at fault but our expectations of what occurs within those walls and the lack of expectation of something happening outside those walls that really has a strangle hold on our spiritual lives.
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