No More Church?
I have been observing a struggle among people who are trying to estlish non-traditional models of church. It seems that large amounts of effort is put toward having to reclaim and restablish the word Church. When one person says "church" they are thinking of a missional communty, yet when anyone outside of the small subculture of emergent church leaders hears the term, they have so many tightly pre-packaged ideas about it that we must spend more time unwrapping and reexplaining what we mean by "church" than actually doing church. Maybe its time to let go of that particular combination of consenants and vowels and moved toward a different title that would more accuratly commuicate our meaning to people.
This isn't a terribly drastic step for people outside the English only world. Lots of languages use different audible sounds to indicate their idea of what we would like to call church. Why not find a new word for our missional communities that will not imply all the things we are trying to escape (the ideas of church being buildings, worship services, denominations, leagle entities with formalized membership lists.. etc)
Why the sanctity of the one verbal sound we pronounce as "church"?
It seems to me that the apostles did not spend anytime trying to think up the term church, I doubt that it even was thought of as a term in the way we think of it, but rather they just described what they were doing by using the common verbage of the day.
It seems to me that the continued use of the term church by the most forward thinking of emergent culture might even be driven by a personal desire "to fix church". We know there may be better words, or better yet, we know there may not be any single word to describe the identity and action of the followers of Christ, but if one were to ressurect the traditional term itself, this would nearly make the author, missionary, para-church worker or church planter into a sort of savior for our beloved term "church". So we come up with fancy titles such as seeker-sensitive-Church, or missional-church and then we gather around those who coined these phrases as if they were our high preists or the new apostles of our saved and reborn church. Who wants to be the savior of "church" who alows the term to be reborn through their own good works! Don't we just want to see a collective of people live in the way of Christ. Does it matter what word we apply to describe this.
This isn't a terribly drastic step for people outside the English only world. Lots of languages use different audible sounds to indicate their idea of what we would like to call church. Why not find a new word for our missional communities that will not imply all the things we are trying to escape (the ideas of church being buildings, worship services, denominations, leagle entities with formalized membership lists.. etc)
Why the sanctity of the one verbal sound we pronounce as "church"?
It seems to me that the apostles did not spend anytime trying to think up the term church, I doubt that it even was thought of as a term in the way we think of it, but rather they just described what they were doing by using the common verbage of the day.
It seems to me that the continued use of the term church by the most forward thinking of emergent culture might even be driven by a personal desire "to fix church". We know there may be better words, or better yet, we know there may not be any single word to describe the identity and action of the followers of Christ, but if one were to ressurect the traditional term itself, this would nearly make the author, missionary, para-church worker or church planter into a sort of savior for our beloved term "church". So we come up with fancy titles such as seeker-sensitive-Church, or missional-church and then we gather around those who coined these phrases as if they were our high preists or the new apostles of our saved and reborn church. Who wants to be the savior of "church" who alows the term to be reborn through their own good works! Don't we just want to see a collective of people live in the way of Christ. Does it matter what word we apply to describe this.
posted by Post_Fidelitas at 10:27 AM
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